Laws that should be for children wrongly protect unfit parents

All over this state, you have evidence that children are in need of being cared for by their own relatives. Instead, most kids are placed into foster care, where they don’t get the love and attention they should have, which creates dissociative disorders they carry the rest of their lives. These kids have grown up now, and more and more there are parents today that aren’t fit parents – yet they are protected by the state of Washington due to not updating their codes in the law.

Washington seems to not care enough to hear the concerns of relatives and grandparents who report abuse when they see it and know about it. Washington needs to acknowledge this before the children are harmed, instead of after they are.

In almost every situation where a child is killed or hurt, a relative – be he or she a grandparent or other – has tried to make someone stop the abuse. It isn’t because relatives haven’t tried to change this in Washington; they have repeatedly tried. It is because this state is monetarily richer if we don’t, and allow good bills to just sit without passing for the children’s sake until it seems to be forgotten.

I can’t forget every time I hold a grandparent in my arms while they sob about their experience, and I can’t forget when I read what happens to the children and how their families begged some agency to investigate. I can?t forget because the children are the heritage of tomorrow.. And I wonder, do we want a tomorrow?

Break away from the gas station cartel

I’d like to publicly thank the owners and staff of the Covington ARCO gas station (Southeast 272nd Street and Southeast Wax Road) for doing their part to keep fuel costs down.

During the recent onslaught of daily gas price increases, the Covington ARCO was consistently lower in price (sometimes as much as 24 cents a gallon) than all of its competitors in the Covington and Maple Valley area.

I applaud their efforts in helping all of us deal with the financial impact of rising fuel costs. It’s nice to see a gas company break away from the gas station cartel that appears to exist in the area where every station adjusts their pricing in unison to the same price.