We here at Shift are not sure it’s possible to pander more than this appearance, reported by the Washington State Standard, by Attorney General Bob Ferguson at the Washington State Labor Council, but it’s a long campaign. But we all know now that AG Ferguson, in addition to still washing some illegal dark money into his campaign while exploring a bid for governor next year, will think first and foremost about state union employees, saying, “Each and every day, I will center your faces and your voices in every decision I make.”

Leave it to the numbers guy at the Washington Observer to explain why the AG would promise to think first of the first set of major donors he met in the first major speech of his “exploratory” campaign – labor unions will spend millions to elect their favorite Democrat. As the WA Observer notes,  “That’s why labor – especially public sector labor  – is consistently the biggest player, money-wise – in Washington politics. Bigger than Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, and Big Oil, combined. The state, both directly and indirectly via spending on education, highways, and other public projects, is a giant employer of union labor.” So, basically, Ferguson was just rubbing shoulders with his very wealthy benefactors to remind them he would give them more taxpayer money if elected.

So much for serving all of Washington, eh, Mr. Ferguson? You can also read more about how Ferguson’s famous thin-skin was on display when he was asked a simple question about his money-laundering scheme here… Washington State Standard, Washington Observer.

The wheels continue to turn on one of the extreme environmental Left’s favorite causes – ending the tyranny of gas stoves in your kitchen. That’s why it’s worth paying attention to the news from the Seattle Times that a “federal judge Tuesday denied a request from the natural gas industry to vacate new Washington building code requirements that call for the installation of heat pumps in new residential and commercial buildings” because that continues Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s drive to ban gas stoves.

The judge who made the initial ruling tipped his biases in the case, writing, “he did not want to delay an update to statewide building codes and cause a ‘chilling effect’ on other agencies trying to address climate change,” pushing the next legal stop to October. You can read more about what the loony Left has in store for your future kitchen appliances here… Seattle Times.

Any driver knows that Seattle’s elected officials don’t care much for cars – from the condition of the streets to the elimination of traffic lanes, it is obvious. Now MyNorthwest highlights the latest leader in the city’s war on cars, with the news it “will elevate the city engineer to a newly-created position: Chief Transportation Safety Officer.” And that means if “a road needs to be changed, if an intersection needs improvements, safety will be the top goal. The movement of vehicles and freight will come second.”

But for engineer Venu Nemani, he knows safety means the priority will be on moving the fewest amount of people on the city’s roads as possible while wasting as much money as possible on modes of transportation that don’t get people to where they want to go. As he said, “(W)e have implemented a lot of visions or projects that uplifted people walking, biking, and rolling, along with people taking transit. We have done a lot of work since 2015, but we have a lot more work to do.” You can read more about how you’ll be stuck in traffic in the city even more here… MyNorthwest.

Shift wanted to focus on the merits of a story on the Northwest’s high-speed train concept, which has been pushed for decades and consistently goes nowhere because the number of people traveling between Vancouver, BC, and Portland, Oregon, does not come close to justifying spending billions of dollars on trains used nowhere else in the United States. Of course, sanity didn’t stop the Democrats in the Washington State legislature this year from “allocating $150 million to a high-speed connection between Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia,” as “reported” by the South Seattle Emerald.

This latest “allocation” of your tax dollars will likely largely be spent on studies and consultants, with not a single foot of new rail track laid anywhere. But that was not considered by the writer of this story, which, if you read the fine print at the end of the story, you might find out why, since the “article is funded in part by an Environmental Justice Fund (EJ Fund) grant through the City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability & Environment (OSE).” You can read on and decide for yourself if a reporter getting this environmental grant to write this transportation story would have any biases… South Seattle Emerald.

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