I don't think the folks at Slog intended me to use my posting privileges here to blog-whore my posts at HA, but there's a bullshit story making its way through the national media about how illegal immigrants are supposedly attempting to steal the election for Washington state Democrats, and since nobody else in our local media seems willing to debunk it, I guess that responsibility will just have to fall to me.

Essentially, an AP reporter interviewed four immigrant volunteers out of the 150 working on Seattle-based OneAmerica Votes' outreach campaign, and one of them admitted to being undocumented. So of course, that became the headline and the lede... one which the Seattle Times credulously reprinted, unchallenged.

“It’s a shame,” [OneAmerica Votes director Pramila] Jayapal lamented. “The way that this whole story has been spun is scary.”

And ironic, especially considering that at the same time the FOX News crowd frets over a 13-year, tax-paying undocumented resident urging her fellow immigrants to exercise a precious right she doesn’t have, our media has for the most part shrugged off as politics as usual the tens of millions of dollars of out of state money pouring in to influence our local elections, many of the contributors undisclosed, and some of them even foreign.

Anyway, read the whole damn thing. And then send the Seattle Times an email asking them why they are perpetuating such crap instead of debunking it?

While Eli gets to do respectable shows like KUOW's Weekday, because he's a serious journalist or something, I'm relegated to the gutters of AM talk... where I'll be chatting with KOMO-1000's John Carlson at 9:35 AM this morning, about my feature in this week's Stranger on Dave Reichert's Brain.

(At least, I think John's still on KOMO-1000... Fisher keeps moving him around so much I can't keep it straight.)

This comment, from Joe Szilagyi, is worth hearing:

Hey, lets do an initiative that says as a condition of running you MUST appear in at least two broadcast debates to appear on the ballot. Who could object to that?

I don't know about an initiative, but really: When did it become acceptable for a candidate running for Congress to simply refuse—full stop—to debate his or her opponent on television close to balloting time?

We're seeing that in two high-profile, hugely important U.S. House races this year: Koster vs. Larsen in the 2nd District, in which Koster just refused to debate Larsen on television, and Reichert vs. DelBene in the 8th District, in which Reichert wouldn't agree to any televised debates at all (in addition to not offering to take questions in ElectionLand).

These two races will help determine who controls Congress in the fall. And, not to get too grandiose here, but they will also help determine the future of this country. The voters in these districts deserve televised debates between their candidates for U.S. House as they prepare to mark their ballots.

What... wait a minute. Isn't it supposed to be Rep. Dave Reichert who gets to use the Seattle Times as both a sword and a shield against his Democratic challenger?

Not this year. And so I'm awfully curious to see if Suzan DelBene can manage to use this sort of third party media validation to finish off what two campaigns by Darcy Burner, and a tree limb to the head, couldn't.

Twice, Burner came close to knocking off perpetually vulnerable Reichert, and twice she failed to close the deal. In 2006, Burner came from nowhere to draw within the margin of error during the final weeks of the campaign, only to have her momentum blunted by Reichert's insulting (and ironic) ditzy blonde ad. And in 2008, Burner appeared to have gained the upper hand by the time the ballots dropped, only to be torpedoed by the Seattle Times' incredibly misleading "diploma-gate" story, and the barrage of Reichert attack ads that pounded it home.

In both races Burner spectacularly achieved a challenger's first task, which is to make a strong case for firing the incumbent. But she never managed to accomplish the second task—which is to convince enough swing voters that she is a preferable alternative—and so in both elections she ultimately fell short.

As much as I admire Darcy, and continue to believe that she would have been a Congressional rock star if elected (think Alan Grayson, but without the crazy), I have to admit that her electoral defeats were partially due to both her own shortcomings as a candidate, and the failure of her campaign to effectively respond to Reichert's closing attacks. But I've also no doubt that her challenge was exponentially compounded by the aggressive hostility shown to her by the press.

Lacking a political resume to run on, Burner could have sorely used the third-party validation of a major editorial endorsement. I mean, if only Burner could have closed with the sort of ad above that DelBene just released, you just gotta imagine that the results might have been different. Instead, she was forced to fend off a vicious media kneecapping.

I know the fading ed board at the fading Seattle Times still likes to fancy itself a political kingmaker. And I guess we'll soon find out if it still is.

If there is ever a political figure who is purely the figment our local media's imagination, it is the silver-haired sheriff, Rep. Dave Reichert, a man whose entire political career is built upon the fiction that he single-handedly brought to justice Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.

But as Michael Hood explains in blunt detail in a re-post of his excellent series on the subject that first ran in 2006 on HA and BlatherWatch, Reichert's oft repeated tale is total bullshit....

Sheriff Reichert became the public face of the sensational arrest of the serial killer by elbowing his way in front of the cameras on November 30, 2001 when the sensational collar was announced.

Everyone knows Reichert is the guy who caught the Green River killer, because he reminds us in every introduction; every speech, interview, and on his website.

It helped get him elected in 2004 in his race against KIRO radio host, Dave Ross; and he still flogs it every time he opens his mouth....

But...

The fact is: technology caught the killer, not Detective Reichert's dogged shoe-leather sleuthing as his press so dramatically implies. Even then, on Sheriff Reichert's watch, the saliva sample that could have busted Ridgway as early as 1996 when the DNA technology became available, was not tested until 2001.

Women died in that interim.

In fact, as Part II of Hood's series explains, Reichert actually bungled the case almost from the start of the investigation:

Frank Atchley, who supervised Reichert in the 1980s, told the P-I that Reichert "actually was more of an impediment to the investigation. He was probably the worst detective I've ever worked with," Atchley said. "He developed tunnel vision."

He's talking about Reichert's lock on one suspect: an ornery cab driver named Melvyn Foster. They had butted heads in an interview early on and Guillén writes, "... an acrimony developed that seemed to taint Reichert's judgment on Foster's viability as a suspect for years." He was so convinced of Foster's guilt, the task force focus disasterously excluded everyone else.

Including Ridgway, who our local media myth-makers fail to tell us, became one of the earliest suspects in the case, after an area woman accused him of trying to abduct and strangle her... the Green River Killer's signature M.O. So much of a suspect that the brother of Ridgway's employer claimed in a call to my former 710-KIRO radio show, that the police went as far as to interview him.

Interviewing family members of employers; that shows a certain amount of interest. But Reichert was so focused on his ornery cab driver, that they let Ridgway go, allowing him to continue his killing spree for 18 more years, until someone in the Sheriffs office — not Reichert — took the initiative to DNA-test a near two-decades old saliva sample.

Had I been Reichert at the moment that DNA test crossed my desk, suddenly confronted with the reality that my own incompetence had led to the deaths of innumerable women, I would have been heartbroken... distraught... wracked with guilt. But Sheriff Dave, he snapped on his dress uniform, posed for the cameras, and rode that tragedy all the way to Congress.

But as despicable at that might be, it's nothing compared to the malpractice of our local media, whose unselfconscious myth-making enabled Reichert to build a political career upon the graves of dozens of murdered young women.

While it's at least comforting to see most of our state's daily newspapers endorsing Democratic Sen. Patty Murray over Republican foreclosure speculator Dino Rossi, there's one repetitive tidbit in these editorials that just, well, strikes me as galling: the popular myth that Rossi deserves credit for balancing a state budget.

For example, in the Seattle Times endorsement of Sen. Murray, just about the only unqualified compliment they could toss Rossi's way was praise for his allegedly "impressive credibility balancing a state budget," while the Columbian, in their endorsement of Rossi, was even more effusive:

In 2003 Rossi was a state senator and, as chairman of the Senate Ways & Means Committee, he played a major role in writing the state budget. Not only did Rossi bridge partisan gaps in ways that were unseen this year in Olympia, he balanced a budget without raising taxes, something else unseen in Olympia this year.

Uh-huh.

Problem is, that's not really the way the 2003-2005 budget played out. In fact it was Democratic Gov. Gary Locke who first proposed an all-cuts budget, and Rossi who merely followed up a couple months later with a few modifications to make it even more draconian.

Don't believe a foul-mouthed, partisan, liberal blogger like me? Then perhaps you'll trust the Seattle Times own contemporaneous reporting from April 2, 2003, under the no-lines-to-read-between headline, "Senate budget in line with Locke's":

The Republican budget has much in common with the all-cuts plan that Democratic Gov. Gary Locke unveiled in December. In fact, Rossi opened a press briefing yesterday with a PowerPoint presentation titled: "Following the Governor's Lead."

The Columbian can laud Rossi all it wants for "bridging partisan gaps," but how hard was it when a Democratic governor presented him with what was essentially a Republican budget? Indeed, far from writing the 2003-2005 budget, Rossi himself described his efforts as merely "following the governor's lead..." you know, except for proposing to cut an additional 46,000 children from Medicaid, Rossi's most substantial deviation from the Governor's plan, and one which fortunately did not even make it into the final draft.

At least, that's the way the 2003-2005 budget process was reported at the time. It wasn't until a year later, during his 2004 bid for the governor's mansion, that our local media accepted Rossi's revisionist narrative unchallenged, and the myth of Rossi the Bipartisan Budget Writer Extraordinaire was born.

And it's a myth that will prove enduring, not just because our local media now has six years invested in promoting it, but because, really, apart from that, what else is there to write about Rossi's relatively unremarkable legislative career, other than his dogged opposition to abortion and gay rights?