Fried committed the only unforgivable crime in America: fucking with rich people

I think you mean the only prosecutable crime in America, Brent.

I love that you think Janet Jackson in 2023 is "the show of a lifetime". Variety is the spice of life.

"Herbold occupies sort of the middle of the council's political spectrum" that line tells you all you need to know about how completely skewed TS is when it comes to the Seattle politics.

Can’t wait to see the Strangers picks so I know who not to vote for. The Strangers platform is more crime and it’s responsible peoples fault it happened.

Jas's AM/PM round-ups are so refreshing after a day of Matt's flood of axe-to-grind blurbs. Happy that you're happy to go see Janet Jackson, Jas.

I remember when The Stranger endorsed Juarez back in 2015, because she "flashes Rihanna vibes." Not a great reason, and not a great council member.

My copy of Strange Days is VHS.

@11: it is wishful thinking on your part. woke has a simple meaning: alert to racial prejudice and discrimination. that's it. it doesn't mean one is pro-catalytic converter theft.

you sure spend a lot of time typing out the same resentments every day.

@11: District 3 was supposed to have been a safe seat for CM Sawant, meaning Socialist Alternative would spend only a token amount of money and effort every four years to retain her in it. Now they’re spending huge amounts of money and effort every two years, and her margin of victory has shrunk to several hundred votes. Had the Recall Sawant effort been any more old-school, disorganized, and incompetent, it would not have qualified for the ballot at all, yet it got thousands more signatures than it needed, and lost only because Socialist Alternative could and did register new voters on the street and harvest their votes immediately. Had Recall Sawant challenged enough of those ballots, she might have lost anyway.

In Socialist Alternative’s hive-mind, they lead glorious worldwide revolution against evil capitalism. The grind of this constant retail politics is far beneath them, and what if they lose anyway? Nothing inspiring there. They may as well quit whilst (barely) ahead of that.

Excellent... another whacky city council member bows out.... Next Sawant. please be Sawant next. One would think the bags of dog poo - with no police follow up... would be considered a "vote of no confidence".

Now all we need are a few center party democrats to fill the "vacant space" left by these fleeing council members, more police and an AG who will prosecute criminals and we are back on track.....

This is not the end,... its not beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning..... Hope is kindled!

The right-wing media shit-o-sphere sure does an amazing job appealing to people incapable of nuance, like @11. Woke! SJW! BLM! CRT! Socialism!! What do they all mean? Fuck if they know, but they’re terrified anyway.

@19 nearly every commenter here votes Democrat. What we on the council is a group of far left progressives that have allowed crime to explode in the city. When I was younger you actually went to jail for shoplifting therefore most people wouldn’t do it. We need to return to that kind of policy.

@12: I beg to differ. I think "woke" is a fast mutating and malleable term that has nobody can control anymore. It ranges from your polite society definition to the seriously contorted and breathtakingly cringing.

@21: putting words in other's mouths is how the definition is mutating. the @11s of Merica are defining "woke" now. however, i am an originalist.

@20: crime is "exploding" everywhere. bellevue got hit by organized shoplifting more than seattle did. i wasn't aware the city council had such power.

I'm so glad Juarez is retiring! I got redistricted into D-5 and I'm dreading having her as my rep for an entire year. I hope we can replace her with somebody far more progrsssive.

@11, I see you have graduated from inveighing on (and probably being banned from) the Seattle Times' comment section to the Stranger. You're pretty easy to identify since nobody else uses the stupid term "Clowncil." Where are you going next, a personal blog that no one reads?

Crypto fraud. I'm reeling.

"A historic breakthrough in clean energy" Jas, I have always enjoyed your writing, but, today, you outdid yourself!
You did not use "an" before the word "historic". The use of an before historic dates back to when British people dropped the "h" when pronouncing words like "an 'ouse", "an 'orse" etc. We are not British and we don't drop the h!
Even worse, pseudo intellectuals have started using "an" when saying words like "an Hispanic", "an hysterectomy" and "an hissy fit". (OK, I embellished with hissy fit.)
Jas, keep up the good work and refuse to embrace an anachronism that should have gone away when we threw the British out almost 250 years ago!

'can I please have a apple?'
hmmm.

"Jas, keep up
the good work and
refuse to embrace an anachronism.... "

an what?
Hmmm.

and, a hour passed;
or, was it an hour?

I thank CM Juarez for her service, and I wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

Sadly, everyone on the Council who has been there awhile must now take part of the blame for the catastrophic failure that was Seattle’s homelessness policy over the past decade. I have little doubt CM Juarez now sees similarly dismal polling data to that which presumably drove CM Herbold to announce her own upcoming retirement.

Had Amazon not taken CM Sawant’s bait, and tried to buy the 2019 elections, Seattle’s voters might have cleaned the Council then, and a reality-based Council might have worked with Mayor Durkan on moving forward. But Amazon foolishly gave CM Sawant An Enemy to demonize, and she took that for all it was worth. Two more years of pointless bickering and gridlock was the result. Now more years of homelessness disaster bring the inevitable wrath of even Seattle’s famously-tolerant electorate.

whattabout America's famously-
Enamored love for all things
Rich? tax The Billionaires
and MULTI-Millionaires
til the Homeless dis-
appear: into Hous-
ing. Pronto

Seattle's not Unique
L.A.'S new Mayor's First Act?

a new War on Homelessness
Note: NOT on the Homeless
who are but a Symptom of
Ameica's insidious Decline
whilst Billionaires wallow
in gilty hallowed Havens.

@32: But what about whatabout whataboutism? (Really, what about it? Hmm?)

If only we could confiscate wealth that mostly doesn’t really exist, or is kept illiquid if it does, then we could replicate Seattle’s success with spending on the homeless (currently half a billion and counting ever since Seattle’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness collapsed into a Homeless Crisis) on an even bigger scale! Wouldn’t that be great?

@32 yeah because declaring a state of emergency around homelessness had done wonders around here.

@35 (and with a nod to @34): There’s no real reason to expect readers sympathetic to the Stranger to have any knowledge of just how much money Seattle has spent — and therefore wasted — on homelessness response. The Stranger’s writers always just assume a far larger expenditure would magically solve the problem; there’s barely any mention of all the money already spent, no mention of where it went, and absolutely no curiosity as to why it failed utterly to solve — or even to mitigate — the problem. Hence sycophants like @32 blithely assume more money would solve the problem, and react with abject surprise when their comfy myth gets challenged with facts. (This is the second time in ten days that particular commenter has simply run away and hid when I challenged him on the topic of Seattle’s expenditures on homelessness: https://www.thestranger.com/guest-editorial/2022/12/05/78755141/seattles-freedom-caucus/comments)

@13: “Bring on the creative left!”

Anyone to the left of Seattle’s traditional Democratic positions will have to be incredibly creative indeed, given the utter disasters the “progressive” left have inflicted upon Seattle. Seattle’s voters are rejecting left-of-liberals to the point where a Republican was elected citywide for the first time in decades.

I don’t know what you want in City Council candidates, but anyone who tells you rents will decline significantly in the short term, or that Seattle will acquire plentiful inexpensive housing in time for you to avail yourself of it, is probably lying. Seattle’s (less than) 90 square miles can hold only so many persons, and housing availability will remain constricted until long after Seattle starts far much more high-rise construction than it already has going.