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Annals of “Liberals Destroy Everything They Touch,” Seattle Edition
These are just a few of the stories at the top of the KOMO News site this morning. Every single story shows how the radicals running local government have destroyed everything they touch.
The City of Seattle encourages (does not punish) public drug use, especially in and around the burgeoning homeless encampments: Seattle Police Officer Pricked by Used Needle in Seattle Park
Also related to the drug scene around Seattle, evidence that there is no plan to decrease the use of illegal drugs in the city: Public Libraries and YMCAs to get Narcan(r) to Prevent Opioid Overdoses
And Seattle/King County does have enabling legislation to allow “Safe Injection Sites” where illegal-drug addicts can “shoot up,” supervised by nurses. They just can’t seem to find the ideal site, so none has opened up yet. I have read that they are considering “mobile” drug dens, so no permanent site will be necessary. I can just see the ads now: “Hey, Burien Drug Addicts! Meet your Mobile Drug Den at Fourth and Highway 900, Monday at 3 PM!”
North Seattle Shooting Marks Five-Year High in Homicides in North Precinct, City Says.
And Seattle has passed the most restrictive gun-storage laws in recent memory, essentially requiring legal gun owners to lock up their firearms where they cannot be obtained by anyone easily (especially the homeowner with the burglar or rapist at the door). Yeah, buy that gun for self-defense, and we will mandate that it be unavailable to you when you need it most.
Sound Transit: Replacing Broken Escalators at UW Station to Cost More than $20 Million
Everyone in the Seattle-Everett-Tacoma area is paying through the nose (car-tab tax, property tax, sales tax) for this useless Choo-Choo Train that one percent of the population will ride. Everyone has heard of the huge (predicted) cost-overruns associated with this boondoggle, and this is one of the most egregious. It seems that they need very long escalators to carry riders from the street down to the underground train station by the University of Washington. The radicals who run (?) un-Sound Transit ordered “commercial-grade” escalators instead of “transit-grade” escalators, probably to save costs. Yeah, big savings! Not only are transit riders inconvenienced by having to walk up and down hundreds of stairs to get to and from the train, but no costs were saved, and more costs will now have to be incurred! On my dime!
Police: Car Thefts up From a Year Ago in Seattle
Seattle police have essentially stopped responding to most property crimes in the city. Is it any wonder that we try our best to stay the hell out of Seattle? The city is almost literally going to hell in a handbasket. In general, the people of Seattle get the government they elect.
Originally posted on RushBabe49.com.
Published in Culture
Seattle is so nice to drug addicts to permit them to shoot up in parks that are used by families, and the addicts are so inconsiderate to not clean up after themselves, and all the Seattle Police spokesperson can say is, “Everyone should be careful, watching where they walk, being aware of these things.” Why the heck can’t they at least nag the addicts about why they need to be considerate with their drug paraphernalia? Do the police think these addicts are uncivilized animals or something? One thing that really frosts me in Seattle is people being conspicuously inconsiderate.
Maybe if you can get your doctor to classify your gun as an illegal drug you’ll have better access to it.
Has anyone collected data on what is actually going on in the heads of Seattle’s leaders? It’s interesting that so many people could get obvious things so wrong.
Wonderful examples presented by Rushbabe.
The reason the war on drugs is a disastrous failure is that we go after supply (that simply cannot be stopped) and is just a way to keep profits up and ignore the origin of the problem, demand.
They want homes to defend themselves from property crime, but don’t want them to armed should they confront a dangerous drug crazed burglar.
Cost overrun’s on near useless transit and high taxes are understood. Just old fashion corruption.
I think @rushbabe49 did just that in the OP. The answer is…
Nothing rational
Thanks, RB. It’s a rare post that causes me to appreciate New Jersey. We’re not where Seattle is. Yet.
I’d like to know what they say if anything. My wife just suggested that, they are progressives so want to get rid of inferior people of all sorts, not just brown ones, so organized and promoted overdoses may be a motivating factor.
I’d vote with my feet . . .
And Montana, not where Seattle is. A couple of hot spots we need to keep an eye on.
I am not always a careful reader. My first reading of the last headline mentally omitted the colon, so I read the headline as, “Police Car Thefts Up from a Year Ago in Seattle.” Leading to the thought, “Enough police cars are stolen to generate statistics for year to year comparisons?”
Oh – put in the colon, and the meaning changes!
Well this stuff seems to be what the sophisticated city folk want.
I have a tee shirt that says:
“Let’s eat Grandma!
Let’s eat, Grandma!
Punctuation saves lives.”
Public libraries have become drop-in centers for transients. If the computers are in use in the adult section they’ll gravitate to the children’s section. They use the computers to access porn. Librarians debate whether access to porn is a free speech issue. Sometimes they’ll fight with patrons for access to the computers.
There have been cases of librarians that will get upset if the police have to use force to remove a transient from the library, not too mention that a library restroom is used as a shooting gallery for drug addicts.
It’s all rainbows, and unicorns.
With apologies to the wife of @iwalton, the Seattle City Council does not want to get rid of the “inferior” types, they support them over the long-suffering taxpayers whose taxes go for the homeless services and supervised “shooting galleries”. Money that could go for property-crime response instead goes to Seattle Public Schools who teach “white privilege” and “sustainability”. I was trying to find a recent story about the abysmal performance of the city schools (I am a 1967 graduate of Roosevelt High School), but didn’t for this article. Tiny house villages are placed in Seattle neighborhoods, and the “residents” are not prevented from using the drugs that caused their situation in the first place. Seattle authorities are not allowed to displace the “street people” who deposit their filth on the public streets, if they do not accept the city’s “help”.
Surprise inspections? Warrantless search and seizures?
From about 1972 to 1980 I was a frequent visitor to Seattle, sometimes for a couple of months at a time. Loved the place.
It wasn’t always like this.
That’s what I thought. I’d keep my weapon at the ready, but with the bedside storage container unlocked and open.
“Honest officer, he gave me just enough time to retrieve my weapon. Thank goodness he was a slow home invader!”
[emphasis mine]
Under the new law, gun owners can be fined up to $500 for failure to store a firearm in a locked container or to render it unusable by anyone other than the owner. That fine would increase to $1,000 if a minor or anyone else prohibited from using the gun gets their hands on an unsecured weapon.
A fine of up to $10,000 would be assessed if a minor or prohibited person uses an unsecured firearm to cause injury, death or commit a crime.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the city by the NRA (already thrown out by a judge) and the Second Amendment Foundation. Seattle has already run the only gun store in the city out of town.
The same thing happened to me.
I have very happy childhood memories of living in the Kent/Renton area for three years in the mid 80’s.
I grew up in Montlake, moved to Hawthorne Hills in fifth grade. I have done more than one post on my personal blog about what has happened to my city. I think things started to go downhill in 1966, when voluntary busing started. It’s still going downhill. Some time the 1980s, I attended an “all-class” reunion at my high school, and I was appalled at how the school had been allowed to deteriorate-peeling paint on the ceiling of the auditorium, broken glass in some outside windows… And then I had to listen to the principal apologize for how the school had fewer National Merit Scholars, due to the lowering of standards for the bused students from the Central Area.
The Seattle Fishwrap has a “Rant and Rave” column, where citizens write in to praise or speak against a person or policy. I just laughed out loud at one of today’s rants, which is perfect for this post.
Rant: That our city is a gigantic dump, with our neighborhoods, downtown and our formerly beautiful parks being spoiled with filth strewn about. Whatever happened to laws against littering, parking more than three days and camping in city parks? Clean up our city, please!
Nope. The Leftists anticipated your move. Seattle is in the current mess due to leftists from California moving, while claiming it was not their kids, not their social policy preferences. Every smaller population state is at risk, absent very loud, aggressive communication that no corporate culture is welcome that does not respect the new host state’s dominant culture and enforce that respect aggressively on its employees/ leaders. Any state failing to lock down the state’s board of regents and K-12 education department under Americanism, reinforcement rather than subversive of the U.S. Constitution, and positive affirmative of the local state culture, deserves to die of the leftist political/ cultural infestation.
Your focus seems misdirected, not at all President Trump’s. The problem is not people with different skin color or economic background. The problem in WA has always been the limousine leftists who moved into positions of economic and political power from California, without early, focused local and state opposition to leftism.
In the end it’s up to the voters and how much virtue signaling they’re willing to put forward for themselves and the expense of their own quality-of-life levels.
New York didn’t elect Rudy Giuliani until after 28 (or 32) years of virtue signaling with bad mayoral and council choices, with only a mild respite thrown in during the first 4-5 years of the Ed Koch era. Quality-of-life levels had to sink so low by the early 1990s that just enough liberals decided they’d rather not live like that and opted not to virtue signal with their votes in the 1993 election.
Seattle, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco and other cities face the same choice — if the voters are more interested in showing the world how caring and compassionate they are with their votes, as that same ‘caring and compassion’ sends their cities into downward spirals (and in the end does nothing tangible for the people they’re supposedly being caring and compassionate towards), the quality-of-life in those cities will simply keep declining.
That is a problem when liberals vote with their feet. They move to a place with a better political and economic climate, but then they vote for the same old s**t they ran from in the first place. Maybe people who move from state to state need a few years to assimilate before voting . . .
This brings back a memory from a Minneapolis newspaper from many years ago. There was an article about how the state was creating a task force to crack down on Minnesotans who are registering their cars in other (less expensive) states. For instance, someone might have a business address in North Dakota or a lake home in Wisconsin and they register the car under that address so they are paying lower registration fees.
Further down the page was a different article about how police in Minneapolis were no longer going to try to catch cars thieves, because it’s just a property crime. They reckoned it’s a matter between you and your insurance company, not really a police matter. So if a private citizen loses their whole car, who cares. But if the state is cheated out of a few hundred bucks a year, you’re in a heap of trouble, boy.
I live in Massachusetts, which is a very liberal state that so far has none of the problems associated with California and Seattle. A few weeks ago, I asked my very smart husband why Massachusetts didn’t have the kinds of problems we see in other very liberal areas. His theory was the same as yours: limousine leftists, who are pretty rare around here. Oh, we have plenty of leftists, and many of them are fairly well off, but very few of them are limousine leftists. My husband ascribed Massachusetts’ avoidance so far of things like tent cities and antifa to the fact that we are a very middle class kind of place, but he warned that what is happening in other places could be coming here soon.
Of course, it also gets pretty cold here in the Winter. New England will never be high on the list of places you would want to be homeless. That is probably also a factor.
I hope this doesn’t happen.
When I was stationed in Groton, Ct (Navy), we used to drive up to Mt. Tom and ski (sorry to see it closed down). We also went to Boston often to watch the Celtics play (even went to an NBA championship game).
So yes, I enjoyed Massachusetts. But like the big US cities, if the middle class flees, there will be a demise . . .
A very interesting contrast! I’m saving this comment for future reference, thinking through how to stop and reverse the negative effects of leftism in each state.
It’s all about revenue . . .
Correct. It’s about their revenue.