The Socialist City of Seattle

This morning I guess I was surprised to read that starting January 1, 2009, Seattle is implementing a 20 cent per bag fee. I assume this applies to both paper or plastic bags.

Already this is causing big changes in Seattle stores as checkout people get to deal with the wide variety of personal shopping bags people are bringing into stores.

I've had trouble adjusting to the no cell phone use while driving law here in Washington. I don't know what the penalty is. I forget about the no talking law about half the time. If I remember I put the cell phone on speaker phone mode and just appear to be talking to myself and not into a phone.

I don't know if the no car cell phone use law is state-wide or just a Seattle/Tacoma thing. By the next time I return here in a decade or two, I expect that talking in cars and listening to the radio will be banned. Talking and listening can be very distracting and I'm sure has been the cause of at least one wreck somewhere.

After a year or two of the anarchy of people bringing random shopping bags into stores Seattle will likely mandate that specific type bags only be used. And then those will be found to cause some environmental hazard after which it will be mandated that all bags revert to paper, due to trees being a very recyclable resource.