We wish you a restful and peaceful long weekend with family and friends. To start the holiday off right, we are again offering a blog from contributor Pam Lewison, with a timely reminder of where our feast comes from, and who does the work making sure there is plenty.

We’ll be back on Monday, November 27. We wish your credit card(s) the best of luck surviving Black Friday, if that’s your thing…

Our Daily Bread: A Farmer’s Holiday Perspective – Shift Washington

Shift has been pleased to cover the initiative effort led by Brian Heywood over the past year, as he has spent millions of his own money to try and provide the voters of the state the chance to change the state for the better. His success means now the mainstream media, in this case the Seattle Times, has to deal with him as well, as his Let’s Go Washington committee “submitted more than 400,000 signatures for Initiative 2117” to repeal Governor Jay Inslee’s carbon tax.

Of course, the Times immediately went to special interest groups which profit from the carbon tax to attack the voters’ effort to roll back a law which has added over 50 cents a gallon to Washington state gas since the Democrats’ so-called “premier and effective climate policy” went into effect at the start of the year. Read on to see if you agree that it’s “not the job of the government to put this burden on people’s backs” here… Shift, Seattle Times.

The people of Seattle can hardly be blamed for wishing that the soon-to-be-unemployed folks populating the city council (reminder, the majority of them did not make it through this year’s elections on the winning side) could move on without doing any more damage before their terms are up. Instead, the Seattle Times happily allows the council’s lead budgeteer to gaslight the public on the way out, claiming “it feels like we’re in a really solid place, at least for the next 12 months” as the city finalized its next budget.

For liberals, that “really solid place” is leaving their successors a massive $200-million-plus deficit. Budget chair Teresa Mosqueda, who is jumping ship for the King County Council, was happy to note that “the hard work is going to be for the council in the future to come up with those revenues” to fill the hole created by Mosqueda and company.

You can read on to see that the main hope is that the incoming council members have no principals, and take the advice of Council member Mosqueda, as her “hope is that once people get into office, the sort of positioning that people have had to take or maybe the rhetoric that they’ve heard throughout the race will subside and the reality and the gravity of the situation will take over” and they will just raise taxes here… Seattle Times.

The accidental Washington Secretary of State that is Steve Hobbs is rapidly stepping up to do something, as Shift earlier reported, that he should have considered before the election took place. That appears the main takeaway from a Spokesman-Review story that the “Secretary of State’s office has alerted the U.S. Postal Service after elections officials in two Washington counties reportedly found uncounted ballots in out-of-service mailboxes.”

It only took the public reminding Mr. Hobbs of his job, “after the Secretary of State’s office found out about the uncounted ballots by voters who alerted the state agency when their ballots did not show up in the statewide ballot tracking system.” Read on to see the irony of Secretary Hobbs using the mail to complain about ballots being delayed, while the USPS uses the internet as a “postal service spokesperson confirmed receipt of Hobbs’ letter in an email” here… Shift, Spokesman-Review.

Leave it zoo officials to rain on our parade, even as a private citizen is raising the prospect that giant pandas could come to Washington state.  That’s the message from Axios-Seattle, writing that “while China has suggested it may soon send more giant pandas to the U.S., they’re unlikely to come to a zoo in the Seattle area.”

Basically, the animal bureaucrats at the “Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma told Axios they have no plans to host any of the rare animals, citing the cost and space they require.” On the other hand, “Ron Chow, a businessman who co-chairs a group called the Washington State Panda Foundation” is more optimistic and “thinks private fundraising could potentially help the zoos afford the animals. See who you agree with here… Axios-Seattle.

The environmental writers working in Seattle can hardly be expected to keep their friends if they write stories that don’t blame hydro-electric dams for all the problems which salmon face these days. That’s why we look to the Wenatchee World to let us know that results from “a month-long Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) Confirmation Survival Study at Rocky Reach Dam were better than expected this year — with a 93.78% survival rate for juvenile Chinook salmon.”

You can read more about survival rates which hadn’t been seen in 20 years here… Wenatchee World.

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