Over at The News Tribune's Political Buzz blog, Joe Turner takes aim at House and Senate Democrats for complaining that their pathetically paltry efforts at tackling the $8 billion deficit aren't getting much press. An excerpt:

[Speaker] Chopp told us Thursday that next week, he will share with us the timetable for when Democrats will show us what they're doing. At least then, we'll know for how much longer we won't really know what they're doing. Great. That's progress, I guess. ...

[Senate Majority Leader] Brown is annoyed with the Press Corps because we keep asking questions about taxes -- when? how much? which taxes? how will the money be spent? Those are pesky question. The are the wrong questions and, consequently, we reporters are writing the wrong kinds of stories, in Brown's judgment.

 And Joe's golden line:

See, Brown considers the Press Corps merely an extension of the Senate Democratic propaganda machine. If we aren't with them, then we're against them. There is no middle ground.

But in all fairness, we do need to point out that the legislature is taking bold steps to address the deficit. Today they unanimously passed a bill allowing the code reviser to save paper by deleting captions, subheadings and tables of contents from state the RCW when removing those sections will not affect code.  The savings from these bold steps? Drumroll please.......$43,000.

I'll leave it to the press corps to investigate how lawmakers were able to reach such broad consensus on this issue without focus groups and blue ribbon commissions.