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Washington State Tag

The last time we visited Washington state in these posts, there was a significant outbreak of measles in the county adjacent to the blue wonderland of Portland, Oregon. Now, public health officials have warned that more than 1,000 students have a potential risk for HIV and hepatitis B and C after they received dental care at 12 schools in and around Seattle due to improperly sterilized dental tools.

Seattle is in the midst of a crisis. Tent camps have become a common sight, along with homeless people, many of whom suffer from drug addiction, mental illness or both. We recently ran a post about the frustration of police officers in Seattle and how some of them are even resigning because they feel like they're not being allowed to do their jobs. A special program from KOMO News called "Seattle is Dying" examined these and other issues. The city's leadership doesn't seem to be doing anything about it and quite a few residents have had it.

A public health emergency has been declared in Clark County, Washington, which is near the border of Oregon and close to Portland. The declaration is a result of an ongoing measles outbreak.
According to the latest update from the county's Department of Health, 23 cases of measles have been confirmed and health officials are investigating two more suspected cases.

Washington state's Women's March chapter has decided to close due to leaders at the national level expressing anti-Semitic views and associating with anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan. From The Spokesman-Review:
Angie Beem, a Spokane Valley resident who served as board president of Women’s March Washington, announced the dissolution of the state group on Facebook on Thursday, citing the national organization’s ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Beem, who helped organize the march in Spokane in 2017 and made an unsuccessful bid for Spokane Valley City Council that fall, said in an interview Friday the decision to disband wasn’t easy.

Seattle's latest attempt to tax its way out of its severe homeless problem failed when Amazon and Starbucks pushed back against the city's "head tax."  We've chronicled other efforts Seattle has made to generate revenue. Whatever they are doing to address the city's homeless problem is not working as evidenced by the scathing letter sent by the convention planning team for the 2019 American Pharmacists Association convention.

Less than a month after they passed it, Seattle's city council voted to repeal the corporate head tax after facing legitimate pressure from companies like Starbucks and Amazon. The tax would have forced companies that make "more than $20 million a year pay an annual $275 tax per employee." The council predicted the tax would raise $47 million a year for "affordable-housing and homeless services." The city council planned to use that extra tax money to counter the city's growing homeless problem.

Last year, all hell broke loose on the campus of Evergreen State College in Washington state when Professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in a campus event which would have barred white people from campus for one day. Now they're at it again.

As the open-borders agenda of the left finally sees the light of day, it's not surprising to learn that blue cities and states are no longer solely committed to refusing to work with ICE.  They are now actively working against federal immigration law and policy, even going so far as to issue emergency rules intended to protect illegal aliens from deportation. In Washington state, one such "emergency rule" was approved Friday.  The rule says that the country of birth is no longer required on applications for Washington driver licenses.  Washington state officials say that asking for the place of one's birth on an application for a driver license can lead to targeting by ICE.  They are having none of that.