Yup whatever

[Dustin Nickerson @DustinNickerson]

Go Mariners 🖤

[Let's Go Washington @letsgowa]

New profile pic to tell everyone to vote YES on all three initiatives, who dis?

[Travis Couture @TravisSCouture]

Some of the crazy policies Democrats have in store for next January in Olympia:

- a statewide payroll tax on jobs, modeled after Seattle’s disastrous jump start head tax

- a new tax on unrealized capital gains, which is money you’ve invested for things like retirement but have not collected

- tripling property taxes and increasing it annually by inflation and population

- reduce the threshold of the new state income tax below $1M to apply to the middle class if not defeated in November

- a new “margins tax” scheme (analysis tbd)

- more reckless spending and more deficits where democrats cut from the vulnerable in programs that work, to give even more to their special interests in programs that do nothing but make everything worse.

- effectively eliminating juvenile detention for juvenile gang offenders like the Bite of Seattle shooter

- using state government to sell and distribute hard drugs like fentanyl

- eliminating penalties for sex offenders who pray on children

- close down prisons and early release violent criminals into communities

- reduce law enforcement, eliminate bail, and destroy our criminal justice system by making it impossible to obtain a public defense, effectively releasing criminals before they ever see a court room

- redistricting Republican lawmakers out of existence to create a permanent and generational democratic super majority (the most dangerous)

You might have read this list and had a gut reaction that this is rhetorical politics. But every one of the things I just listed are actual legislation that democrats have introduced in Olympia recently or policy recommendations passed to them by their allies. They’ve already promised these. All are just a few things Republicans were able to defeat along with the few moderate Democrats left in Olympia.

If Democrats in Olympia are emboldened by results in November, and the moderate Democrats replaced by socialist Democrats, this is just a taste of what we are in for.

I don’t know about you, but that list is absolutely a devastating failure that will take reasonable people a generation to come back from.

60% of WA voters who did not vote in the last election were Republicans and Independents. That means we have an opportunity to save ourselves before it’s too late, push back together against socialism and communism, and demand reason and common sense once again.

If the list I provided isn’t motivation to vote, nothing is.

I’ve heard “what do republicans in WA stand for?”
- free markets and capitalism, not cronyism or socialism
- lower taxes and more of your money left in your own pocket, we introduced billions in tax relief from property taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, and more.
- combatting our drug crisis with accountability and treatment, not free needles and houses with no rules.
- protecting victims of crime, including sexual assault and domestic violence survivors, and protecting children from abuse and neglect.
- a small government that protects those who cannot protect themselves, and does what it’s supposed to do very efficiently.
- fiscal responsibility with balanced budgets that live within their means and produce tangible results for all Washingtonians.
- ensuring our social safety net lifts people up and makes them whole and productive, not forever dependent on politicians
- promoting justice and accountability with a robust and fair public safety system that is well-funded, respected, and supported.
- protecting your constitutional rights as found in the U.S. and WA State Constitutions, not by erasing the rights others find inconvenient.
- promoting a transportation system with high quality roads that reduce traffic, increase freight mobility, and improve our environmental quality - with transit systems that are efficient, clean, and safe.
- infrastructure improvements that help development of housing and jobs, improve the quality of life in WA, and lower costs

[Dinesh D'Souza @DineshDSouza]

This resurfaced footage of Mamdani has gone viral where he admits to manipulating White liberals to vote him into power. This is the Democrat playbook.

[Future 42 @future42org]

'They won't let our cattle graze the land, so grass builds up into brush and catches on fire.
Then after a fire, they won't let loggers come in and clear out the scorched trees, which makes them burn even hotter in the next fire.
We need to get back to the basics of taking care of the land.'

That^ is from a cattle rancher in Okanogan County, who says the blame for intensifying wildfires is a result of decades of land mismanagement, by both the Washington state and Federal departments of public lands.

Interesting conversation that also leads into why beef prices are so high right now in the US.

(@CPL_Dave you should give this one a listen, if you truly care about wildfire prevention)

@MattSmithFOX13 | @fox13seattle
'Okanogan rancher blames public land mismanagement'

[Rip Wheeler @WheelerRipWA]

The Dirty Little Secret of Wildfire

How America Traded Logging Jobs for a Perpetual Firefighting Economy

For much of the 20th century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were managed as working landscapes. Private timber companies and federal land managers cut, planted, thinned, and tended the land with the understanding that the trees were an asset to be sustained across generations. Clearcuts functioned as firebreaks. Small crews routinely extinguished ignitions before they became news. The result was a regional economy built on living-wage jobs, steady tax revenue for schools and public safety, and forests that, for the most part, stayed green.

Occasional fires occurred. What did not occur were the annual, multi-hundred-thousand-acre, smoke-choked seasons that have become the new normal.

That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The northern spotted owl was elevated into the most consequential bird in modern American policy. Scientists and environmental organizations argued that the species required large tracts of old-growth habitat. Petitions, lawsuits, and court orders followed. In June 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as threatened. Federal Judge William Dwyer’s rulings and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan locked up roughly 24 million acres of federal forest across Oregon, Washington, and northern California.

Federal timber harvests collapsed—often by 80 to 90 percent from 1980s levels in the key regions. Mills closed by the dozens. Supporting businesses disappeared. Unemployment surged. Some communities never fully recovered. Private industrial landowners continued managing their own ground because they still had direct financial skin in the game. Federal and state lands largely stopped being managed for timber production or for systematic fuel reduction at anything approaching the previous scale.

The forests kept growing. Fuels kept accumulating. An ignition that once would have been contained by a small crew with shovels and a radio now found denser, more continuous fuel beds. Large fires (5,000 acres and up) went from relatively rare events in the 1970s to routine occurrences in the 2000s and 2010s. In multiple recent seasons, more timber has burned than the industry harvested in its heyday. The irony is difficult to miss: forests “saved” from chainsaws have been delivered to ash in far greater volume.

Meanwhile, the northern spotted owl’s population has continued to decline across much of its range. Logging was never the primary driver. Competition from the invasive barred owl has proven far more significant, and habitat loss from high-severity fire now ranks high among the threats. The original crisis was urgent enough to trigger listing and sweeping land-use restrictions. The promised recovery under the Northwest Forest Plan has been, at best, incomplete.
The economic and ecological bill arrived in the form of unmanaged fuels and repeated megafires. And that is where the dirty little secret begins.

Once the timber economy on public land was kneecapped, a new industry rose to replace it. Wildland firefighting—suppression, logistics, aviation, camps, contracts, and the supporting apparatus—became a multi-billion-dollar annual enterprise. Agencies and contractors employ thousands. Budgets are large and sticky. In government, “use it or lose it” is not a slogan; it is an operating principle. A quiet fire season is a budgeting risk. Early, aggressive attack on every ignition that could still be handled by a small crew is expensive in the short term and reduces the later need for the full apparatus. Allowing fires to grow until they justify emergency declarations, large incident management teams, and federal cost-share arrangements is, from a certain bureaucratic perspective, rational and financially advantageous.

Local structural firefighters and many ground-level wildland crews do not share this incentive structure. They want the fire out. Once a fire reaches a certain size or complexity, however, control shifts upward to state and federal incident management teams whose metrics, funding streams, and political realities are different.

Neither major political party has shown a strong appetite for fixing the underlying problem. One side treats any expansion of active management or commercial thinning as an assault on old growth and the owl. The other side speaks frequently about forest health but rarely forces the structural changes in litigation risk, planning timelines, and budget incentives that would actually move the needle at scale. Campaign contributions and jobs flow from the existing system. Admitting that the original policy overcorrected and produced a more dangerous landscape remains politically costly.

Climate change and longer fire seasons are real factors. Drier fuels and hotter summers make everything worse. But denser, less-managed forests on the public estate are the accelerant that policy deliberately chose. Private industrial lands are managed more intensively and still burn, yet the severity is generally lower. Young plantations and certain silvicultural choices create their own risks, but private owners retain a direct financial reason to keep fuels in check and respond quickly. Public lands under the post-owl regime largely do not.

Oregon and the broader region now hold more trees than they did in the 1920s, largely because private landowners continued to replant. They also experience more catastrophic fire. The government did not “save” the forest. It changed who controlled the management decisions and, in the process, swapped a productive industry for a perpetual emergency-response industry. The owl was the symbol. The lasting result is a landscape that burns bigger, rural economies that never fully healed, and a political class with limited incentive to alter the arrangement. Instead of market-driven capital allocation, the new system runs on taxpayer subsidies.

Households and businesses understand that money spent inefficiently is money gone. Government tends to treat the same dollars as an everlasting well. Until the incentives change—until early detection, aggressive initial attack, mechanical thinning where appropriate, and genuine long-term forest management are rewarded more than the sheer size of the suppression effort—the same pattern will continue every summer: more smoke, more lost timber, more money spent, and the same speeches about how hard everyone is fighting the fires that policy helped create.

[Let's Go Washington @letsgowa]

On Friday, a judge in Thurston County cancelled our hearing to argue why the PIID is factually inaccurate and essentially cut the people out of the process. We're still telling everyone we know: VOTE YES ON I-645 TO REPEAL THE INCOME TAX.

Read more about what happened and our response here. https://t.co/IDEiVubTEv

[Rip Wheeler @WheelerRipWA]

Washington’s $80 HELOC Tax: Another Grab From Your Home Equity

Washington state has found yet another way to extract money from homeowners who simply want to access the equity in their own property. Close a HELOC or other residential mortgage loan secured by Washington real estate and the closing agent is required to collect an $80 “Foreclosure Prevention Fee.” It is not optional. It is not a recording cost. It is a mandatory state levy that applies whether your loan originates inside Washington or out of state, so long as the property sits here.

The fee became law through the 2025 legislative session and took effect for closings on or after July 27, 2025. Subsequent tweaks in 2026 (SSB 5938) adjusted a few exemptions and notice rules, but the core demand remains: $80 per qualifying residential mortgage loan, including open-end home equity lines of credit. Reverse mortgages for borrowers 60 and older and certain chattel loans get a pass. Almost everyone else pays.

Where the Money Goes

The $80 is remitted by the escrow or settlement agent straight into the state’s Foreclosure Fairness Account. From there the Department of Commerce distributes it by formula:

• 50% for housing counseling
• 16.5% to the Office of Civil Legal Aid for foreclosure-related legal representation
• 15% for the foreclosure prevention hotline
• 10% to Commerce for program administration
• 8% to the Attorney General’s consumer protection division
• 0.5% for outreach

State fiscal notes projected roughly 89,000 qualifying originations a year, generating more than $7 million annually. That is real money pulled from ordinary borrowers—people refinancing, consolidating debt, funding repairs, or tapping equity—and redirected into a government program that most of those borrowers will never use.

Why Are We Forced to Pay It?

Because Olympia decided that every homeowner who takes out a mortgage or HELOC should subsidize a statewide foreclosure-prevention apparatus. Lenders used to fund parts of the older program through fees tied to notices of default. Lawmakers expanded the revenue base by taxing new originations instead. The fee can be financed into the loan so it does not have to come out of pocket at the table, but that simply means you pay interest on the state’s cut for years.

This is not a user fee for a service you requested. It is a compulsory transfer. You did not ask for housing counselors, a hotline, or additional civil legal aid funding when you applied for a HELOC. The state simply attached the cost to your transaction.

Just Another Fee in the Stack

Washington already layers recording surcharges, housing affordability assessments, covenant homeownership program fees, and other add-ons onto real estate documents. First-page recording costs routinely exceed $300 once all the state and local surcharges are stacked. Vehicle registration, business licenses, special assessments, carbon-related charges, and countless local levies follow the same pattern: invent a purpose, attach a fee to a common activity, and call it “prevention,” “fairness,” or “affordability.”

The $80 foreclosure fee is simply the latest entry. It is small enough that many borrowers barely notice it on a closing disclosure, yet large enough that tens of thousands of transactions quietly generate millions for the bureaucracy every year. Death by a thousand cuts remains death.

When Will It End?

It will not end on its own. Once a revenue stream is established and the agencies that receive the money grow accustomed to it, the political incentive is to protect and expand the program, not sunset it.

Homeowners who are current on their loans and simply want to use their equity become the funding base for services aimed at those in distress. The Legislature has already shown it is willing to refine the exemptions and notice language while leaving the $80 intact.

Every new fee is sold as modest and targeted.

Collectively they raise the cost of living, the cost of credit, and the cost of owning property in Washington. Residents keep paying while the list of mandatory extractions grows longer. The question is no longer whether the next fee will appear. The question is how many more the public will tolerate before demanding that the extraction stop.

[Jason Rantz on Seattle Red @jasonrantz]

Rantz: A judge rigged the income tax ballot. We must bury it in yes votes on election day. https://t.co/AHNqcgedXn

[Catherine Herridge @C__Herridge]

EXCLUSIVE: Texas Children’s Hospital to Fund First Hospital-Based Detransition Clinic in the Country As Part of Historic $10 Million Settlement With Whistleblower @V_Sivadge

“The institution that once sanctioned the harm of these kids is now reversing course and offering them help.”

[Catherine Herridge @C__Herridge]

EXCLUSIVE: Whistleblower Nurse Details Alleged Multi-Layer Medicaid Fraud Used to Fund Gender-Transition Treatments on Minors at Texas Children’s Hospital

“Number one is the hospital used the incorrect sex on the patient's medical record. Instead of stating the true biological sex on the patient's record, the hospital used the preferred gender identity of the patient…The second thing is they used the patient's preferred name. And the third way is they misdiagnosed patients intentionally…for example, that a 15-year-old girl had a testosterone deficiency and a boy had an estrogen deficiency, a teenage boy had an estrogen deficiency.”

[Brandi Kruse @BrandiKruse]

Absolutely, under no circumstances, should you use the phrase “gypsy fortune teller” in front of Thurston County Judge Chris Lanese.

[Jenn Pellegrino 🇺🇸 @JennPellegrino]

Jimmy Carter in 2005 on voter ID: "It will not restrict people from voting."

He even described Voter ID as “a move forward in getting more people to vote."

Republicans need to share this video far and wide. Voter ID was bipartisan then. It should be bipartisan now.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

"I am a Sharia law survivor from Iran"

Christian refugee in McKinney, TX begs City Council not to let a 5 acre Islamic center in

His warning is worth a listen:

[Savanah Hernandez @Savsays]

I visited Seattle’s $165 million dollar downtown library and it was OVERRUN with drug addicts.

Not only is this library filled with adults who are high on drugs, but they also offer FREE fentanyl test strips, syringes and injectable narcan that anyone, including children, can access.

Visitors have complained of “foul odors”, unusable restrooms and harassment by the homeless and I experienced all of this while at this location.

Seattle residents just passed a tax increase to raise $480 million dollars for libraries just like this one and this is unfortunately the state that they’re in:

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

Man, is this damning.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

BOMBSHELL 🚨 Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge says she found evidence that Joe Biden’s family was being blackmailed by China (and shows the documents) and our mainstream media ignored the evidence

“What we saw in the release of the records, which I'm afraid I think in the media or legacy media there was kind of a willful blindness. They didn't want to look at the records. All you had to do was spend a couple of hours. I found these records which are talking about blackmail by China. It was for President Biden's daily brief. I can conclude, I think, that it was probably about targeting his family”

She explains earlier that all this was ignored and buried by the FBI, CIA and the media in order to keep Democrats in power