The effort by Let’s Go Washington to give voters a voice on controversial laws recently advanced by Democrats took the next step in dominating this year’s legislative agenda, thanks to the announcement reported on by KING 5 yesterday that “Secretary of State Steve Hobbs notified the Legislature that signatures for Initiative 2113 were certified. Initiative 2113 would amend the state’s controversial police pursuit law by ‘restoring the authority of a police officer to engage in a pursuit when there is reasonable suspicion a person has violated the law’.”

The usual suspects are supporting Democrat efforts to keep opposing allowing police officers to do their job catching criminals, as the “American Civil Liberties Union of Washington (ACLU) campaigned against the initiative, asking people to decline to sign I-2113.” You can read how fast this effort is moving with “five other high-profile initiatives are awaiting signature certification. Those include Initiative 2117, which would repeal the state’s Climate Commitment Act that critics blame for gas prices increases (note: which was certified today), as well as Initiative 2124, allowing anyone to opt out of WA Cares, the state’s long-term care tax.”… KING 5.

In place of a Newsmaker interview this week, we bring you Republican State Senator Nikki Torres’ response to the gaslighting remarks delivered by Governor Jay Inslee in (thankfully) his last State of the State Address. Sen. Torres perspective deserves more attention than the ink wasted on the governor’s many questionable statements. While Inslee’s address was a lesson in creative storytelling, Senator Torres brought a refreshing dose of reality to the table. Take a moment to watch Sen. Torres’ no-nonsense response here.

The Seattle Times editorial board could be suffering from a case of whiplash, now standing up for things that they used to run away from. One such animal, as Shift noted, was the paper’s belated desire to maybe punish people for having a political pep rally on I-5. The latest Times stand is pointing out the broken promise that farmers would be exempt from the Democrats’ carbon tax and that the “exemption for farmers was clearly too complicated for the state’s Department of Ecology to implement when the law went into effect in January 2023. So farmers paid — and they shouldn’t have.”

The Times goes even further by demanding that if “Democrats who control the Legislature want to save cap-and-trade, they must be completely honest about the Climate Commitment Act.” You can read on to see how unlikely honesty is at this point from Inslee and company… Shift, Seattle Times.

Whenever a liberal Democrat tells you that some over-reaching bill they want to jam through “is not” what it appears to be, you can bet they know how little support exists for their policy. Such is the case, pointed out by MyNorthwest.com,  with the desperate desire from Seattle socialists like long-gone Kshama Sawant to new State Representative Emily Alvarado to impose rent control on people who own property, with Rep. Alvarado pointing out that “rent increases are capped at 5% every 12 months” under her proposal that “is not rent control.”

That’s how dishonest the Left is about housing, telling voters that the government “capping” what a private landlord can charge for renting their own property “is not rent control”, as if the property belonged to the state – like in one of their favorite socialist countries! Read on to see how one researcher points out this rent control bill “would reduce new housing construction by 5% …reduce the total value of housing by $1.4 to $1.7 billion, and reduce total property tax revenue in the state by about $20 million” here… MyNorthwest.com.

The unelected Sound Transit board continues to thumb its collective nose at taxpayers, tossing a half million dollars at a new “interim CEO” while paying about the same amount this year so the current CEO would go away. That’s from the news in the Seattle Times that “the Sound Transit board Thursday took the lowest-drama path possible by hiring Goran Sparrman, a seasoned manager who previously led the Bellevue and Seattle transportation departments and spent the last five years as a vice president here for the big HNTB engineering firm.”

Rest assured that this selection will work much better than the last few disasters (covered extensively in Shift), because according to Sound Transit uber leader (and King County Executive) Dow Constantine, the new person reporting to him “is someone who has worked in multiple governments around the region and he is known and trusted by political leadership around the region.” Read on to see how few deck chairs will be moving around on this sinking boat of an agency here… Seattle Times, Shift.

No one can read about a parent’s loss of a child to a drug overdose and not be moved to tears. Unfortunately, when that loss is turned into political advocacy – using high school students to advance the agenda – sometimes uncomfortable questions have to be asked.

In this case highlighted by the Spokesman-Review, the question that comes to Shift is do we really want a society, like one featuring Democrat policies to legalize all drugs (and open all borders), where teenagers view that making Narcan (an anti-overdose drug) mandatory at all state high schools is great because “(I)t’s practically health care” and “I don’t think there are any downsides to it?” Read on to ponder that sad question here… Spokesman-Review.

Democrats are demonstrating another way they like build campaign support for the upcoming election, using federal dollars (as a substitute for state dollars) to build electric vehicle charging stations which do not make fiscal sense for private industry (or the state) to build. That’s the takeaway from The Columbian’s story that “$41 million in federal grants will bring over 180 electric vehicle chargers to communities across Western Washington”, meaning the chargers for rich people driving electric vehicles are costing less-well-off taxpayers barely more $200,000 apiece.

The story notes the Democrats are spreading the taxpayer money (borrowed from the Chinese and added to the national debt) in a very scientific way, from the “ ports of Seattle and Tacoma;” to the “city of Mount Vernon; city of Port Angeles,” and “Indigenous communities across Western Washington.” Read on to see how this waste is “part of $623 million in EV charger grants announced nationwide by the Biden administration.”… The Columbian.

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