1. Monday’s city council meeting featured the official swearing-in ceremonies for all but one of the council’s seven reelected and newly elected members—the odd one out being District 3 council member Kshama Sawant, who is holding a special ceremony for herself in a week. Sawant still took the opportunity to give a speech denouncing “big business,” Amazon specifically, and other opponents before describing her charge as head of the council’s new sustainability and renters’ rights committee—implementing rent control, placing a moratorium on winter evictions, and passing a tax on Amazon. The council’s new rules will require Sawant (and all other committee chairs—sorry, Andrew Lewis) to convince at least two of their four fellow committee members to show up if they want to hold a meeting, because committees can no longer meet without at least three council members present.

The council also adopted its new committee roster without amendment, preserving an apparent power imbalance among the council’s newcomers that I pointed out last week. While Alex Pedersen, who joined the council in November, will oversee several of the city’s largest departments—transportation, City Light, Seattle Public Utilities, and IT—and Dan Strauss will chair the important land use committee, Tammy Morales will lead a once-monthly committee overseeing community economic development, and Lewis, as mentioned, won’t chair any standing committees. One thing Morales and Lewis have in common: Both were out of town for much of December, the critical month when council members typically negotiate their committee assignments.

2. Pedersen’s primary and general-election field manager, Joseph Rouse, got into a social-media scrap with several Pedersen critics a few days ago, posting a link on the District 4 Facebook page to a piece by Safe Seattle leader David Preston that revealed where one of the Pedersen critics lives and works. The link to the doxxing post was removed by an administrator, but not before several group members pointed out that Rouse edited and wrote for a conservative campus satire publication called the Oregon Commentator when he was a student at the University of Oregon several years ago.

Rouse wrote for and held a variety of positions at the paper, whose mission statement endorses a “political philosophy of conservatism, free thought and individual liberty,” between 2011 and 2013. The publication, which is now defunct, ran numerous articles endorsing guns (“If women are to actually prevent rapes from occurring, and actually protect themselves and not ‘women’ as a social construct, then it is time we discussed women equipping themselves with firearms”), taking potshots at women, left-wing students, and people of color (“As I approached one hall, I could hear people speaking Spanish. So I walked up to one of the students and naturally said, ‘Hey, so are you guys waiting to water some begonia or what?”). How edgy was this publication? SO edgy that they ran a hardcore porn money shot as a full-page ad (page 15, and obviously NSFW).

At the end of one of his columns, which seems to be a confusing parody of the concept of “rape culture,” Rouse described himself this way: “Joseph Rouse is the publisher of Oregon Commentator and has a bitch tied up in his truck right now.” In another, trashing a proposed campus ban on smoking, he and a cowriter decry “the promotion of diversity and suffocating political correctness” and the whole “back-patting, cum-spouting” smoking ban proposal. “Because blacks, whites, gays, straights and many others use tobacco, it can’t be grouped into a minority and, hence, isn’t worth shit. Well, fuck that,” Rouse and his coauthor wrote.

Pedersen said in an email that he was not aware of Rouse’s views or writing, and that the writings do not reflect his values. (Pedersen, notably, did not hire Rouse as a council aide.) Rouse has not returned messages seeking comment. But he has continued to aggressively argue with Pedersen critics on Facebook, where he says he “invested seven months of my life getting [Pedersen] into office and “actually know[s] the man.” (Rouse confirmed on Facebook that he wrote for the publication but said it was not a “right-wing periodical.”)

According to campaign records, Pedersen paid Rouse a total of $3,500 for “campaign operations work” in August and November. Rouse’s local campaign contributions include $75 to Pedersen and $25 to Pat Murakami, who ran unsuccessfully for the District 3 council seat last year.

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3. Mike Solan, a Seattle police officer and vice president of the Seattle Police Officer Guild who has carved out a niche for himself as the voice of the far right wing of the Seattle Police Department, is running to lead the SPOG on a campaign focused on “thwarting the anti-police activist agenda that is driving Seattle’s politics,” “Fundamentally chang[ing] the activist narrative,” and… pepper-spraying anti-fascist demonstrators?

In November, Solan released a short campaign video on Youtube that includes 20 seconds of footage from the Russian state-controlled network RT, showing Seattle officers spraying what appears to be bright-orange pepper spray, shoving protesters with their bikes, and subduing demonstrators with tear gas and fists. “MIKE SOLAN. IT’S TIME TO GET SERIOUS,” the ad concludes.

The ad/stunt isn’t out of character for Solan, who has publicly denounced the entire Seattle City Council on local talk radio, served as a spokesman for the campaign against a statewide police accountability initiative, I-940, promoted George Soros conspiracy theories, appeared as a guest at events sponsored by the Washington State Republicans and the Heritage Foundation, and given an interview to the online anti-homeless group Safe Seattle in which he complained about the “undue scrutiny” placed on police.

Solan’s opponent is current SPOG president Kevin Stuckey, who released a decidedly more sedate video a month after Nolan’s went online.

In 2018, after four years without a police contract, the city council approved a new contract that gave officers a raised and adopted police reforms that critics contended were watered-down. Negotiations for a new contract, incredibly, begin this summer.

4. Correction/update: Although attendees were reportedly told that drag performer Beyonce St. James was volunteering her time at the annual All Home conference on homelessness last November, King County confirms that she received $500 for her performance. According to the county, St. James’ invoice was paid by Department of Community and Human Services director Leo Flor out of his own personal funds. Last month, All Home acting director Kira Zylstra resigned after being suspended over the incident after some attendees at the daytime conference said they had not consented to watch or participate in a sexually explicit performance.

The county declined to provide a copy of the invoice, saying it was part of an ongoing investigation.

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