Mike Baker

I gotta say, it fills me with a great sadness to see that any American — let alone an American posing as a Pentagon correspondent — would view this as their "purpose."

Family Affair: Commerce Secretary’s Sons Cash In on A.I. Frenzy

NEW: As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick drives billions of dollars in foreign payments to help build AI data centers in the US, his sons help run a company earning tens of millions in fees helping finance AI data centers. A NYT investigation. (Free link)

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/u...

The Current No. 1 Christian Artist Has No Soul - Christianity Today AI-generated musician Solomon Ray has stirred a debate among listeners, drawing pushback from popular human singer Forrest Frank.

AI-generated musician Solomon Ray is topping Christian music charts.

www.christianitytoday.com/2025/11/solo...

Brawl of the Wild

• #2 Montana v #3 Montana State
• Both with 7-0 conference records
• A storied rivalry dating to the 1800s
• One of the best venues in all of football
• One of the greatest trophies in all of sports

Such a shame that GameDay is not in Missoula this week

Trump calls a reporter “insubordinate” and “a terrible person” after she asks a question about Epstein. I’m not going to say what the question was because I think it’s worth turning up the volume to hear for yourself.

Pros: Impactful work. Ambitious projects. Brilliant collaborators on data/interactives/photo/video. Investigations on pretty much any subject you can conceive.

Cons: I will call you like 5 times a day.

🚨Job alert🚨

Come be my editor and lead NYT’s national investigative coverage.

Here are the new Jeffrey Epstein emails about Trump

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

For what it’s worth, there was a similar reversal for Harrell in 2021. But it was slight — 2.5 points — and then reversed again.

So, Wilson seems like she is in a great position to win. Harrell needs a big shift in fortunes. But is that totally out of the question?

The other challenge for Harrell: The very last votes seem to trend further left. I suspect that’s mostly due to the demographics of people who need to resolve signature challenges.

We can see right now that many of the challenged ballots are from young voters.

The current election has about 8,000 ballots remaining.

In 2017, the reversal meant Durkan went from losing ballot drops by ~3.5 percentage points to gaining by ~2.5 — a swing of 6.

Harrell needs a larger reversal than that. He’s losing batches by 11.4 percentage points now.

Here is the main reason I’d be a bit wary of calling the Seattle mayor’s race just yet.

In the 2017 race (Durkan v Moon), Durkan’s numbers got steadily worse, except for a sudden and brief reversal when there were about 7,000 votes left to count.

Many of the ballots that have been held up due to signature issues are from young voters. So getting those resolved could give her a further boost.

Based on the ballot-processing data, there appears to be 8,120 votes ballots left to count for the city.

But of those, there are signature challenges on 1,703 of them. This race could be decided on which voters get their signature problems resolved.

Here is the chart of the changing vote tallies so far. As expected from last week, Wilson needed to gain about 55% of the late votes to surpass Harrell. She got 55.6% of those tallied today.

Incredible. Progressive challenger Katie Wilson now has a 91-vote lead in Seattle’s race for mayor. She had been steadily gaining on incumbent Bruce Harrell.

There are about 8,000 ballots left to count.

Good question. They only remove the ballot from the envelope after the signature has completed verification.

Late update on Seattle mayor's race: The county says they have 277,881 on-time ballots for the city.

That means 44,985 left to count. But:
• Some will have signature issues
• ~1.5% of voters are not making a choice in the race

So I would expect 270-275k total votes for mayor

For all the people desperate for a final answer on this race, I'm sorry to report that the county doesn't plan any more tabulation updates until Monday afternoon.

Given how close this election is getting, it could come down to how many people resolve signature challenges on their ballots. The county says there are 2,053 signature challenges for Seattle ballots.

UPDATE: The elections department says they counted more than expected today, so there are now only an estimated 45,000 votes left to count for the mayor's race.

As a result, Wilson needs to maintain that ~55% level to catch up.

Updated chart:

‼️👀‼️

With today’s ballots, Seattle’s race for mayor has narrowed even further (50.7% to 48.9%).

Progressive challenger Katie Wilson got 55% of today’s votes. There are roughly 55,000 ballots left to count. She needs ~54% of the remainder to surpass incumbent Bruce Harrell.

Last year, Meta's internal documents projected that it would get $16 billion in annual revenue from running ads for scams and banned goods.

via Reuters

www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Here is a look at how the 2021 count unfolded.

Harrell's daily proportions for the first five drops went 65%, 62%, 54%, 49%, then 50%. This time he has gone from 53%, then 57%, now 48%.

I kept it so you can see how many votes have been counted and roughly how many more there are to count!

‼️ Seattle’s race for mayor is going to be *very* close ‼️

Bruce Harrell has a 5.7-point advantage. But with roughly 100,000 votes left to count, the numbers are shifting toward progressive challenger Katie Wilson. She took 51.6% of the votes tallied today.

The trendlines:

I also checked the daily counts on the 2017 race: Jenny Durkan also started losing ground on day 2, so Harrell's numbers today are noteworthy compared to the past two elections.

Later ballots in Seattle generally swing left, shifting the margins of some races by more than double digits.

I just went back to look at the 2021 race. Harrell started losing ground on day 2. This time, he gained, so it's possible his numbers could be more resilient this time.

Oh wow, a bit of a surprise in the new ballots that just posted from the Seattle mayor's race.

Bruce Harrell has actually expanded his lead. He got nearly 57% of the ballots counted today, expanding his lead to 8 points.

But lots of votes remaining to count.