Old-time reporter ignores old-time story, instead attacks…Shift

Earlier this week, Seattle P-I blogger Joel Connelly tried to come to the defense of the tax-raising Proposition 1 [“Republicans vs. Republicans on Metro rescue plan”] by pointing out that at least a couple of Republicans support raising the sales tax and adding a $60-dollar car tab charge throughout King County to subsidize the bloated (and Seattle-centric) Metro bureaucracy.

He paid a back-handed compliment to those select Republicans by suggesting they showed political courage and that “Gut-check time came early this year, and — with no help coming from Olympia — the King County Council showed guts.”

Of course, since Jay Inslee and legislative Democrats were the ones who stayed away from the transportation bargaining table through the last session in Olympia, despite several attempts by Senate Republicans to re-start the stalled talks with new offers, one might expect that the state’s most senior political writer would assign some blame there.

But that didn’t fit with the story Connelly wanted to write, so it turns out the villains in the raging Prop 1 debate are actually heavy-handed partisans – like the folks at Shift.

He makes light of SHIFT’s concerns over King County Council member Larry Phillips’ use of taxpayer resources to help Move King County Now, the pro-Prop 1 campaign. And Connelly makes an attempt to pit SHIFT against county council Republicans — who despite voting to put the issue before the voters are not in lockstep support of the massive tax increase (as he falsely claims in his blog post).

The veteran of the old P-I newspaper even suggested that the ongoing story about the secret, big-money Democrat attack network funded by the Progress Alliance of Washington is just a partisan “notion”. Evidently the more than $8 million which Alliance donors have admitted funneling over the last seven years into a variety of so-called “non-partisan” groups is not worth looking into if you’ve been around politics as long as Connelly.

Perhaps his longtime Democrat friends told Connelly to move along, nothing to see here. Just write something nasty about Republicans, that’s much easier.