From the top

In the blizzard of angst following the Buffoon in Chief’s reupping of an unimaginably stupid dumping upon our estranged friendly Canadian neighbors, I’m not even sure which American snowflake dropped the line on antisocial media:

“We’re (still) so sorry Canada. Please know he doesn’t speak for us.”

Nice try. And: If only.

I get it: It’s an honest attempt to be nice to people who have always been nice to us. But sorry, just a little too convenient. And to Canadians, likely to come across as a hollow platitude and simple attempt to escape blame for what they see as our abrogation of civic responsibilities most of them have managed to maintain just fine, s’il vous plaît.

We’ve been through this once already, when the Blithering Chunk-’O-Cheese-in Chief unleashed his first gaseous attack on Maple Leaf Nation. But here we go again.

THINK ABOUT IT. While it’s calming to our nerves and, and a predictable, even necessary survival skill amid the present great unpleasantness, the “doesn’t speak for us” line is right up there with “This is not who we are.”

Sit down for this one, folks. Hopefully within sight of a mirror.

It actually is who we — or at least far too many of us — are, as a national body. And yeah, by the nature of our “representative democracy,” he speaks for us. Loudly, crudely, stupidly, embarrassingly and very, very, very often, as is the case with any craven, self-serving malignant narcissist handed the keys to the world’s richest kingdom.

For the historical record: This handing was done not once, but twice.

The latter matters: Anyone can make a mistake, be duped, experience temporary insanity. But an entire nation of someones doing so, failing to grasp the lesson, and doing so again leaves only several explanatory choices: Lazy, stupid, or every bit as evil as the anointed megaphone-holder and his henchpeople.

I’m doubling down here on the first two, saving the latter description for the relatively small portion of the public with swastikas tattooed on their souls, if not their skin.

But the rest of you, buckle up and get real.

SO JUST OWN IT. Donald J. Trump, Private Bone Spurs No Class, really does speak for us. To Canada, and the entire rest of the lesser world. And we have allowed this to happen.

He speaks for us because we don’t vote. Half of us can’t be bothered to spend the five minutes it takes to fill out a ballot and drop it in our own mailbox. (Apologies to anyone physically unable to even lift that little red flag; there are workarounds.)

He speaks for us because we are willfully ignorant. We can’t be bothered to keep up on civic affairs, in spite of the fact that everything we need to know is now literally delivered to a screen most of us carry even into the bathroom.

He speaks for us because we fail to insist on adequate alternatives. The ascendance and then political resurrection of this insufferable fool and his army of goose-stepping lackeys occurred largely in a leadership vacuum created by the epic flaccidity of the opposing party. The D brand ran the most-establishment candidate in history during the obviously anti-establishment election of 2016 and then propped up the cardboard facsimile of a once-capable leader past the point of no return in 2024. When was the last time we/you/us took steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again? (Yes, we all are very, very busy with more important matters.)

He speaks for us because our chosen leaders failed us where it counts, but we kept returning them to office. Since the infamous and too-easily disregarded Powell Memo of 1971, the moneyed interests controlling America have very successfully flipped the scorecard on public accountability, creating for them a dream situation: the masses clubbing each other about the head so effectively as they fight over scraps on the floor of the Richest Nation on Earth that they pay no attention to the minority-control slight of hand going on behind the scenes.

Result: In elections fueled by corporate and oligarch donations, we let our own “representatives” — of both parties — walk away unscathed after caving in time after time on critical matters: Public health care. Consumer protection. Meaningful congressional oversight. Term limits. Campaign finance reform. Public education. Public health. Child care. Progressive taxation. Investment and banking fraud. Literal and figurative bed-sharing between elected officials and K Street lobbying firms. On and freaking on. Each of these intractable problems, each leading to our current state of decay, had solid solutions introduced on the floor of Congress. Each died there thanks to our inattention or mistaken assumption that everything was Going Just Fine.

He speaks for us because even given all the above, we continue to look away. Seriously: If you had been able to see a single page of today’s news 30 years ago, would anyone have imagined that a plurality of Americans in a nation heretofore clearly devoted to snuffing out fascism would somehow not be shutting down the country, insisting on an emergency course reversal? Or even rushing into office a slate of candidates willing to push the “go” button on the long-ignored “to abolish it” lever intentionally installed in the Declaration of Independence? What happened to those Americans?

Answer: Most of them are dead. So instead the nation hunkers down, unplugs even farther, and waits it out. As if inaction is a keen strategy. How is that working so far? Sit back and observe how well the Big Present Problem is solved via the midterm election. If you believe a blue wave will sweep all this away via a vote that the present anti-democracy junta will peacefully accept, you haven’t been paying attention. Minority rule has been their game since day one.

One could go on. This one has gone on long enough. If you’re still with me, thanks for having the guts to endure some tough love. Maybe you’ll think twice before sending a platitude out to our next door neighbors without looking at your own role.

And if you’re willing to accept even a tiny shred of that, I leave you with a question: What are you going to do about it? Light a candle?

Pretty sure there’s a tariff coming on those.

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RIP, Dolly — and adieu to the common good?

Did that screed above make the BellingHammer feel better? Why yes it did. It also might fit in well with the biggest sad news of the week — some of the saddest of the decade.

As an ordinary person I can’t add much to the wealth of worthy tributes to the now-late, great Dolly Parton, an uncommon national hero. But I do think it’s worth a moment to reflect on what gave her such beloved/admired status among so many disparate groups of people.

As I said in a social post upon her passing, Parton’s rise from poverty to national icon status should be appreciated in its broadest sense: She was a truly great American in all the ways we used to define that.

Her icon status was earned in an uncommon fashion, on multiple stages. She was a gifted musician with generational talent and an uncanny ability to tie together disparate artistic genres. Even more impressive, she was a woman who kicked the ass of the decidedly anti-woman culture of late-last-century Nashville-based country music machine — an achievement in itself. (To get a good sense of this, watch the overlooked, excellent Tammy Wynette Showtime biopic series, “George & Tammy.”)

But her charitable work and her sassy, here’s-what’s-good-for-you sensibility when choosing political and cultural causes made her a true American original.

The writer Tommy Tomlinson, in a Substack post worth your time, notes her “easy brilliance,” aptly concluding:

Here is her greatest gift: If you gave every category of people a circle in a massive Venn diagram—straight and gay, liberal and conservative, white and black, Asian and Hispanic, trans and cis, devout and atheist, old and young, billionaire and broke—Dolly is the place they all overlap. That doesn’t mean everyone loves her. It means more different types of people love her than they love anybody else.

Why? Because unlike most other people in the national spotlight, she never gave up on what used to make us a single people: a passion for, and devotion to, the common good. Putting others above self.

Some of us still remember.

Can’t say it close to as well as Tomlinson did here:

Dolly Parton really might have been the greatest living American. She looked and sounded only like herself, and yet so many of us can see and hear ourselves in her—well, maybe not our current selves, but the version we hope to be.

Those rhinestones were mirrors.

Here’s hoping that in the process of both celebrating and grieving her, some of us might embrace her spirit and carry it forward. Start by just giving her a new listen (see below).

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Baa Ram —You: An enterprising Bellingham dude is letting his sheep follow in the steps of many hungry goats in taking out unwanted foliage through a “lambscaping” service, Cascadia Daily News reports. It’s a clever idea.

Pro Tip: Landowners who want to make this a DIY project but lack the sheep can find plenty at regular meetings of the Bellingham Public Schools board.

In the Slow Lane: Lots of folks were amped up here this week when the City of Bellingham (Motto: We’re Getting Somewhere — Slower Than Once Imaginable”) adopted a new 20 mph speed limit for city streets. They’re calling it a lifesaving measure.

It’s Just the Start!: Sources down on Lottie Street are telling Hammer the city, once the current change sinks in and everyone crawls forward, will soon announce a new speed limit of 2.5 mph for every moving thing in the city — except for junior high kids ripping on scooters down sidewalks at speeds of approximately 45 mph, who shall remain free to do whatever the hell they damn please.

It All Goes Toward: Finally realizing the city’s longtime goal of making the ’Ham a place that takes forever to get through, no matter where you’re going or when, or by what means. As the city’s former traffic director used to famously say (after driving his car at work to design new bike lanes): Congestion is a sign of success! Please maintain your Soma ingestion schedule, folks.

Renaming it the Bay of No-Fundy: The good folks down at our Community Boating Center were sad to announce the cancellation of the last of the summer’s “Beats on the Bay” concerts. The event was a victim of its own success, drawing hordes of water-going concert folks in boats, kayaks, strings of milk cartons and literally anything else that floats in a big circle around the princely schooner Zodiac. Too many of them were ill-equipped, not wearing PFDs, and prone to disaster in saltwater that stays dangerously cold all summer.

Hammer’s Honest Take: Seriously, good call. Glad to see efforts will be made to keep it going next season with more staffing and reinforcements. BTW, nice move keeping the Sept. 1 show going in nearby Fairhaven and redubbing it, “Beats Near the Bay.” See you there.

Ouch: This week’s cringe of semi-sympathy goes to the local Lynden Tribune, where editor Bill Helm had to own up to badly mistaken election coverage from his newspaper this past week. I hate to jump on common errors, which happen regularly at most news publications (I’ve had a fair share). But this one must have been especially painful: Helm believed, and reported to thousands of readers, that the primary-election victories of two local state representatives, meant that there would be no need for a general election vote on those seats.

Hoo Boy: Helm did the right thing by (eventually) coming clean with a solid mea culpa. But gotta say, it was less than satisfying because the explainer itself was bereft of the most critical of the “Five W’s” of journalism that most of us hold dear: “Why?” It’s sort of like writing a football game story with the understanding that the team with the low score wins. Onward and upward, we hope, for the Trib.

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Xmas comes early for the BellingHammer

Wednesday was a quiet milestone here in Escrow Heights: It’s been three months since my unceremonious booting from my job as the founding executive editor at Cascadia Daily News, a respected news product I poured my very being into.

Building, shaping and working with and in the newsroom at CDN was one of the great experiences of my career in journalism — something I’ll always cherish. The community response to the work was tremendous.

On the other hand, it was a job that required, at least to me, full-time commitment, bordering on obsession.

Getting that ripped away with little warning requires the need for what I’ll kindly refer to as an “adjustment.” Still getting there, but a better life balance is already emerging from the rubble.

Two things have helped immensely.

One is a level of community support, and appreciation, that I had never expected. I bump into people everywhere I go who take the time to shake my hand and thank me for my part in restoring the connective tissue that seemed severed in the Upper Left Corner five years ago, when the region seemed on the verge of news-desert status.

The full story of that project will be told in due time. But I’ll always be proud of the newspaper as I left it. So a huge thanks here to all who have reached out.

The most common question I get: What am I now doing with all my “free time.” I rarely have a ready answer. In a lot of ways, I’m recovering from an all-consuming gig; it took a lot out of me.

I can attest that the requisite personal repotting that comes with adapting to semi-retired life more quickly than expected tends to make you focus on small, daily goals rather than big-picture achievements.

I recall the memorable scene from the movie “Clueless,” which if you’re a youngish person and have not seen, please do: Alicia Silverstone’s vapid Valley Girl character, Cher, is dining with her dad and brother in their Beverly Hills manse when Dad decides to make small talk:

Dad: “What did you do in school today, Cher?”

Cher, beaming with pride: “I broke in my purple clogs!”

Many days, I break in my purple clogs. Or some reasonable facsimile. That, and this, are enough for now.

Speaking of this: The other thing that’s helped a lot with the adjustment is this new little gig, which gives me purpose. In just three months it has grown in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Subscriptions to the BellingHammer newsletter have grown rapidly; monthly page views are routinely eclipsing much of my old work at the local newspaper (some of which was paywalled). I am humbled and super grateful for that; it propels me to work harder at it.

A big welcome to all the new folks. For them — and shoot, as an update for early adopters, too, as this thing continues to take shape — here’s a brief take on what you can expect to find here:

• Opinion. As we used to say in the office, metric F-tons of opinion. Drawn from my propensity to … have a lot of opinions, but hopefully informed by the judgment I’ve soaked up through four decades of daily journalism in the Northwest.

• Analysis, be it snarky, edgy, or just fun, via the weekly Anvil section.

• Reminiscence. Recounting and revisiting some of my previous work, updating readers on subjects or people who’ve drifted from view. Not just for nostalgia’s sake, but to help us all keep a better context on who we are as a people, both in our region and beyond.

• Some photography. Very amateur photography. It’s a longtime hobby.

• Media criticism and analysis. From someone who has worked most sides of the aisle in the news business for much of my life. I remain devoted to exposing waste, fraud and abuse in media — and helping support truly independent local news, which I still foolishly believe can help save American democracy.

• News coverage! I wrestled with this for a while but clarity has arrived: When a story breaks here that I know something about, have covered before, or can add some context to, I’ll be doing that on Substack, occasionally outside my established weekly newsletter schedule. I think competition is good for everyone. You can help by sending news tips my way.

• True independence. I’m not beholden to anyone except readers. And after a long career in the biz dancing between various vipers, I treasure being freed from the pressures of misguided managers, advertisers or boards of directors — or anyone else. Everything I publish here will remain free as a public service unless people want to chip in with a paying subscription. It’s greatly appreciated but not required.

Again, thanks for helping this publication grow beyond my expectations. It warms my heart.

Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

Legacy Recordings: The Essential Dolly Parton (CD). Whether you’re already familiar or newly curious, this is the best career overview of Dolly tunes in my own collection, ranging from a great selection of her early, mostly forgotten true country to her later pop music/movie career. Not surprisingly it’s sold out at the moment on Amazon. Find one!

The Atlantic: What Dolly Parton Knew About Reading, by Emma Sarappo, Aug. 28, 2026 (gift link). A nice newsletter take on the lifetime gift from Parton of introducing reading to young American children.

Nonesuch Records: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down, by slide guitar master Ry Cooder (CD). A gem of social commentary by Cooder, this recording accidentally served as a soundtrack to the opening salvo of this newsletter. Inspired by the Great Recession and artistic interpretations of past American social injustice, it’s a master work of Ry outrage that will make you tap your toes as you get pissed off. Bonus: Accompaniment by the late, great San Antonio accordion master Flaco Jimenez. The record opens with “No Banker Left Behind” and winds through tunes with punchlines that seem as apt today as when the album dropped in 2011. From “Dirty Chateau:”

She started life in the lettuce fields

Up in Salinas where the farm work is done

You go streaking by in your automobiles

You don’t even know where your lettuce comes from

Thanks for reading Ron Judd (The BellingHammer)! This post is public, so feel free to share it. This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

From the top

On a warm August night in the city’s roundabout-infused north end, the 23rd mayor of Bellingham arrives quietly in a cement-gray Polestar 3 EV. The low-slung, bad-ass vehicle looks like it might compete at Indianapolis.

But shortly after stepping inside a local brewpub in a city chock full of them, Kim Lund fits right in as just another youngish-looking 50-something Bellinghamster working through a tall pint of local lager.

Never let it be said that the city’s top manager doesn’t know how to read a room. Or blend into it. A city full of highly engaged citizens impatient in their pursuit of the good life, Bellingham tends to run through its mayors.

This one is the first in memory who has what might qualify as a style.

Lund, midway through an inaugural mayoral run, was here Wednesday evening to speak — briefly. Mostly, the agenda for the city’s series of “Ask Us Anything” meetups is simple and these days, more rare:

Listening.

The meetups, in three neighborhoods in one of the Northwest’s more interesting Upper Left Corner cities, have been more of a listening tour than political spin.

This is by design. And, in an era where local governments, bereft of traditional hand-me-down federal funds and like the rest of the universe, at distinct odds with the ruling junta in the Lesser Washington, probably necessary.

WEDNESDAY’S MEETUP at Larrabee Lager Company drew a crowd of more than 100 folks of varying ages, mostly in good spirits thanks to flowing ale and hot-from-the-oven pizzas.

In spite of the Great National Unpleasantness (as in most parts of town, zero red hats in this room) she began, a lot of good things happen every day here at home with what feels to some like an increasing burden of tax dollars:

People call for help and get it: The city has responded to 72,000 911 calls this year. Public Works has delivered a super big gulp of 3.2 billion gallons of safe drinking water — and processed 4.3 billion gallons of waste water. City crews are planting trees and issuing permits for “more affordable” housing at an accelerated rate. “Tiny homes” for the previously homeless have doubled in number. The city library has lent 1.8 million items (no stats on returns).

And so on.

When it came their turn, residents respectfully asked the mayor, flanked by a long row of city staff leaders, about a broad range of subjects, yielding thoughtful, if not always satisfying, answers:

Yes, the city is aware of Flock cameras on nine private properties in city limits — something the city can’t really control after having “said no” to them in civic spaces. It’s a rapidly emerging field of law, said City Attorney James Erb. A specific concern is data from the cameras being used in immigration roundup efforts. No specific policy recommendations — yet. The city is working with a group supporting state Keep Washington Working Act efforts on a “deep data dive” on information-sharing agreements for cities, Lund added.

Is the city aware of the reported rollout among ICE troopers of shock gloves? Yes, it’s working with the state Attorney General’s office on that and other immigration civil rights issues, Lund responded.

Is there a conflict with a city planning official working on a school board committee on possible elementary school closures, which go against tenets of the city’s long-range plan? Not really, Lund said, acknowledging that a city official is in fact there, to “inform the conversation” with real data and information, not set a course.

“The school district has its own elected officials,” Lund added. “I know that feels to some like a blurred line.”

Waiting for a follow-up from the questioner that did not come, Lund added: “I don’t know what I can do to make you feel more seen.”

You got the sense that she meant it.

That’s how it went for about 90 minutes. Reasoned questions, reasoned answers on topics including trans rights and city sanctuary efforts, parks and facilities, backlogs of city ordinance approvals, the city’s new waterfront park construction project and a proposed grand skateboard park under a waterfront-area overpass.

SHE WAS NOT AN OBVIOUS mayoral candidate. Lund, a chemical engineer by training who last led a local educational nonprofit, had a private-sector rep for getting things done. She probably didn’t plan to be a mayor who made her mark primarily by helping constituents that they are, indeed, simply seen and heard.

In 2026 America, that’s the low bar to which resource-starved elected officials in midsized cities must cling. It sounds simple, but leading a city whose stockroom contains only a few boxes of empathy and a couple jars of hope can be a fraught occupation.

Lund in 2023 edged out incumbent Seth Fleetwood, a fellow city native and longtime political wonk. She ran as a consummate outsider, using all the right buzz words to win over a frustrated electorate: Data-driven. Strategic. Results-oriented. Collaborative. “Trusted community partner.” She promised to be a mayor who “acts with head and heart.”

Whatever all that meant.

Her stated priorities: Access to affordable housing. Downtown vibrancy. Homelessness. Community health and safety. Climate change.

And on top of that, what often proves to be the clincher in this oft-impatient town: Not Seth Fleetwood.

As executive editor of the local newspaper at the time, I do recall some minor scoffing about what felt like a platitudes campaign.

Still, change is always attractive, so it was a tough call. After interviewing both candidates, the Cascadia Daily News Editorial Board endorsed Fleetwood. We reasoned that, in an era of heightened national racial tensions and pandemic malaise, on-the-job training was a luxury the city approaching 100K in population could not afford.

THE PUBLIC GETS the last say, and thought otherwise.

Lund, also endorsed by a couple former mayors and disparate groups ranging from public-sector unions to the proudly leftist Riveters Collective and the escrow-ist Whatcom Association of Realtors, raised just shy of $100,000 — about two thirds of that from individual donations.

She took 53 percent of the vote.

Scoreboarding her original agenda more than two years later, Bellingham today:

• Remains highly unaffordable. Lund has kept a pledge to streamline local permitting, encourage smaller, more-flexible, affordable homes, abandon city parking requirements for new housing units and other measures — likely realizing that supply/demand prevailing market forces and skyrocketing construction costs mean these steps are going to do little to lower the cost, at least, of local housing in a desirable area. Cities have few levers here; she is pulling all of these through executive orders and other means.

• Has in fact shown signs of “downtown vibrancy,” with choreographed community events such as music festivals. But vacancy rates remain high and the homeless population remains chronic. The city’s recent actions, including fencing off some notoriously homeless-populated downtown alleys, has basically shuffled that population — and the local-business angst that follows it — around. The city also has drawn both praise and criticism for taking steps to break up unpatrolled homeless camps on several sprawling vacant properties.

• Has made progress on community health and safety. Much of that is owed to what everyone hopes is moving past the peak of the fentanyl crisis, which may be more the driver here than anything, although Lund did reassign resources here as well.

• Has done its (small) part — which many locals consider small and performative — to plink away at climate change. The city also has continued to urge electrification of new buildings and spending a lot of time, money and civic energy on what, sorry to say, remain lightly used bicycle paths.

CALL IT A DRAW, if results are your bottom line. Which is not true for everyone.

The mostly left-leaning Bellingham public, faced with the unsettling national calamity that is Trump 2.0, has been fairly forgiving of local government. Key: Lund has learned on the job and critically, hired competent folks who have kept keep wheels turning. Importantly, they have avoided lapsing into a hopey-changey neophyte flopfest like … present-day Seattle.

Some of those staffers might be too competent if judged by their price tags. The biggest “scandal,” if you will, of Lund’s early administration has been her own salary — about $237,000 per year plus an additional $49,128 in benefits, set via a process over which she has no control.

She is said to be very sensitive to the subject, especially after a series of reports last year by Cascadia Daily News, at my behest, examined not only soaring public salaries, but the depth of the salary discrepancy between local haves and have-nots. This prompted a flood of letters to the editor about what seemed like out-of-whack pay to her, County Executive Satpal Sidhu, and, especially, the local schools superintendent, Greg Baker.

(Confession: As a local columnist with a penchant for provocation, I did enjoy fanning these flames more than a little bit.)

In the wake of this, Lund chose to forego the city’s most-recent 3% COLA raise. And the resulting lingering tempest did provoke a local reexamination of a salary setting commission. The mayor said recently the city is examining its own charter for ways to provide more flexibility in what city leaders are paid.

OF COURSE, that won’t affect labor contracts, to which the city is beholden for most of its public services.

That spiraling expense has caused this city, like many others now bereft of once-reliable federal aid and, more recently, pandemic-recovery funds — to cut services and staff. Like her peers, she’s forced to spend much of her time explaining to frustrated citizens what the city can’t do.

But notably, she has enhanced her own image by forming what feels like an unusually adept empathy bond with the public.

Key to this has been her success in altering how the city interacts with its public — in notable ways. These changes fall into a set of complementary categories:

• Transparency. The city’s top leadership has worked to better connect oft-evasive department heads with journalists and the public. Early in her tenure, Lund and top aides saw fit to meet not only with surrounding local governments and advocacy groups, but local media. Example: Via a top aide, veteran city Deputy Administrator Janice Keller, she set up a series of meetings with journalists from CDN — off-the-record discussions to open communications channels and discuss a broad range of issues. As a participant, I can attest this proved to be mutually beneficial. There is comfort in leaving a room realizing that folks who often by nature are at odds can still share a sense of devotion to an old-fashioned greater good. This is no longer the American norm, and should be appreciated.

• Outreach. Lund is one of the first politicians I’ve seen follow through on what often is just cheap talk: Going out to the people to gauge their concerns, rather than just opening the doors to City Hall and waiting for people to step up to the mic.

Much credit for both, I think, is owed to Keller, who also served under Fleetwood and four other prior city mayors. (Full disclosure: She is a longtime acquaintance; we are former WWU classmates who in previous young lives once ran the newsroom at the local campus newspaper, the Western Front.)

In conversations over the years, both of us have lamented, from opposite porches in the political neighborhood, the accelerating distrust resulting from disconnects between civic bodies and the public.

In any city where “civic engagement” means unlocking the front door to City Hall once a week for all who have the motivation or time to enter at an appointed weekly hour, critical municipal policies on everything from civil rights to child care to sewage tend to be — surprise! — driven by the wants/needs of activist groups, leaving the other unwashed masses to complain that said public body is out of step.

Or worse, doesn’t listen.

LUND’s TEAM deserves credit for working uncommonly hard to combat this. The Ask Us Anything mini-tours are the latest result. When she retires at the end of September after a lifetime of public service in Bellingham civic affairs, Keller can embrace this steady arc-bending away from intake and toward outreach as a worthy career achievement. This should continue.

In the meantime, Kim Lund pledges to keep eyes focused — and ears and heart open. Wednesday’s meetup ended with thanks to the crowd, which applauded itself for being there, engaging in a civil manner.

No big headlines or breakthroughs. Much common lamenting. Significantly, nobody yelling into a microphone. But still being seen. And quietly heard.

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Still in the Headlines: Yet another damning documentary on the exploits and rank profiteering of the Boeing Company, formerly of Seattle, arrived on Netflix this week. Notably, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing” includes an appearance by former ace Seattle Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates. It will not be reassuring to the traveling public.

Not That the Company: Has managed to completely destroy its long-ago reputation for quality products, but Netflix now has a separate content category called “Boeing Scandal Collection.” Hammer would not make this up.

Seriously: When the two most broadly watched shows about your company are called “Downfall” and “Freefall,” you’ve fully augured (sorry) into the realm of well-deserved, historic PR disasters.

Speaking of Which: An amusing postscript to the Bellingham neighborhood listening session described above: Unnamed city staffers hanging out afterwards, probably like counterparts all over the Northwest, couldn’t help but marvel over the ongoing Festival of Bad PR emanating from the smoldering ruins of the Mayor Katie Wilson administration in Seattle. For public officials, it must be an inescapable indulgence in there-but-by-the-grace-of-God escapism, like your own dip into Housewives of (insert city here.)

And Speaking of Cordata: An urgent announcement this week from a nearby adults-only planned community, Chatty Q-Tip Acres (nowhere close to its real name), leaked to The BellingHammer by a resident:

This is a friendly reminder asking residents not to contact our landscaping contractors with requests or concerns when they are working on our grounds. There have been contacts with them while they are in their trucks on lunch breaks and while they are operating their large stand-behind mowers. Stopping them to talk while they are on the large machines is especially very dangerous.

If you have landscape concerns, please bring them to the attention of the Landscape and Grounds Committee.

Thank you for your cooperation.

The Landscape and Grounds Committee

Media Hall O’ Shame Update: Seattle Times sports columnist Matt Calkins, “highlighted” in a previous BellingHammer post for work that truly stood out in a spectacular, train-wreck sort of way, has resigned from the paper after a spat with editors over a spiked column about trans athletes in sports. Without commenting on the particulars, this is not bad news for subscribers.

OK, One Comment: As the author of a column at said publication for many years, Hammer can say he never had a full column actually spiked by management. A few altered, maybe, which is part of the deal and probably a good one.

And Maybe One More: Often taking positions completely contrary to the paper’s august Editorial Board, readers would sometimes ask: “How did you get that into the paper?” Response: Well, I typed it up on a computer, sent it over to an editor. And then this big loud machine printed it up …

In Other Words: The paper in those days, at least, was not editor-pen heavy.

Except For: One trend in particular, my relentless focus on the collapsing standards of local institution Boeing, did clearly draw the attention of the publisher. Prompting this actual conversation between self and an unnamed top editor after, I suspect, a meeting with ownership:

Editor: “OK, I’m not going to tell you to go soft on Boeing …”

Hammer: “Good; are we done here?”

It was a great job.

Speaking of Shame: Prominent headline in local publication, which should remain nameless (The Bellingham Herald): Ex-Kentucky Cheerleader Pleads Guilty to Killing Baby, Provides Grim Details. As we latch-key kids used to mockingly say: Film at Eleven!

And Speaking of Media: Can anyone explain, pray tell, the intended audience for all of this week’s breathless coverage on the news networks of the Tupac Shakur murder trial?

And Finally: Some legitimately sad news: Cocoa Laney, lifestyle editor at Cascadia Daily News, is leaving the building, Hammer learned this week. A super-talented, multi-skilled artist in the journalism world, she’ll be tough to replace. The ’Ham was fortunate to be treated to her journalistic prowess for the past several years. Great things no doubt lie ahead for Cocoa, who is hereby granted a lifetime invite to any future CDN-alumni picnics at Hammer’s Escrow Heights compound.

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Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

New York Times Magazine: Flock Cameras. Canoodling Lawyers. How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With? by Willy Staley, Aug. 21, 2026 (gift link). An interesting dive into the many privacy/civil rights questions raised by the use of Flock surveillance cameras (see Bellingham meeting, above) and posted random personal video that goes viral. If the description alone doesn’t spark your interest, this lede might:

Let’s stipulate here, right up top, that it’s probably not a smart idea, or a morally upright thing, to go to Central Park in broad daylight and make out with your younger colleague, especially if you’re married. This is, reportedly, what happened between two white-shoe lawyers on a recent summer day. It’s possible this sort of thing happens all the time in a city of 8.6 million; it’s possible it doesn’t. Frankly, it’s none of my business or yours. The only reason I know about it is that a TikToker named Jay Guapo, who has 3.6 million followers, happened to be walking by and decided to film the couple …

The Atlantic: The White House Freak-Out Over Natalie Harp, by Jonathan Lemire, Aug. 20, 2026 (gift link). “Gift” used loosely here. But because you wanted more evidence of the stunningly low depths to which the present administration has sunk (you did, right?), here’s a chronicling of last week’s sordid response to the Jon Ossof-fueled Trump-aide tempest, including these dignified words emanating from the Pennsylvania Ave. Casino Cage Fight Construction Zone:

… (T)he story really wasn’t going anywhere until White House Communications Director Steven Cheung unleashed a flamethrower of a post on Monday morning, writing, in part, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country.”

Your tax dollars at work.

Natalie Merchant: Tigerlily, 1995. Your audio chaser for this week. The more insane the world gets, the closer this record stays to Hammer’s turntable. Timeless melodies, well-delivered.

Thanks for reading Ron Judd (The BellingHammer)! This post is public, so feel free to share it. This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

From the top

Five years ago, while still (semi-)gainfully employed by a large metropolitan daily newspaper, I wrote a piece judging the relative stupidity of the nation, based mostly on the country’s TV viewing habits.

The piece in Pacific NW, The Seattle Times’ Sunday magazine, was headlined thusly: “The decline of American civilization: There’s more bad TV than ever; it’s available everywhere; and it’s making us fat, lazy, selfish and stupid.”

My (admittedly gum-wrapper flimsy) operational thesis: Sometime in the 1990s, the abandonment of actual, writer/director/actor-driven television in favor of cheaper, and yes, infinitely dumber, “reality” television, marked a major dumbing-down point in U.S. history.

A new benchmark on the stupid scale.

This scourge of “reality” went mainstream with “Survivor” (now, in Season 50, please look this up if you are as chagrined as I was) and culminated in the greatest felony crime against reality of all time, “The Apprentice,” a show that clearly aided and abetted the ongoing toilet bowl spiral of a once-great nation by creating the business-genius mythology of failed developer Donald J. Trump.

The reality boom, I observed, was both reflective of, and perhaps causational, in making our nation collectively dumber than several hundred million fence posts.

A half-decade later, here is the shocking thing: That moment in time was a relative high point in American mass-media cultural intellectualism compared to today.

I’m sorry. It’s true. The TV programming I lamented is now populated with entirely new genres of idiocy. Remember how the internet was supposed to unlock and democratize the best of humanity? Pfft. That thesis ignored the overriding instant-gratification and prurient-interest genes.

We’re all guilty to varying degrees.

If you didn’t think the entertainment that occupies too much real estate in all our brains could get any dumber, just dial up TikTok (which makes its predecessor, YouTube, feel like the Library of Congress), or scan your television grid for the resurgence of material ranging from rehashed search-for-Bigfoot nonsense to mythology-as-fact “documentaries” such as Discovery’s Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch — a celebration of stupidity so truly profound it really merits its own government-funded psychological study.

But one no longer needs to plug in and turn on to gauge the depths of America’s unique dullarditis. Just look what’s been happening to our language.

HOW STUPID ARE WE? This much, based just on recent Boob Box Viewing, paying specific attention to advertising:

• Sales pitches for designer drugs, which sadly dominate the air waves during news shows, especially, sternly warn, “Don’t take Flippbippavance if you are allergic to Flippbippavance.” (As if this would have been even considered an option by a sentient person with an IQ greater than a delphinium, which at least has the sense to occasionally bend toward the light.)

• Other ads make it clear corporate America, now “maximizing shareholder value” at unprecedented levels, has given up on any American vocabulary of more than about 26 words, simply abandoning apparently complex, vexing, PhD-level terminology such as “fatigue.” Ad agency solution: Insert the uncommonly lame term “tiredness” in its place!

  (One drug company, whose name will be omitted here because it is unpronounceable, has recently tried to cover all the bases — and market segments — by explaining that its product might “cause fatigue (or tiredness)”.

  No doubt suffering from extreme tiredness due to the stripping of workplace rights and fast-tracking of countless monopolies, America was probably too fatigued to even notice this difference. Little thing, yes. But they proliferate.

• Similarly, overpaid consulting geniuses have determined they can repeatedly rope people into dubious purchases via the broad-scale Elevation of Zero. Case in point: Selling lifetime-commitment contracts for plasticized vehicles by adopting the term, “Zero-percent financing!” which, like “calm winds,” is technically an oxymoron, heavy emphasis on moron, because it just means interest-free financing, in which there is no such thing as 0 percent.

• Following suit is a whole range of other misnomers, including “zero added sugar,” (which apparently was much easier to digest than the befuddling “sugar-free”) “zero dollars down,” or even “zero-dollar shipping.” Obvious lesson: “zero” lights up some latent-DNA buy-buy-buy impulse that no other word can match. Zero has become the most officially overused word in the entire English language.

• Further: We are told on various occasions (and here we go back to the marketing geniuses at America’s drug-dependency complex) that, if things go south on injection of Vergungjaboobie or its variants, that one should “call your doctor if you’re having trouble breathing or speaking.” It would be a great parlor trick.

IT’S NO BIG SECRET that America’s marketeers have always toyed with our brains, to great effect. Some context: Long before the invention of dialup modems (kids: ask your parents), wordfuscation used to be almost tongue-in-cheek apologetic. Recall the disclaimers on ads for morning-staple breakfast cereals such as Captain Crunch and Froot Loops, each of which was approximately 99.75% pure sugar, but advertised as “part of a well-balanced breakfast!”

Which part? Get back to us after our Ozempic jab.

That was all rather quaint. Now the bastardization of language is purely predatory.

Net effect: This slide toward end-state capitalism evident in our media both signals, and fuels, a dumbing down of historical proportions. Prove me wrong.

It has contributed to all manner of disturbing occurrences, not least being the national election — twice — of a president demonstrably dumber than a paving stone, along with a cabinet of cradle-to-grave laughingstocks and an entire legislative branch of semi-fossilized dolts of all political persuasions.

And that’s just at the federal level.

NONE OF THIS likely has escaped notice of smart folks in the room today. The point of this screed-ing to the choir is less to spitefully re-cast aspersions than to fulfill my traditional doomsayer’s role of pointing out that it’s highly possible this is just the beginning, not the end, of our nation’s waterslide-plunge into downtown Dumbo City.

We may have seen nothin’ yet. The Skyrizi is the limit! (Don’t read about Skyrizi if you’re allergic to Skyrizi. Call your doctor if you hate me.)

Given the events described above, I’ll go out on a limb here and predict some next-stage developments in the way language is force-fed to us by media we all happily lap up.

In the near-future world of advertising, terminology already accepted as clear to anyone smarter than a collectible chunk of the Bellingham Rock will follow the path of “fatigue” and be modified to rope in even that segment of the consumer population stumbling through life in a state of semi-consciousness. You can consider this additional terminology the idiot suffix. Examples:

• “Wet (or not dry)”

• “Hard (aka not soft)”

• “Bright (meaning, not dark)”

• “Upper, denoting above, and not lower)”

And so on.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES this say about us? Well, collectively we are clearly one of the dumbest assemblages of mammals on the planet.

Whose fault is that?

Big, fat, open question there, which I won’t attempt to answer at the moment other than to say: Don’t blame me! I have an alibi — one that includes more than four decades of screaming that various emperors have no clothes (and, especially in the present circumstance, should not be viewed up close without special protective lenses.)

You’re all way ahead of me on this: A lot of people will blame the American education system, which surely is involved, but could not be reached for comment by my deadline as it was taking the entire summer off.

So I’ll put the questions to you, an enlightened audience, in terms of a … wait for it … patented BellingHammer Highly Unscientific Poll.

If you have something more actually serious (meaning, “not flippant”) to say about this, please respond in the comment section, which has ZERO moderation, or shoot a reply to me via the button below. Whom do you blame? I’ll report results next week (meaning “after this week.”)

Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

All This Hubbub About Catering-Crate Trump: Is really overblown. I mean, you have to appreciate the intellectual honesty the Secret Service deftly employed here. The only more non-ironic, and fitting, way they could have spirited the Demander-in-Chief out of Turkey a couple weeks ago would have been to put him in a shipping container full of straitjackets.

Besides: It’s just part of the deal when you’re a major world leader. BellingHammer has been informed by various sources (or “people are saying,” in MAGA language) that the last time he visited an old folks’ home on Whidbey Island, U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Soccer Scarf, had to be spirited offshore in the Phecal Phreak poop pumper boat (actual motto: “We take crap from anyone!) to avoid angry Gaza protesters on San Juan Island.

Meanwhile, Closer to Home: The Whatcom County Council (motto: Still in the Dark, but We Have Ordered Headlamps!) has finally agreed on the concept of a plan to build a new jail with sales tax money long ago approved by voters, Cascadia Daily News reports. Sounds like it’s still open to question whether the Bill Elfo Memorial Incarceration Facility will have enough money left over to include desired amenities including two courtrooms, a family visitation room and a rapid-resource center (the latter something surely frowned upon in bureaucracies in general).

Sadly: This likely dashes any hopes that the jail complex might come with its own Tim Hortons, the acquisition of which still is the last thing separating NW WA from greatness.

Department of (Imaginary) Civil Warfighting: Are America’s Democrats, as many national-TV talking heads would like you to believe, engaged in a battle between socialists and nonsocialists for the soul of their party? Not so much. But the generalized Search for a Spine by voters continues.

Even Here — A Little: In the upper left corner, prominent pols can’t even summon the gumption to be testy combatants. Witness the feel-good video posted by state legislative candidates Eamonn Collins and Michael Shepard, likely headed for a recount after being separated by only nine votes in the Whatcom County primary election. Their shoulder-to-shoulder message: “Every vote counts! Stronger together!”

Seriously, Dudes: Where is the win-at-all-costs hatred we’ve all come to cherish? Not even a hint that it was a rigged election! You’re giving political infighting a bad name. Mike the Pillow Guy must be rolling over in his zero-wrinkle case.

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’Hamsters unite

A big thanks to Evan over at The Hamster Wheel newsletter, for the kind mention of the fledgling BellingHammer earlier this month. Many Wheel subscribers made the leap of faith to sign up for the ’Hammer — a testament to the broad reach of the city’s leading events newsletter. Give it a follow.

Still laboring

The previously striking journalists at Adams MultiMedia-owned newspapers in Skagit and Snohomish counties are scheduled to go back to the bargaining table on Aug. 24. They say that if they leave without a deal, they’re back off the job, with an open-ended strike. I’ll have more to say about ways the chronically low wage structure in U.S. journalism harms the public on a daily basis in an upcoming BellingHammer.

Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

Substack: Bari, How Can You Douthat to '60 Minutes'?, by Gene Weingarten, July 29, 2026. I’m late getting to this but worth your time to ingest Weingarten’s delicious takedown of the move of incomprehensibly boring columnist Ross Douthat to a likely epic-misfit position at “60 Minutes.” (“The Gene Pool” is a great read in general).

Substack: The business cost of cross-border bad blood, by Frank Catalano, Aug. 11, 2026. An interesting, albeit depressing, update on the actual cost, to businesses, of the Trump-pumped, idiotic trade war with our friends in Canada, by NW WA’s leading media business analyst. Catalano reports results of a spring survey by Western Washington University’s Border Policy Research Institute showing, not surprisingly, serious damage to local business by Canadians’ understandable reluctance to cross the border. Nearly three-quarters said they consider damage to their business to be “long term/permanent.”

Washington State Standard: With PNW electricity demand surging, planners map out major grid upgrades, by Aspen Ford, Aug. 14, 2026. The piece describes the (obvious) downsides of “electrify everything, all at once,” and the accomopanying need for PNW power grid updates to avoid what appears to be a coming age of blackouts in our region. Money graph:

The Pacific Northwest will need a massive buildout of new energy infrastructure over the next six years to meet rising electricity demand, according to a draft regional power plan released Thursday. Implementing the plan will cost the Pacific Northwest approximately $2.3 billion. And the rate of building will need to quicken to make it happen by 2032.

Please join me in holding your breath.

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When exactly did everyone in the world I speak to, hear from, read online or pass on the street become a “sleep expert?”

Yeah, I know, like most maladies, I probably brought this onslaught of unwanted advice upon myself. I no doubt triggered the dread digital 'rithm that now runs our lives by doing something ill-advised, like … what, mail ordering some sleep gummies or an eye mask?

The buttloads of helpful “advice” flowing from this are about as welcome as an hourlong conversation with a Premera Blue Shaft insurance bot.

The list of providers of “sleep expertise” that have thoroughly chapped my ass in recent months includes:

• Anyone, anywhere, who has ever offered an opinion on which time standard the West Coast should adopt as a permanent one, best lining up with what’s most “healthy and natural” for a human population meant to be hunters and gatherers, not doomscrollers, clockwatchers and featherbedders (see previous BellingHammer rant.)

• Anyone with a bachelor’s degree or higher in a marginally health-related field, usually also on the shadow payroll of a major pharmaceutical or supplement conglomerate.

• General garden-variety idiots of all flavors on antisocial media.

• Actual university employees with PhDs who believe they have figured out the secret of life, which invariably involves treating your nightly sleep as a spreadsheet-complicated process. This, they espouse for people who have little strength to do anything beyond flicking a light switch and collapsing face forward into a supine position.

• My goddamn wrist watch, which gives me a “sleep score” every morning based on what seems like abjectly junk science fueled by the unfathomably skimpy data points of time/heartbeat.

THAT LIST also should include, of course, click-whore media folks who spew out endless takes on the Hot New Tip that might help you sleep off that pitcher of margaritas — or worse, actual necessary-life situations — in the least-harmful way possible.

Earlier this year, one of those big reveals made its way into The New York Times, a notable fearless champion of the First Amendment, no-knead bread and Wordle. The paper quoted a buttload of research leading to two completely unstartling revelations:

1. Most U.S. adults do not have a consistent sleep schedule.

2. This may be harming their health.

Everyone involved here clearly is a candidate for the hotly competitive Ya Think? category in next year’s Nobel Prizes. Anyway in the interest of TL;DR the article (you can read it yourself if you need to take the edge off) goes on to warn all of us that poor sleep hygiene should be added to the growing list of things that can and will eventually join forces to kill you.

The newspaper, which, with the rather large exception of that Iraq War (see: Judith Miller), is always helpful, offers some tips for golden slumbers from the “sleep experts” themselves:

1. Set an alarm to go off an hour before your bedtime, every night, to remind you to go to bed. (I am not making this up; apparently what people REALLY NEED IS ANOTHER @#_$(*@#$ ALARM TO SHUT OFF to help them relax into slumber.) They note that this alarm might also remind you to “do something relaxing during that hour,” including enjoyable pursuits such as reading, meditating, prank-calling an ex, or spraying a garden hose at your neighbor’s stupid cat.

2. Expose yourself to sunlight every morning — ideally for 20 or 30 minutes at the exact same time every day. It is best to go outside and do this, notes a panel of experts, none of whom clearly has lived in places where the rest of the world lives.

3. Get more REM and deep sleep. (Duh!)

4. Get a white noise machine. Or read a Ross Douthat column.

OK, THAT LAST ONE is a joke. Sort of. And he (inexplicably) is leaving for the tattered remains of 60 Minutes, anyway. But fortunately, BellingHammer himself, by nature of the fact that he has successfully gone to bed and then risen more than 20,000 times(!) over the course of his largely unproductive, often sleep-challenged life, is as of today also a self-appointed Sleep Expert!

If you’re anything like me — and god help you if you are — the problem is not so much getting to sleep, but staying asleep. Especially as one gets to that magical age when facts and details that seem impossible to summon from the murky mental depths during the day all stand up and dance a Conga line across your consciousness at approximately 3:15 a.m.

The solution is simple: You just need to learn to silence these mental voices.

To get the full story on how to do this, and a half-off coupon for an untested herbal supplement endorsed by The Pillow Guy and others, you’ll need to sign up for BellingHammer’s Deluxe Subscription Nighttime Bliss Package (details soon). But for now, as a public service, he’s willing to part with his list of uninvited random mental subjects that SHOULD BE AVOIDED AND/OR PUT TO THE SWORD AT ALL COSTS:

• "How can the prescription drug Tremvaya achieve “visible healing of my intestinal lining” when, aside from rare disemboweling accidents, I usually can’t see my intestines, even from the outside? Can Mark Zuckerberg or Sen. Rand Paul, R-Hallucinogenics, see inside my intestines? Isn’t that a HIPAA violation and don’t I need to sign a waiver for that? What did Dr. Fauci know about this, and when? And couldn’t I achieve the same result by ingesting bleach?

  (Note from BellingHammer’s legal counsel: Please DO NOT ingest bleach, or really, anything else, under claims from a Substacker, nor the sitting President of the United States and/or his appointed lackeys, as these have not been vetted by the Food and Drug Administration, which currently is headed by a retired circus clown.)

• The man who walks around 24/7with lackeys toting a device capable of launching weapons that would destroy the planet via nuclear warfare is a delusional, low-functioning buffoon prone to temper tantrums based on demonstrable personality disorders and perhaps, sheer insanity. Should I be concerned? (Back to sleep, back to sleep.)

• Tomorrow is Friday. Is it the day to schlep the blue-topped Stupidly Oversized Recycling Toter, containing “recyclables” to the curb, or is it the day to schlep the yellow-topped Stupidly Oversized Recycling toter, also containing “recyclables” but inclusive of chicken wings and pizza detritus, to the curb? What happens if I take the wrong one? Will this impact my credit rating?

• Why do I have to buy a new lawn sprinkler every single year? Can no one on the planet make one, at any cost, that will keep oscillating for more than six or eight weeks? How did we get to this point? How do we get away from it?

• Is the term “white noise” racist? How can I be sure?

• Is 1,200 USB cords really too many? Why does whichever one I try not fit until I turn it upside down seven or eight times?

• This one cheeky young friend of mine keeps telling me I should will her my home, paying forward the gift of privilege as a form of “generational reparations.” I keep telling her she must be high, but doesn’t she sort of have a point?

• Is Four Seasons Total Landscaping still in business now that Rudy Giuliani isn’t?

And so on.

In coming weeks, I’ll share my own tips on ways to push these thoughts back to the craphole place they really should occupy in your brain. As soon as I get rested enough to figure all this out. In the meantime, please direct any emergency questions about sleep patterns, circadian rhythms, Samba rhythms or smoked pork products to the White House Comment Line, 202-456-1111.

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly!”

Who’s Next ‘Under the Bus?’ You can count on those three words popping up in any news about the current Trump “administration,” the cabinet thereof having long ago earned the title, (apologies to David Halberstam) of The Worst and the Dullest.

Backseat Banter: At any given moment, someone in the White House Inner Circle of Stench is about to be thrown under said bus, to serve as a pressure-relief valve for the acute toddler-conniption tendencies of the occupant of the Gilded Oval, who has an IQ seven points below a common geranium.

This Week: It was Jeanine Pirro, the pro tem Secretary of Chablis, who reportedly had to grovel, weep and genuflect (all at once) to keep her job after abjectly failing to convict anyone from tampering with the pool liner in the Capitol reflection pond. (Ironically, the “President,” likely having never successfully completed this task himself without assistance, said she “folded like an umbrella.”)

Next Week: Who knows, or at this point, even cares?

Only One Thing is Clear: With two-plus years still to go in the national running nightmare, due to all the buildup of body parts in the undercarriage, they’re going to need a bigger bus.

Or Perhaps: An entire new fleet of Trump-class mass-transit vehicles.

Meanwhile, Let’s All Keep On Fighting: The former Cold War, which as nobody in D.C. noticed, ended in 1989. Latest chapter: The new class of true-relic battleships that Trump insists, like most other inert objects in the nation, must bear his name, now looks like it’ll cost a LOT MORE than originally promised. All to provide target practice for the Russians, Chinese, or any other marginally militarily well-equipped nation in a real shootin’ war.

Trump’s “Golden Fleet:” Now has an estimated price tag of $275 billion for 15 ships, The New York Times reports. You’ll know them when you see them: Serious bulging amidships, equipped with special howitzers with barrels that turn back on the operator before firing.

The First: The “USS Defiant,” now has a projected cost of $23 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Names for the additional ships have not been announced, but rumors on The Hill indicate leading contenders for the additional Trump Class of lumbering drone targets include: USS Daunted, USS Belligerence, USS Duplicity, USS Comb-over, USS False Equivalency, USS Fearmonger, USS Featherbedder, USS Dullard, USS Vapid and USS Bigot. The full battleship package also comes with a hospital ship and tender, designated USS Clorox and USS Cracker Barrel.

Actual, Unedited Rationale for Building the Ships: From the Commander In Chief’s own porcine-pursed lips last September: “I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships. I used to watch ‘Victory at Sea.’ I love ‘Victory at Sea!’”

On the Other Hand: Building the ships would provide temporary seagoing jobs for tens of thousands of young Americans who can one day look back and proudly tell their grandchildren they did a tour of duty on a Blithering Idiot Class naval vessel.

Actual Major Newspaper Headline: From large metro NYC daily this week: “Breaking news: Childhood vaccine supporter confirmed as C.D.C. director.”

Meanwhile in Washington the Greater: Because of two confirmed positive tests, BellingHammer’s local health authorities sent a bulletin to his mobile device this week urging him not to “touch or handle” wild bats. Which is just like something the the killjoys over there would do to ruin everyone’s wild-bat touching and handling plans for the weekend.

Next Week: Those nanny-state health department deep-staters, clearly all Biden Admin admirers, will probably be warning people not to drink the brackish, cyanobacteria-laced algal-bloom water piped into homes ringing nearby Lake Samish.

Oh Wait: That was last week, and it was serious. But you get the point: It’s just another small step toward robbing our individual liberties, which, up until now have ALWAYS included the freedom to touch, handle, caress, fondle, converse, two-step, or do whatever we want with wild bats. Not to mention fetid ditch water.

Excepting of Course: Allowing either to play in high school girls’ sports competitions, which obviously would lead to the downfall of society as we know it.

We Kid: Our friends at the health department. Leave the damn bats alone, people. Like the geriatric heavy metal acts appearing at your local casino, they consume a lot of insects.

Breaking Big Election News: In BellingHammer’s town, with democracy literally on the line (again), nearly two thirds of eligible voters chose not to. Well played, folks.

The Big Local Scandal: Actually a pretty good one: It’s complicated, but apparently involves who was sleeping with whom at the county prosecutor’s office — and who did what, when and why to either deal with it, or allegedly cover it up.

Big Surprise: The only one of four primary election candidates with a solid alibi, outsider and public defender, Ryan Swinburnson, got the most votes. Hot take: If there ever was a local establishment in need of a thorough housecleaning more badly than BellingHammer’s long-neglected Escrow Heights home office, it’s the prosecutor’s office.

Out of Tune: Official legal notice arrived midweek that at least two (of the currently three) members of the duly elected Bellingham Port Commission were planning to attend the otherwise-notable Subdued Stringband Jamboree at the Deming Log Show grounds. It’s unclear if the legal notice was to denote that no official Port bizness will be done there, or just a warning that two of them might actually pick up a banjo and/or attempt to harmonize (unlikely if one is Bobby Briscoe.)

And Ahem, Does This Mean: One of them didn’t get invited? Super awkward.

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Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

The Washington Post: Preflight sermon gets plane preacher kicked off Alaska Airlines flight, (gift link) by Hannah Sampson, July 31, 2026. I long ago promised a corporate flack that if Alaska Airlines, the leading carrier around here, ever did anything even tepidly meritorious, I would be sure to point it out. Well, here you go. Nothing is more offensive than a pushy evangelical inflicting their view on a captive audience.

Poynter.org: A community can have local newspapers and still lack local news, by Jennifer Nehrer, July 29, 2026. Demonstrably true. (See: Bellingham, pre-2022, with a big neon newspaper sign atop a downtown building and literally nothing beneath it. Fortunately no longer true, thanks to recent competition.) But the “ghost newspaper” phenomenon described here is very real and remains a clear danger to democracy. (I have long maintained, and I believe have since helped demonstrate, that the appearance of a watchdog press where none exists can be more dangerous than no presence at all.) Note the interesting angle of public supported reporting positions allowing the masquerade to continue as corporate owners install a free employee in place of one or more formerly (poorly) paid ones.

New West Records: Jerry Lee Lewis - Live From Austin, TX (Limited Edition Color Vinyl). Never been a passionate fan, but this record, acquired along with a bunch of other tasty New West vinyl reissues of legendary former Austin City Limits performances (some of us grew up on these, likely contributing to our poor late-night sleep-prep habits!), hits every note, pushing the undeniable originality of The Killer right into your living room in a hair-raising way. Flaming classic rock ’n roll from front to back, meant to be played loud. “Jerry Lee’s got the bull by the horns!” he croons in the midst of “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” On that day in 1983, he clearly did. The disc itself is flaming red. And it’s a keeper.

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From the top

Libby Williams’ weekly routine says about all you need to know about the struggle to save local news — and perhaps the teetering facade of American representative democracy that goes with that.

To maintain its historic role as a check on government and shining bulb for an enlightened electorate, journalism needs young journalists who still believe. One of those is Williams, who admits that her own resolve is flagging.

Williams, 26, has a bachelor’s degree in digital journalism from Central Washington University and lives in Bellingham. Most days of the week, she’s the sole working reporter for the Stanwood-Camano News, a small weekly owned by a growing national chain, Adams MultiMedia.

Williams and a nearby colleague, Nicholas Johnson of the Anacortes American, and a half-dozen other local journalists staged a brief labor strike this week.

All a lone reporter at a small newspaper really has to do is keep up on all aspects of local life: public government, schools, private institutions, happenings and events, tragedies and opinions. And separate fact from online fiction. Then distill that information into a daily online publication and weekly print newspaper. A story a day or more, with no backup.

It is an always-on, largely thankless task, carried out nationally every single day by thousands of people, many of them young, some stubborn and older, who still believe that a free press not only matters, but matters most critically at a local level.

It’s worth that all of the local strikers are far more representative of the field of U.S. working journalists than any of the evening-gown and black-tie show ponies who attended the controversial White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend.

This work, at this pay rate, is essentially public service.

On “off” days, Williams is not really off. She writes freelance pieces or works at a Cruisin’ Coffee stand, where she makes a better hourly wage — a difference even more notable because of occasional tips, which ethics rules rightfully forbid in news jobs — than she does working as a journalist.

That news job currently pays less than $20 per hour. And at most publications, the pay is for 40 hours a week at jobs that require far more. These are literally fast-food wages.

“When people hear what we’re asking for is $20 an hour, they’re like, ‘That’s pathetic,’” Williams says.

And it is.

THE BRIEF STRIKE this week, which workers say will portend another, “indefinite” walkout if contract terms aren’t met at a bargaining session next month, highlights issues that plague what remains of the local news industry nationally: Historically pathetic wages and now, a new challenge to jobs, journalistic integrity and public trust from news companies’ use of artificial intelligence.

The same issues were on the table this spring when another group of Puget Sound reporters who work for McClatchy, including The Bellingham Herald, won small concessions in negotiations in their own contract talks. Both units are represented by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.

The two issues prompting the walkouts go hand in hand.

• AI: Garbage in/garbage out, the calling card of current generative AI, might pass muster for customer service at your local utility company. It does not work for a functional, enlightened, probing and ethical local news publication. The Skagit workers’ stance against its use, “unrestricted,” according to an Adams contract proposal, is a legitimate line-in-the-sand for ethical journalists. Not to mention job protection.

• Pay: The union’s wage proposal, which calls for a small pay increase that would do little to solve the ability for local reporters to survive in the communities they report on, has been a nonstarter with Adams to date. The company probably will settle at some point for an infinitesimal raise in the same range.

  These eight college-educated Adams journalists currently make between $19.10 (minimum wage in Bellingham, not coincidentally) and $22.29 per hour. The group includes one Skagit Valley Herald reporter, Vince Richardson, who is a 23-year veteran. This in a county where one needs to earn at least $24 per hour as a “living wage.” To survive, not thrive.

Williams, like the others, still sees a career as a working journalist as her preferred career choice. But she’s having a hard time clinging to that resolve.

“It’s knocked me down a few pegs in the last week,” she said by phone this week, from a picket line in Stanwood. On picket lines, public response has been overwhelmingly encouraging. But online comments from trolls telling the workers to give it up and move on admittedly hit home, she says.

“Personally I’m not feeling too great,” Williams admitted on Tuesday. “It’s just been the same thing every meeting” with Adams since negotiations began in November, she says.

“I’ don’t feel like they’re hearing us.”

FELLOW STRIKER Johnson, the one-man-band in Anacortes, is looking for a lifeline to stay in the trade he loves. He’s a proud member of a relatively vanishing species: At 38, the 2010 Western Washington University grad has toiled since at several NW Washington small papers — by choice. He loves the community bonds built and maintained by truly local news operations.

He can’t get out of the house, he says, without community members telling him how much they appreciate what amounts to a lifestyle self-sacrifice to deliver the essential context to news that only comes from institutional knowledge, born of living in the community he covers.

He believes what they say and would dearly love to be able to continue to do what they both expect and respect.

“We’re all so thankful at the level of support from our readers,” he says. “Lots of people are writing and calling management, just expressing support for our modest cause.”

Which, he says, is simply this: “Can we live and just do journalism for you, please? We just want to be able to pay our bills and live in these communities. That’s why we got into this.”

Community support around the pay — and especially AI issues — has been expressed loudly and clearly by the community, he believes.

“People just have a natural aversion to the idea that you wouldn’t have humans controlling or creating the news,” Johnson notes.

Polling data consistently back this up. But media chains, which by nature exist to maintain profit margins, not become sustainable local institutions, do not necessarily share that aversion.

MANY OTHER PAPERS in the Adams chain, Johnson believes, have responsible policies on the use of AI in news reporting. (An Adams company spokesperson has been quoted as saying some of those papers have accepted the contract language on the table here.)

“Having sat in on bargaining (this week), it was clear that the company, at least on the surface, really does see the issue similarly to us,” he said. “That is that it should be used as a tool, and there should be guardrails.”

So what’s the rub?

“They just don’t have any interest in conceding that those guardrails be included in a contract.”

Bingo.

Like other “media companies,” the chain’s line in the sand is keeping the doors open to the potential cost-saving benefits of the use of AI. They’re OK with the status quo at their papers, but won’t surrender the possible loss of control that comes with making AI use a subject of mandatory bargaining. Even in a contract, as has been the pattern, that expires in two years.

It’s likely to be a sticky issue, and not just here, in coming years. And it’s easy to see why it’s at the forefront in NW Washington.

MINNESOTA-BASED Adams MultiMedia runs seven Washington publications as well as more than 120 newspapers and “more than 220 media-related and associated digital products” (whatever those are) in 19 U.S. states. Its no-doubt-highly-paid CEO, Mark Adams, spent 20 years at a Boston private equity firm before launching the company in 2013 with backing from other family members. Adams has been on a long buying spree of formerly family owned news operations, including those in Skagit and Snohomish counties.

Aside from profit, they have reason to watch their bottom line. The Skagit papers, already flimsy in size, scope and manpower in a growing region, in the past five years have seen the media landscape shift beneath them: Previously legacy media hangers-on in a near-monopoly setting, they find themselves understaffed players in what suddenly is a competitive news market.

The Skagit Valley Herald and Anacortes American now are challenged daily from the north by the upstart (non-union) Cascadia Daily News, which covers Whatcom and Skagit counties with a newsroom of 16 (mostly fulltime) journalists.

Adams also is up against the endless parade of social-media faux news accounts as well as new nonprofit competition, including the Bellingham-based Salish Current, which covers many environmental and social issues in both counties. And across the Swinomish Channel from Anacortes, the longtime flagging weekly newspaper in LaConner got a new spark last year, with conversion to the nonprofit La Conner Community News.

But Adams maintains a clear local-market advantage that goes beyond historical legacies of formerly respected, locally owned publications: They own the largest, most productive working newsprint press plant in this corner of the state. That plant — built, ironically, with a sprawling, hubris-fueled sea of still-mostly empty office cubicles planned for local reporters who never actually materialized — prints not only the three newspapers in question, but CDN’s print edition and now, a slew of Sound Publishing papers acquired by the notoriously skinflint Carpenter Media Group. That chain includes The Herald of Everett and more than 30 other Washington publications, mostly weeklies.

The Skagit Press owned by Adams also does a broad variety of other commercial printing work, from brochures to gift wrap. That’s a mainstay that gives the company a strong foothold here. But as always has been the case, human news production, even at fast-food wages, remains an expense, not an asset. And it would surprise no one that Adams, like other multi-publication owners, looks to cut corners in every way possible.

FOR THE SKAGIT WORKERS, that’s what drives the moving pieces on the table. Fifty cents an hour here or there — and the possibility of greater company savings by cutting back even farther on personnel, although that’s hard to imagine at an operation already down to one person.

To which bean counters at news chains are likely to say: Hold my beer. It’s no longer inconceivable to imagine them trying to maintain “local” news orgs with no humans at all. Some would have done it long ago if they could.

Which brings us back to local-news guy Johnson, who clearly loves his craft. But as a veteran journalist, he’s also a realist.

“I’ve been depressed about this career path, to some degree, for years,” he says. “It’s something I believe in, but it’s a very difficult thing to do as you get older, and move forward in life. The reality is, I feel like I’ve been held back a little bit because this industry doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for growth. There are just fewer and fewer jobs.”

Does this, one of a string of labor struggles he’s been involved in for more than a decade, leave him running out of hope?

Johnson sighs and pauses.

“I guess I care about securing pay for whoever is in this job in the future,” he says. “I would like to see whoever is in this job see it improved to be something that is sustainable. I believe everybody deserves to be able to afford to live in the community they cover.”

Multiple-disclaimers Department: The author, before he lost his mind and became management as founding executive editor of Cascadia Daily News (where he wrote most current news policies, including one on extremely limited use of AI) was a long-ago shop steward and officer with the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which in 2000 conducted a bitter, 49-day strike against the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer. He remembers how to light a burn barrel; he does not cross picket lines.

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

What Can He Say: That Hammer hasn’t already said over the years about the White House Correspondent’s Association’s annual dinner, a journalistic abomination for decades, its utter stupidity and tone-deafness now magnified by the disastrous invitation of First Amendment Enemy Number One to last weekend’s proceedings.

OK, Just a Couple Things: Summing that all up nicely was Dean Blundell right here on Substack, who called the Trump appearance “a hostage video with beef tenderloin.” Media critic Margaret Sullivan chimed in with the label, “a predictable disgrace.” There was a lot more, all true.

The Thing Is: Even in that long ago pre-Trump era, in which attacking U.S. journalists as “enemies of the people” went from a weekend drinking game among a few right-wingers to standard fare emoting from every open wound of the current U.S. government, yukking it up with sources and celebs in D.C. managed to 86 press credibility all across the nation. The event has long stood as an embarrassment to U.S. working journalists, most of whom, flying closer to planet Earth, grasp the obvious optics.

To Wit: How pathetic was it to witness, in the wake of the previous aborted attempt to pull off this dinner, so many TV news folks hustling back to their anchor seats still in gowns or tuxes, talking about the tragedy of the night’s events. All true, but …

These Were Mostly Folks: Who sit in the same chairs every night, dutifully reporting the streams of lies and rampant attacks by the Trump administration on the U.S. free press.

Not to Mention Any Names: Such as MS-NOW’s Stephanie Ruhle and Ken Dilanian, among many, many others. How, exactly, do you expect to maintain public credibility for your reporting and opinion when you are seen glibly socializing with members of the most anti-free-speech administration in the nation’s history?

Seriously, Media Partiers, Would You Have: Raised your glass there to a toast to the memory of Jamal Khashoggi? If the Trump debacle doesn’t end this sad event once and for all, there’s little remaining hope for the D.C. press corps.

Bottom Line: There’s a word for anyone who sat in numbed silence and endured that sorry spectacle without walking out in disgust: Complicit. The public sees you.

Did That All Make Hammer Feel Better? Yes. Yes it did.

Speaking of Media Elites: Is anyone else puzzled that not a single member of the vaunted East Coast power press corp has managed to crack the mystery of where the hell Mitch McConnell is? How can this be that difficult?

Meanwhile, In Washington the Greater: Quite the unsettling scene with a shootout at the Bite of Seattle this week, an event annually attended by a couple hundred thousand folks. And an unsettling aftermath, with the Seattle Police Department and Mayor Katie Wilson “administration” struggling to provide even basic information to the public for five hours after the tragedy.

Even Worse: The SPD police chief, who clearly slept in during what should have been mandatory public communications training, had to be separated from a local news reporter who had the audacity to question all this at the city’s No-Better-Late-Than-Never presser.

Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye: And within two days, said chief, Shon Barnes, was canned by Wilson, shining light on the fact that he A) apparently spends a lot of time with his wife and kids in Chicago, which to our knowledge is not even a suburb of Seattle; and B) in the midst of the greatest career crisis he’ll likely ever face, he was “taking the day off” as some constituents scrambled to save his job, according to The Seattle Times.

Further Evidence: As if needed, that even in the Zoom era, you can’t be an effective community leader without being a fulltime member of same.

And Finally: Hyperlocal note here. Even with his … ahem, local connections, B. Hammer is perplexed about which of the four candidates for Whatcom County Prosecutor to vote for in the primary election. He’s strongly considering writing in Andrew Reding.

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Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

Cascadia Daily News: Turnover is high at Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office. What’s happening? (paywall), by Annie Todd and Isaac Stone Simonelli, July 30, 2026. Strong local reporting here, combining two related topics long under scrutiny by the local newsroom: staffing and management issues in the local prosecutor’s office, where most of what goes on has long, long been shielded from public view. This piece sets the stage for what’s likely to be a contentious election, with four current candidates vying to replace outgoing prosecutor Eric Richey. For nonlocals, it’s a fine example of the value of a professional, independent local newsroom.

The AI Humanist: Let’s argue about age verification, by Bruce Barcott, July 26, 2026. From Barcott’s interesting Stack comes a look at the next big AI thing:

Many of the most powerful AI chatbots and social media platforms have been or will soon be forced to implement heightened safety protocols for kids and teens. If you’re an adult you probably haven’t noticed. But in the coming months a new wave of age-gating will kick in. At some point you’ll be stopped and made to prove you’re of legal age.

Oh, the joy. Please make it all stop.

The Atlantic: The Return of the Monarch: After years of decline, butterfly populations are rising—for now, by Vann R. Newkirk II, July 26, 2026 (gift link). A bit of (at least temporary) good news to launch you into the weekend. The author visits Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve and finds a resurgence of the majestic winged flyers, after previous reports of precipitous population drops. The photos and video are worth the click; the report includes fascinating background on how Monarchs have historically been tracked, how they act and where they live and travel. To wit:

Individual butterflies can travel as far as 100 miles in a single day and can congregate in groups so thick that they show up as clouds on weather radar. Glider pilots have seen them flying at altitudes above 10,000 feet. Year after year, new generations tend to gather around the same landmarks, despite having never seen them before. They seem, for example, to love the Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey.

Now you know.

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If you live alongside me in the nation’s Upper Left corner, the two biggest world events of the last two weeks were obvious: A guy from nearby Kendall, Washington getting tossed like a bagged salad by a bison bull in Yellowstone National Park. And a genetic-freak-of-nature raccoon, nicknamed “Jimothy,” scampering around somewhere in Seattle.

The numbers don’t lie. Do they?

The above “obvious” scale was determined by social-media scoreboards. What’s “viral” at the moment. Which has — all together, class — absolutely nothing to do with the more important metric: the lost art of reasoned news judgment.

As a longtime reporter, journalism instructor and recently, hyperlocal-newspaper editor, I’ve spent a good portion of my life teaching students, colleagues and members of the public what, exactly, qualifies as news in my mind — and what sorts of extremely human, experienced-based factors guide such decisions.

You can, in fact, find literal textbook definitions of what qualifies as news. I’ll save those for a local crabby lecture. My mission here is to follow up last week’s pledge, made while noting our present “bauble-obsessed culture,” to explore how news organizations manage the unwelcome intrusion of a digital scoreboard in making daily coverage decisions.

One unavoidable fact: Weighing the impact of a potential story’s online viral nature on its newsworthiness is a rigged game, with no clear rules. Another: It is thus a tremendous pain in the ass, with decisions bound to please no one. Alas, such newsroom decisions are a fact of life in our unfortunate post-truth world, in which hapless consumers are bombarded with megagigs of “content” daily — some of it rank propaganda, some of it relevant, most of it very much the opposite. And newsrooms are left to respond accordingly.

IN MY MOST RECENT JOB, as a founder and five-year executive editor of Cascadia Daily News, the aforementioned hyperlocal entity, the degree to which something was “all over the socials” was a frequent metric in news choices. We did have one advantage over, say, The New York Times, TMZ or The Atlantic: As a newsroom that under my direction was truly independent from inside and outside influences and focused primarily on stories with local impact, weeding out the news wheat from the blather chaff had a couple clear guideposts.

If something was “viral” but also met our criteria for local newsworthiness — usually defined as something of great interest to, or significant potential impact on, our readers — the fact that something was “blowing up online” wasn’t a disqualifier, as long as the other standards were met. We would do our own take, emphasizing the news — and yes, occasionally just entertainment — values.

Fact: Broad public knowledge and/or likely interest in a potential news story has always been a factor in making news decisions. It’s why trained and experienced journalists matter. In truth, the internet is just a souped-up modern stand-in for what used to be water-cooler conversations.

Key difference: Casual community gossip was usually second or third hand information, taking days or weeks to generate critical mass. Now, personal-publication platforms spread awareness instantly. Multiply that by millions for the “facts” bombarding us daily via (anti)social media. All too often, this masquerades as broad public sentiment.

Newsrooms less driven by the indefatigable forces of economic pressure that come with internet page hits have the luxury of downplaying or ignoring things that might have been truly viral in a community, but hold little or no actual news value. But as noted in last week’s piece about Bison Man, those news operations are increasingly scarce.

EVEN AT PUBLICATIONS devoted to the truly local, with stories produced by actual human beings, pressures are inevitably present to slip into the all-too-easy pattern of judging the “success” of published news stories by how many page views they generated online.

At CDN, in a newsroom filled with digital-native reporters and editors — and by folks who had come to our enterprise from other operations where those sorts of analytics, sadly, truly did qualify as an unofficial news-production bottom line — that pressure was subtle but still present.

I staunchly chose to use page hits and other analytics as an informational tool, not a determining factor. It went without saying that much of the newspaper’s most important work in covering the minutiae of government processes, elections, public policy and other matters was rarely likely to reside on the most-read list.

(It’s worth noting, however, that some of CDN’s most enterprising coverage of those subjects sometimes did find itself on those most-read lists — a credit to the hard work of talented staff and to a smart, media-savvy audience.)

Sadly, online analytics sit much closer to the driver’s seat at most other modern publications, as evidenced by their tripping over themselves to report on stories that come with a built-in social media audience, padding the week’s online page hits.

ONE SMALL EXAMPLE: For years now, my longtime employer, The Seattle Times — a respectable publication — has tripped all over its presses trying to make news out of “earthquakes” emanating from pro sports stadiums in downtown Seattle.

The first time this occurred was by happenstance. Fifteen years ago, some local geology nerds had set up seismometers a block from the Seattle Seahawks’ stadium in Sodo. In a 2011 Wild Card NFL playoff game against the New Orleans Saints, an improbable 67-yard touchdown run by running back Marshawn Lynch got the sellout crowd into such full-throated, foot-stomping hysteria that it registered on the seismometers, similar to a very small ground tremor (magnitude 2.0) as seen in a minor earthquake.

The resulting “Beast Quake” story was clearly an engaging novelty, and a fun way to celebrate a local event with the added built-in, enthusiastic audience of a beloved pro sports franchise in a football-crazed town.

Except it didn’t stop there. On countless occasions since, the newspaper has repeated the same story, same facts, with many other large-scale stadium events, reinventing, ad nauseam, the “Beast Quake” phenomenon as news. (In fairness, The Times was not initially alone; countless other media orgs followed suit with the original story, the earthquake techs later related.) The farther the succeeding stories get from the first one, the more they have become standing parodies of themselves.

Fact is, we all now know that 70,000 people gathered together in one place can make enough commotion to register on a seismometer — especially when said exuberance is accompanied by high-wattage amplification of music, such as at a concert.

The question: So what? What possible impact — or even possible entertainment value, given the well-trod path to this likely deep-page-hits well — does this have on people 15 years later? It’s pure content candy at this point.

It’s like news orgs trotting out a “new” story twice a year (The Times has long been guilty here as well) about the “controversy” over Daylight Saving Time. These pieces, like any other mindless Ford/Chevy debate, inevitably generate tons of page-hit comments and social media blather, but shed literally no new light.

Brainwashed defenders of this practice — and trust me, there are many in the news biz — will respond with this flaccid defense: “Well, it creates a lot of engagement.”

Which is fine, and perhaps even beneficial, in a big-picture way. But history shall record that “engagement” alone doesn’t pay journalist’s salaries or buy paper, ink and server space. Never has, never will.

THE GREATER DANGER is that this sort of drip-based erosion of what used to be bedrock news standards also creates engagement of another sort: A weakening of the critical mortar between any respected publication and its readers. Which is trust.

Readers trust their news org to help them decide what’s most important, what’s real, and to put it into context. The more stories published that treat trivia as news, or pure mythology (bigfoot tours, anyone?) presented as demonstrable fact, the more that trust erodes.

This is a matter of optics — a nagging concern I took to the newsroom every day both as a reporter and editor. For any smart news organization, community optics is something you learn over time, mostly by participating in, or observing first-hand, previous bad story framing or timing, or even headline words that erode trust. And then living with the reaction.

Experience teaches you what works, and more memorably, what doesn’t in your particular market. Local institutional knowledge thus is a critical element. This is one reason surveys show people place more trust in news produced by people who live among them.

I can’t overstate how mission-critical trust is in news reporting at all levels. Will readers trust a newspaper or broadcast outlet that publishes a deeply reported, carefully worded story impugning malfeasance at a local institution when that story is based largely on sources who aren’t named because they fear retribution?

Trust makes accountability journalism, and informed commentary, possible.

As difficult as that was to maintain before, it’s gone off the treacherous scale since the unwelcome injection of artificial intelligence into daily news content and broad spread internet social media blather.

The increasingly evident garbage in/garbage out nature of generative AI, I fear, is already hypercharging existing broad public distrust of news organizations. Even those that painstakingly stick to firm ethical and professional standards are sending their news through a digital funnel in which the veracity of literally everything published is soon to be cast in greater doubt.

We live in a media world where you couldn’t always believe what you read; now you literally can’t even believe what you see and hear thanks to deep-fake technology.

CAN NEWS ORGANIZATIONS with all the right intentions overcome that?

I don’t know. I’m not exactly confident.

But signs of hope glimmer, ranging from AI-detection tools (presently in infancy and fraught with false positives and other curses) to the emerging nature of entrepreneurial journalism as a societal force.

We live in a teachable moment. Trust in media ownership is on the national table at an unprecedented level of late, thanks to the overtly fascist, anti-American proclivities of the pay-to-play Trump administration. As dozens of corporate media entities kiss the ring of the current Gilded Oval Office occupant, countless journalists have been forced to make a choice: Soldier on and do the critical work as long as possible — or gamble on changing the rules of the game.

Many have chosen the latter, creating a wave of democratization, if you will, of news delivery.

Some of the nation’s best reporters have given up on traditional ownership models where once-solid walls between journalistic integrity and blatant money-grubbing and/or overlord back-scratching have crumpled. They’ve moved to nonprofits, or independent publishing on platforms such as this one, leaving The Man to his own devices.

While it’s difficult to imagine individual Substackers ever having the resources to match the accountability power of well-financed newsrooms, it’s still a healthy sign, and evidence of an ironic boomerang effect: The very digital world of self publishing that has fueled the credibility problem also can be reverse-engineered into a weapon to combat it. This is happening now at an accelerated pace.

WHILE THAT PLAYS OUT, even small players in the media world can take concerted actions to stem the growing tides of public mistrust in what they publish:

• Own your own optics. Make solid news decisions based more on impact than titillation. Consider the “viral” nature of any event a red, not green, flag for publication. Ask yourself if “engagement” is worth the potential price of trivialization of your brand.

• Be painfully transparent about those decisions. Every publication needs a regular voice communicating with the public about its policies, its reasoning, and its practices. This is more critical than ever, and very few publications do it well, at any level.

• Immediately acknowledge, express honest regret, and correct errors that are an inevitable part of the reporting process. Again: Optics. Trust. Accountability.

• In an increasingly fake digital world, don’t underestimate the value of printed publications in creating street cred. Print lends an air of authenticity; it is news you can hold in your hands. It’s tangible, professional, and not something a convenience store clerk can ape from a keyboard in their basement.

• To survive, even small hyperlocal pubs need a business model that insulates journalists from commercial interests by ensuring a large portion of revenue comes from public “ownership” of a product — through subscriptions, donations and direct grants and donations. The more a publication is beholden to revenue from clicks, and the more-appealing advertising rates that (purportedly) come with them, the more susceptible it will be to influence on newsrooms by business officials who in the eyes of customers represent the interests of ownership, not the public.

• Accordingly, aim higher than traditional standards of journalistic and media-company ethics, maintaining a stalwart, strict separation of news decisions from business interests — or an activist-salted governing board, in the case of nonprofits. Make your newsroom’s full independence a selling point to the public. Then live up to it, avoiding even the appearance of ownership/business office intrusion on news practices that rightfully erode trust, which can be impossible to reclaim.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s a daunting challenge. I’m confident, and hopeful, that truth will find a way. But is the next-gen of journalists assembling their own machines from the loose parts of a largely cratered industry up to the challenge? If you’re interested in the survival of representative democracy, you’d better hope so. It’s on life support.

As always, I’m interested in your take.

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Speaking of Baubles: Even more embarrassing, in some ways, than news org’s knee-jerk responses to viral online memes is the bandwagoning by local government agencies who have fallen victim to the notion that attempts at jocular humor is part of their job description.

Case In Decided Point: Whatcom County, BellingHammer’s own oft-wayward local government agency, practically injured itself jumping on the “Jimothy” bandwagon this week with an inane post about the deformed raccoon under the guise of “Monday Morning Trivia.”

Adding Insult to Existing PR Injury: The public employee responsible for this bit of bandwagon riding (likely sporting a six-figure salary in a town of gig workers and retirees) used the occasion to point out that the county council had previously established its environs as a “Sasquatch Protection and Refuge area” — an actual government recognition of an entity that does not exist. Celebrate the stupidity!

Next Week: The county ups its page-hits ante by considering a hunting ban on the Easter Bunny.

Not to be Outdone: In the grasping-for-baubles department, Washington state’s Emergency Management Division managed to actually combine the above two lamented memes with a stunningly stupid post using “Jimothy” as a tool to espouse earthquake safety! True clickbait master-class material, and worthy of multiple records requests by some pesky reporter to tally up the public cost.

In Other BM News: Due to the nationwide outbreak of Cyclosporiasis, which spreads on vegetables such as lettuce, the nation was left to legitimately wonder this week: How can I tell the explosive diarrhea from Cyclosporiasis at Taco Bell from the regular explosive diarrhea from Taco Bell?

And Finally: Not to spread alarm here, but: The New York Times reports that diseased catfish in a northeastern border lake have been determined to have unseemly growths from a form of cancer, spread through the water. Sort of like George Carlin’s prescient, classic fake newscast bit: Saliva has been proven to cause cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a very long period of time.

Keep calm and swallow on, everyone.

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Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

The New York Times: Trump, His Money, and the World, by Katrin Bennhold, July 23, 2026 (gift audio link). A stunning greatest-graft-hits compilation of the rank corruption and raids on the public till by the Trump administration and lifetime-loser family members and associates. The report launches with a lede for the history books:

“This summer, we learned that Donald Trump made at least $2.2 billion in his first year back in the White House. That’s a crazy amount of money. No other American president or leader of a liberal democracy has even come close to becoming so rich while in office.”

The Conversation: The antifa terrorism threat the Trump administration describes does not exist, by Jason M. Blazakis. The author, Director of Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College, lays out the facts of the abjectly fictional nature of the public threat of “antifa” by Mina-bird members of the MAGA movement. The author’s summation: “As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.” Not that facts really matter in propaganda. But still …

Georgia Trust for Local News: Georgia Trust for Local News partners with local supporters to acquire two historic newspapers, by Shannon Holforth, July 18, 2026. The Trust reports on acquiring (from much-loathed national chain McClatchy) two truly legacy Georgia newspapers, which will be put under community nonprofit ownership. Encouraging trend here, and worth watching whether successful private-to-public conversions effectively scale down to out-of-gas-and-funds local community news businesses via a multi-product nonprofit ownership structure like this one. The Georgia Trust is a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit (with funding from the Knight Foundation and others) that acquires, stabilizes and revitalizes news organizations across the country and now oversees 21 publications. One small hammer blow for local news. It matters.

From the top

Message to the rest of the world (literally, in this case): Leave bison man the hell alone.

The gent who became a global internet sensation this week after being charged, then flung like a rag doll about 8 feet into the air, by a rut-crazed adult male bison at Yellowstone National Park was not, as millions of people instantly judged on antisocial media platforms, a clueless tourist who got too close to one of the wild, unpredictable beasts.

He was basically minding his own business, walking with a grandchild through an established Yellowstone campground, at a distance far beyond what park officials recommend for watching bison.

Classic wrong place/wrong time situation.

Carl McDaniel, 65, of Kendall in rural Whatcom County, saw the huge bull rolling and throwing up dust from a significant distance (60 to 100 yards, depending on whose estimate one accepts) when it sprung to its feet, sprinted in an aggressive charge toward a passing vehicle, then turned its wrath on the nearby pair, who had paused for an instant to snap a photograph.

They did not, McDaniel told a reporter, see obvious aggressive behavior from the bull until it unexpectedly charged. Both of them fled into nearby trees, with McDaniel circling around twice to distract the bull from his grandson. Carl held his own for one short lap, but that lead quickly evaporated: Bison can run at up to 30 mph, and with a ton of weight carried on those hooves, can inflict deadly harm.

As they often do to other things, including small RVs, the bull head-butted McDaniel right off the ground and into a splayed-out spiral, high in the air.

For his trouble, not to mention what turned out to be significantly more than 15 minutes of fame, McDaniel suffered multiple fractures in his upper right femur and, as of this writing, remained hospitalized in Bozeman, according to friends. He’s hoping to get released soon and come home.

THE SPECTACLE, of course, became instant news site fodder around the world. “Grandpa gets tossed by bison!” the video headlines read. Some were less kind, especially in the inevitable smarmy comment-section responses.

As a news hand, both old and new school, none of this was surprising to me. In our present full-on bauble-oriented global culture, the conversation order of the day all too often is dictated by what stands out from a veritable sea of daily short video clips. For journalists, the instant, fleeting “fame” assigned to McDaniel and others caught up in pixelated moments raises larger questions, namely: Does something that’s gone “viral” online immediately qualify as news?

In too many newsrooms, the answer is yes: Reposting the bison video is an easy way for news sites, both legit and basement-oriented, to earn waves of cheap page hits, which (marginally) help fuel advertising. If that’s your main revenue source, garbage in/garbage out is what readers and viewers are going to get fed regularly. That’s the case with most commercial U.S. media.

Even in legit, conscientious newsrooms, data on page hits can become irresistible eye candy, leading to faulty decisions that elevate non-news as something meaningful simply because something is “all over the place online.”

The ethics of all that are a worthy subject for another post, another time. (To pave the way, I’ll note here that when I left my 32-year career at The Seattle Times, the most-read story online — from a paper with a large handful of Pulitzer Prizes — was about a guy who died after having sex with a horse in Enumclaw. Perhaps that has changed, but prurient interest is an undeniable force.)

To be clear, unwarranted sensationalism was not a significant factor here: The imagery of McDaniel’s suborbital journey was undeniable eye candy. (Armchair psychological analysis might suggest people identified with either the bull, Carl, or … both?) I don’t question how or why it became a story that quickly swept the web, becoming an overnight sensation acknowledged by everyone from Cascadia Daily News to TMZ and CNN.

By chance, the only available recently published photo of McDaniel was right here in Bellingham, in the files of CDN, my former newspaper, which had featured the grandfather in one of the paper’s “Faces In the Crowd” pieces last year. CDN, I’m told, got calls the same day from other news organizations wanting to use the only picture around showing McDaniel in non-spread-eagle airborne mode. Our own local brush with bison-launching greatness!

NONE OF THAT is likely to be of much interest to Carl McDaniel, who is said to be in good spirits but obvious pain, concerned about a long recovery.

What should be of interest, but likely won’t be, outside our confines, is this: People I know who also know Carl described him this week in the exact same way: a standup guy and pillar of his community in east Whatcom County, where folks tend to get judged instantly and accurately by actions and character.

He’s a ready volunteer for multiple community associations, everything from health and welfare to community infrastructure. Anytime a call went out for helping hands in any fashion in the county, these folks said, McDaniel would be there.

Asked by CDN reporter Sophia Gates why he so regularly offers himself up for public service, McDaniel said this:

“Twenty-five years ago, when I came out here, literally the day I moved in, I had neighbors come by and help me unload the truck. And I have found that the community up here is insanely close. If people need help, they just help.”

I recall meeting him a couple years ago, when CDN staffers traveled to Van Zandt for the first of what would become an ongoing series of community meet-and-greets. McDaniel was one of several dozen community members assembled that cold morning at the Van Zandt Community Center the minute the doors opened.

It’s what you do if you’re a guy like him.

Acquaintances also describe him as physically strong and able, belying his grandfatherly image punctuated by a flowing gray beard. That strength, they speculated, might have saved him from a far-worse fate at the hands, er horns, of that crazed bison.

AS A WRITER and observer of human/wildlife encounters for many decades, I confess my own personal interest in McDaniel’s bison aerial event. I’ll just say this: If Carl McDaniel qualifies as some form of idiot for being in the place he was, then I am Ron Judd, Lord of the Idiots, to borrow a line from my patron saint, George Constanza. Because I’ve been in far-more-precarious, idiot-label-deserving situations, on too many occasions to count.

For many years, as the outdoors reporter/columnist at The Seattle Times, I had the good fortune to spend ridiculously large amounts of time — company time, no less — in truly wild places from the Southwest to Alaska. Along the way, I spent probably more days than the average person getting up close and personal with wild animals of all sorts, all over western North America.

Numerous bears, both black and, yikes, brown. A cougar or two. Bobcats. Countless salt-crazed, occasionally ornery mountain goats in the Olympics, Cascades and Rockies. Mostly indifferent bighorn sheep. Scores of deer and both Roosevelt and Rocky Mountain elk — the latter often in the rut phase, ready and willing to attack (or, also double yikes, mount) literally anything in their paths. Wiley coyotes. Sneaky beavers. Hissing rattlesnakes. Angry marmots. Scampering packs of over-curious otters. Stealthy gray wolves, times a few, one of them face-to-face from about 5 yards. Wild horses and burros.

And yes, on more than one occasion, bison, either on their own or in large herds. They are a beast I learned to hold in such high esteem, I devoted an entire magazine piece to them back in the day.

Rule one about being around bison: You don’t want to piss them off — especially in groups.

Rule two about being around bison: Not unlike grizzlies, it’s almost impossible to tell when they’re going to be pissed off. Or by what.

That said, there are certainly signs and precautionary time windows. For bison, some of those signs were evident with this bad boy in Yellowstone: The rolling, rutting in the dirt, bluff charging, etc. All evidence that he is literally crazed because it’s mating season.

Some of you know this feeling.

The other is simply timing: For bulls like this, the time for that affliction is seasonal, and the season is now. Normal safety sense should be heightened tenfold during any large mammal’s rutting time.

BUT SHOOT, SOMETIMES you just get caught up in the moment. As a frequent wild beast greeter, I, of course, watched and documented, but never played the part of one of the clueless vacationing Oompa Loompas walking right up to a large, likely aggressive, wild animal for purposes of that Last Great Selfie. Not even once.

On the other hand, I have done incredibly stupid things — or been in the presence of others guilty of same.

One year, visiting Alaska for some stories on salmon fishing, I got flown into a remote basecamp along Cook Inlet, in the shadow of Mount Iliamna. There, after being dumped on a beach literally covered with grizzly tracks, I fished alongside an older gent from Idaho for waves of coho salmon that entered the river, about as wide as a two-lane city street, near our camp at every high tide.

Soon enough, a number of brown bears started doing the same across the river; we retreated respectfully. But they seemed to be busy enjoying their own fish bonanza. Eventually, we inched down to the bank on our own side and started nervously casting lures right across from them.

We caught fish. They caught fish. We left them alone. They left us alone. They might not have.

Later that night, we heard and then spotted a full-grown sow, probably pushing 1,000 pounds, barreling up a game trail, straight toward our camp. We gave her a wide berth and she passed on after a good sniff. But we slept all night in a flimsy frame tent with one eye open and the old chap’s loaded double-barrel shotgun between us.

A less daunting, bison-related encounter that came to mind this week was an afternoon many years ago, casually tooling along the access road at the National (now Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT) Bison Range, near Moiese, Montana, in a pickup truck with a Seattle Times photographer friend who probably should not be named (Harley Soltes).

At the top of a crest, we stopped to admire the stunning view across Flathead Lake to the Mission Range when the reserve’s large herd of bison rose above the horizon like some creeping blob of movable beef, making a beeline for us.

When they got within about a dozen yards, I got back in the truck. Harley did not. Within moments, he was pressed up against the passenger door with dozens of bison cows, bulls and calves literally brushing by him. This went on for some 20 minutes. Or possibly hours, not sure.

Harley, who seemed both excited and oblivious, stuck on a wide lens and got some killer frames. I’m glad, in hindsight, they did not become literally that.

Other occasions come to mind. I shall spare the details to cling to some shred of outdoorsperson dignity.

My point: Even for more-experienced hands, it’s easy to get wrapped up in a moment and do something dumb. But this was clearly not the case with Carl McDaniel.

Let he among us who has not lingered longer than would be wise to switch lenses and get that great shot cast the first digital stone.

Stay strong, Viral Carl, the bearded internet sensation. And get home soon. Local folks who care more about your reentry than your launch are holding out the landing net for you.

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Collins Worthy: After their own easily avoidable Senate-candidate disaster, Maine political officials were said to be “scrambling” this week to find a candidate who can defeat incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in the swiftly approaching 2026 midterm. Hammer notes: Only the nation’s Democrats could possibly find this to be an imposing task.

This Week’s Brave-Dude Challenge: Look your barber in the mirror and in the eye and ask him: “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”

Smoke’s On: Wildfires in Canada once again are fouling the air in America’s upper Midwest and Eastern regions, raising the question: Why does Canada hate America? And the even better question: Why in the name of all that is holy would they possibly not?

Straight From the Halls of Science: A new study reported by Science Daily indicates the human brain “doesn’t make decisions the way we thought.” All sentient human brains have been looping the Carl McDaniel bison video and unavailable for immediate comment.

This Just In: President/Convicted Felon Trump reportedly uttered on Thursday that “some other nation” will be responsible for securing land along the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. war against Iran, popularly known to American consumers as Operation Infinite Duration, escalates.

Raising the Question: Which of our “allies” wants to sign up first for human Drone Target Practice duty?

Hammer Meets Rock: In tribute to his making fun of the entire matter a couple weeks ago, your humble scribe last weekend was gifted by a friend and colleague at a BBQ an actual chunk of the famed “Bellingham Rock,” busted up at great public expense by Washington’s Department of Transportation and Mythical-Fish Passage Projects.

Place of Honor: Said rock will now reside in the Curio Section of BellingHammer’s backyard, where it will live out its (and likely his) days in the company of approximately 1.4 billion other similar rocks.

Come to Think of It: Honoring the tradition of Washington’s late Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, who famously named her family pigs after Olympia press corps reporters, Hammer might spend some time this summer naming each of those rocks after members of Congress. And in the interest of historical continuity, may slather the Bham Rock with Krylon and write an occasional new cryptic slogan on the front. Watch this space for updates.

Daylight Time: Finally on our side?

BellingHammer swears on a stack of The Week magazines that last week, writing about the scathing hot topic of long summertime days in the NW, he had no inside knowledge of the possible pending adoption, by the present historic do-nuthin’ Congress, of legislation to finally allow states in the Western U.S. to complete their adoption of a permanent time standard. It would match the current Daylight Saving Time schedule, ending the truly idiotic tyranny of twice-yearly clock changes, which most (sane) people long ago learned to loathe.

The possibility proved so exciting to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray that she put out a decidedly non-viral video asking folks to push to get the measure through the Senate, after being approved by the smoldering ruins of what once was the U.S. House of Representatives.

While there has long been broad acceptance of the need to Ditch the Switch, the mere mention of this, of course, re-released the gigantic fart cloud of ill-informed public argument about whether Daylight Time or Standard Time should be the chosen permanent standard.

This argument was long ago settled by a large majority of West Coast dwellers, from California all the way to British Columbia, where the switch was already implemented this year. The driver there was the same: As discussed last week, in northern states, especially, most people desire more daylight in the usable evening hours, rather than the morning.

Permanent Daylight Time provides more usable daylight when people are actually awake, or off work and out of school to enjoy them, for an additional chunk of the year. Switching to permanent Standard Time would actually make the current time schedule even more whacked in our state than it already is: Yes, it’d preserve daylight arriving around 8 a.m. in dead winter, but at an insane price: the crack of dawn in midsummer months would be at roughly 3:45 a.m. Big win for blackout curtains folks, big loss for civilized society.

FANS OF STANDARD TIME, of course, issued the usual plaintive wails about the horrors of kids trooping to school on winter mornings in the dark. As if school schedules, set by local elected folks, are somehow holy writs etched into the Ten Commandments. (This also illustrates how many parents value public education not so much for learning but for subsidized day care in a society providing few other viable options.)

Other mythology routinely lather/rinse/repeated online:

• America briefly tried this in the ’70s and “everyone hated it” for the above reasons. In fact, it was trotted out then as a federal experiment, with no corresponding adjustments to school, business or work hours, and no time for adjustments. And societal needs have changed a bit in 50 years, yes?

• All “sleep experts” agree that a Standard Time regimen is more “natural,” more “healthy,” etc. etc. Nonsense. While some of them believe human circadian rhythms fit better with the Standard timetable, most of those who actually live in the real world, rather than a campus, also agree that human society doesn’t function in any other hunter/gatherer way with what’s “best” for the human body, which has the infinite capacity to adjust. Most also agree that twice-yearly interruptions of time schedules likely do more damage to the same cherished rhythms than either permanent plan.

What matters here: People have the right to adjust daylight schedules to where it’s most useful. And here, a majority long ago expressed a preference for more evening daylight.

I’m still not holding my breath. But if this measure passes, Trump will likely sign it and some of us can die happy after never changing a @#$)(*#$ clock again.

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What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s digital countertops this week

Substack: “Small airport. Big challenges,” Franksplaining Business, by Frank Catalano, July 14, 2026. The veteran Northwest newsie, like myself a fellow former Cascadia Daily News scribe, launches his retooled newsletter with a scoop: the results of a Bellingham Intergalactic Airport local-business survey shedding light on the degree to which the city’s regional airport might be a present or future factor in businesses and workers relocating to, or staying in, the ’Ham.

The New York Times: Graham’s Death Highlights Congress’s Age Issue, by Annie Karni, July 12, 2026 (gift link). Two words: Ya think? If the passing of L.G. wasn’t enough (he was a youngster in this deep-rings collection) one needed to tune in to only a few minutes of this week’s latest Embarrassing Senate Confirmation Hearing, presided over by the fossilized remains of Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Jurassic Park, who proved himself barely able to read note cards filled with law-enforcement support for nominee Todd Blanche without drooling down his own shirt. A truly sad spectacle for a fading democratic republic.

The Washington Post: Trump’s attorneys, Justice Dept. leaders misused courts in IRS case, judge says, by Jeremy Roebuck and Mark Berman, July 13, 2026. Speaking of fading republics, it’s worth your time to get the full breadth of Judge Kathleen M. Williams’ remarkable takedown of the Trump “Justice” Department, describing the scheme to establish an out-of-court-settlement slush fund for victims of supposed judicial overreach during the Biden Administration as so abhorrent and foolish that its courtroom proponents should face professional sanctions.

At the bottom

Thanks for supporting the American free press. It still matters.

Non-Editor’s Note: BellingHammer early on Friday mistakenly scheduled an unedited version of this week’s newsletter. Here’s the right one, hopefully more typo-free!

From the top

10 P.M., BELLINGHAM BAY — Will the last person leaving the Bellingham waterfront please turn out the lights?

Longtime NW types will get the meme: That sentence is a take on the legendary Seattle billboard during a big layoff at Boeing, formerly of Seattle, back in 1971: “Will the last person leaving Seattle — Turn out the lights.”

It was a wry commentary, by some local real estate agents, on the airliner-dependent economy of the day. It became a legendary moment in the city’s history, as iconic as the grainy video reel of Tex Johnson flying a set of barrel rolls in a Boeing 707 Dash 80 passenger jet over the Lake Washington SeaFair hydroplane course in 1955. (His official explanation when Boeing CEO Bill Allen asked him what the hell he was doing: “I was selling airplanes!)

These days, that billboard slogan comes to mind in a more immediate sense, often around this time of the year in the broader Upper Left Corner: Seriously, gods of the universe, can you make the sun finally go away?

I know, I know. The newbies especially hate to hear that from a locally born and reared person. We can’t help it; the love of damp darkness, as I have often written, is encoded in our DNA. At least it feels that way to this fifth-generation Northwesterner.

Some of us get nervous when we go for months without pulling a hood over our heads. So shoot us, already.

WE DO COME ABOUT IT honestly. An oft-misunderstood reality of life here is that we are Westerners, through and through, but with less-recognized reality of also being Northern folks — a much-less-discussed or even recognized cultural geography category.

Just how northern is something many of us go through life without fully pondering. In 2015, I wrote about this subject in a Seattle Times Pacific NW Magazine piece, placing Washington state — and particularly its upper left corner — in the right place on many a mental map.

That story included the brain-teaser test I’ve since given to hundreds of people; it’s a sure-thing bar-bet winner: “How many people in Canada live south of the city of Washington border town of Blaine?”

(Cue Jeopardy music, watch brows furrow as if it’s a trick question.)

Real answer: somewhere north (you see what I did there) of 70 percent. You can argue this and dispute it all you want but it’s true.

Look at any real map showing the curvature of the earth and latitude lines. See where the vast majority of the population of Canada plies its wares and allegedly skins its mooses: What we call in America the upper Upper Midwest. The facts, and national censuses, do not lie.

While the Midwest even at lower latitudes clearly has a more harsh climate than marine-air-blessed Washington, this lays bare the great myth that Canadians are some sort of hardy Arctic people. (Make no mistake: A few, especially Indigenous northern dwellers, truly are. But most of their Dudley Do-right deeds are done from climes decidedly south of where Puget Sounders live.)

Incidentally: The same holds true for some proud northerly types on the East Coast of the U.S. (looking at you, Maine.)

Much of our world view is shaped by geography; much of what we accept about geography actually resides in the public imagination, I pointed out in that story:

Blame bad maps, poor education (quick: what’s a Mercator projection?), popular fiction, and what one trans-border-dwelling Canadian academic terms a fanciful “geographic imagination.”

Those maps — be they on paper, flat screens, or in our minds — suggest a straight up/down North American continent in which America hogs the center, Mexico lies below, and all of Canada stretches north to fortresses of solitude inhabited by Santa Claus, Clark Kent and polar bears.

Sorry, but no.

The popular myth that the border between America and Planet Maple Leaf runs along the 49th parallel from sea to roiling sea — and by extension, that all of our Canadian friends ice skate to work and school every day on frozen rivers, dodging caribou at every turn — is bunk. Pure geographic mythology.

And this about Canada’s 49th parallel relationship to the U.S.:

Canada’s two largest, frostbitten cities, Toronto (43 degrees 42 minutes north) and Montreal (45 degrees 30 minutes), both lie well south of Seattle (47 degrees 36 minutes north), as does the federal capital of Ottawa. The southern tip of Ontario, in Lake Erie, lies at 41 degrees 40 minutes north — roughly the same latitude as the redwoods country south of Crescent City, Calif.

Of the Canadian provinces, only Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba lie entirely north of the 49th parallel; even Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, lies far south of many Washingtonians — it sits at about the same latitude as Deception Pass State Park. All three maritime provinces on Canada’s east coast lie entirely south of Blaine, as does more than half of Labrador and Newfoundland.

And then bringing it home to our own nation:

In the Lower 48, only a boundary-glitch chunk of mostly uninhabited land at Lake of the Woods, Minn., lies substantially north of the 49th parallel. Most Puget Sounders live well north of the tippy top of Maine, whose state seal features a moose chilling out beneath a pine tree. Maine’s latitudinal line, at 47 degrees 27 minutes north, runs somewhere between Burien and SeaTac.

These facts don’t lie, they just hide in a dark corner: Seattle is the northernmost U.S. city of 500,000 people or more. Bellingham is the northernmost city of more than 50,000 in the contiguous United States. And the eclectic border town of Sumas, Whatcom County, is the northernmost incorporated place in the Lower 48, thanks to a survey error that put it a smidgen above the 49th parallel.

And finally a bit about our own societal body clocks:

Because only about an eighth of the world’s surface is north of us, the seasonal shift in the earth’s axis has an exponential effect on our days. In a town such as Sumas, the sun looms over local raspberry fields for 16 hours and 12 minutes during the summer solstice — but only 8 hours and 14 minutes during the winter solstice. Talk about a mood swing.

It’s easy for most people to overlook how that affects our daily lives. In mid-December, the sun in Bellingham rises at 7:55 a.m. and sets at 4:15 p.m. In La Jolla, Calif., the sun is up by 6:42 a.m. and sets at 4:45. A midwinter day in Everett is about 8 hours and 20 minutes. In Phoenix, it’s almost 10 hours; in Miami, 10½.

What does it mean for us? During midwinter in Washington’s “Fourth Corner,” the “3:30 rule” is widely in effect: If you don’t get your stuff together in time to walk your dog, prune the dogwoods or mend the fence by 3:30 p.m., you’re going to be finishing in the dark.

Is there any wonder some of us don’t have time to find our true place on the globe?

As I am wont to do, I found all this fascinating back in the day. It remains so.

The summer daylight-hours part is what’s been on my mind for weeks. During a weeks-long window preceding and after the summer solstice (June 21), NW WA is blessed with what many consider the hard-earned reward for tolerating their monthslong blackout: On those nights in the heart of the solstice window, “civil twilight” does not arrive in our backyards until after 10 p.m.

The light lingers; the soul rebounds.

OK. It’s not exactly Juneau or light-all-night Fairbanks. But we feel like we can see them from here. At least for a number of weeks of what seem like endless days, wherein one can go home from work at a civilized hour and still have an entire day’s worth of daylight available for doing what one does around here. Namely, mountain biking, gardening or therapy-circle book clubbing, depending on one’s station in life.

(Brief aside: Don’t even get me started on the ill-informed, never-ending argument about switching to permanent Daylight Saving vs. Standard time; anyone who has actually lived in a northern state recognizes the afternoon-sunsets folly of the latter “natural” time scheme.)

MOST PEOPLE here truly love the long summer light. In fact, they literally embrace it.

On the first of those uber-long days in Bellingham, 48 degrees 45 minutes N, you can go down to the Taylor Street Dock, a promenade jutting out into the bay, and watch seas of people who have marched lemming-like down the ramp, standing and facing west toward Lummi Island, their arms raised and palms open in Sunday-afternoon-revival-style, literally bending forward into the revitalizing warmth like a young bean stalk procured from Joe’s Gardens in the city’s Happy Valley neighborhood.

Charge my batteries, Great Orb in the Sky!

It’s sort of comical. But sweet, in its own way.

Muddling along outside that norm, however, are a few of us who enjoy it for a bit, but then actually start mentally leaning back the other way — quietly yearning for the inevitable slide back into the welcoming arms of darkness. Most of those folks, self included, are somewhat loathe to admit this, due to the shunning and shaming likely to ensue. (This is especially true when I’m around my spouse, who is one of those bean stalks in a way that I find charming, but cannot fully relate to.)

In unguarded moments I will sometimes let slip, around 9 p.m., lowering the front window shade on our west-facing living room: “X@#()$* sun!”

And every time, she will look at me in sheer horror, as if I have just opened and dumped an entire can of vegetarian refried beans across an original copy of the Ten Commandments. The sacrilege!

I explain: “The warmish weather and all this light; it’s just … a lot of pressure, if you know what I mean.”

She does not.

And then I will slink into the basement, her bewildered look branded on my memory, into the cool dampness of the next best thing to endless winter one can find during the trying bright times.

We manage to get through this on a regular basis. Mostly, we laugh about it and celebrate the difference. But something tells me she doesn’t embrace the value of that truce as much as I do.

As I often say in honor of my 8th grade football coach: Such is life in the Great Northwest. There are worse places to be, in any light.

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Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Sad Clown Quote of the Week: Military and politics commentator Tom Nichols, asked on MS Now about what sort of briefings the Loon-in-Chief must be getting on his “strategy” in Iran, summed it all up: “Basically, he’s unbriefable.”

Add That: To your growing list of distinct similarities between the 47th president of the United States and a block of feldspar.

Anti-Social Media Scourge, Part Infinitum.: The latest scourge in the epic time suck that is Facebook: A deluge of avocado/cheese/boiled-egg recipes with the teaser headline: “I can’t stop making this!”

BellingHammer’s Response: Yes. Oh yes you can. Next time the urge strikes you to mash and air fry, try just laying down for a bit. It will go away. Every time.

Trump This: Trolling around on America’s Internal Revenue site this week to look for a missing amended tax return, BHammer was bombarded with teaser ads for the newest thing coming from the Gilded Oval Office: “Sign up for your Trump account!” It’s a government savings plan for your kids.

Hammer Has Thoughts: One: If I sign up with one do I get the steaks? A bible? A philosophy degree from a failed, unaccredited university? A gallon of COVID-slaying bleach or better yet, that and a 60-watt lightbulb? The mind reels.

Further: Get it through your head: No matter how much money is in the Trump Account when little Monique heads to college, it’s always going to be Trump Money, and you’re always going to look like an idiot.

Other Than That: Seems like a perfectly fine idea.

Speaking of the Lesser Washington: Oddly enough, I, too, enjoyed a spirited phone call with U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell recently. It lasted about 20 minutes; we discussed the odd shape of plastic 2-liter soda bottles, the Pythagorean Theorem, the nutritional benefits of kale, and Coco Gauff’s heartbreaking semifinals loss at Wimbledon.

BellingHammer moves up the charts!

Thanks to all the Hammerheads here for making this newsletter, as of today, an official Substack Bestseller, determined by a rapid rise in paid subscriptions. The status is denoted by an orange check mark next to my title. Super grateful to have everyone on board.

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Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

Paul Bogard: “The End of Night,” (Little, Brown and Company, 2013). An engaging treatise on the generally related-to-above topic of vanishing places on Planet Earth to experience true darkness, seeing the sky like our ancient ancestors once did. Passages come back to me a decade after reading. It was my inspiration for another Seattle Times piece, in 2013, titled “Things are not looking up for dark-sky watchers (paywall).”

The Atlantic: If Other Jobs Were Like U.S. Senator, by Alexandra Petri, July 9, 2026 (gift link). The satirist’s chortle-worthy take on the ongoing controversy about the remaining life and possibly death of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, in her own unique style:

You visit the zoo. THE RHINO IS IN, a large sign informs you. But you don’t see any rhinoceroses, just some zookeepers crawling around in a rhino suit. “We’ve worked with the rhinoceros for years,” the zookeepers explain, when confronted. “We know exactly what he’d do in this situation.”

“Do we need to get another rhino, though?” you ask. “Is there a rhino in this zoo, currently?” No one answers. You don’t deserve an answer.

Cascadia Daily News: Western’s journalism program can play part in success of CDN, other news media, by Micki Jackson, guest writer, June 28, 2026. In the wake of controversy surrounding the firing of a newspaper editor in Bellingham, a local resident urges the Journalism Department at Western Washington University to organize a public forum “that brings together students, faculty, working journalists and community members to discuss the future of local news in our region. Such a forum could provide a nonpartisan space to examine how local journalism can remain both financially viable and ethically grounded, while reinforcing the civic role it plays in community life.”

It’s a capital idea and worthy challenge to my alma mater. Name the time/place.

Ron Judd (The BellingHammer) is a Substack Bestseller and reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. If you’re already on board, share with a friend!

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They held a lot of truths to be self-evident, those famed, and unfortunately deified, Founding Fathers of the great, teetering experiment in self-rule called America.

Of course they did. They were all dudes.

What did anyone expect to emerge from happy hour meetings of this elite Committee of Five? Subtlety? Reasoned analysis followed by calm, rational compromise?

Then, like now, cocksure confidence was written into these boys’ DNA.

Yes, this drafting business was an important task, the sort of thing left to men of the day. But like all guys who have followed, this philosophical boy-band quintet had a lot of competing guy interests, not the least of which was sowing seed, challenging one another to duels in the street, polishing their muskets and, in later decades, habitually leaving stuff out on the kitchen counter.

(Lending weight to this, biographers of Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s principal author, have noted that as a college student at William & Mary, “Jefferson spent considerable time attending parties and dancing and was not very frugal with his expenditures.”)

He later buckled down. Some of us do, some don’t. But the nature often overpowers the nurture even among the most-accomplished.

’Twas even more so back in the late 18th century, when a fledgling nation of Euro-lopers was still largely clinging to the rocks of the East Coast, engaged in a long-running battle with the justifiably upset locals, the King of England, and Mother Nature herself. Any of those tête-à-têtes could have gone either way.

Undaunted, the original colonists carved out their own niche — and had the foresight to codify their hopes and dreams for the society they would first forge, then hand down as they slid into retirement, all the while doing what men of the day did: impregnating their spouses to produce additional capable farm hands and stable tenders. The early American dream, oft-realized.

But as a student of history, I can’t help but wonder how things might have played out — and might still be playing out today, in decidedly less tacky-gold-leaf manner — had the nation’s original founding mothers been given a turn at the quill pen that would write the famed Declaration of Independence.

That foundational document — which, it should not be forgotten, clearly has not been read by, nor even prez-splained to, the current Acting President of the United States, Donald John Trump, who called this call for armed revolt a “declaration of unity and love” — truly did set the course upon which we stumble today.

No less an authority than Abraham Lincoln described the bold screed as a moral guidepost for the nation — a statement of principles through which the later Constitution should be interpreted.

It had heft. Still does, at least outside the presently Gilded Oval Office. What we’ll sadly never know is how the course it set might have veered with additional influence from the people who have truly made the country what it is today. And by that I mean the nation’s invariably more savvy citizens, who only recently, in broad historical terms, forged the right to vote in our grand democracy.

A HISTORICAL GLIMPSE at the lives of the Declaration’s fab five drafters indicates strong female guidance likely was at hand — or at least available.

Jefferson’s marital history is much discussed. The Virginian in 1772 married Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow and third cousin. The slave-owning couple bore six children; after her death, the widowed Jefferson fathered additional children with Martha's half-sister, Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was three-quarters white by descent.

Martha Jefferson’s children described her as highly educated, inquisitive, musically talented and skilled at various household practices — including brewing beer. You like to think she shared a pint or two with Tom to talk about issues of the day. (And that these were not IPAs.)

Lawyer and activist John Adams was married at the time to Abigail Smith — also a third cousin; such was the shallow depth of the upper-crust colonial gene pool! Biographers have noted that Abigail, who wed John in 1764 over the protestations of a highly disapproving mother, was an intellectual equal, sharing her husband’s love of books, debate and inquiry. Watch the TV series; surely she had thoughts about his day job.

Benjamin Franklin was in a common-law marriage to Deborah Read, to whom he had first proposed in 1723, when she was 15. They finally got together in 1730, after the globe-trotting Benjamin returned from England to resume his pursuit. They raised Franklin’s illegitimate son and two children of their own. One might assume Deborah went into the partnership with eyes wide open in matters familial and political.

Robert Livingston — a New York attorney and diplomat who would later administer the first Oath of Office to George Washington — in 1770 was betrothed to Mary Stevens, the daughter of a Continental Congressman. They lived in Clermont Manor, an estate in New York’s Hudson Valley; her family connections likely gave her a full understanding of all the hot issues of the day, including slavery, with which, like other Founders, they both were, shall we say, personally familiar.

Roger Sherman, of the Connecticut Shermans, was married in 1742 to Rebecca Prescott, a second cousin of Samuel Prescott, who reportedly was along for some famous horseback ride of Paul Revere in 1763. The mother of nine of Sherman’s gaggle of 15 children, less is known about her upbringing or life — but she was connected enough in political circles to be given the honor of sewing a few stars on the nation’s first stars-and-stripes flag by Betsy Ross.

Point One: On the occasion of this historic Fourth, it’s worth taking a moment to note their own role in our history.

Point Two: We’ll likely never know how much influence they in fact might have had over the sheet of paper that would light our path. But you can imagine how things might have gone if there had been a bit more.

TO PLAY DEVIL’S ADVOCATE here, this writer realizes official opportunities to intervene in such matters were clearly limited; these no doubt strong women clearly lacked societal standing to do even the low-hanging-fruit spousal tasks we all take for granted today. This included letting their men leave the house every day wearing powdered wigs, puffy pirate shirts, dress coats sewn from fabrics that now seem better suited for drapery material at the late, great Liberace Museum, and plush, surely crotch-rotting knickers, as well as long socks that made them all look like relief pitchers for a colonial minor-league baseball farm team (the New England Patriots?)

Given the times, nobody is likely to suggest that the Founding Mothers would have been so bold as to paint with wildly different strokes, such as calling out slavery, in which they, typical of the times, were literally personally invested — even though some of them would take concerted action to end it later in life.

Even so, it’s fair to dream that a she-edited version of the Declaration, Female-Infused, might have gone something like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men people (HELLO? DID YOU EVEN THINK THIS THROUGH?) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and the ability to park a family vehicle in the garage, as it was intended. Said unalienable rights should be subjected to review among persons demonstrably lacking certain other human traits that should be self-evident, such as the common sense God gave a goat, or the ability to put away one’s own shoes.

And so on.

Beyond that, following through on Lincoln’s premise above, it’s just as easy to imagine a more far-reaching list of amendments to what would become the nation’s Constitution. Possible additions to personal protection guarantees in foundational documents, new language in bold:

• Amended 1st Amendment: Protects freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, the right to petition and the right to one’s own sink in the primary bathroom, no exceptions.

• Amended 2nd Amendment: Protects the right to keep and bear arms — arms being defined as single-shot muskets, for the defense of the realm, but clearly not for wanton, mechanized slaughter of nation’s children and other innocent victims, because what nation of idiots would abide that?

• Amended 4th Amendment: Protects against unreasonable searches and seizures — including of one’s personal property in a homestead where another occupant has lost his wallet or keys and assumes it was hidden away as part of some cruel hoax.

• Amended 6th Amendment: Guarantees the right to a speedy, public trial, the right to counsel and the universal right to no-fault divorce.

• Amended 8th Amendment: Prohibits excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments, including habitual gaslighting/mansplaining and being forced to stare at the floor of a carriage or vehicle when spousal partners make obscene gestures at fellow citizens in the crowded parking lot at Costco three days before the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration.

• New 28th Amendment: Congress shall make no law restricting the right to the establishment and security of separate and distinct user profiles on various streaming platforms.

• New 29th Amendment: Being a nation of both cats and dogs, the need for continual compromise should also be self-evident.

Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Harumph Dept.: Barely out the door at my former newsroom for four weeks and learned by reading the paper that the editors left holding the wheel seem to have joined the crowd of trend setters connecting previously good independent words as a single word, accepted as newspaper “style.” Case in point: Health care and day care, always perfectly clear, now appear to be healthcare and daycare.

I Kid the Wheel-Holders: Life — and the slow-drip degradation of the language — goes on. (We used to have a lot of fun good-naturedly arguing these points of journalistic ephemera that most people likely don’t even notice. The tradition lives!) But I fear upcoming reports on other common subjects with trendy verbiage such as periodotontalgumdiseasepreventitivecare, prepardumprenatalcare and diagnosticmedicalsonographycare.

This Week’s Media Hall ’O Shame Award: Goes to … The Bellingham Herald, a local legacy newspaper that published this week a piece about some longstanding providers at the local health care (you see what I did there) agency, PeaceHealth (and what they also did), that was so gushing it might have made readers search for what appeared to be a missing “Paid content” label.

Not That it Actually Was Paid: Nor anything against the subjects of the piece, but when your story includes quotes from the source of the profile that include these words in any form: “We’re awesome. We’re amazing,” you might want to consider mixing a bit of reality into the broader news mix.

Which Would Include: Basic read-the-room optics in a Northwest region where the agency in question long ago abandoned its mission of mercy embarked upon by Catholic nuns and became another unwieldy, outwardly uncaring “not-for-profit” health care conglomerate. In spite of a workforce of, largely yes, good and dedicated health professionals.

In Other Words: A little balance over time goes a long way. Haven’t seen that.

This Week’s Big Disclosure: BHammer should come clean here and admit that he, like Acting President DJT, also was fortunate enough to earn $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency proceeds over the past year. It made him so giddy that he slipped in the shower, conked his head, and started writing this weekly missive instead of just living off the compound interest.

Begging the Question: Does it still even qualify as taxable income?

And Finally: Mixed results in the nation’s most recent jobs report, with some growth in new positions, as well as unemployment rates, being tempered by the belief that large numbers of people continue to leave the labor market. Happy to have contributed in my own way to that latter driver.

BellingHammer rising!

Another big thanks here to all the early adopting HammerHeads in the room. This newsletter spent the past couple of weeks routinely living in the top 20 “rising” Substack accounts in the News category. Much appreciated.

Workbench

What’s cluttering the BellingHammer’s countertops this week

The Washington Post: Can you pass this quiz on American history and government? (gift link), June 27, 2026. Shaming his own master’s degree in history, BellingHammer got one wrong and no, will not admit to which. Take it yourself. Then mail a copy to the Chief of Staff and demand that the POTUS do the same exercise on live television.

The New York Times: It’s America’s Birthday, What are we Celebrating? (gift link). In a more serious vein, here is a nice collection of essays from Times’ columnists on others about the state of affairs in America as it turns 250. Don’t expect a summer pick-me-up here.

The New Yorker: Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits? by Jill Lepore, May 18, 2026. A thought-provoking treatise on the sausage-making, no less than 17 Declaration drafts, far more astute, serious and informed than the one above, written by an expert. Launched with this banger of a lede, notably being written by historians who usually lack such flair: Red-headed, spindle-shanked Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, in 1776; he was so young and, as it turned out, so long-lived that he had another fifty years to think about what it meant. She can take it from there.

The Atlantic: I Went to the Great American State Fair and I May Never Sleep Again, by Alexandra Petri, July 1, 2026 (gift link). The week would not be complete without my gift glimpse into the mind of A. Petri, a spiritual satirical soul sister. Among the many observational gems here: Washington State has no official presence, but like many other states without an official presence, that has not stopped some graphic designer from conjuring up a nightmare on its behalf, this one in the form of an elk posing proudly with an Amazon package. (Note: Any WA state reader who has additional info about that factoid has a patriotic duty to pass it along to me for further examination.)

Cascadia Daily News: America 250, July 2, 2026. More than 10 pieces here, outside the paywall as a community service, from my talented former colleagues at the Bellingham newspaper, celebrating the nation’s anniversary, with a keen eye toward the establishment and protection of freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. A worthy read for fans of representative democracy, citizen engagement and justice anywhere on the planet.

Bottom drawer

Happy Independence Day to all. Thanks for supporting the BellingHammer and the American Free Press, and sharing the duty with friends. It still matters!

On my big list of Places One Might Experience a Lifetime Milestone, my optometrist’s office was nowhere to be found.

Until a couple weeks ago.

That fateful day, about a week after being fired as a local newspaper editor, I was picking up a new set of Highly Overpriced Progressive Glasses (patent pending) when the desk attendant asked what must’ve seemed an innocent question.

“What do you do for a living again?”

I stared straight ahead, like a daft wildebeest gazing across the river to the other side, not fully cognizant of the sea of emotional crocodiles lurking beneath the surface. Words finally came.

“Uh, nothing, I guess?”

The dude thought this was a funny quip. I found it all mildly terrifying.

I did some math.

For the approximately 47 years prior, I would’ve known the answer to that question, usually offered up with a dollop of self-assured pride: “Journalist.”

Suddenly, blank space.

I’m in my early 60s but not really ready to check the “retired” box. And skipping straight ahead to that memorable George Carlin routine — “Occupation: Fool!” — seemed a bit harsh. (Also, let’s face it, that’s become an increasingly crowded and competitive field in the U.S. over the past decade.)

I’ve since given all this quite a bit of thought. Part of the result is what’s happening in this space (promise: after today’s initial extended throat-clearing, it will typically be more concise).

SOME OF YOU early adopter HammerHeads — bless you one and all for your faith — probably have a sense of where the written trails will lead here. For better or worse. Others, not so much. So, for all of you, a one-time recap of how I got here seems in order.

Journalism has been in my blood since roughly age 16. Having realized by then that writing was one thing at which I did not suck, I took a practical approach: I didn’t see any available community college courses on becoming a great novelist, but journalism seemed an obtainable, mildly honorable, practical career path. It also seemed a great way to exercise some personal demons already cranking on bellows in whatever fires drove me as a youth.

Namely: Righteous indignation over malfeasance, incompetence and puffery, translating into occasional spite for perpetrators of same. And a drive to connect with fellow humans through the craft of writing, especially when said connection elicits emotion on both sides of the chain.

Journalism was a way to actually get paid, albeit not much, for writing.

My choice was burnished one day in a high school freshman English class when the teacher stopped me on my way out the door to lunch.

“I want you to forget about all the assignments in this class,” he said calmly. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“Awesome!” I said, rising to get out while the gettin’ was good. He stopped me again.

“The tradeoff is I want you to spend your hour in class just writing. About anything. About everything. Keep a journal and turn it in to me at the end of the trimester.”

This, to me, was a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket. Within a couple weeks, I was journaling (long before this was even a thing, mind you) not only through that class, but through all the rest of them.

I got an “A,” a rarity for a malcontent who later would team up with a few friends to pick the lock of a school supply room and use ditto-machine equipment to produce, at taxpayer expense, a true underground newspaper, The Malignant Tumor.

Things progressed (slid?) from there. After studying the actual craft at Western Washington University, where the journalism department then was run by serious journalists rather than career CV-padding academics, I headed out into the daily news world in 1985 to save the world from whatever might be attacking it at the moment.

In my mind, if this work involved the exposing of various emperors demonstrably lacking clothing, so much the better. It punched all my buttons, and I loved it, all the way from a community weekly newspaper to a small daily and then a big metro daily, The Seattle Times. There, surrounded by a lot of talent, the work remained so fulfilling that I reinvented myself a half-dozen times to stay in a game that lasted what now seems like a mind-boggling 32 years.

OVER THOSE DECADES I wrote daily news stories about education, government, the environment, sports, food, culture, investigations, mountain climbing, you name it. I spent years serving as that newspaper’s outdoors reporter, a plum assignment in the Pacific Northwest. I assigned myself the role of columnist during that gig. I have kept it ever since.

I parlayed that job into a gig covering the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, for over a dozen years. It took me around the world on someone else’s dime. For a columnist, everything that played out beneath the five Olympic rings was an extremely target-rich environment. I came to adore the gig for its exposure to elite athletes who literally devoted every hour of their lives to achieving one thing, on one day, often in a race or event lasting less than 30 seconds.

I loved the broad spectacle of the Games, which injected me, as a writer, into a traveling human circus. The event always mattered to me as that rare time people from across the globe came together in one place to do something other than try to kill one another.

I eventually came to loathe the corporate greed and corruption that drove the whole show; still do. I couldn’t do it with a straight face today, but I’ll always be glad I did.

Along the way, The Seattle Times’ then-executive editor, David Boardman, saw a voice in my work that he thought should be unleashed — a decision he might have later come to regret. He commissioned me to write a column in the Sunday newspaper called The Wrap. It was a quick-hitting summation of the week’s event, written with a lot of Jon Stewart-colored satire.

I leapt into it. Readers tended to either love it, hate it, or simply not get it, given the depths to which the time-honored tradition of journalistic satire had plunged in acceptance over the past half-century.

I didn’t care. Somewhat surreptitiously, I made many points in that column, under the cover of humor, about some sacred cows — not to mention any names, such as The Boeing Co., formerly of Seattle — that the paper’s staid editorial board didn’t seem to want to touch. Beat writers at the paper loved the column for this reason, often being gracious enough to let me try out a line or two on them to make sure it was landing correctly. It found an audience, some members of which are still here today.

THAT COLUMN ran for about nine years. When it was ended by the paper, I shifted gears again and took a job as a full-time writer at Pacific NW, one of America’s last surviving newsroom-produced Sunday magazines. It allowed me to choose my own stories, spend weeks reporting with talented photographers, then see my work come alive in full-color splendor created by top-notch editors and designers.

A dream gig. And before it lasted a full decade, I walked away from it. To start a brand new hyperlocal news organization in Bellingham, where I’d lived since 2001. During COVID-19. Between the first and second Trump administrations, and the resulting assaults on the First Amendment. With some decent financial backing, but no real business plan, and no scope of content except for a blank yellow legal pad staring me in the face.

In hindsight, yes, I do realize how insane this sounds.

Skipping over a lot of details here, some of which surely will be infilled later: With the help of some tremendously talented and devoted colleagues, mostly youngsters with little or no experience, that newspaper, Cascadia Daily News, in less than five years turned into a leading news source in its region, garnering national awards for excellence — and more important, a true bond with its community of readers.

I had a fleeting sense of that bond as time went along, but didn’t realize the passion behind it until last month, when I was summarily fired from my job. The outpouring of support for what I had done there — and what everyone in town hopes the newsroom can continue to do — was both surprising and heartwarming.

But the abrupt end to the job that I had loved to the point of preoccupation left me with that big, fat, what’s-next question. And to the moment we are gathered together in this space today, as they say in the wedding biz.

ONE OF MY self-assigned roles at CDN was as an opinionated voice of the newspaper — a role that might not exist moving forward, from the looks of things. This took the form of a weekly personal column and another, unsigned treatise called The Hammer. The name was an ode to its intended punch and the name of the city, Bellingham, from which it originated. By tradition, it was the last thing placed in the Friday print paper every Thursday evening, delivered with much fake pomp from myself to page designer Jaya Flanary, now a CDN managing editor.

The Hammer, which was retired by the paper upon my dismounting, carried on the legacy of The Wrap, which carried on the tradition of a long string of cheeky, unsigned columns in the American free press going back a couple centuries. This new venture carries the name forward in another fashion. The spirit has never changed.

The BellingHammer is, by design, a work in progress. Is it journalism? Sure. I’m still connected to decades’ worth of sources and know where many NW bodies are buried — or should be. Is it satire? One section of it, at least, every week. Is it wry observation? I suppose so. (Eyes-of-beholder department there.) Is it humor? God, let us hope.

To close the big floppy circle here, I intend for this space to be a new blank canvas, and playing field, for the same impulses that have long driven me. Expect some live reporting, a column-like lead in, a true Hammer section, some pointed media criticism, small-dose political analysis, and, especially, historical context for today’s national mayhem, something that has been a complementary passion, informing some of my best journalism, over my lifetime.

SO HERE I AM, repotting myself once more. It won’t be my only pursuit; a book project or two, one delayed by my Cascadia work, another born from it, might be in the works once I recover from five years of long days at a startup.

But for now, I’m content with a new space to do what I’ve always done. Which was summed up, in beautifully blunt words I might’ve chosen myself, by a local letter-to-the-editor writer, Suzanne Butler of nearby Mount Vernon, who protested my firing thusly:

I depended on him to be an energetic jack-ass about so many things I care about; a good jack-ass, the kind of jack-ass I want in my life. I cried reading his reaction to Yo-Yo Ma’s concert. He gets it, he got it, and I hate that past tense.

I hate it, too, sister. Especially because I lost my job standing up for my newsroom. But so it goes.

I’ve been blessed with opportunities, but pleased to have yet another one here without interference from bean counters who don’t get it.

I’m also pleased to use it as a chance to answer that optometrist’s-office question, next time it comes up, with full authority:

What’s in one’s blood continues to flow. For the rest of my days, just call me a writer.

Anvil

Small, swift blows for sanity struck here weekly

Rockin’ Down the Highway: For a community as generally hip as it is, Bellinghamsters exhibit a curious affinity for fixating on stuff that’s been around for a few decades. (This might be owing to the fact that we’re such a relatively young city that anything more than a few weeks old feels historic; Bellingham’s first colonialists didn’t even arrive here until the 1850s — we know some folks in Boston who have socks older than that.)

The Latest Manifestation: Locals were all abuzz recently when a big, hurking rock that rested along Interstate 5 south of town for a half century — painted with slogans literally thousands of times over the years, like a community billboard — got busted into pieces by the state Department of Transportation to make way for another Highly Dubious Stream Enhancement Project.

Part of a Pattern: The Great Rock Bust-up of 2026 caused what qualifies in the City of Subdued Excitement as extreme caterwauling in some quarters — approaching the level of angst generated when another unofficial local mascot, a large stuffed sloth placed by unknown miscreants in a tree in the same area, was removed by the same dunderheaded state agency, for no apparent reason.

Thus Spake the Great State of Washington: From a news release this week about The Rock: “Before it was removed, Bellingham Rock was located within the active I-5 construction area at Chuckanut Creek (milepost 247), where contractor crews working on behalf of WSDOT are replacing culverts that block native fish from passing.” (Hammer notes: No convincing evidence that native fish ever passed here; nor likelihood they ever will.) “This work is part of a statewide effort to correct fish passage barriers and comply with a federal court injunction requiring the state to open habitat for salmon and other species.” (Hammer notes: Ah, there you go. What’s $160 million in public funds up in smoke among friends?)

BREAKING (Sorry/Not Sorry) DEVELOPMENT: More than 1,000 pieces (average size, 3 inches), each alleged to be from that former 100-ton boulder, are about to be handed out, like government cheese, to the public for free! It will be a literal Chunk ’o Rock Drive-Thru at the Civic Stadium complex on July 11, with cars queuing up in a large parking lot for a first-come, first-served piece of roadside detritus infamy.

Just Asking: Might it be possible for folks distraught over getting shut out of this rock-dispensation bonanza to get some sort of rain check qualifying them for a branch, twig, discarded soda bottle or large maple leaf sucked up in the agency’s next roadside cleanup? Just trying to look out for everyone here, and keep the recycling wheels turning.

Roll With It, Baby: Amazingly, this project also managed to ring up some high-priced WSDOT legal counsel time. To obtain their piece of The Rock, collectors must digitally sign a please-don’t-sue-the-state waiver, foregoing any rights for damages that might be caused by unauthorized chucking of said stone, or more to the point, from possible ingestion of toxic substances emoting from the 17,000 metric shit-tons of spray paint amassed on the rock over a period of some 50 years. (The state says it stripped all the paint off, but admits rock fragments have not been tested for same.)

Worse Comes to Worst: You can always chuck your commemorative rock in rage at a stoplight at one of the Bellingham major-intersection traffic lights that only turn green on alternate Thursdays. You did not read this here.

Meanwhile, Couldn’t Help Notice: That U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Sweaty World Cup Scarf, was so busy not rushing to the non-vote on the big Congressional housing measure in the Lesser Washington this week that he had to shoot a social media update on the nonvote from — his moving car? Dude, tell your driver to pull over.

BellingHammmer Suspects: If the Ds don’t get a majority in the fall, leaving the 2nd District Congressman for Life once again as a bystander on committees such as Transportation and Infrastructure, he’ll have ample time to negotiate a deal with Jerry Seinfeld for a spinoff, “Comedians and Congressmen in Cars Getting Coffee and Lamenting Permanent Minority Rule.”

Freudian Slip Department: Alicia Mendez, one of my few remaining preferred TV news journalists, might have been guilty of same on Thursday morning when she announced the latest figures from the “Fed’s Primary Inflation Gouge,” notably at its highest since April 2023. Watchers of that national inflation gauge — a group clearly not including the acting President of the United States — probably would say it works either way.

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This Week’s Media Hall ’O Shame

What made America’s great sportswriters America’s great sportswriters? That select group, including one I once sat next to in the press box of the Rose Bowl (Jim Murray) and one who’s an old friend (Art Thiel), always remembered that sports was the toy box of the news world; it was a pleasant diversion from all the rest of the crap being flung your way on a daily basis. Their work slyly acknowledged this from time to time; they connected the playfield with the real world deftly and directly, only when appropriate.

Clearly never receiving that memo are many of the modern practitioners of what once was a great craft. That included, this week, Matt Calkins of The Seattle Times, who on Sunday, June 21, offered up this bit of embarrassing gushing and wanton overreach about the U.S. men’s team’s early performance in the World Cup:

“American patriotism feels like it’s at its 10-year peak — and it’s all thanks to the fever this team is creating on the pitch.”

Seriously?

Step away from the Statue of Liberty hats and get out to where the other 99.998% live, then get back to us, please.

Last Week’s Poll

Opinions were split for my query last week about a chat function for the BellingHammer. Slight edge for “maybe.”

In hindsight, it occurs to me that the question wasn’t explained extremely well. To clarify: Reader comments are always welcome on individual Substack posts; it’s a feature of the platform. I keep an eye on those and respond when I can.

What I referenced was a broader chat function, i.e., topic-specific live chats, that some Substackers use as a premium membership feature. I’m less inclined to go there. But I’ll keep an open mind. Thanks to all who responded.

Workbench

What’s on Bellinghammer’s messy countertops this week

The Seattle Times: “Q&A: New Mexican publisher on newspapers’ future, strength and more,” by Brier Dudley, June 21, 2026. The Times’ Free Press editor ably picks the brain of Patrick Dorsey, chair of the trade group America’s Newspapers, who says “Newspapers are still a damn good business” in spite of all the challenges. “We have to be aggressive, we have to be entrepreneurial, we have to be consistently looking to change, to market ourselves,” Dorsey says. (My own experienced take: Private ownership mixed with supplemental public funding can be a recipe for success in niche markets where demand for high-quality journalism is high — and where strong leadership on a publication’s news side is matched by innovation, industry smarts and a strong public presence on the business side. It’s a model Dorsey sees as continuing to have a strong advantage over fledgling nonprofit-only setups.)

The Seattle Times: “WA’s rich are leaving? Another tax on wealth smashes records,” by Danny Westneat, June 24, 2026. My former colleague at the Seatimes keeps getting right-wingers cranked up in the comments sections by using factual information to counter most of the nonsensical arguments about the detrimental effects of taxation in general, and high-earner income taxing specifically. Proving here that facts, while notably upsetting to some folks, still matter. And the record haul from the state’s capital gains excise tax frankly doesn’t jibe with the canard that such measures drives the rich folks off to another state.

Joe Ely, Silver City, 2007, Rack ’Em Records (CD). The longtime Austin-based crooner was a serious soundtrack-of-my-life person who once appeared onstage in Bellingham for a memorable show alongside kindred spirits John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett. The three of them spoke of being in town for only several hours before feeling the gravitational pull of … what else, The Horseshoe. All of which proved hilarious to a sellout Mount Baker Theatre audience. Great memory, and great folk rock across his career. Ely died in December in Taos and will be missed.

ROW S, MOUNT BAKER THEATRE — More than halfway into her 70s, alone in the spotlight, she looks so small. But lord, that voice against all odds still rings huge.

Bonnie Raitt, American icon, gift from the gods to the slide guitar and all the rest of us who regularly pencil her into our life’s soundtrack, is seated center stage, in a chair, waiting for her pitch-perfect band to scramble a bit for an impromptu encore they clearly weren’t set up for.

“It’s a Mose Allison song,” she said, to both them and us. Most of the Q-tipped audience in a packed house June 13 knew exactly what that meant. The band should have as well (“How many Mose Allison songs do we do?” Raitt quipped as they scrambled to shift instruments).

“This is why I like playing these venues instead of the big markets, like Seattle,” she added, filling time. “You can sort of do whatever you want.”

This, she did.

The place hushed as she slid into words, put to paper by Allison in 1968, that to many were familiar. But they immediately landed, given the state of national affairs Raitt had lamented several times on stage, with all-new, gut-punch relevance.

I can't believe the things I'm seeing
I wonder 'bout some things I've heard
Everybody's crying mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word

That smoky-blues voice rang through a community theater celebrating its centennial this year. The last-century complex is a civic treasure; one of those things savvy local HammerHeads opt not to mention to their pushy friends from Seattle planning to move on up. (You can’t really hide Baker, the mountain, when it's out. But this place? Just shutupaboutit, already.)

The building occasionally lands top talent with an open night between gigs in nearby Vancouver, British Columbia (“Not the 51st state,” Raitt quipped at one point this night) and on to points south, providing gift opportunities to see the Bonnie Raitts of the world from 20 rows back for 89 bucks. Many of those nights stand as stars-aligned highlights of my quarter century of residence on the shores of what we now call the Salish Sea.

It’s why we put up with the rest of it all (much more on this in coming weeks) to live here.

A bad enough situation
It's sure enough getting worse
Everybody's crying justice
Just as soon as there's business first

“This is a nice hall,” Raitt, who likely has seen a cool million of them, said while gazing around inside the 1,509-seat theater earlier in her set. “Protect what matters.”

In this case, at least, this city has. And should it somehow fail to continue respecting and maintaining this beating-heart jewel of a building, the ’Ham should just be shut down.

Bonnie Raitt likely didn’t know this, but just weeks before, the very spot where she sat center stage, bathed in warm light, was occupied by none other than Yo-Yo Ma, performing with the Bellingham Symphony Orchestra and similarly holding the town’s soul in uniquely practiced fingers.

It’s the sort of magic that sometimes happens when you have a nice hall — a refuge, more than ever, when the entire world outside it seems routinely upside down.

You know the people running 'round in circles
Don't know what they're headed for
Everybody's crying peace on earth
Just as soon as we win this war

Straight ahead
Gotta knock 'em dead
So pack your kit
Choose your hypocrite

She last played in town, she said, in … brace yourself: 1975. Hearing this, it was impossible not to spin up a mental lowlight reel of everything that has changed since. How far we climbed and how much farther slid. Wars following wars. Duplicity elevated to the expected. People left behind. The ascendance of a literal idiocracy.

You don't have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd
Everybody's crying mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word
Nobody knows the meaning of the word

The words touched and hurt at the same time, which of course is why we all went nuts over it. The timeworn song was a testament to the power of art; like its ageless singer, it took a new form, reflecting the harsh light of the present.

For a fleeting moment, at least, you felt great comfort in knowing that sense of conscious reflection still exists.

So happy to be there for that. And so very grateful to be here for this. Trying to protect what matters.

Speaking of grateful

This newsletter launches with a rocket boost of support from an unexpected number of readers, likely mostly folks who have read my newspaper work over the years — apparently based on faith in what’s to come. (Pressure? What pressure?) Given the last month, during which I was shoved out of a journalism job that had become both a passion project and joyful part of my life, that faith touched me deeply. It won’t be forgotten. I know get to work directly for you.

Scanning the subs, I see a savvy, growing and like-minded group of some hundreds (!) of folks already. Mostly Northwesterners, but a healthy scattering of friends, acquaintances and peers from across the U.S. Mostly center/left focused, engaged, alarmed and resolute to, based on other Substacks they follow. Welcome, all. There’s a stool for all freethinkers here.

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Quick getting-fired redux

After May 26, 2026, when I was shown the door from my last working gig, as exec editor of a hyperlocal news startup, I was contacted by a surprising number of folks in the industry who all said the same thing about working for the oft-mercurial types of folks who tend to own news organizations:

Dude. It’s a badge of honor. How in the world did you last five years?

I laughed at that, but it was appreciated, and to be honest I have embraced the thought. (Along with some readers who bombarded the newspaper with letters to the editor, I also was struck by the irony that I got fired the same week that CBS canned Scott Pelley. History shall long remember one of these firings.)

I was proud of what I left behind. The newspaper was created from scratch by myself and what eventually became a remarkable team of mostly young journos, a team still working the job daily. They are fierce, sharp and committed, and I hope they succeed in carrying forward what we built together. That local newsroom changed its community; its protection matters.

In the meantime, what remains on my plate are many loose ends — and the occasional barbecue. At one of these in the backyard on Saturday, I was reminiscing with one of those young news teammates about the previous, and somehow only other, time I was fired from a job.

I was 12 or 13. Unlike my recent unceremonious termination, the first was definitely “for cause.” The cause was a food fight, of sorts — chucking raspberries at other kids across rows at a commercial farm in Monroe, WA, where my sister and I and a cousin were employed as pickers.

Looking back, it is a testament to our … cough, maturity that my cousin Jerry and I lasted several days, at least, at this mind-numbing task before we lost our minds and started doing what young boys equipped with splatter-prone projectiles will do.

Caught literally red-handed, both of us were fired on the spot by the cigar-chomping boss man, Mr. Dean. We had to wait until the end of the shift, as I recall, to get a ride home and explain to family how we had been callously separated from what clearly qualified as a hostile work environment, well before that was even a thing.

Several days later, the owner arrived back in our neighborhood to pick up his crew and sheepishly admitted he was, well, a few pickers short.

We were rehired on the spot. This was my first lesson in labor strife, and the power that comes, or at least used to, with showing up to provide the means of production.

By the end of the summer I had earned $66. It was enough to buy a 10-speed bike. I’ve been working daily jobs ever since — until three weeks ago.

Once loose ends are cinched, adjustments no doubt will loom. But in the meantime …

The BellingHammer swings anew

Hammer Wants Some of Whatever the Bellingham School Board is Smoking: Seriously. Do these people not read the papers? For months, mostly in response to some smart enterprise reporting over at my former employer, Bellinghamsters have been up in arms about what feels like a cadre of unseemly high salaries of public employees in the City of Subdued Excitement/Inadequate Wages.

One Top Example Being: Bellingham Public Schools Superintendent Greg Baker, whose compensation last year, at nearly $400,000, which in a town with a population less than 100,000 was higher than his counterpart in … San Francisco.

Not Only That: BellingHammer’s previous alter ego in that newsroom (these degrees of imaginary separation are getting increasingly complicated!) got so cranked up last year about what seemed like soft, bloated leadership at Bellingham Public Schools that he issued a (later-award-winning) column appeal for the public to step up and demand a review of Baker’s long-running tenure.

The Questions Then Asked About Various District Controversies Were: Is all this really OK with the publicly elected members of the BPS school board? Is there some standout feature of the “Dr. Baker” administration, in terms of academic success and overall school system well-being, that outweighs the incalculable damage done to individual students and their families that have been thoroughly documented in the newspaper? Does someone with a gavel and nameplate have the courage to do what they were elected to do and ask it?

Answer To the Latter This Week: Nope!

After All That, the Public Got This: That school board’s tidy three-year extension for the BPS boss this week, buried 6 feet under, as usual, among “Personnel Recommendations” in a consent agenda at a meeting — was smartly sniffed out, as usual, by intrepid Cascadia Daily News reporter Charlotte Alden. Note the somewhat-reduced base pay, but the addition of a couple more weeks’ vacation, for Dr. Greg, nonMD.

(Translated) Messaging on This: It’s not just that school board members are unwilling to acknowledge the managerial elephant in the room in a district where leadership is under scrutiny for misunderestimating (apologies to George W. Bush) student enrollment, leading to possible closures of two elementary schools right after gaining additional tax money to build even more. By sliding this renewal under the door, they’re basically telling the public: How we spend our $400K a year on top management is really none of your goddamn business.

Hammer’s Take: It’s a stunning disconnect between board members and the general public. Bordering on extreme institutional arrogance. Feel free to look up your local rep and weigh in.

Forced-Semi-Retirement Note 1: Having removed from Google Maps data various work-related locales, including the newsroom in Bellingham’s once-and-future Tavern district, the only two “destinations” that show up on BellingHammer’s car navigation screen post-termination are “Home” and “Old World Deli.” Stating the obvious here: Guy could get used to that.

Your Tax Dollars at Work Dept.: As the entire transpo system between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. was thrown into fits this week thanks to the arrival of the FIFA World Cup, the Washington State Department of Transportation (motto: Cute, But Largely Ineffective) was providing state residents with real-time traffic info such as the below Bluesky post. So helpful — and so decidedly non-hilarious.

Who Wants to Tell Them: That the cutesy public-service agency social media feed thing ended in about 2019? Try to keep up, people. Now please get off the Hammer’s lawn.

Blatant SEO Pandering Attempt: BellingHammer’s IT consultant, Ludditia, suggests at least one additional mention of the World Cup here. OK. Here’s the best four-word description I have ever heard uttered about the event: Another gripping nil-nil tie!

To Which the Futbol Crowd Will Retort: You just don’t appreciate the intricacies of The Beautiful Game.

And to Which the BellingHammer Would Fire Back: Life is too short to argue that point. But either way, the degree of on-pitch overwrought flopping and clutching of knees, coupled with the off-pitch rank corruption routinely exhibited by the global pirates organizing the event, tends to more than cancel that out. Sorry/not sorry.

On the Other Hand: It’s not every day your region gets visited by something actually called the Soccer Celebration Barge. Put that in your civic scrapbook, Seattle!

This Week’s Blatantly Unscientific Poll

I’ve long been a public cynic about chat functions and comments on journalism sites. In fact, as a local newspaper editor, I made some waves back in fall 2025 by banning public comments on CDN stories posted on the newsroom’s Facebook page. The reasoning: Those comment spaces have become the virtual cesspool of humanity masquerading as public sentiment.

The reaction to that was broad and swift: The few squeals of protest from professional misinformation peddlers and basement-dwelling digital flamethrowers were drowned out by a plethora of thanks from the more-silent majority, happy to be rid of the blather. One of the best calls I ever made there.

This venue, of course, is a somewhat-private room — with, one can hope, fully different dynamics. So I’ll put out the question here: Should the BellingHammer have an ongoing chat function? Is it mostly a read for you, or an engagement window? I’m flexible. Please vote accordingly.

Workbench

What’s strewn about on Judd’s messy mental countertop this week

• “Takin’ My Time,” Bonnie Raitt, 1973, Warner Bros., vinyl (natch). Given the above, Bonnie Raitt’s third and probably greatest studio album is a no-brainer this week. What a pleasantly rediscovered blast from the past. Everything Raitt brings to the table is here: blues, jazz, calypso, New Orleans R&B — reggae! And yeah, if you’re going to read about “Everybody’s Cryin,” you really need to hear it. (Goes down well with a bourbon of approx 94 proof, with or without the requisite Fresca.)

• “The Democrats Need a Candidate Shakeup,” by Matthew Yglesias, The New York Times, (gift link), June 17, 2026. Two words: Ya think?

• “Are You There, God? It’s Me, J. D. Vance, and I Have Some Notes,” by Alexandra Petri, The Atlantic (gift link) June 17, 2026. Typically spot-on satire, a nearly lost art, by one of my favorite practitioners. Petri in this piece uses her savage gift of intentional overstatement, contempt and mockery to flay the language and logic in Vance’s new memoir, Communion, which it is safe to say is not on the bedside nightstand of the Pope.

• “Stephen Colbert’s unauthorized use of Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Peanuts’ music leads to donation,” by Jon Blistein (Rolling Stone, June 16, 2026). A short recap of the recently axed late night comedian’s delightful middle-finger gesture to CBS on his way out the door: Willful violation of a music copyright rule that left his former employers’ holding the bag for what turned out to be a donation to World Central Kitchen. Well played.

At the bottom

Thanks again for supporting (and sharing with friends) The BellingHammer, and standing up for the First Amendment. Strength in numbers matters.

Watch for weekly newsletter-style posts here soon.

The ’Hammer’s thoughts and opinions draw from a well of four decades’ experience as a daily journalist and columnist at The Seattle Times and, most recently, Cascadia Daily News, a pro-democracy, award-winning daily news startup created from scratch in an actual newsroom in Bellingham, WA. I like to think the legacy of probing, inciteful journalism I helped establish and nurture as CDN’s founding editor lives on there.

When I was unceremoniously fired by CDN’s owner in late May 2026, countless readers expressed dismay in letters to the editor and other means, saying they would miss the “voice” of their popular newspaper. To everyone who spoke up, thanks from the bottom of my heart.

But rest assured, that voice will remain in full throat in this space — sans paywall. I’ll be posting a weekly newsletter on Fridays, updates when the mood strikes. All free thinkers welcome. Tell your friends, and if you lack same, go land a few and tell them. Win-win!

BellingHammer posts will be free, but if you want to support my work and help keep me in classic vinyl and good spirits, you know the drill — feel free to donate. I’ll add a chat function for subscribers if it feels appropriate.

Thanks and stay tuned.