Archives for July 2008

One more sign of the favorable political climate facing Democrats this cycle is the sudden reversal of Republicans’ formerly unassailable fundraising advantage in districts nationwide. And we’re not just seeing the inevitable impact of Democratic incumbency here; according to an analysis released today by CQ, of the best-funded House challengers this cycle (as measured by cash on hand), nine of the ten top spots are held by Democrats.

And who should we find near the top of the list, in position number three?

3. Darcy Burner, Democrat, Washington’s 8th ($1.2 million). Burner, who was formerly employed by Microsoft, is taking on two-term Rep. Reichert ($916,000) in a suburban Seattle district in which she came within three percentage points of unseating the congressman in 2006. Burner’s challenge is one reason why Reichert is among the most vulnerable Republican incumbents; so too is the likelihood that his district will back Barack Obama over John McCain for president. CQ Politics Race Rating: No Clear Favorite.

Burner is also one of the few challengers on the list with a substantial cash on hand advantage over the incumbent… a margin that I expect to substantially widen at the end of this month’s pre-primary reporting period. And as CQ notes, this isn’t the only advantage Burner is likely to have come November:

Some of these Democratic challengers may also benefit from added assistance from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats that has tens of millions of dollars more than its partisan counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee, to spend on television ads and other campaign communications.

The DCCC has already booked a million dollars worth of TV ads in WA-08 this fall. No word yet of an NRCC ad buy on Reichert’s behalf.

Obviously, Burner’s hard fought fundraising advantage puts her in a better position to win this November than she was heading into the 2006 election, but it also tells us a bit about the relative support of the two candidates. According to OpenSecrets.org, Burner and Reichert have raised similar amounts in-district and in-state, but the real disparity comes when looking at individual vs PAC contributions. Thus far Burner has raised 84% of her funds from individual contributors, a constituency that provides only 59% of Reichert’s funds. That’s a huge difference, and a disparity that’s likely to grow between now and November.

It’s gonna be a nail-biter, but if I were Reichert I’d be pretty damn worried.

Over the weekend we’ve been following a story here in Clark County about a local couple who appear to be the target of racist vandalism simply because they dared to put a Barack Obama yard sign in front of their home. The Columbian ran a small item on Friday night:

Someone scratched the words “White Power” on a car belonging to a Vancouver family who recently posted an “Elect Obama” sign in their front yard.

On Sunday, Frank Wastradowski, who lives northeast of Southwest Washington Medical Center, noticed the vandalism on the side of his wife’s 1993 Plymouth. The letters, likely scratched with a key, were about 8 inches tall.

“It’s a hate crime and it’s time we get past racism,” he said.

Wastradowski said he won’t take the sign down, adding, “That’s my freedom of speech.”

Now KPTV-12 in Portland has a story up about the incident, and we learn that the words “I’m gay” were also scratched into the car. Since the KPTV story features Karen Wastradowski, Frank’s wife, one can only conclude that the vandals were quite intent on displaying their vast stupidity for the world to see.

There are a couple of things worth noting here. Yes, Clark County has its share of unrepentant bigots. Earlier this year the son of a Battle Ground city council member was charged with cyberstalking over virulently racist emails sent to a black council member and other community members. So while vandalism is not exactly an unusual thing during the summer months, it’s also not acceptable to just shrug off racist defacement of private property as “just kids being kids.” They learned it somewhere.

A small ad-hoc group of us here is working on setting up a donation fund for the Wastradowski’s so they don’t have to drive around in a car that says “White Power” on it. My fellow blogger Aneurin at Politics is a Blood Sport has been following the story here and here. Aneurin has talked to Frank Wastradowski, and unsurprisingly the couple did not have full coverage on the car (nothing against 1993 sedans, of course.) We’re working on some details about how to set the fund up and to do it in a way that will aid the Wastradowskis rather than just make a partisan statement.

In a larger sense, if someone can’t place a yard sign for a major party candidate in front of their home without this sort of thing happening, we don’t really have much of a democracy. At this point we are hoping some local Republicans will also come forward and denounce this attack and perhaps throw in a small donation as well.

As things progress I’ll keep HA readers up to date. It might be easy to ignore a relatively small and stupid act of vandalism, but the Wastradowski’s need to know that the community won’t tolerate this sort of thing and will take positive actions to counteract it.

And one other thing, which is in the “gee, that’s kind of curious” file, is that Frank Wastradowski used to be the campaign treasurer for former state Senator Don Carlson, R-Vancouver. There’s no way to know if the vandals knew that, unless someone is caught, but it’s still pretty ironic.

Sure, the guy is nuts, but this is what inevitably comes from violent, eliminationist rhetoric:

The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.

Jim D. Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he described his feelings and why he committed the shooting, Owen said.

Adkisson said he was frustrated about not being able to obtain a job and how much he hated the liberal movement, Owen said.

Adkisson hated liberals… and so he shot up a Unitarian church. During a children’s play.

Committing suicide by going on a shooting rampage in a Unitarian church is like shooting fish in a barrel and expecting the fish to shoot back. The Unitarians I’ve known are about the most peaceful and harmless folks I’ve ever met; indeed, the only church less likely for Adkisson to find armed resistance would have been a Friends meeting house. (And even then, only maybe.)

So of course this guy was crazy. Sane people don’t go on shooting rampages.

But hatred like his doesn’t grow in a vacuum; it is nurtured, shaped and focused by hate-mongers like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, who cheer at the notion of killing a few liberals to keep us in line, or who have made careers out of vilifying the political opposition as terrorists or traitors or worse. No, neither Coulter nor O’Reilly nor any of their cohorts pulled the trigger, but they surely understood that their words might feed the insanity of someone who could. If these are the mullahs of the extremist right, then the liberal-hating homicidal Adkisson is a suicide bomber of their own creation.

Say what you want about the aggressive rhetoric of netroots activists like me, but we don’t advocate violence, because we understand that ultimately, the sole purpose of advocacy is to incite action.

UPDATE:
Sam Smith at Scholars and Rogues weighs in:

Jim Adkisson was an unbalanced man, and perhaps it was only a matter of time before he snapped. But two questions to ponder: first, who created the conditions that hastened the snap? And second, when the train jumped the tracks, who created the bogeyman that the diseased brain latched onto as the cause of all the pain?

[Read more…]

When I clicked on the headline in today’s Seattle P-I, “Statewide primary races getting little voter attention,” and saw that it was an AP wire story, I just had to laugh.

Do ya think, maybe, the reason voters are paying so little attention to down ballot races, is that our dailies are paying so little attention to them?  Hmm.  It’s a plausible theory, you gotta admit.

It’s been nearly two weeks since Seattle Police raided the Lifevine offices in the University District. The return of the medical records for several hundred patients resolved the most egregious error made that day, but the police continue to hold onto 12 ounces of medicine which was also confiscated. The medicine belongs to Martin Martinez, a registered medical marijuana patient. The police recognize that Martinez is a registered patient, was allowed to be in possession of the marijuana, but for unclear reasons, they are refusing to give it back.

(Just to provide some perspective, I have no idea who provides medicine for Martin, but if he were forced to replace what was taken through the black market, it would cost him a couple thousand dollars)

I briefly spoke with Leo Poort, an attorney working for the Seattle Police Department, who was vague about why the police were doing what they were doing and referred me to Martinez’s attorney, Douglas Hiatt. At the Cascadia NORML website, the following explanation of the relevant law is provided:

There is no justification for police to seize medical marijuana from a legal marijuana patient. WA State law is very specific on that point. RCW; 69.51A 040 reads: “If a law enforcement officer determines that marijuana is being possessed lawfully under the medical marijuana law, the officer may document the amount of marijuana, take a representative sample that is large enough to test, but not seize the marijuana”.

Police authorities have misconstrued that sentence to mean that officers may or may not confiscate the medicine at their discretion, but as any student of the English language can plainly see, that interpretation is completely incorrect. The word “may” in that sentence clearly applies to the last section of that sentence, not the entire subject of the sentence. We believe an educated jury will agree that WA statute 69.51A 040 means: “officers may take samples of the medicine, but they may not seize the marijuana when they have determined that marijuana is possessed legally by a patient.”

Seattle Police continue to stonewall Lifevine Attorney Douglas Hiatt who has made several verbal requests for the return of the 12 ounces seized on July 15, 2008.

On Saturday, I was at a BBQ with some friends. I’m at that age where a lot of my friends have young kids, and one of the older kids (around 5 years old) was playing with his toy phaser. The adults were playing along, pretending to get shot and falling down. Eventually, a slightly older boy saw the fun, wanted the phaser for himself, and just took it right out of his hands. His mother had to explain to him that you can’t just take something from someone for no reason. This is a lesson I expect to see being taught to kindergarten-age kids. The adults in the Seattle Police Department who we trust to serve and protect us shouldn’t need it too.

Some amount of attention has been paid in recent years to the enormous amount of special interest money that has flooded into our state Supreme Court races. This is part of a nationwide pattern in which the US Chamber of Commerce alone has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade targeting judicial races, successfully building pro-business, conservative majorities on benches in state after state.

But here in Washington we elect all our judges, from the Supremes all the way down to our local municipal court… low profile races that, given the restrictions on the candidates (they are actually barred from talking about issues), often turn on name recognition more than any other factor. And to gain name ID, you gotta spend money, mostly in the form of expensive direct mail campaigns.

Take for example the race for King County Superior Court Position 22, a three way contest between Julia Garratt, Holly Hill and Rebeccah Graham. This is one of those rare, easy judicial races for me because Graham is not only an extremely qualified attorney who has presided over thousands of cases as a Superior Court pro tem judge… she is also a close personal friend. That said, I hadn’t intended to write about the race because I don’t feel particularly qualified to judge judges, and I don’t think my personal endorsements hold much sway.

But this race illustrates a deeper problem with the way we elect judges, a problem which deserves a broader dialogue.

Take a look at the “Cash Raised” column in the PDC reports, and it looks like a pretty damn competitive race, with Garratt, Hill and Graham raising $14,370, $14,595 and $11,240 respectively. That’s the amount of money folks like you and I have given to the candidates, but in this race it tells much less than half the story, for while cash contributions represent the sum total of what Graham has raised thus far, Garratt has loaned her campaign an additional $12,600, while Hill has invested a staggering $70,000 in personal funds into her own race.

$70,000! That’s more than twice the total contributions raised by nearly every other candidate running for King County Superior Court, and from what I know about local judicial races, it’s gotta make Hill the hands down favorite. It just blows her opponents out of the water, and you can be sure that this was exactly her intent.

I don’t bring this up as a personal knock against Hill; while she doesn’t come anywhere near the valuable bench experience Graham has accumulated over her six years as a pro tem judge, I’m told Hill is both a good attorney and a good person. But are all our citizens really best served by a judiciary where personal wealth—and the willingness to use it—becomes the most important qualification?

Of course the real solution is to stop electing judges in the first place. I’m about as engaged a voter as you’ll find, and I generally have no idea who to vote for in judicial races. (I usually ask Graham and my other lawyer friends for advice.) But no matter how wise, this state is never going to vote for less Democracy, so the system we have is pretty much the system we’re stuck with.

But what we can do is move toward a system of public financing that would lift the fundraising burden from our judicial candidates (who aren’t even allowed to directly solicit funds in the first place), and remove the distorting role of money from races for offices that I think we all agree should remain scrupulously apolitical.

Unless, of course, you’re a free market ideologue who believes that society is best served when everything—even justice—goes to the highest bidder.

Now this is a great political ad.

This week, former State Department counter-narcotics official Thomas Schweich wrote a bitter piece in the New York Times Magazine about how his attempts at fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan were undermined by everyone. I did my best to unravel this man’s grand delusions.

No, the headline isn’t referring to I-1000 mentioned below, the sensible and humane statewide initiative that would allow physicians to (legally) prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients under narrow circumstances. Rather, I’m talking about Eric Alterman’s column in today’s Seattle P-I, chronicling the slow, sad death of our daily newspapers.

The flight of readers and advertisers to the Web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku.

For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the(ir) lowest point in modern history.”

When losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed $3.9 billion in value in just the first 10 trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of those companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone.

It’s been nearly 2 1/2 years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.”

And yet the strategy continues unabated.

The accountants may tell you that the logical thing to do is to cut expenses in line with declining revenue, but I’m pretty damn sure newspaper publishers would be better off heeding Ivans’ commonsense observations than those of the bean counters. The newspaper industry is in the midst of a rapid and dramatic transformation that does not have to lead to its death. Now is the time for innovation and risk taking; those who gamble right will win and thrive, while those who gamble wrong may perish. But those who don’t gamble at all—who merely continue to do the same old thing, but less of it—will slowly and surely drift off into oblivion, their own obituary dominating the front page of their final edition.

And that’s a death without dignity.

Personally, I’m rooting for the Times and the P-I to gamble right. I know there are some at those papers who take my relentless criticism as some form of deep seated hostility, but I’m a child of Watergate, an avid newspaper consumer who grew up idolizing reporters. Yeah, sure, I’m a tough critic… but only because I care.

And if anybody in management at either daily ever wants to sit down and talk with me about my ideas for reimagining the newspaper business (some of which don’t even include hiring me), I’m always up for a cup of coffee or a beer. You know how to reach me.

Former Governor Booth Gardner’s Death with Dignity Initiative (I-1000) officially qualified for the November ballot this week. Carla Axtman from Blue Oregon reflects on the campaign to bring the original Death with Dignity law to Oregon ten years ago.

“As if the cost of gas and food weren’t high enough, the Seattle City Council is planning a twenty cent tax on every grocery bag, and a costly ban on take out food containers… Enough is enough!”

“We don’t need another hit to our pocketbooks,” the exasperated voice on the radio ad tells us… but who exactly is “we”…? A consumer protection organization? Advocates for the working poor? Knee-jerk, anti-tax ideologues like my good friends at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation?

No, as Paper Noose reveals over at Blogging Georgetown, the ad is produced and paid for by one of Seattle’s most beloved and engaged civic organizations, the… uh… American Chemistry Council.

Actually, this radio ad is a creation of the ACC’s faux environmental arm, Progressive Bag Affiliates, whose stated mission is to promote “the responsible use, reuse, recycling and disposal of plastic bags,” and whose oh so “progressive” members include:

• Advance Polybag, Inc.
• The Dow Chemical Company
• ExxonMobil Corporation
• Hilex Poly Co., LLC.
• Inteplast
• Superbag Corporation
• Total Petrochemicals USA, Inc.

Yup. You can’t get much more progressive than that.

So as you listen to the ad, remember that polyethylene bags aren’t the only kind of plastic garbage these chemical companies produce. They’re also pretty damn good at astroturfing.

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/7801.mp3]

Former Washington State Supreme Court justices Faith Ireland and Robert Utter have notified Attorney General Rob McKenna and county prosecutors that they intend to file suit against the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) and the Master Builders Association alleging massive public disclosure violations, unless prosecutors take action within 45 days. From a press release issued this morning by their attorneys:

A secret campaign war chest created by leaders of a statewide builder’s association to influence this fall’s gubernatorial election has been openly challenged by a group that includes two prestigious former State Supreme Court justices: Robert Utter and Faith Ireland.

The amount of money amassed by the BIAW has been estimated at upwards of $3.5 million. Contrary to state law, the BIAW and the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish County (MBA) are not registered as a Political Committees, nor have they publicly disclosed the sources of their campaign money.

[…] Former Justice Faith Ireland supports the effort to force transparency in the electoral process. “Washington has good public disclosure laws and when they are enforced, we will have a transparent, accountable political process. Without enforcement, sneak tactics and last minute ambush can unfairly influence the outcome of important races,” Ireland stated.

Former Justice Robert Utter agrees. “I believe the actions of the BIAW violate the letter and spirit of the public disclosure law in this campaign season and in past seasons as well. The law provides for a process to test these concerns. I look forward to a successful determination of the issues.”

I’ve only quickly skimmed the Notice of Intent to Sue, but the arguments look pretty compelling and well supported, and it’s hard to believe a couple of former Supreme Court justices would get behind such a suit if they weren’t pretty damn confident about the legal underpinnings.

Attorney Knoll Lowney calls the BIAW’s actions perhaps “the most significant violation of campaign finance laws in state history,” and the consequences could end up being much, much greater than just a PDC fine. Almost as an afterthought the press release mentions another pending case:

In a related matter, a class action suit (RE Sources v. BIAW) is pending in Thurston County. That lawsuit, filed by BIAW trust beneficiaries, alleges that BIAW funneled trust money that was earmarked for marketing and promoting worker safety into their political activities. That class action seeks accounting, preservation and restoration of the BIAW trust fund. Questions relating to this action may also be answered at the press conference.

If successful, this suit could force the BIAW to pay back into the trust fund the millions of dollars it has illegally spent on political campaigns over the years, essentially bankrupting the association. Gee, I sure hope our state’s radio and TV stations are getting cash up front for all those lying BIAW ads.