Oh, what a night. What a very special time for Seattle’s left. In the race for mayor, Katie Wilson was surprised to find herself ahead of incumbent Bruce Harrell by a solid point (on the first drop!). Erika Evans demolished the Trumpy incumbent Ann Davison with a stunning 14-point lead in the city attorney race. And incumbent Sara Nelson is looking at nothing but dust from Dionne Foster’s 14-point lead in the race for Seattle City Council position No. 9. This is all just the first ballot drop, and experience tells us that these leads will only grow with the coming returns.
As for Seattle City Council position No. 2, Eddie Lin, who claimed nearly 46 percent of the votes, will likely face Adonis Ducksworth, who is behind by 15 points. Seattle City Council position No. 8 is a done deal; incumbent Alexis Mercedes Rinck took the lion’s share (75 percent) of that race. Oh, what a night for the Stranger Election Control Board, which also saw its pick for King County Executive, Girmay Zahilay, claim victory (he leads Claudia Balducci by 10 points). It was, however, not such a great night for the Seattle Times, which couldn’t help but see Zohran Mamdani at the bottom of these dismal results.
But I think it’s more than that, more than Mamdani. Cities are under attack from the far right (the ICE raids, the cuts in healthcare and scientific research, the slashing of Diversity and Inclusion programs). Cities are diverse! And we’ve had enough of politicians who bend to the wind too easily, too readily. Moderate Dems are in deep trouble. Cities now want candidates who are assertive, who know there’s no room for compromises, who refuse to play ball with the filthy rich and their minions. Alexis Mercedes Rinck will soon not be alone in City Hall.
Northwest Progressive Institute to Sara Nelson: “See, I told you. Here they come now.”
For years, we have warned Sara Nelson that she is dangerously out of touch with Seattleites.
Our polling has been consistent. She has had so many opportunities to course correct… and squandered them all.
This is the result of those choices.
Nelson looks like a goner in November.
#seaelex
— Northwest Progressive Institute (@nwprogressive.org) August 5, 2025 at 8:39 PM
What is this? A wet lawn? That’s what it is indeed. A little rain fell as I slept last night. (I had a dream about walking to a grocery store with my aunt—she was visiting from Dallas and appeared to be much younger than she is in real life.) And, yesterday at around 4 p.m., Rainer Park, which I crossed after slipping my votes into the ballot box at Rainier Community Center, was cooled, again and again, by breezes that came not from this tiresome summer but the leaves-falling season that one hopes will arrive sooner than expected. It’s presently 62, and forecasters predict “spotty showers” during the day.
Microsoft is still hitting that layoffs pipe despite the fact that it became, a few days ago, the second company in the history of the United States to reach a $4 trillion valuation. Microsoft is behaving like “money is too tight to mention,” when clearly it’s far from that desperate situation.
This is Tallulah Lipson:
She and her husband, David Lipson, a local filmmaker, want Capitol Hill to know that it definitely needs a Crisis Care Center on Broadway. From their flier: “As the survivor of a mental health crisis, I know firsthand how essential these services are. But for those who believe themselves to not be in need of these resources it’s important to note that this Crisis Care Center would increase the availability of first responders and lessen the burden on local emergency rooms, creating a safer Capitol Hill for all of us.” Amen.
The New York Times gave Trump a pat on the hand for firing labor statistics chief Erika McEntarfer over a jobs report that showed exactly what everyone with a brain knows at this point: the economy is sinking, and sinking fast. Growth in the labor market is slow or already in the negative. The GDP is standing on quicksand. The unemployment rate is ready to rocket to the moon. “In announcing the firing of the government’s chief labor statistician last week, President Trump condemned the works of McEntarfer as ‘phony.’ Such a move has had few precedents, and for good reason.” New York Times is not alarmed that the US government, which began collecting economic data in the first quarter of the previous century, is about to make book cooking a regular thing. This means that we (investors, journalists, political scientists, economists, the general public) will not, for now, have anything approximating accurate information about the performance, not only of the labor market, but all other markets. Expect to see 1 billion big and beautiful jobs in the next report.
But the fools will believe it. And this is why I think Wall Street will see a silver lining in cooked jobs reports. Recall that during the years leading up to the crash of 2008, top credit rating agencies (CRAs) were also cooking the books, giving AAA ratings to garbage. This practice kept the bubble bubbling. (For more on this, watch The Big Short by Hollywood’s last great Marxist, Adam McKay.) But sooner or later, those who are not fools but wolves will begin shorting a market inflated by bogus economic data. And this crash will stand next to all other crashes like the explosion of the hydrogen bomb stands next to the ones dropped on Japan.
ICE is hurting the economy for no good reason. And even the billions it will receive from the Big Beautiful Bill will not compensate for the massive drop in economic activity in California alone. Best believe that the whole of the US will feel the damage ICE has inflicted on the galactic-sized market called Los Angeles. From The American Prospect: “[T]here are already visible microeconomic impacts today, not just in the future. The 2,800 arrests in Los Angeles since June, outside Home Depots and car washes and homeless shelters, massively understate the chilling effect of ICE raids on the largest city in the largest state in the union.” What most Americans haven’t grasped is that those Latinos who show up for work are no longer spending but saving. You spend when you have a clear picture of the future; you don’t when the crystal ball in your mind’s eye is murky. A consideration of this fact would alarm any serious economist. It means that much of that money, which is in the billions, has been removed from circulation (hence the poor job report). LA is not island. Its ICE-induced economic woes will radiate to a large number of red and blue states.
Two papers you should trust when it comes to the Middle East. One, Haaretz; the other, Al Jazeera. This headline is from the latter: “Gaza faces famine as convoys are delayed and deaths from hunger rise amid Israel’s ongoing military assault.” Yes, Israel is now starving Gaza. And it must be noted that, beginning with Ireland’s Potato Famine, the most obscene episodes of mass starvation have been imposed by capitalists rather than nature. Think only of India during WW2. That was Winston Churchill. So, what do we really learn from Zionism? The desperate situation in Gaza? And the gas chambers of Nazi Germany? Maybe we see history is, after all, a weak teacher. We make so much noise about its lessons, but Gaza clearly shows these lessons are a bunch of hot air. Maybe history can’t teach us much at all and our natural feelings of human fellowship require another cultural foundation.
What is this? Trump will now require Zambians and Malawians “to pay bonds up to $15,000 for some tourist and business visas.” The pilot program will begin in two weeks. Seriously, the bozos in that administration have no idea about Africa. A kaffir who can afford to fly to the US can afford that bond. This is why those who come to America by plane are nothing but a brain and buck drain for the Dark Continent. Do they (at the State Department) really think regular kaffirs can even afford a $3,000 ticket? Zambia’s GDP per capita, my guy, is around $1,300. You’re lucky to get on a chicken bus with that kind of scratch. Maybe the State Department is very well aware of this fact and only wants a performance out of this lame bond business. Trump, once again, is filling the troughs for his racist base.
Let’s end Slog AM with the excellent neo-soul tune, “Save Your Tears For Someone New,” by Lee Fields:
