Archives for January 2006

Abrams certainly has a large enough personal fortune to finance his own campaign, but I think his dropping out is yet another indication of party support solidifying around Burner, who has proven to be a tireless campaigner and fundraiser. A year ago, few people would have given Burner a snowball’s chance, but now, the people in the know really believe that she can win in November.

UPDATE:
I just received an email from Menno van Wyk saying that he has informed Burner that he is not a candidate, and that he would do whatever he could to help her beat Reichert. So either my bird got Abrams and Wyk confused, or Burner is now running for the nomination unopposed.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Well, another little bird tells me that my first little bird had it straight. Apparently, both Abrams and Wyk have dropped out, leaving Burner unopposed. It looks like we have a nominee.

Also, I received a lot of responses about my plans to produce a weekly podcast from Drinking Liberally. I’d love to discuss this face to face with anybody interested in helping out, so please come on by.

House Democrats on Monday accused Republicans of dirty politics for mailing out 25,000 postcards that accuse certain lawmakers of being soft on crime and protecting violent sex offenders.

The postcards show a mug shot of a middle-age man with slicked-back hair. His eyes and his name are blacked out to shield his identity. The cards, shown in photocopies provided by Democrats, carry a bold headline that reads, “This violent predator lives in your community.”
…
The cards are part of a $75,000 Republican ad campaign that Democrats say is targeting lawmakers in swing districts for the November election. In addition to the cards, the campaign is using radio spots, television ads and automated phone calls.

“It’s politics at its worst,” fumed House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam.

It’s three days late, but the Seattle Times finally covers the story of the GOP’s bogus “Sex Offender Notification” postcards. One has to wonder, if the blogs hadn’t kept up the pressure, digging further into this story, if the MSM ever would have paid attention?

As the article makes clear, the GOP leadership remains unapologetic…

“I’m not going to apologize for playing tough,”

And untruthful…

House Republican Leader Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, said he had nothing to do with the ad campaign and referred questions to Kevin Carns, executive director of the Speakers Roundtable, a GOP political-action committee (PAC).

My question is… did DeBolt actually say that with a straight face? The Speakers Roundtable is an associated PAC of the House Republican Organizing Committee, with which it shares funding, office space, and staff. And this is not the first time DeBolt has lied to journalists. Can my friends in the media actually take this guy seriously again? He’s totally dissed you.

The truth is, the GOP’s entire sex offender legislative agenda was never anything more than a stunt intended to be used for political advantage…

Carns said there was discussion of an ad campaign even before the vote was taken…

And the Democrats are rightly furious…

“The entire postcard is a lie,” Kessler said.

For example, she said, although the postcards claim the sex offender pictured lives in a particular district, the same photo appears on all the cards.

And how does the GOP defend it’s deceitfulness?

Carns said the cards aren’t supposed to be taken literally. “I would have loved to put an offender from each specific district and not obscured their name. But we’d have put ourselves at liability to do so,” he said.

He used one picture, with identifying information blacked out, “as a metaphor,” he said.

Or was it an allegory?

Hmm. If you’re looking for a metaphor, Kevin, how about: “Eat me”…?

Oh. Well forgive me for not figuring that out. Stupid me (and Jon and Richard) were looking in Clark, Walla Walla, Kitsap, and King counties… you know… where the bulk of the postcards were actually mailed. You see, when we read the bold print at the top that said “This violent predator lives in your community” we just assumed the state GOP meant the community of the person receiving the postcard. Silly us.

Rep. Bill Grant represents the 16th Legislative District in faraway Walla Walla County. I sincerely doubt his constituents consider Pierce County to be their community.

Of course, then Stefan tries to switch the discussion off his GOP overlords getting caught in a disgusting and irresponsible dirty trick, and move onto the Republican meme that Democrats are soft on crime:

I suspect that part of the reason that the Ds wanted lesser sentences for offenders who are known to their victims is not, as publicly stated, to ensure more convictions of creepy uncles, but to protect teachers who prey on their students.

You know what Stefan… fuck you. If you actually believe that Dems would protect teachers unions over sexually abused children then you are just plain sick. And if you don’t believe it, then your are as dishonest and conscienceless as the GOP operatives who designed and executed this disgusting fear campaign.

Apparently, the “violent predator” living “in your community” depicted on the postcards really gets around. Or perhaps there’s something to the nefarious, Democratic conspiracy Darryl has uncovered…?

I’m not sure what I find more shocking… that the state GOP would stoop so low as to frighten families with a bogus sex predator warning… or that they would be so mind-numblingly sloppy as to picture the same fictionalized creep in six different districts ranging from Vancouver to Walla Walla to Kitsap County to Kent?

The postcards were sent into our district as well. Most of the calls that I’ve received (at my home and at my office)have been from people who are angry about the cards — feeling that the Republicans were politicizing the issue of protecting our kids. We have had a couple of folks who called to ask if they could get the address of this sex offender — people who were concerned that it was an accurate portrayal.

My wife and I are expecting our first child in March. Nothing is more important to me than making sure our child — and all of the kids in our state — are safe. I’m offended by efforts to play politics with important issues.

Rep. Kilmer also forwarded me a copy of an op-ed he wrote with Rep. Patricia Lantz, outlining the bipartisan sex offender bills they are co-sponsoring, and explaining the circumstances regarding the Republicans first-day-of-session maneuver, and the “outrageous” smear campaign in its aftermath.

I don’t generally blog on the same topic three posts in a row, but I want to impress upon my friends in the media the seriousness of this incident. The state GOP leadership didn’t just lie about their Democratic opponents… they mailed out a fake “Sex Offender Notification” postcard to tens of thousands of households scattered throughout the state.

Imagine how many parents have been unnecessarily frightened and angered to find this official looking notice in the mail, apparently informing them that a man convicted of abducting and assaulting children has moved into their neighborhood?

This is not politics as usual. This is not just another political dirty trick. This is a new low — at least for WA state Republicans — and it is unforgivably despicable.

My friends in the press have an obligation to inform the public about the truth behind this deceitful campaign. Let the GOP slide under the radar on this one, and you send a clear message to political operatives around the state that anything goes.

UPDATE:
Just thought I’d nip this lame excuse in the bud: yes… these postcards are directly linked to the state GOP leadership.

The postcards acknowledge they are paid for by the Speaker’s Roundtable, which is indeed an “associated PAC” of the House Republican Organizing Committee. The Roundtable’s executive director Kevin Carns and communications director Jennifer Pierson are also the HROC’s political director and communications director, respectively. Both the HROC and the Roundtable rent office space from the BIAW… which is also a major source of its funding.

Both the first-day-of-session stunt and the smear campaign in its aftermath were planned, coordinated, and paid for by the House GOP leadership. There’s no way around that.

Yesterday I did a quick hit on the state GOP’s vile “sex offender” mailing, not realizing that the image I used came from VanBlog, the new blog from Vancouver, WA’s Vanguard weekly newspaper. This oversight on my part is doubly disappointing, because I’ve been meaning to plug VanBlog and writer Jon DeVore, whose now defunct (and much missed) Columbian Watch was one of my favorite WA state blogs.

Jon is working on a piece about the scandal for Vanguard, and has provided updated information in my comment threads. And yes… I think it appropriate to start calling this disgusting misinformation campaign a “scandal.”

In my original post I said the Republican hit piece was “based on a lie,” an assertion perennial HA reader/GOP candidate Richard Pope objected, I had not backed up with facts. However, the lie to which I referred was the general lie of this whole campaign of lies… that the Democrats’ rejection of a procedural stunt on the first day of session was in any way a rejection of a particular policy or objective. I had actually assumed that the “sex offender” shown on the post card was an actual “sex offender” who actually lived in Rep. Deb Wallace’s 17th district. I mean… the Republicans wouldn’t be so stupid as to mock up a fake sex offender, would they?

Well… apparently… they might.

Jon explains in my comment thread that he has been trying to match the man pictured to known sex offenders, without any luck:

I did have someone sit down and go through ALL of the Clark County Level II and Level III sex offenders (the ones there are pictures for) on the state web site. (http://ml.waspc.org/) He found NOBODY that even remotely resembles the person in the mailer in Clark County.

I personally went through every photo of someone listed for “rape of a child” in Clark County myself today, with no matches.

And the usually staunchly partisan Richard reports similar results from his own research, eventually concluding:

Looks like the GOP mailing will backfire and generate a bunch of negative publicity. I can’t believe they were so stupid as to make up an alleged offender out of whole cloth. I wonder whether any of the 62 REAL Level III sex offenders listed for Clark County are quite as bad of character as the fictional fellow’s history portrays him to be.

Unfortunately, lost in the Republican’s cruel, insensitive, and stunningly stupid misinformation campaign — what Seattle P-I columnist Thomas Shapley calls “a cheap and shameful political stunt” — is a rational public debate over our sex offender laws, and what can be done to strengthen them.

For example, one of the most controversial provisions of our current law offers shorter sentences to offenders who abuse family members, as opposed to strangers… what our friend Richard cynically denigrates as a “Friends and Family discount.” But as Shapley points out, there’s actually a rationale behind this provision.

Coursing though all those debates is the understanding that the toughest prison sentence can be irrelevant without a conviction. Especially when family members are accused, there are demonstrable links between the severity of the potential sentence and the child victim’s willingness to testify or even report the sexual abuse. Do you really want to send Daddy or Uncle Harry to prison? It’s just another facet in the victimization of the child, of course, but it is a factor.

The true predators take smarmy advantage of this conundrum, using their position of trust and affection to prey on children, only to have the relationship they have perverted to their own gratification serve as a shield against prosecution or as a get-out-of-jail-free card into deferred prosecution and treatment.

“What’s a little child sexual abuse between friends and family?” … one might assume that’s the Democratic platform according to the vile, Republican rhetoric we’ve been hearing. But in fact, our current law was crafted the way it is at the urging of prosecutors. It may make for good political demagoguery to call for harsher sentences, but if the result is that fewer offenders are convicted, we’ll only be putting young victims at even greater risk.

And that, of course, is the larger risk of exploiting emotional issues like this to vilify your opponents: it short-circuits an informed public debate, raising the potential of bad policy and unintended consequences.

The truth is, this postcard was never about urging Rep. Wallace to protect children, it was about defeating her in the November election. So instead of conjuring up a fictional child molester, why not just cut to the chase, and paste Rep. Wallace’s photo onto the postcard? After all, that’s the message Republican strategists are really trying to send to voters.

UPDATE:
Further evidence of the GOP’s fake “sex offender” comes from a diary on Daily Kos that shows the exact same postcard, but this time addressed to voters in Rep. Bill Grant’s 16th District.

The postcards boldly warn voters “This violent sex predator lives in your community.” I hadn’t realized that the GOP’s sense of community was so broad that it spanned multiple legislative districts.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Collect them all! We now have images of postcards from the 16th and 17th districts. If anybody has a postcard from another district, please send me an image.

It is sick enough to exploit the victims of child sexual abuse for political gain, but to do so based on a lie is doubly unforgivable.

The conscienceless, grandstanding bastards at the state GOP have mailed out postcards like the one above in several districts across the state, targeting Democratic legislators. This is part of a well-funded, coordinated campaign from The Speaker’s Roundtable, that includes robo-calls and TV ads. And it is both offensively exploitive and incredibly dishonest.

As I previously reported, on the first day of session the Republicans set up a procedural motion to call for a vote on a 116-page legislative package that absolutely no one had read — not prosecutors, not police officers, not victim’s advocates, not the legislators themselves — knowing full well that the Democrats would reject such an irresponsible move.

But that’s what the GOP wanted; they had their mean-spirited advertising campaign in the can, just waiting for the Dems to give them an excuse to launch it.

If the Republicans really wanted to pass some legislation on this issue they would have sat down with the Democratic leadership — which supports much of their proposal in principle — and crafted a bipartisan package. But apparently, they couldn’t give a flying fuck about the victims of sexual predation beyond how they can cynically use them for political gain.

Yeah, politics is a tough game and all. But this is really disgusting.