At this point she is merely making quacking sounds that elicit fluttering behavior from the other GOP ducks.

The hell is that suit. Santabot?

Trump also believes that allowing water to flow to the sea in California rivers (to protect fish) means that water is unavailable to feed the system of fire hydrants that exists throughout the wilderness areas in the Sierra. He read that on Twitter.

Doesn't she belong to one of those "intelligent design" orgs? The Discovery Institute or something like that?

STFU, Susan--YOU'RE the bitch full of hot air blowing smoke.
@5 seatackled: Intelligent design? Susan Hutchinson? All I see is a big Space for Rent sign on her forehead.

Hutchinson only won something like 4 counties - she didn’t even win in the Tri-Cities or Spokane. She’s flailing desperately for anything.

Much like Kellyanne Conway, I'll allow that suit, while hoping both stunningly well-dressed grifters feel the full measure of justice for their lies and malfeasance.

I don't have time to listen to Susan Hutchinson. I'm far too busy gestating this turkey for eight hours.

That outfit looks like something that would have shown up on a villain in the original "Star Trek" series (minus the obligatory flag pin, of course)

She should have just stayed on the television. She might have ended up with an afternoon show for the housewives and shut-ins.

This is what happens when you ymuse too much hairspray for years and years!

@11:

Oh, the immortal William Ware Theiss would NEVER have created something so gauche!

OTOH, it does remind me of that "The Simpsons" episode where Marge discovers a genuine Chanel dress suit in a thrift store, and has to keep altering it in order to continue to impress the stuck-up neighbor ladies.

On second thought, it looks more like something Sylvia Anderson would have designed for one of her husband's television programmes, say, UFO or Space 1999...

Why? Why lord did you have to take Kathey Gertsen? And leave this dull-witted lizard person behind to plague us. Were we not kind enough to Kathy?

Sounds like you clowns are having a good time with this one. No doubt it's get hotter around the world. Now you need to realize the mismanagement of the enormous amount of forest land and the whining tree hugger mentally is more than partially to blame.

This is a HUGE talking point in conservative-land. I visit there occasionally and lately it’s been tough to engage on anything.... but.... the right-wing fully believes democrats and “activists” (like the Sierra Club) are responsible for the fires. They say it’s because of improper land management— specifically not clear cutting and replanting — that causes the conditions for these fires. I don’t want to fully get into it, but don’t discount this ploy because it sounds ridiculous; there are people and lots of them who really really really believe this.

Acres of wild trees are not the only thing going down in flames.

For the answers to all your questions
re: Wildfires and Catastrophic Climate Change,
check out Eli Sanders excellent article:

“We Asked the State's Top Wildfire-Fighting Official:
Are Smoky Summers the New Normal?”

Why is Hutchy wearing that straightjacket?

Aren’t the arms sposed to be crossed / lashed together or something?
(Will they be Required Wearing for malcontents under the New Trumpfy Regime?)

And republicans wonder why people think they're dumb, demented, or deranged.

@11 Catalina Vel-DuRay and @13 COMTE: OMG, she DOES look like a villainess from the original Star Trek ("The Trouble With Trumpists")! That would truly be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic, and the devastating cost to all of us and life on Earth as we know it wasn't so exponentially high.
@20 kristofarian: In answer to your question "Why is Hutchy wearing that straitjacket?"
Answer: 'Cuz she's Washington's own Queen of Denial!
@21 RickFromTexas: I know, right?

Susan looks totally stoned by all that smoke in the second photo.

@22 Yes Donald Trump...

Chalk “how ecosystems work” amoung the many, many things Wingnuts don’t understand. Science is hard.

See when you cut down old growth, even if you replant, you don’t actually instantly make a “forest.” You know that saying “you can’t see the forest for the trees?” Literally. Forests are complex systems. See, this may shock you, but trees take time to grow! And there is host of biom in the soil and undergrowth easily disrupted when mature trees are gone and the forest floor suddenly gets more UV light. It takes many decades for a tree grove to really become a robust forest.

So. See. As replants grow there is more undergrowth. Because there is more sunlight getting through the smaller trees. More sunlight. More heat. I know you rightwing nuts might not realize this but the Sun is a star undergoing fusion. It’s not furnace in God’s basement. So the sun dries out the undergrowth. Making it... I’m going to use a big word now... combustible. That means... FIRE EASY!

Forest fires are not spread by dead falls. And “thinning out” forests mostly makes undergrowth grow more and get drier.

So all that bullshit about Tree huggers being responsible betrays how stupid you are.

It is logging companies who over logged and under-replanted and climate change extending dry seasons that are driving these fires.

Btw. Most well paying logging jobs were in Mills. Not cutting down trees. But in the 80’s Weyerhaeuser and major logging companies decided to sell raw timber overseas rather than milled wood to cut labor costs. So they laid off the union mill workers. Those workers then turned to lower paying logging jobs setting chokers and cutting down trees. So more trees got cut and replants take a long time to grow and most don’t take.

So THAT’s whay we are where we are.

Btw. Half my family was in logging business.

Oh. And “Tree huggers” didn’t kill those logging jobs. Automation and union busting did.

But mostly automation. Have you seen the massive harvesting machines they have now? One can do the work of twenty loggers.

And they also tear the fuck out of the ground and make, you know, errosion more likely. Making it harder to replant. So. Again. Trees don’t grow back as fast. And cheap replanting contractor do a shit job and often monocrop.

That makes young trees vulnerable to bark beetles, pests, and disease. And a warming climate makes for more disease and more regions beetles can go. Making for more dead young trees.

And nobody is harvesting those young dead trees because you can barely make toilet paper out of them. No salvage crew is pulling those out. So they sit there and are com-bust-ti-ble.

@26 & @27 Dr. Zaius: Thank you again for nailing it. It sounds like the automated excavating and wood harvesting machines are among those to blame for the fatal March 22, 2014 landslide in Oso that claimed 47 lives. Didn't Weyerhauser end up having to pay a major settlement over that? I remember a local was quoted as saying that after the clearcutting there was nothing left to hold the mountain up.

Seriously--pull your heads outta your asses, people voting RepubliKKKan!

And now, what with all the overwhelming evidence that there's a CRIMINAL in the White Trash House, when are we going to fire Team Trump / Pence already?

@28 I have no idea. My inside knowledge of logging goings-on ends at the Washington, Oregon, and Idaho (and sometimes Wisconsin) borders.

@26/27:

So true. My grandfather retired from logging for Weyerhaeuser in 1976, just before the big push for automation started up. A bunch of my other relatives got laid off from the mills around Longview/Kelso a few years later, and most bought into the line fed to them by management that it was "tree-hugging environmentalists" and their obsession with little birds that killed their jobs; all the while they were in the process of retooling to more highly automated systems both in the mills and in the woods, and, as you say, by shipping raw wood overseas to the lumber-hungry Asian markets where domestic milling was starting to take off (it being much cheaper to ship logs to their mills, than to ship milled lumber from ours).

Good reporting, Rich, particularly the part pointing out that there is a bipartisan effort to fix Federal policy on controlled burns. Hutchinson seems particularly ignorant and and clueless, even by today's woefully diminished standards.

Republicans need to wise up pretty quick and stop running against the birds and the bees. Worldwide weather has become so quirky, chaotic and outside historic norms, climate change has already become a widely accepted belief among the "commoners". Only those at the top of the corporate executive food chain don't accept the idea.

Maybe Hutchinson is just trying to mollify her CEO campaign financiers because nobody else in Washington State can otherwise be that block-headed.

Whether or not it's been conclusively, empirically proven to be true, climate change and its environmental impacts are now the widely-accepted conventional wisdom. The only debate left is about how to ameliorate their effects going forward.

Suzie has a point. If we'd just allow her environmentally friendly friends chop down all the trees, there would be fewer fires.

@35 Wtf?: You must be suffering from severe smoke inhalation if you really believe that shit.

@17: If you believe that I've got the titles and deeds to both the Deception Pass and Tacoma Narrows Bridges I'd love to sell ya.