– The embarrassment is not limited to the flag, itself. The fact that it still flies, that one must debate its meaning in 2015, reflects an incredible ignorance. A century and a half after Lincoln was killed, after 750,000 of our ancestors died, Americans still aren’t quite sure why.

– Good for gender neutral city bathrooms in Seattle.

– So wait, there’s a cost to inaction on climate change?

– Five Thousand Ladybugs of Highly Effective People

– It’s also crucial that white allies reject the lie that there is an epidemic of black men raping white women, which has motivated so much white violence toward black bodies historically. The systematic lynching of black men in the South was routinely built on the idea that there was an epidemic of black men raping white women in the South, and so many years later, reports of the shooter’s own words indicate that the protection of white women was a direct motive for killing so many innocent people, including six women.

– Nothing can ever be politicized.

– What does that fundamentalist word-salad actually mean? It means this cartoon. It means this hideous envisioning of precisely the diseased ideology that terrorist Dylann Roof described as he murdered nine faithful Christians at their Wednesday night Bible study.

– Anyone else find #CharlestonSyllabus helpful?

– You guys, crows are awesome, but also crows are the worst

– 18 Missing Link victims will go to the hospital by the time the trail study is complete

They’ve taken the tweet down and changed the headline, but for most of yesterday, The Seattle Times had headlined their story copy of an AP soty and tweeted “Concentrated evil” or “sweet kid”: Details on the suspect in Charleston church shootings. Ansel at Slog gives some context to the harm done by various attempts by the media to humanize these killers. And that’s an important thing to say.

That context is important, but this case it’s ugly enough on its own. We’re talking about a racist crime. We’re talking about terrorizing a community. We’re talking about a man who committed the grossest of acts. And it doesn’t matter if you can find some friend’s parent who vouched for him at some point “sweet kid” is disgusting.

Look, I’m all for finding out all about how the people who knew him felt about him before. If it’s in the wire story, I guess run it. But The Seattle Times chose to highlight that. And it’s a fucking disgrace.

My ancient laptop is acting funny so no links. Will try to do something on the commute home, but no promises.

To the TV and radio hosts, the columnists, the leaders of White churches, to the parents of White people: You really have to take the lead in teaching our community not to murder Black people. There is a sickness in the White community where we excuse police, where we excuse people who saw an unarmed Black kid with Skittles, where we excuse anyone who says they’re scared of Black people killing them. While each time it’s horrendous, last night, we saw as the toxic racism of our culture that hardly bothers to condemn the murder of Black people came to a head in a Black church in South Carolina.

Yes, sure, there is more to deal with than looking for every excuse after a Black man or woman gets killed by the police or by someone with a gun. Yes, we need to deal more specifically with the toxic aftereffects of slavery, and of Jim Crow, and of redlining. And we need to end the pay gap between Black and White people. We can deal with the school to prison pipeline. We can take Black people seriously when they talk about their own lives. We can cut the micro-aggression bullshit. But we can at least start with condemning it when Black people are killed in this country. We can at least not look for excuses.

All of that has to start with White people. A white person bought Dylann Storm Roof a gun in the first damn place. White people are the ones whose paranoid fantasies give space for this sort of thing. We’re the ones who make excuse after excuse after goddamn excuse.

We’re the ones who after the fact say selling loosies should have been a death sentence. We’re the ones who say being put in the back of a police van should be a death sentence. White people, and especially those with a platform need to confront the deadly racism in our community. As long as we keep making excuses, there will be more.

– Dear SPD: Get your shit together.

– COOKIES ALL AROUND.

– Donald Trump isn’t going to be president, obviously. But him running probably solves his biggest concern: What if during the campaign, people aren’t paying attention to Donald Trump.

– Will there ever be a GOP candidate for governor who supports a minimum wage?

– Maybe it’s best to accept that some of this big-picture planning is just happening on autopilot.

– Pro-Choice and Pregnant? Yeah, It’s Really Real

– Increasingly it looks like this whole P.C. boo-hoo is just a weaponized version of Those Were The Days.

– Being a GOP presidential candidate gets you the opportunity to scam the elderly out of their homes, eventually.

– Wow, Councilmember O’Brien.

– The legislature should pass a resolution saying they don’t know if longer fire seasons caused by global warming are real.

– WHY WERE YOU MUTED?

I don’t even understand what Dori Monson is trying to say here.

I have good news for the wildlife of our state. They’re getting their own overpass on I-90.

I don’t know enough about the overpass but roads are pretty bad for the environment so something like that to mitigate some of the problems is probably a good thing. There are reasonable discussions about cost and about what else we could do with that money, I suppose. But that isn’t really the issue here. The issue is superlatives:

The world’s most wildlife-friendly highways.

I don’t want to be obsessive here, but it comes up later: Most wildlife-friendly according to who?

How come everything we do has to be a world record? The [Seattle] tunnel was going to be two feet smaller in diameter, which would have made it the second largest tunnel in the world. They said no, no, no – let’s add two feet so that it can be the biggest drill ever. They were so obsessed with a world record sized drill that they cared more about that then building a drill that would actually drill.

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I was pretty critical of the tunnel machine for a long time, but I’m pretty sure Dori just made that story up.

Everything has to be a world record because they’re spending our money. I could set all kinds of world records if I could just spend other people’s money to achieve my goals.

Something something wasting Bonneville International’s money on the dipshittiest radio show.

Maybe we don’t need to have the world’s most wildlife-friendly highway ever.

Well, there are places that have more fragile ecosystems. Islands and like rainforests and shit. But I think it makes more sense to see the value of the project on its own merits rather than pointing out that you could do something similar in the Brazilian Amazon. Also, we didn’t answer who deemed it that. So if you want, you can just call it the antepenultimate and nobody will care.

This overpass is going to cost $6.2 million. Watch and see how much it ends up costing. It’s supposed to open in 2019 and cost $6.2 million. I’m going to guess 2023 and $20 million. I’ll go triple the cost that they’re estimating right now.

Calendared. I’m sure he’ll let us know if WSDOT’s prediction turns out to be correct. Also, is this a standard we can apply to all road projects or just the ones that don’t have to have safety improvements or to account for the weight of moving cars and trucks, so are probably less likely to come in over budget?

– Trans* Women Are Women

– Getting names is making East Link really feel concrete

– There is literally no problem on earth that lowering taxes on business people will not solve.

– Polish your lenses, oil your tripods, search your archives – the seventh Panda’s Thumb photography contest, begins – now!

– Ping pong tables in parks is kind of fun, but I don’t know why we have to ruin it with pretending it’s going to stop crimes.

One of the most infuriating arguments against Roe v Wade is from people who claim that they’re for abortion rights, but wish it had come from the states, legislature by legislature. The idea being, I guess, that women, trans men and other people who can get pregnant controlling their own body should be subject to the whims of legislatures and not a fundamental right. It always seemed like such a dodge to me.

But now that state legislatures and Congress are proposing and enacting more and more anti-choice legislation, and at least some courts are upholding them, it’s surely time for the people who have been making that argument to step up and oppose these things legislatively.

Because now Texas is pushing TRAP laws and the court isn’t intervening. Now 20 week bans, pre-viability, are sprouting up across the country. Now states are banning medication abortions with consequences. Now, if you care about abortion, but for some ungodly reason think it has to be legislative victories, you can act. Abortion rights are coming under attack, and it’s time, it’s past time, for pro-choice people to fight back.

So sure, in Washington we’re fighting to increase access. But it isn’t like the Reproductive Rights Parity act has passed. Or for that matter that the budget will be anything like friendly to reproductive rights. Of course the main reason to oppose these anti-choice measures is that they’re harmful to the people who live in those states who can get pregnant. But now the people who have been waiting for abortion to be a legislative thing, can finally get in the game. Unless it was just an excuse not to participate in the first place.

– We’ve had passionate left-wing students for a long time. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong, but either way the risk that you’ll lose your job because of their political complaints is basically zero.

– Everybody, just stop defending the Duggars, or trying to deflect blame onto liberals or whatever. Thanks.

– The weekend rollout of bus announcements makes me think Metro knew there might be some backlash. But still, good on them for correcting their course.

– Winning Hearts and Minds by Pointing Guns at them

– This book looks great. Anyone else going to Mamrie Hart’s book signing tomorrow?

– I know, I said no more puns. What can you do?

– Jesus is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

– But, I thought Ed Murray was just concerned with ethics.

– I just can’t with the McKinney story.

– Wells Fargo’s corporate practices don’t make up for an ad, but that ad is pretty sweet, and if that’s your idea of moral decay, you’re the worst.

– New Hampshire’s legislature is pretty ridiculous, but at least Obama managed to salvage some sort of civics lesson.

– With the Women’s World Cup, the whole country can have the same uncomfortable feeling Reign fans (myself included) have about cheering Hope Solo.

– Oil, gas, coal industries want Washington, British Columbia as permanent home ports

– I get what Goldy’s point is here, but Goldman Sachs would be a lot more creditable if they hadn’t recently helped crash the world economy.

– Chart of the Day: Novels about men are more likely to win major literary awards

– There was a Comcast outage recently, and if you’re upset, here are some things you can do about it.

– Here’s hoping there’s some Safe Routes to School money in the final budget.

– Everyone keeps saying how good Daredevil is. I’ll have to check it out.

I’m pretty sure this is my favorite lede ever.

For the last six weeks, what appears to be a broken down van has been parked outside the offices of Bonneville Seattle, home of KIRO Radio, 710 ESPN Seattle, KTTH and My Northwest.com, despite official notice warning the owner to move it or face towing.

City law prohibits vehicles from remaining in the same spot for more than 72 hours.

It’s emblematic of a longstanding but growing problem around the city, as parking becomes harder to come by in denser neighborhoods.

Oh man, if I look out my window, I can really see there’s quite a problem. Sometimes I have to walk past it when I go to lunch. This particular story is one everyone can relate to, right? The story of a van in a not particularly well trafficked neighborhood?

I thought the there’s-traffic-congestion-on-my-way-to-work stories were my favorite example of unnecessarily overly personal “reporting” but I think this is way better. Talk about hyper local.

I’m dragging a bit, so I think I’m going to try to sleep on the way in to work. So here’s a placeholder instead of some links. Sorry.