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It has always been overpriced, and in today's Washington state, it is run by liberals. Remember libs?? They love taking from the (so called rich) and giving to all others. Seattle is high priced at every level. I live in the southern part of the state which enjoys the almost 8% sales tax rate.

Unfortunately, we live in a state in which the outlying counties don't contribute much politically to Olympia. King County is where elections are won or lost -- and we all know how liberal it is here. There are pockets of conservatism (ie. Issaquah, Bellevue, Medina), but they are few and far between. Liberals have pushed for an even higher sales tax. They've pushed for higher fees (ie. ferries, licensing, inspections, etc). Thank God for people like Tim Eyman. Liberals hate him with a passion. I don't mean they dislike him. They literally hate the guy. I've seen some of them reduced to blithering, spitting morons at the mere mention of his name.

Consequently, liberals (along with their co-conspirators -- the unions) have pushed for higher property taxes. They constantly harp on the education issue -- and most people are so misinformed about the lack of correlation between education expenditures and teacher accountability that most levies pass without even the slightest whimper. Sure, people like Tim Eyman rub the property tax growth restrictions in their faces -- but liberals don't care about the law. The law is an inconvenience for them (witness: WEA union contributions to liberal politicians in violation of state law) -- and really only applies cynically when their political opponents happen to cross the line.

I recently rode in the Seattle-to-Portland bike ride. Passed through countless towns in the southern part of the state. And, as I was riding, I thought about how far away Seattle was from that beautiful countryside. People like to stigmatize conservatives with stereotypes of uneducated rednecks and narrow-minded Puritans, but the fact of the matter is that Seattle is not America. It doesn't represent the rolling hills. It doesn't understand attitudes in those small towns. It doesn't contribute or care about our soldiers fighting and dying for our freedom in Iraq. It is wholly disconnected from (and uninterested in) the average American way of life that I saw on that bike ride. And all that you have to do is look at an electoral map from the 2000 election to see the stark map of politics. Democrats appealed to urban voters in densely populated cities. Republicans appealed to the rest of the country. The differences in politics couldn't be more stark, despite cynics' attempts to paint the GOP and Democrats as a single party.

Everyone, please support Dino Rossi for governor. I know him. He's a good man. The alternative is truly chilling: Christine Gregoire (who completely screwed up in her last job) and Ron Sims (who never met a tax hike he didn't like).

I will certainly do that. Your take on the state is exactly right as it seems to me. I live in the Columbia Gorge and you are right...the beauty is breath taking and I know I live in another world from Seattle and the other high population areas. We pay the taxes and are thankful we can do that. I just wish we had more say in how the money is used. PDX has high taxes most of which is poured into the Oregon school system, yet this past week showed PDX's schools below the national average...shameful, but thats liberal spending for you and believe it for sure, libs control the schools unions where a lot of the money lands.