Slog AM: Senator Lindsay Graham Is Dead, So Is Dr. Grant, but Mitch McConnell Might Not Be

Good Morning! The sun is shining, NDAs are expiring. It’s summer in Seattle. We’ve got a week’s worth of central-casting summer weather coming up (high 70s, low 80s, barely a cloud in the sky), so go do summer things while we’re still free from the grip of smoke season. 

But first, the news. 

Grinder Loses Its Favorite Soldier: Senator Lindsey Graham died on Saturday at 71. The medical examiner in DC said he likely died from an aortic dissection, which is sudden, often fatal tear to the body’s main artery that one doctor described to the New York Times as feeling like “a knife to the heart.” Graham was a vicious war monger, and an obsessive opponent of LGBTQ rights: He fought the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” opposed marriage equality, and supported state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors. And with his death comes the death of any NDAs that might be floating around Washington DC and South Carolina. Trans influencer and actor, Jesse James Rose, got the party started: “Most of you know him as the homophobic Senator from South Carolina but to me he will always be the man who paid a twinky pre-transition college student a fat stack of cash to do unspeakable things to him in a hotel room while he wore red lingerie,” she alleged on Instagram. 

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell might still be alive? On Sunday, the Senator’s office released a statement written in first person, insisting that he hasn’t had a heart attack, just a fall that left him unconscious for a bit, and that after a battery of tests, his doctors were comfortable with moving him into rehab. In a mashup of Weekend at Bernie’s and a hostage situation that only 2026 could provide, his office also included a photo of McConnell with his wife, Elaine Chao, and a copy of the Sunday paper. 

The War Is Back On: No one in the Iranian or the US governments is pretending to be working toward a ceasefire anymore. Iran attacked a Cypriot-flagged container ship on Saturday and it triggered a weekend full of violence. US Central Command said that it had carried out 140 strikes on Saturday night alone. Iran announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz, again, freezing about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, again. 

Republicans Want More American Babies: And they’re turning Title X, a program that’s supposed to improve access to low- and no-cost birth control, into a pronatalist nightmare. First, Trump struck the entire thing from his proposed budget. And then when the funding opportunities did open up, they were not what clinics expected. According to the Intercept: “Grants funded through the program will help ‘build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis’ and other conditions that affect infertility, the notice said. Contraceptives are hardly mentioned, except in a section on ‘overmedicalization,’ which appears to commend the fact that ‘reports have shown a decrease in females’ current use of any contraception.’” Advocates are suing, naturally, because you can’t rewrite a law through a grant funding notice. 

Fucking Finally: On Friday, a judge ruled that Washington can do health inspections at the ICE detention center in Tacoma. GEO Group, which operates the facility, has been blocking inspections since 2023 when Washington passed a law setting health and safety standards for private detention centers. The ruling will go into effect in 14 days from Friday, giving the company a chance to appeal. 

Santa Got Run Over by Bison: The animal wandered into a small campground in Yellowstone National Park, and a Washington man who “plays Santa Claus at events when needed” stopped to take a photo of him rolling in the dirt, not realizing that it was mating season and he was juiced testosterone. The bison stood up and charged Santa, hooking him and throwing him eight feet in the air. He broke a few bones, but survived. 

Missing Link Stymied Again: A judge ruled last week that the Burke Gilman missing link couldn’t skip a long, expensive environmental review. We’ll be biking on poorly-marked sidewalks for the foreseeable future.  

Labor Win: The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday declared that the state’s exemption to the minimum wage for live-in healthcare workers is unconstitutional. For some background, read Stranger contributor Conor Kelley’s breakdown of the case. 

The ’90s Favorite Scientist Passes Away: Sam Neill, known to so many as Jurassic Park’s Dr. Alan Grant, died in Sydney, Australia at 78. 

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