News For Reasonable People

In Washington state, the revolution is eating its own. State Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen engineered the largest income tax in state history — a 9.9% millionaires tax — and positioned himself as a progressive hero in the process. It wasn't enough. Socialist Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has now endorsed his primary challenger, Hannah Sabio-Howell, a self-described socialist and labor organiz...

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's administration secretly submitted a $3.3 billion bid to buy back the city's infamous parking meter system — and that bid was higher than the winning offer of $2.53 billion from investment firm Stonepeak. The bombshell dropped during a City Council hearing when a Stonepeak executive casually revealed Chicago's losing number, leaving aldermen furious and demanding ans...

Oregon's Governor Tina Kotek has finally done what conservatives and business leaders have been demanding for years — admitted the state's economy is broken. After landing near the bottom of CNBC's top-states-for-business rankings and watching companies flee to Nevada and Texas, Kotek rolled out something called the "Governor's Prosperity Council" and a "Prosperity Roadmap." On...

New York City's Rent Guidelines Board just voted 7-1 to freeze rents on nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments — and the lone dissenter resigned on the spot. Christina Smith walked out after a board stacked with progressive appointees ignored every piece of cost data put in front of them: rising maintenance bills, property tax increases, insurance spikes. Politicians will call it a historic...

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's administration secretly submitted a $3.3 billion bid to buy back the city's parking meters — roughly $800 million more than the nearest competing offer — and buried the entire thing under a non-disclosure agreement. When the deal fell through, Johnson dismissed the controversy. The city council and watchdog groups are not dismissing anything. Chicago's original park...

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has unveiled yet another "new approach" to the city's notorious 12th and Jackson corridor — one of the most active open-air drug and stolen-goods markets on the entire West Coast. The plan promises police enforcement, outreach workers, and treatment referrals. Sound familiar? It should, because the Chinatown International District has been living through variat...

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is seeking proposals for an $8 million "homelessness prevention fund" that will distribute about $8,000 per household in rental assistance and eviction protection. It sounds compassionate on paper — until you ask who actually ends up in Seattle's encampments and why they're there. Sean makes the case that funneling taxpayer cash through a revolving door of nonp...

San Francisco's answer to its self-inflicted grocery desert is a government-run store funded by a brand-new 1% grocery tax. City leaders call it affordable access. The rest of us call it a doom loop tax — penalizing the stores still standing to replace the ones they already drove out. Whole Foods, Safeway, Lucky, and dozens of other grocers didn't leave because the government wasn't involved enoug...

Five years after Seattle's JumpStart tax went into effect, the verdict is in — and it's brutal. A new Downtown Seattle Association report confirms the city has shed approximately 30,000 downtown jobs while the taxable value of its commercial office buildings has collapsed by 48%. This isn't a pandemic hangover or a national trend. Bellevue, twelve miles away across a couple of bridges, has no Jump...

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is tearing itself apart — and the trigger is about as basic as it gets. A proposal that clergy be required to be in monogamous relationships has ignited a furious denominational revolt, with progressive committees and pro-polyamory advocacy groups inside the church fighting the rule tooth and nail. The "More Light Presbyterians" hosted a "faithful po...

Seattle's King County Regional Homelessness Authority — an agency already drowning in a forensic audit that uncovered more than $13 million in overspent or unaccounted funds — is now demanding that Seattle and King County hand over $8 million more. The audacious argument from a KCRHA director: the missing $8 million wasn't lost, it just should have been billed to the city and county all along. If...

North Seattle residents got tired of waiting. Tired of watching sex traffickers work the Aurora Avenue corridor night after night while city hall looked the other way. So they did what Mayor Katie Wilson wouldn't — they blocked the streets themselves, throwing up makeshift barricades to break the johns' loop and take back their neighborhood by force. Now, after months of community pressure made th...

Seattle just tumbled to #29 on the global foreign investment attractiveness index — and Mayor Katie Wilson is handing out the shovels. A new report flags Washington's hostile regulatory environment, skyrocketing taxes, and a permissive approach to public safety as the core reasons international capital is walking out the door. While other cities are rolling out the welcome mat, Mayor Wilson is rol...

Seattle fought hard to land World Cup games, officials celebrated in press releases, and the hospitality industry got left holding the bag. Hotel bookings are down a staggering 20% compared to last year — and the Washington Hospitality Association is calling it a "recipe for disaster," potentially worse than the pandemic's toll on the industry. The financial bonanza everyone promised nev...

MAGA-aligned lawmakers in Washington State are importing California's election chaos and pointing it straight at Bob Ferguson. The LA mayoral primary's glacially slow vote count — where Spencer Pratt is somehow still in contention — has become exhibit A in a coordinated campaign to cast doubt on Washington's mail-in voting system, and by extension, on Ferguson's own gubernatorial victory. Here's w...

The federal government has finally done what LA's politicians refused to: cut off the money. The Department of Housing and Urban Development pulled all federal funding from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — $944 million — after investigators found the agency couldn't demonstrate basic financial controls over funds it received since 2021. A prior audit had already found LAHSA couldn't a...

The brother of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is suing the very city she runs — and it may be the most politically awkward lawsuit in California history. Kenneth Bass is among thousands of plaintiffs accusing Los Angeles of negligence after the Palisades Fire destroyed their homes, and his name on that filing puts Mayor Bass in an impossible position: defend her administration, or watch her own fami...

Portland's city council just finalized its budget, and Mayor Keith Wilson signed off on millions in cuts to police staffing and overtime. This is a city that already can't keep up with its crime problem, and leadership just decided to accelerate the slide. Response times in some districts have already doubled — and that number only goes up when fewer officers are working fewer hours on fewer shift...

Activists in Alameda County are collecting signatures to put a $30 minimum wage on the November ballot — promising prosperity, new jobs, and relief from Bay Area's crushing cost of living. They have friendly studies. They have One Fair Wage backing them. What they don't have is a single example of this actually working. Seattle tried it. Researchers documented the destruction: 1,800 jobs gone, hun...

Seattle had grand plans: 500 units of homeless housing ready for the 2026 World Cup. What taxpayers got instead is Bayside Village — 50 tiny homes in Interbay, each costing between $16,000 and $17,000 apiece. That's 75 total, roughly 15% of what was promised. City leaders are celebrating it anyway. The shelters are manufactured by Pallet, a company that markets them as emergency-room-style stabili...

Seattle's mayor just ordered the removal of barricades that had been put in place specifically to protect residents from pimp-related shootouts. Not a misprint. The city identified a problem — organized criminal violence spilling onto residential streets — and someone actually tried to do something about it. Then the mayor stepped in and had the barriers taken down. This is the Seattle doom lo...

Residents living near Aurora Avenue in Seattle have had enough. Gun violence in the corridor has been climbing for months, and the people who actually live there — not the policymakers safely insulated in Bellevue and Capitol Hill offices — are the ones paying the price with their safety, their sleep, and their property values. CHAPTERS0:00 Residents near Seattle's Aurora Avenue…1:29 Aurora Re...

Seattle's housing crisis is getting harder to hide. Mass tech layoffs are draining the high-income renters and buyers who kept the market propped up — and what's left is a progressive housing agenda with nothing to show for years of zoning fights, upzone mandates, and developer fees. The city's leadership bet everything on endless tech-sector growth to subsidize their affordability sch...

Seattle's luxury real estate market just sent a flashing warning signal: high-end listings jumped 84% — a number that doesn't happen in a healthy city. This isn't a housing boom. It's an exit. The pattern is identical to what played out in San Francisco, Portland, and every other city where progressive governance chased out the productive class. High earners don't announce thei...

Washington State's premier social wellness spa is done waiting for the legislature to get its act together — and Nashville just won. The expansion south isn't a growth story. It's a verdict on what WA has become for small business operators trying to build something in an overregulated, overtaxed environment. This is the story Democrats don't want told: the businesses that leave qu...