One way to test whether "time away from these drugs" (fentanyl and "new meth," which is... meth) works is to look at relapse and death rates among the many, many people who go to treatment voluntarily. But that would involve research, not fear-mongering. webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache… Instead, we have broad claims based on a correlation among an unknown subset of 100 women recruited to treatment through unknown means, quickly converted to a causal relationship and used as justification for jail-as-treatment.

I'm all for "improved passenger access" but let's acknowledge that "avoid conflicts with Seattle Storm facility" only became an issue after Jenny Durkan got special one-time-only zoning for her pals on the way out the door soundtransit.org/sites/default/… As I reported at the time, this giant new sports facility was speed-walked through a special zoning variance even though it would complicate plans for light rail and is incompatible with land-use policies the city had just adopted for the area soundtransit.org/sites/default/…

telling straight women "just have more sex" in the same breath as "women enjoy less of the sex they're having" is bizarre, unless the only point is to make men feel less lonely (which is in fact the main focus of this article). nytimes.com/2023/02/13/opi… the writer says in one aside that "sex brings people together [if it's] good sex," but the health studies she cites are almost all about the benefits of orgasm, not sex (and at least one is ONLY about cis men).

Appalling: Danny Westneat of the @seattletimes blames the death of Jahnavi Kandula—killed while walking in a crosswalk where the mayor canceled a safety project by a cop rushing to an overdose call that the fire department was already handling—on "the drug epidemic." @seattletimes To believe this, you have to believe that a) overdoses require an armed response, b) cops are always and inherently innocent of any wrongdoing, including reckless driving (an investigation is ongoing), and c) road safety is meaningless and traffic violence is normal.

Haaaa I haven't been posting here about the ongoing saga of the bags that @FlySWISS lost (1) and destroyed (2), but I do need to tell you about the latest nonsense because it's SO Kafkaesque: @FlySWISS (As background, @FlySWISS lost one bag and has made it impossible to apply for compensation using any method and destroyed the other bag, which they also lost but we managed to find by going to the Seattle airport and seeing it sitting there, completely unlabeled in any way).

I've been trying to get info about the city's prioritization strategy for encampments ever since @MayorofSeattle's office claimed the "sidewalk strategy" they came up with was not their actual strategy. No luck on that so far, but the records I've received have been interesting. Not surprisingly, the mayor's office has more responsive to some demands for encampment sweeps than others; basically, it helps to be influential and/or persistent. I was surprised, though, to see that one of those influential constituents was a media organization, @SeattleDJC.

Right-wing activists who crusaded to stop 90 new shelter beds and a sobering center in SoDo, ostensibly because they wanted to "protect"= Chinatown, are saying the quiet part out loud: They oppose all shelter, anywhere. changewashington.org/victory-county… The plan would have added 40 high-acuity beds for people with the highest health needs, plus up to 50 new tiny house-style pallet shelters and a sobering center. Right-wing activists including the county GOP and the Discovery Institute were instrumental in sinking it.

Seattle @CMDanStrauss tried to bar the press from a 230-person meeting on homelessness and crime, and even prevent attendees from recording, so that everyone could be "candid." This isn't how public meetings work, or how elected officials should behave. kuow.org/stories/a-high… @CMDanStrauss Having attended thousands of public meetings, I can tell you that people are generally more than happy to say abhorrent or shocking things in public. The presence of the media is what allows the wider public to know what their neighbors are saying. publicola.com/2018/05/03/ton…

Seattle's redistricting commission is preparing to vote a new map, amended to put the bulk of Magnolia into District 6 along with Northwest Seattle. Commissioner Rory O'Sullivan says he'll support the amendment he previously opposed: publicola.com/2022/10/10/con… O'Sullivan asserts that this map is the option that "most negatively impacts Magnolia." As I've noted, Magnolia is politically and demographically divided along its ridge, which splits the half with water views with the half that has some of the city's densest (!) Census tracts.

The Stranger apparently doesn't understand what abortion ACCESS funds are for—not "funding every abortion in [Seattle]," where access to abortion exists, but ensuring that women in places WITHOUT access can obtain abortions, including any related costs. thestranger.com/news/2022/10/1… Maybe it's the use of the dismissive term "dumping"—as if funding abortion access for people in places like Idaho is like flushing cash down the toilet—but this framing seems really dangerous to me. Abortion access is a real problem and abortion funds can help mitigate it.

.@MayorofSeattle's office used a new-to-me tactic to deny access to information that would shed light on why @seattledot didn't get a commission from SPD that would allow parking enforcement officers to issue tickets when they moved to SDOT:They just withheld the records in full. @MayorofSeattle @seattledot I'm trying to find out what kind of advice SPD gave SDOT about the special commission—relevant because the lack of a commission resulted in millions of dollars in refunded parking tickets. I requested communications with/involving a particular SPD employee, an attorney.

Exclusive: Andrei Constantin, a @seattlepd officer who was the subject of multiple formal complaints, has been fired for Twitter posts mocking victims of police violence and encouraging violence against protesters in multiple tweets first documented here:

https://twitter.com/WhiteRoseAFA/status/1446542570604146690

@SeattlePD According to SPD's disciplinary action report on Constantin, he violated SPD's social media rules and professionalism standards for tweeting, after a driver killed demonstrator Summer Taylor during a protest on I-5 in Seattle, "shouldn't play on the freeway."

As usual: I dig it up, the @seattletimes posts it days later without credit or attribution. This one is particularly egregious because the lede includes a quote from 2019 that I pulled from an obscure council meeting and quoted on Twitter and in my piece. seattletimes.com/seattle-news/h… @seattletimes Here's my piece from last week, in which I include the quote they used along with a video clip I created and posted on Youtube from the meeting (a video I also posted on Twitter) publicola.com/2022/09/30/ear…

A records request I just received includes this email complaining about homeless people from Dr. Doug Migden, the Queen Anne long-distance cyclist whom Councilmember Alex Pedersen installed on the Seattle Bike Advisory Board instead of the board's pick (publicola.com/2022/02/18/spd…) In the email, to which the mayor's office responded generically, saying they'd address the encampment, Migden complains about passing by "able-bodied" homeless men "who are not mentally ill" and were too "well-dressed" for his sympathy

Homeless advocates worried that @MayorofSeattle's new dashboard would include a map of existing tent encampments, endangering the people who live in them. It doesn't. Now Republican King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn is proposing just such a map for the county. @MayorofSeattle Dunn, who is running for Congress, has proposed using resources from the county's parks and human services departments to make this map, which would include not just locations of encampments but the approximate number of people in each one.

This AP story misrepresents yesterday's announcement of a new website on so many fronts.

1) The $118 million is not new or "planned"; it's what the city provided to @KC_RHA in the budget adopted in 2021, before Harrell was mayor; /1

apnews.com/article/seattl… 2) That $118 million includes $40 million in one-time federal COVID funding—it's not all from the city—and the overall $173 million budgeted last year to "ease homelessness" (per the AP story) includes stuff like trash pickups and sweeps; /2

Imagining how many more actual media questions could be asked at this press briefing on homelessness with Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington if Jonathan Choe from the Discovery Institute, a right-wing think tank, was not using half the time with rhetorical accusatory "questions." This press briefing, for press, was invite-only for press, and yet for some reason a representative from an activist organization was invited by @MayorofSeattle.