It must be getting embarrassing for State Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig, who was forced during the recent legislative session to assure the media that his fellow Democrats were done hiding public records from public view, and is now having to interrupt his summer to essentially say, “oops.” At least that’s the impression from this latest report from Crosscut that the “Washington state Senate has released a new batch of lawmaker emails and text messages that had been redacted using a legally unproven exemption designed to shield government information from the public. The records were released months after Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig said all such information from his chamber had been disclosed.”

Open government advocates, reporters, and opposition researchers are now going through this oddly timed batch of Democrat mistakes, and this “latest release raises more questions about how the Legislature has handled its self-proclaimed constitutional right to black out documents like lawmakers’ text messages, emails and memos, which all must be disclosed under Washington’s voter-approved Public Records Act.”  You can read how Democrats like State Senator Patty Kuderer (who is seeking a promotion next year to Insurance Commissioner) really don’t want to talk about their desire for secrecy here… Crosscut.

Two things seem certain about Governor Jay Inslee’s expensive state’s cap-and-tax law, which Democrats jammed through the COVID-lockdown legislative session in 2021. The first is that the carbon tax law is complex. The second is that Governor Inslee (and the partisan special interests which benefit financially from the future decisions being made by Inslee) will use that complexity to try and avoid responsibility for the higher gas prices which the law is intended to cause (as Shift has highlighted). But cracks are appearing in that second certainty, as even the Seattle Times is now highlighting an academic expert pointing out the problem of the Democrats’ position: “The idea is, yes, we want to try to cap emissions, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for customers in one state to pay outrageously more than anyone else to reduce the carbon emissions of just that one state.”

It’s sad to read how the Inslee administration is congratulating itself – “Successful auction of cost-containment allowances held” – for recently conducting an emergency scheme triggered after the Department of Ecology so badly managing the program’s launch that it blew through price caps it set (something California has never done in 10 years of administering the nation’s other cap-and-tax law).  You can read how one of the early cheerleaders of the law (and the state’s largest utility) Puget Sound Energy tells the Times that now “PSE ‘is concerned about the high costs of Washington’s cap-and-invest program’ with cost-control mechanisms ‘triggered so early in the program’ ” here… Shift, Seattle Times.

The numbers speak for themselves, but they don’t seem to be speaking loudly enough for the so-called “progressives” on the Seattle City Council, who are “progressing” towards an August vacation while drug use remains legal on city streets due to their inaction. And as King 5 reports, “no state in the U.S. saw a more significant increase in drug overdose deaths year over year than Washington, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Washington saw 25.3% more reported drug overdose deaths in March 2023 than in the same month in 2022.”

You can see in-depth just how the “data shows no state was close to Washington when it came to the rise in drug overdose deaths” here… KING 5.

Washington voters who have followed Governor Jay Inslee’s mistake-ridden wandering through three terms in Olympia, or who read Shift, will recognize that blaming all bad things on climate change is not a new tactic. However, the tragic fires in Hawaii are showing Democrat politicians from governors on down trying to shirk their own responsibility by blaming it all on climate change, giving a real climate scientist like Clif Mass the opportunity to point out that “the fires ‘had nothing to do with climate change, like zero’.”

You can read a detailed explanation that uses actual science, not political sound bites, as “Mass says there was something that could have been done to help prepare locals for the fire threat: warn them” by reading on here… Shift, KTTH.

The Mariners are already done for the day, so here’s a podcast to fill part of your evening listening. The Seattle City Council races are now set for the general election, and as “KUOW Politics editor Cat Smith puts it, things are getting spicy in some of the races.”

You can find out that she “saw some surprising shifts after the initial round of results”, giving you a complete scorecard here… KUOW.

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