– Free abortions on demand without apology is a laudable goal. How we get from here to there, especially in states where activists are on the defensive, is a question.

– SDOT’s bridge operations crew would like to remind bicyclists that bypassing a gate can have serious consequences.

– My yacht doesn’t have any helicopter landing pads; It’s barely a yacht. In fact it’s a bike.

– Donald Rumsfeld is complaining about Obama’s war planning (h/t MikeBoyScout in the comments). I mean, there are legit criticisms, but Rumsfeld ain’t really the one to make them.

– The Facebook page for the demonstration in Seattle against the Russian anti-LGBT law.

– Anyone going to Bumbershoot? I haven’t bought my ticket yet, but this is the thing I’d most want to see if I do go.

– Put a panel on it

A bit later than I’d said, but I’ve emailed these out to the candidates. Nobody had any changes, so I mostly just did a find and replace of mayor for city council and then added a question about gender pay equality.

1) Now that I-502 has passed, what should the purchase of marijuana look like within city limits? Will medical marijuana collective garden storefronts in Seattle have to abide by the 1000-foot rule established by I-502?

2) With Metro’s ability to fund itself at the whim of the legislature, what should the city’s role be in public transportation? How should the City Council both make sure we get our fair share, and that the system serves the entire region well?

3) What should the waterfront look like after the Viaduct comes down? Will there be a streetcar or other transit?

4) What should happen in the next 4 years to make sure that police reform both satisfies the Feds, and works for Seattle citizens?

5) A recent study found Seattle is the worst of the 50 largest US metro areas in terms of pay equality for women. Why do you think that’s the case, and what is the city’s role in closing that gap?

Dominic Holden is reporting that Group Health won’t cover abortions but they will provide abortion services to people who need them (???). I imagine the story will be a bit less muddled in next week’s paper, but that’s, like, a week away.

What we know now is that the regulatory environment is muddled at best. So now Rodney Tom can see plainly the consequences of his taking the leadership of the state Senate. If he wants it to pass, he can either send it to a committee that will pass it or he can support a 9th order challenge. But that would require him poutting women’s (and trans men and gender queers who can also need abortions) health and lives above his own personal ambition, so no.

I think President Obama was right to call the use of chemical weapons by Syria a red line. And between the video and intelligence — that most of us are getting third hand — it certainly looks like chemical weapons have been used. Of course a decade ago there was pretty convincing evidence that a regime that had used chemical weapons was stockpiling them, and that turned out not to have happened.

Once again, there are inspectors on the ground, and once again there is a drumbeat to war. But I hope we can wait until the inspectors give a report before we make a final decision. And when we make that final decision, we should figure out the way to make it as international and as diplomatic as possible.

While both are to be avoided, the use of chemical weapons is different from the regular course of war. The taboo on it has served the world well for nearly a century. That Saddam Hussein is the worst example of chemical weapons use until last week is a testament to how rare it is. It wasn’t used by either side in World War 2, or much during the Cold War. And that is for the good.

Still, relying on weapons inspectors is the best way to show that we’re opposed to these weapons for the right reasons, not for political reasons.

– We can all agree that naming storms after climate deniers is the best idea ever.

– Mike McGinn did a great job on Fox News, but on the other hand they only asked him one question. Over and over again.

– I hope there isn’t a teacher’s strike in Seattle, but if there is one, I support the teachers.

– Even if you think there wasn’t enough evidence to convict or whatever, George Zimmerman is not a responsible gun owner. He stalked and eventually shot dead a young man who wasn’t armed. For him to tour the factory where his gun was made is the worst. Both by him and by the people who set it up.

Of course, the headline is joking. But in 2009, when Susan Hutchison ran for office in Democratic King County, she did it claiming to be a nonpartisan. Now, not so much.

The Seattle Times (http://is.gd/6EHqfL ) reports Hutchinson defeated the interim GOP chair, Luanne Van Werven, in a run-off vote after two other candidates were eliminated at the party’s meeting in Spokane on Saturday.

Hutchison ran unsuccessfully for King County Executive in 2009, downplaying her Republican ties.

On Saturday, she pledged to breathe new life into a state Republican Party that has suffered stinging election defeats.

I don’t know if her election puts the lie to her claims to being anything but a Republican, or if that was already so obvious that nothing can put the lie to it. In any event, we can now be pretty confident that the GOP never bought her claims of nonpartisanship.

But I would like to take the occasion of her election to hope sincerely that she actually tries to attract moderates to her party. Their hateful wing is so far out there, that even though they can’t be elected to a majority in the legislature they’re hurting people. When she ran, her record was sitting on the board of the Discovery Institute and supporting candidates like Mike Huckabee. But her rhetoric was moderate and conciliatory. We’ll have to see what one emerges with her party leadership.

– It’s sad that there needs to be an app for school lockdowns.

– I like seeing what The New York Times thinks of Seattle developments. It’s very provincial of me, but I don’t care. They are rather fawning over Jeff Bezos.

– The Many, Many Jobs That Won’t Earn You Enough to Live in Your City

– I forgot to mention it in the post on Friday, but this editorial in the Ballard News-Tribune was what set me off thinking about a city post-Seattle Times.

– I have jury duty starting tomorrow in Seattle. Since it’s city, it’ll only be a misdemeanor, so I don’t anticipate it being very long. They said there would be WiFi in the waiting room, so I’m hoping y’all don’t notice anything, but my posting schedule may be a bit different than usual.

The man who massacred Afghan civilians was sentenced today at JBLM.

A military jury on Friday sentenced a U.S. soldier who massacred 16 Afghan civilians last year to life in prison without a chance of parole.

The decision came in the case of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 40, who pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty.

Bales did not recount specifics of the horrors in court when he testified Thursday or offer an explanation for the violence, but he described the killings as an “act of cowardice, behind a mask of fear, bulls— and bravado.”

I believe in the parole system, even for awful cases. And Robert Bales is certainly an awful case. So I would have liked the possibility of parole to come up at some distant point in the future. But I certainly can’t begrudge the toughest sentence available given the circumstances.

These sort of posts almost inevitably get misconstrued as me wanting The Seattle Times to go away. I don’t. More voices are better. More journalism is better. But I think that given The Seattle Times’ turning away from the web, their continuous pissing away their credibility, and the general state of newspapers, it’s not very out there to assume that their day will come. So this post is looking at some of the things that might happen if they went away.

The first, and I think scariest option, is nothing. It’s possible that given the state of the newspaper industry that nobody would want to put out a daily in Seattle. The money making pieces of the newspaper have already been made less so with craigslist and with sports blogs. So perhaps we would just lose the reporting that we get now.

But I think it’s more likely that something would replace them. There is already a lot of solid local reporting on the ground in Seattle. From West Seattle Blog to Capitol Hill Seattle to the blogs of the weekly papers, you can get decent, current, reporting today outside of a daily. It’s no substitute, but I suspect those things would step up, and other online voices would fill any gap left behind.

However, I’m also not convinced that in the absence of The Seattle Times would mean the end of a daily in Seattle. I think it makes a certain amount of sense that one of our local millionaires or billionaires would take it on as an act of good will. They could either buy The Seattle Times outright or they could start their own paper if it went under. This paper might manage to be even more pro-corporate friendly than The Seattle Times currently, if that’s possible.

Another couple of possibilities I’ve been thinking about are a bit more out there. I could envision either The Stranger expanding to a daily if there was no daily or the newspaper guild starting a paper like they did during the strike. I don’t know if there would be any will to make these things happen, but I don’t think they’re outside the realm of the possible.

I hope that we have The Seattle Times for a good long while, and I’m rooting for it to get better as a paper. But it seems reasonable to think about what happens if they go under.

Over the weekend I’m going to send out questions to the City Council candidates who will be on the ballot in November. I could do similar questions to the Mayor’s race, at least 1-4. 5 was less policy and more executive specific. So I could add another policy question or if you think there’s something Council specific that ought to be addressed, that would be fine too.

I should also note that I don’t actually expect anyone to answer them. I’ve made joke endorsements when only one candidate from a crowded field responded (although I have always voted for them if I made the endorsement), but honestly, I know HA, especially post Goldy is low on the list of places to respond to. Two years ago it felt like only one of the races got any serious coverage. Maybe that’s the nature of things when it’s all insider incumbents. Or maybe it was the perceived nature of the candidates. But I didn’t like the powers that be deciding that the challengers don’t really count. This year I think some of the challengers have got better press, so it’s maybe not as important. But I’d like to let people answer the questions in a way that isn’t gotcha or soundbite journalism if they want to.

All this to say, if you have an issue you’d like to see covered that isn’t addressed in the linked questions, let me know. And if you’d like questions asked in any other race, by all means suggest away.

Whenever I have long hair (such as now) I take it off the brush and put it out for the birds. This is something my mother told me to do and I think her mother told her to do before that. Apparently, I’m helping mangle pigeon feet.

“There are a few diseases that damage urban pigeons’ feet… Pox is one, but pox certainly never destroys the whole foot,” Roberts says. “I would say that 99.9 percent of the pigeons with damaged feet I have seen owe the damage to the carelessness of human beings in disposing of their rubbish. It isn’t just guesswork—the cotton, hair, fishing line is still evident after toes and even feet have been lost, embedded deeply into the skin.”

Human hair, I ask? “Human hair is awful. If it tightens around a bird’s foot, it digs in deeply and it doesn’t snap. It is extremely difficult for even a rescuer to get an implement like a seam cutter under embedded hair to remove it, and soaking it doesn’t soften it.”

But how in the world does human hair end up on a pigeon’s foot, I ask? “People are actually advised to leave their hair clippings out for birds to use in nest building. Women with long hair will remove the hair from their hairbrushes and drop it out of the window for the birds (I have seen them do this), thinking it will help the birds. But the damage it does, particularly to pigeons who will turn in circles and therefore get the long hair tangled round both feet, then tightened, is just terrible.”

Although Mudede doesn’t believe it’s the cause — or much of the cause anyway– I’m willing to go with his expert. I will stop depositing my hair on the ledge of my apartment from here on out. I was always worried that they got caught up in a storm drain anyway.

Or maybe it’s time for a haircut what with it being 80 something degrees.

– I’m not sure RT was lying about America, but it is important to get the truth of Russia’s anti-gay horror show out there on a Russian station.

– This has nothing to do with keeping the babies safe and everything to do with a government that has decided that the 4th Amendment is getting in its way and that an expectation of privacy is an anachronism that only a bunch of irrelevant cranks or criminals care about. I don’t see how you can interpret their actions any other way.

– A dual endorsement in the general election is strange, but OK, King County Labor Council.

– I’m fine with the GOP not having Presidential debates on CNN and NBC if they want. But the fact that there’s going to be a documentary on one of the most important people of the late 20th century doesn’t strike me as a good excuse.

– The Snoqualmie Valley Trail bridge looks pretty neat.

– But if you want proof of how silly the whole thing is, it would be hard to do better than simply glancing at the homepage of the Seattle Times online this morning. Even as the world’s leading climate scientists warn of the sea level rising by three feet by 2100, the Times is twisting a debate about the wisdom of coal exports into an election year kerfuffle.

– Macklemore talking about how he gets more leeway because he’s white.

– Is it strange that all I want to do now is move to Asshole Jupiter?

I didn’t set out today to just say nice things about random statewide elected Democrats. I mean I have problems with all of them. But kudos to Attorney General Ferguson for this opinion.

Any public health district in Washington that provides maternity care must continue to offer “substantially equivalent benefits” in the form of contraception and abortion services, even if it contracts with a religious-affiliated medical organization, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in an opinion Wednesday.

“I fully expect all public hospital districts to comply with this opinion,” Ferguson told a Seattle news conference.

The opinion impacts a growing trend in Washington, in which small local hospitals have chosen to affiliate with larger health organizations, including Catholic-affiliated PeaceHealth and Providence Health and Services.

Good work. It’s no substitute for the Reproductive Parity Act, but it’s a good opinion and hopefully it will spur action in the next legislative session (I can hope).

I’m glad that Mike Kreidler is the Insurance Commissioner.

Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler is fining four insurance companies for overcharging consumers in Washington state.

Kreidler’s office said Tuesday that Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., Hartford Casualty Insurance Co., Hartford Insurance Co. of the Midwest, and Trumbull Insurance Co. have agreed to each pay a total fine of $100,000 split up among the companies.

I’m not sure that would have happened if there were a Republican in that role. Maybe everything would be the same, but I suspect their corporate friendly agenda would have led them to do the minimum if they even bothered with the case at all. It’s important to have strong rules, but it’s also important to have people who will enforce them.

– I don’t know enough about the Frequent Network Plan but it’s worth a look.

– 82% of Americans are correct.

– Goldy is more thrilled than me with the prospect of a State GOP Chair Pam Roach. I think she would be as problematic as before, but with a larger platform.

– Just as was the case before Roe, women’s abortion access in many states across the country is largely becoming dependent on two arbitrary things: where she lives, and how much economic privilege she has.

– Cascade Bikes is asking you to write a letter to SDOT to help complete the Missing Link.

– I think we are on solid biblical footing, in other words, to say that the current effort among House Republicans to gut SNAP is an example of the sin of Onanism. The anti-welfare rhetoric and ideology of the tea party — with its denunciations of “takers” and “moochers,” and the rallying cry of its founding in rejection of mortgage assistance for soon-to-be-homeless families — is a virulent, vicious strain of Onanism

– Anyone going to see Romeo & Juliet at the Sculpture Park? Also, in case you ever have to promote it, it is not “the greatest love story ever told.”