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It’s another round of examining the latest headlines in the Puget Sound from my recovery bed. This time, you will not believe what Sound Transit is getting up to next. Let’s get right to the Big Lead (cue Big Lead gong).

Between now and the end of March, Sound Transit is spending about $575,000 to move a piece of art downtown Redmond because it is in the way of the light rail station being built.

How far are they moving it? About 300 yards.

This is the most hideously ugly piece of art you could imagine. It is a triangle that looks like something in a junkyard. Think about the art you have in your house. You probably chose it very carefully, deciding that it was worth your money. That is not the way public art works. With public art, the government hires a bunch of scam artists who aren’t good enough to sell their works in the free market.

Dori: Sound Transit ‘can’t afford’ $30 tabs, but can hire art consultants

Even with my gimpy knee, I could get two buddies this weekend, and we could move that thing for $1,000. I don’t know what Sound Transit is spending the other hundreds of thousands on.

A video circulating on social media clearly shows a homeless man pushing a woman into a tent that has caught fire. He shoves her and chokes her out, trying to hold her down in the burning tent.

What we have right now, all around the Puget Sound is worse than Third-World conditions. Not only is there is a level of poverty and desperation every bit as bad as Calcutta, there is a level of violence much greater, because so many people are completely out of their minds with drug addiction and mental illness. When you have people like Kshama Sawant and most of the Seattle City Council not wanting to do sweeps, that means they are fine with the status quo around the region.

We know that there are 13- and 14-year-old girls in these camps, vulnerable girls who have run away from home and been lured there by traffickers. These scum-of-the-Earth pimps turn them out as prostitutes to fund their heroin habits. Should we as a society be enabling child rape, sexual assault of females, and throwing women into burning tents? I will never understand how Seattle politicians can continue to be enablers of child rape and assaults on women.

It’s quite obvious that Jenny Durkan is so far over her head that she can’t see the surface, and so the only way that she can keep her remaining constituency is to say that things aren’t as bad as they are, as she did in her ridiculously optimistic State of the City address this week. How do Sawant and Durkan and Dow Constantine and Jay Inslee live with themselves? Women and girls as young as 13 are being raped in these camps. How can they allow that to go on?

Business tax still alive in Legislature

The tax on large businesses in King County is still alive in the Legislature, despite initially not making it to the bill deadline. Look at Chicago, which tried a head tax. Even their far-Left mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, said that it was a job killer. And that was just a $35/worker head tax — this one will be several hundred dollars. Of course this is going to be a job killer. The King County businesses can just flee to Snohomish County or Pierce County.

Here is the bottom line — what are the politicians going to do with the money? As long as drugs are not prosecuted, drug dealers and drug addicts and gangs are going to keep flooding King County, which means that homelessness is going to explode. We could spend $100 million, $1 billion, or even $10 billion, but without a different approach to drugs, we will not see any improvement to the problems around here.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.