It appears from one of the few high-profile federal court cases not involving Donald Trump that Senator Patty Murray can be a very expensive breakfast date. At least, that’s the first impression from the Seattle Times investigation (strangely buried on a Saturday morning) into a campaign finance scandal involving the senator, her official staff, and “$500k dark to help Murray” from crypto crook Sam Bankman-Fried for her last campaign.

That’s the tawdry take about a previously secret August 2022 breakfast Senator Murray held with “the younger brother of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried” to allegedly discuss “pandemic preparedness policy.” It must have been some breakfast, as Gabe Fried wrote his brother “that he’d ‘talked to Murray folks’ who ‘gave us most of what we wanted.’ He wrote that ‘we still want to do partial fill of $500k dark’ — an apparent reference to a dark money donation.”

What remains to be seen is whether this revelation will lead reporters to get the senator herself to talk on the record about what she “gave” to the crypto crowd that generated $500,000 in help or even to ask whether she will be returning any of her ill-gotten campaign gains (as the same taxpayer-funded spokesperson told the Times she did last year when asked about tainted crypto contributions). Read on for more details about how easy it is to get a private breakfast with Senator Murray if you’re trolling with the right bait here… Seattle Times.

Democrats across Washington state have been searching for a way to convince drivers that the massively expensive cap and trade/carbon tax is not their fault after this summer’s gas price surge, despite the law passing with only Democrat legislative votes in 2021. The latest effort to spin their way out of the problem is from Crosscut, even though it notes that “(B)oth critics and supporters of Washington’s new carbon pricing system have drawn a direct line from the cap-and-invest program to the state’s record-high gas prices.”

Of course, Democrats try to erase that line as much as possible, suggesting “our program is still new, one potential explanation (for high prices) is that market participants are still getting their feet under them as they develop their compliance and decarbonization strategies.’ Or you can ignore the bureaucratic-speak and accept the reality that, as one expert noted, “It’s a costly program by design” here… Crosscut.

The Democrat establishment has been quickly lining up behind Attorney General Bob Ferguson in his quest to secure Jay Inslee’s fourth term as governor. The latest domino has fallen for Ferguson, as reported by former Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, with “the latest, most influential endorsement in his campaign for Governor, as U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell joins five members of Congress, plus an incumbent and former governor and a bevy of Democratic-aligned interest groups in the Fergy camp.”

The Cantwell endorsement came with the nod of approval from Connolly himself, long a top target of liberal candidates, as he noted that “Ferguson opponents are certain to depict him as a taxing, spending, regulating, big government replica of Inslee,” but that Ferguson “is already positioning to block any such moves” which point out the truth of his positions. You can read more about how the AG “warns of state agencies being ‘captured’” under fellow endorsee Jay Inslee and whether he’d do anything to release them here… Post Alley.

Shift has let you know that we are not talking with every candidate running this year, so we are pulling in interviews from others to fill in the gaps. One illuminating read is from PubliCola, which captures endangered Seattle City Council incumbent Andrew Lewis complaining that the public has been confused about his work because “it was effectively spun and represented to the public by people who opposed the council (that) the council is going to pull the rug out from under the police, and they’re not going to replace it with anything.”

You can understand why Councilman Lewis was well under 50% in the primary vote when you learn he thinks that “we have a lot of projects that we’re making good progress on, and it would be bad to switch leadership in the middle of it.”  While you are considering the value of that switch, read on to see whether Councilman Lewis is on to something when he says that people think the council is “going to replace (the police) with something goofy, and you’re not going to be safe” here… PubliCola.

People in Puget Sound tend to think of all of Eastern Washington as conservative, especially if they never venture across the Cascades. That’s why they would likely be surprised to learn from the Spokesman-Review that since January 2021, some 665 suspects “accused of violent crimes such as rape, molesting children, making death threats, assaults and vehicular homicide were set free on their own recognizance” by Spokane County judges, a trend one county commissioner finds ”alarming.”

Unfortunately, this was unsurprising to the county sheriff, who noted that “they are elected officials. They should be able to stand on their decisions.” You can find out more about what decisions these judges might be accountable for here… Spokesman-Review.

You can file this one under “likely not to get a vote in a Democrat legislature,” but one path toward fiscal sanity might be making it just a little harder to raise taxes. That’s the basic concept behind the op-ed in Center Square about “adding requirements to a state’s constitution that require a supermajority vote or voter approval to raise taxes.”

Noted tax expert Jason Mercier notes that “with the exception of Washington state, policymakers in the Mountain States (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) have been very active the last few years prioritizing tax relief for citizens while making fiscally conservative budget investments.” However, hope can always spring eternal for Washington to join in the tax relief trend here Center Square.

Here’s another tax relief idea that is likely too much to hope for, but at least this one is being written by a legislator, so some reporter might ask some Democrat what they think about it. Certainly, Representative April Connors was able to interest the News Tribune in her view that as “the sponsor of the Carbon Auction Rebate – CAR for short – I say it’s time to return a portion of the over-collected taxes back to the people.”

Rep. Connors was writing, of course, about the “over-collected taxes” from Jay Inslee’s cap-and-trade/carbon tax, as in just nine months, “the state has raked in $1.46 billion – nearly three times the $574 million in revenue the state predicted when the measure was signed into law.” Shift has noted repeatedly how the state is building a massive new bureaucracy dedicated to environmental extremism with those carbon tax millions, so read on to see whether you agree with the representative that “honest policymakers have a choice: We can act today or continue to tax families at this needlessly high rate, doubling down on a regressive tax system” here… News Tribune, Shift.

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