Get Real With Rick Dancer

We talk about current affairs, affordable housing and more.

When the Forest Service stops managing the forests for all uses, rural communities are the first to feel the impact of such poor decisions.

In this series, we expose what's happening by focusing on one small county in Washington State.

Remember, the public forests belong to you and me, but right now, anti-logging lawyers and judges are managing our forests. That needs to change.

There are numerous missing people in Oregon right now. Did you know most missing people are white men? It's true. And most of them had drug or alcohol issues. The families of these men wonder if that may be why law enforcement doesn't seem to take their cases very seriously.

This is an interesting, raw discussion with some of the families.

Rural Oregonians are done with the state. They want out, but not moving out; they want to change the borders to join Idaho. This is a very interesting idea that's got a lot of steam and some opposition. But before you write it off as crazy, get your facts right here.

There is so much mismanagement of the timber in the Pacific Northwest. The man you are about to meet knows because he's been working in the industry for decades. Take a few moments to find out why it's so important to get the goverment to change the way it currently is doing the timber business.

Skamania County: Caught In The Middle.

In a small timber community, nestled on the banks of the Columbia River Gorge, people don’t just feel used, they feel taken advantage of.

They can’t harvest enough timber to keep their community alive.

They don’t have enough money to educate kids the way they wish they could.

And the county services are suffering greatly. 

In Episode Two of our Truth About Timber Series, “Skamania County Caught In The Middle,” we tell the story through the voices of the people who are living it.

Your schools are in financial trouble, your county services bare bones, and everywhere you look is the answer to your problem….The Forest.

But you can’t touch much of it.

Welcome to Skamania County Washington.

On one side, you have the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area; on the other, the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

And on top of that Federal Timber land set aside for the Spotted Owl.

There’s not much farmland, Skamania County Washington is rural but mostly mountains. 

There’s tourism, but those are NOT family-wage jobs.

Light manufacturing? Maybe but not a lot of hope there, either. 

This is the story of hard-working people hanging on barely.  

A few weeks ago, I was in Redmond at a party. I met the woman you are about to meet and quickly realized, in Oregon, she knows where the bodies are buried. There are some other cool things about her, but we'll talk about this in this episode of Get Real With Rick Dancer.

In Oregon voters have given a super majority to Democrats and like nationally they are using that power to destroy the state with higher taxes and laws that are despicable.

We talk with a lawmaker about those laws, how the state got to this state, and what can be done about it.

I'm not sure what to think about the whole Iran war possibility....We also go back and talk of the embarrassing moments of COVID stupidity and Voting in Oregon.