The folks over at the Seattle Times who write the opinions that don’t appear on the news pages must be channeling their inner Governor Jay Inslee these days, as they try desperately to get people to support the state’s carbon tax by continuing to mislead people about the carbon tax.  That’s all that can be taken from the paper’s prime Sunday editorial, which at least conceded “clearly, ‘cap-and-invest’ will need reforms to survive.”

The fact that the Times chooses to identify the carbon tax by the Democrats’ chosen nickname (“invest” is the Democrat term for taxpayer handouts to their campaign donors) indicates how deeply the leaders at the state’s largest paper have drunk the climate change Kool-Aid. However, the writers do quote one sane Democrat as pointing out an inconvenient truth for his party: fuel costs “went up too much, too fast, leading to price shocks at the pump. That was avoidable if we’d implemented this in a more thoughtful way.”

Unfortunately for Washington state taxpayers, “a more thoughtful way” eludes us as long as Gov. Inslee and his fellow environmental extremists control state government. Read on to see that the Times did embrace one idea which Republicans have been proposing – that the state should return some of its windfall carbon profits “back to motorists. One possibility is a car tab rebate” here… Seattle Times.

The right to keep information from public eyes has been a key priority of Washington’s Democrat-controlled legislature, as Shift has writtenabout often. Now the Tri-City Hearld is trying to generate some public outrage at this long-standing practice, imploring readers that if they “take only one thing away from this editorial, let it be this: Washington’s lawmakers are choosing secrecy.”

Unfortunately, the editorial writers are afraid of offending the powerful too much, and try to spread the blame over all legislators, as opposed to the Democrat leaders who “have collaborated to manufacture a right to keep the public in the dark about legislative affairs that will diminish the people’s ability to hold elected officials accountable.” Remember that Democrats have been the only ones making rules in Olympia for years, and see how they “crave secrecy” here… Shift, Tri-City Herald.

The Democrat “public safety agenda” of jamming through laws putting criminal rights before crime victims has been covered extensively by Shift. Increases in specific crimes thanks to specific laws passed by specific Democrats is so clear that 16 mayors in Pierce County have written legislators demanding action, pointing out on the pages of the (Tacoma) News Tribune that “(W)e have experienced open drug use, increases in the number of vehicles stolen, increased property crime, increased eluding from police, and an overall disregard for public safety.”

All those increases in bad behavior have come after Democrat legislative actions making it easier to do crime than to do time in Washington state. One mayor highlighted that car theft is skyrocketing and that “this increase is a direct result of people knowing that law enforcement cannot pursue them for stealing a car.” Read on to see why “consequences stemming from recent changes to state laws have made it harder for local jurisdictions to meet their responsibility to keep communities safe” here… Shift, (Tacoma) News Tribune.

Four billion dollars will buy many things in the state of Washington. Whether investing that amount of money in culvert demolition can help bring back endangered salmon is very much in doubt, leading the Yakima Herald to suggest a possible legal approach of asking whether “all this work is even helping anything. Salmon populations are still declining, so the argument could be made that replacing culverts isn’t solving the problem.”

Of course, culverts are a problem, since after “years of legal wrangling and a trial, (a) judge ordered the state to replace 800 culverts in western Washington and open 90% of upstream habitat by 2030.” You can read on to see how that money could be used elsewhere and “would buy miles of smooth pavement and sturdy overpasses” here… Yakima Herald.

Shift was launched a decade ago in part as counter-balance to the massive spin machine that exists here on the Left thanks to the Progress Alliance of Washington and its very deep (and very dark money) pockets.  The success of Democrats investing their dark money millions in branding anything they disagreed with as “extreme” is most apparent in the ideological shift in voters noted in Crosscut, with pollster Stu Elway highlighting that “a mark of how deeply political polarization has taken root here in historically moderate Washington, partisans of both parties consider the presumptive nominee of the other party to be a literal threat to the country.”

Those of us who began voting last century can remember a time when candidates would lead with their policies, not their party ID, in an attempt to attract votes. But as Elway reminds us, as “partisanship has taken on stronger elements of personal identity, there are few real ticket-splitters these days.”

Read on for his view on why “Washington used to be a place where people talked about ‘voting for the candidate, not the party.’ That has changed in just one generation” here… Shift, Crosscut.

Thanksgiving may have passed, but reasons to be thankful have not. That’s why Shift wants to highlight the Capital Press coverage that “thanks to a much larger harvest, Washington apple shipments to foreign markets are up 127% over the previous season as of mid-November.”

The state’s apple commission is even more pleased to note that the “volume is up, but we also have more high quality, consumer choice varieties available.” And lest you think this is not that big a thing, remember that “Washington’s top crop is apples, and the harvest in 2022 was valued at $2.07 billion.” More apple facts are here… Capital Press.

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