Four weeks ago, ETS! ran a summary of some of the really bad bills and issues being considered by Washington's retro state legislature in Olympia. They included the various tax cut schemes, welfare de-invention, the bill banning same-sex marriages (in the event they're ever legalized), Paul Allen's football stadium funding, legislation that would preempt tenant rights statewide, anti-abortion legislation, and yet another youth-bashing Becca Bill.

Of those, it now appears that the tax cuts, gay marriage, and football issues will go to the ballot box. Other bills are in various stages of committee or reconciliation among houses. (Call the state legislative hotline at 1-800-562-6000, or check http://leginfo.leg.wa.gov/, for info on your legislators and the status of particular bills.)

Unfortunately, there's lots more to worry about.

Here's an all-too-brief summary of some of the other wretched bills quietly oozing their way into law. Two of the more noxious ones--expanding the death penalty to include juveniles, and gutting the jury system by allowing convictions on 10-2 rather than unanimous jury polling--appear dead. But dozens of others live. Even more sadly, bills people can actually support seem virtually nonexistent in Oly this year. Taxation without representation strikes again.

Takings are back. HB 1837, reviving last year's Prop. 48, is a reactionary property rights measure that pays landowners for any economic loss due to government regulation. This "Regulatory Takings Fairness Act" would cripple enforcement of environmental law and enrich large property owners (like big timber). If you can't win at the polls, sneak it through Olympia. Same for SB 5594, which would revoke the law banning bear-baiting and hound hunting that passed easily last November.

Other property rights bills include HR 1649, which limits the Growth Management Act by repealing project review requirements, and HB 1208, which would abolish the GMA entirely and replace it with a developer lapdog disingeniously called the "Local Control Of Local Government Act." Such local control, of course, doesn't include the local tenant rights laws abolished under preemption bills HB 1043 & SB 5091. ("Preemption," incidentally, is an increasingly popular corporate tactic first perfected for state law by tobacco companies fighting local anti-smoking ordinances.)

Somewhere, some consultant is making a pile of money telling legislators how to give bills names that make them sound like the opposite of their actual effect. Another gem: The Restoring The Balance of Powers Act actually abolishes it by giving the state legislature the right to override any state Court of Appeals or Supreme Court ruling that a law is unconstitutional. While we're on Orwell, remember the Bush-era gag orders on doctors who couldn't mention the "A" word (abortion) to patients? The concept gets new life with HR 1602, which would forbid any state agency from providing information on alternatives to pesticides. This craven gift to the chemical industry, for example, would prevent an info line from telling someone to use salt or beer traps to kill garden slugs--because neither salt nor beer are registered pesticides. Meanwhile, HR 1701 would not allow pesticide use complaints to state agencies from anonymous whistleblowers. Another anti-whistleblower bill, SB 5208, would not only ban anonymity but require the accused be notified and grant permission to enter private property before an investigation starts. Just in case corporate evidence needs to be shredded, buried, or dug up first.

With the expiration of Clinton's federal Salvage Logging Rider, state forests are now facing equivalent bills. Olympia's version, HR 1128, uses language almost identical to the salvage rider. "An extremely serious forest health situation" in Okanagan's Loomis State Forest, the state's largest and wildest state trust forest, requires that it be clearcut. According to a new Northwest Ecosystem Alliance study, the pine beetle epidemic creating this danger actually ended in 1995. Hmmm.

Perhaps the state's most pressing crisis is the emerging shortage of pallets and beverage crates due to a presumed combination of students' rising tuitions and bad taste in interior decorating. SB 5769 would fix it by making possession of more than 10 such items without proof of ownership a felony. ("First, they came for the guy with the milk crates, but I didn't speak, because I only had six milk crates and two pallets...")

Queers are, as we know, taking over the public schools. (Better them than corporate advertisers, wouldn't you say?) The breathtakingly bigoted SB 5167 addresses this welcome development by mandating that kids be taught that gay people are filthy perve rts (or something like that). 5167 probably won't survive a veto but may well make it to the ballot instead.

The death penalty is, as usual, good for a few votes. SB 5093 would eliminate proportionality (that is, any sense that the punishment fits the crime) as a basis for appeal in capital cases, and SB 5348, 5203, and 5980 would all expand list of crimes eligible for capital prosecution. Another expansion bill, 1297, passed the House last Friday by a vote of 86-9.

Wanna battle crime and perverts? HR 1227 requires mandatory AIDS testing for anyone arrested (not convicted--arrested) on prostitution-related grounds.

Water rights are one of those boring issues (at least in the parts of the state with rain) that lots of people use to make money. This year there's a bumper crop of water laws. Our fave, HR 1116, specifies that any well drilled more than 1/4 mile from a body of water won't be considered as possibly drawing groundwater away from it. This is the hydraulic equivalent of legislating the sun to rise in the southwest. The net effect is private theft of now-public water. Other bad water bills: HR 1115, HR 1272, SB 5027, and SB 5526. (Call for details, we don't have room!)

Then there's HR 1624, which exempts wetland development from enviro regulation unless it can be proven that the tract in question "...has been naturally wet at least 11 months of the year from time immemorial." Time immemorial? "Your honor, as our first witness we'd like to call God." "...do You, Sir, solemnly swear on this Bible..."