Finally, the heat ends: I am one of the "fall-loving freaks" Hannah called out in AM yesterday who cannot fucking wait to don a light sweater and sip my first pumpkin spice latte of the year from a local coffee shop. Follow the Seattle Weather Blog's advice and throw those windows open for some cool, refreshing breezes.

Impending traffic clusterfuck this weekend: Consider yourself warned, Slog-reading motorists and Link-riding Mariners fans. The Seattle Times reports Dept. of Transportation workers will close Highway 520 between I-5 and 92nd Avenue Northeast for repairs, southbound I-5 will shut down to one lane in SODO, and Sound Transit workers replacing some tiles in the Columbia City station will reduce the frequency of trains to every 20 minutes instead of every 10. This will all conflict with three Mariners games over the weekend, including a sold-out contest on Saturday celebrating local legend Ichiro Suzuki. 

Another reason John Goodman sucks: Remember last year when a local mega-landlord dumped a bunch of money into our local elections to help conservative candidates win? Now he has effectively evicted a bunch of sea lions from their seasonal lounging pier in Ballard, the Seattle Times reports.

Local impact of student loan cancellation: KUOW broke down the stats on how many people in Washington will benefit from the forgiveness of up to $20,000 in student loan debt (only $10k if you didn't receive a Pell Grant). Turns out, direct economic assistance to people not making very much money helps a lot of people!

Rent control, but for tuition: The People's Policy Project points out an obvious fly in the ointment of Biden's student loan reforms. Maybe fifty years of giving blank checks to hedge funds masquerading as institutions of higher education was enough?

Mark your calendars: On September 19 from 10 am to 6 pm, the Seattle Municipal Court will hold an outreach event at the Rainier Beach Community Center. The Court will bring service providers who work with its Community Resource Center to help people obtain housing resources, sign up for Apple Health or other public benefits, vacate old drug convictions, and other stuff. The Court says it will provide translation services in Amharic, Mandarin, Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese. You don't need to make an appointment, but you can register here in advance for faster check-in. Bonus: there will be free lunch provided from 11 am to 2 pm.

The word of the day is "stochastic terrorism": If you think the transphobes with pitchforks are going to stop at getting people fired, I really want to know which alternate universe you just blipped in from.

In a totally unrelated story: Someone attempted to scale the security fence at the FBI's office in Chicago, but authorities deemed him mentally unstable, and he never appeared to be a threat. While officials said the man had no clear political ideology, they also noted that violent rhetoric from the far-right following the FBI's raid to recover classified documents from Trump's beach house has spurred an increase in threats to federal agents.

More of this energy: After Texas's draconian abortion ban took effect, some providers came up with the brilliant idea for a floating clinic that could provide reproductive health care on federal waters. The cruise out to the area where basic human rights remain valid takes about 90 minutes, far less time than getting on a plane or driving out of the moral wasteland of the Lone Star State.

Speaking of Texas: A federal judge in Fort Worth struck down the state's ban on people aged 18 to 20 possessing handguns, because apparently three months is about how long you have to wait after an elementary school shooting before you can expand the arsenal of the disturbed young man planning the next one.

Florida cops having a normal one: Miami-Dade police officers decided to block a pregnant woman and her husband on their way to the ER after they honked at two deputies blocking an intersection while talking to one another from their cars. Is there any jurisdiction in this country where a cop's hurt feelings don't interfere with public safety?

Cannot believe both of these stories happened today: In other news about cops interfering with medical care for pregnant women, a California resident secured a $480,000 award from the Orange County government after two of their sheriffs stopped at Starbucks on the way to the hospital after her water broke while she was in custody. Jail officials took two hours to respond to her emergency call for help, and she ended up miscarrying after being hospitalized. Guess the only available response is to give Orange County cops more money for training on how to not be enormous assholes to pregnant people having medical emergencies.

Collective action works, comrades:

No, not that lawyer: One of Alex Jones's lawyers took the Fifth at a disciplinary hearing yesterday over his mishandling of confidential records. You'd think that this plea would relate to his attorney's mistaken disclosure of an entire digital copy of Jones's cell phone, but, like me, you'd be wrong. This disciplinary hearing concerns the unauthorized release of medical records for several victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. 

We've reached the Stupidity Singularity: A North Texas school named George Dawson Middle School will restrict students' access to a book written by ... George Dawson. The school board overseeing the middle school says they're concerned about the first chapter in the book written by a Black man famous for learning to read and write at 98 years old after growing up in the Jim Crow South. In that chapter, written from the perspective of 10-year-old George, he describes seeing a friend lynched. To be clear, the pro-censorship conservatives are saying that kids older than he was when he witnessed this atrocity shouldn't be able to read a survivor's account of the crime.

Let's end AM with this homage to the progenitor of nearly all our current societal problems from Atlanta-based rapper Michael Render: