Goldy

The only convincing thing one can say about yesterday’s KING5/SurveyUSA poll of the King County Executive race is that the top line is statistically unchanged from the one three weeks ago. Susan Hutchison drops a couple points, Larry Phillips rises one, while Dow Constantine and Ross Hunter remain steady. If there’s any motion, it’s from Fred Jarrett climbing from 4% to 7%, but even that might fairly be categorized as noise.

It’s hard to predict anything from these numbers except that Hutchison will make it through to the November election, but if I were Constantine’s folks I suppose I’d be somewhat buoyed, although Phillips does appear to be closing the gap with liberal voters.

Oddly enough, Hutchison continues to poll surprisingly well with liberal voters, relative to the other members of the field, which suggests that many voters just don’t know her very well yet. No surprise there, and something the Democratic nominee will ultimately have to work hard to correct, considering that word in the street is that the usual Republican suspects plan to spend $1 million on Hutchison’s behalf in the general.

Here’s hoping the usual Democratic suspects don’t get complacent.

UPDATE:
And speaking of the usual Democratic suspects, Constantine just beat out Phillips for the highly prized SEIU endorsement.

That’s what Eli Sanders is reporting over at Slog, and if true it would be very good news indeed.

Cantwell’s apparent opposition to a public option was always a bit puzzling, which made her low hanging fruit for organizations and activists looking to move a few crucial senators from nay to yea. All those constituents who made phone calls, sent emails, showed up at rallies and otherwise kept the pressure on Cantwell deserve a ton of credit for their effective grassroots activism.

As Erica reported yesterday over at Publicola, the whisper campaign regarding Seattle City Attorney candidate Pete Holmes is no longer a whisper, with both incumbent Tom Carr and his campaign manager Cindi Laws now publicly and repeatedly challenging Holmes’ eligibility for the office.

Today, Carr reiterated that view. “The charter provision says that you have to be both active [with the bar] and engaged in the practice of law in Seattle,” Carr said this morning. “He has not been practicing law—taking on clients, giving advice, doing the things that lawyers do.”

Well, here is what the City Charter says about the qualifications for the office of City Attorney:

The City Attorney shall be an attorney of the Supreme Court of the State, and have been in the practice of his or her profession in The City of Seattle for at least four years next prior to his or her election.

And here is what the Washington State Bar Association says about Holmes’ status as an active attorney:

Clearly, Holmes has been an “attorney of the Supreme Court of the State” since 1986 (five years longer than Carr, by the way), so that part of the requirement seems beyond dispute. As for the requirement that the City Attorney have been in the practice of law in Seattle for at least four years prior to the election, here’s what Holmes told me via email:

My Washington bar license has always been on “active” status. After 16 years in the private sector, City Council appointed me as the lawyer member of the OPA Review Board in 2002 (which expressly requires a WSBA member in good standing), where I practiced my profession in public service until the last quarter of 2008. I’ve been in private practice at Crocker Kuno PLLC since the first quarter of 2009. I was fully authorized to practice law during my OPARB tenure; I just didn’t accept private, fee-paying clients—and presumably Carr hasn’t either since 2002.

Now, I’m no attorney (much to my mother’s chagrin), but I don’t read anything in the City Charter that says anything about taking on private clients. If Holmes has been an active member of the Bar, and such membership was a requirement of his appointment to the OPA Review Board, then that sure sounds like practicing law to me, for why require an active attorney if not to benefit from his legal advice? And how, in this sense, is Holmes legal service to the city really any different from Carr’s legal service, except by volume?

But all this niggling, legalist nitpicking is really beside the point, for if Carr truly believed that Holmes was technically ineligible to run for the office of City Attorney, the appropriate course of action would have been not a whisper campaign, but rather a legal challenge to his eligibility under RCW 29A.68.011, alleging that Holmes’ name “is about to be wrongfully placed upon the ballots,” and to be filed in King County Superior Court “no later than the second Friday following the closing of the filing period for nominations for such office“… a deadline long since passed.

I mean, Carr is the sitting City Attorney for chrisakes. I assume he knows this stuff.

No, instead Carr and Laws appear to be raising questions about Holmes’ technical qualifications merely as an underhanded means of raising questions about Holmes’ professional qualifications for the office. “Hey look… this guy is such a crappy lawyer he doesn’t understand the law enough to realize he isn’t even eligible to run for the office!” That seems to be the message coming out of the Carr campaign.

What this sort of cynical, political maneuvering says about Carr’s own professionalism, I’ll leave up to you.

David Brewster thinks Susan Hutchison will be hard to beat because, amongst other things:

King County is a safe place to indulge in a protest vote, since the government is so peripheral.

Really, David?

In size, budget and population served, King County government is larger than that of twelve states. That’s why the Executive’s office is seen as a stepping stone to the Governor’s Mansion… in responsibilities and duties, it is equivalent to being governor of a small state. And increasingly, the county has been forced to deliver crucial services the state is no longer willing or able to provide.

If Brewster is right, and much of Hutchison’s apparent appeal comes from her being a “protest vote,” then our media has an obligation to explain to voters what King County government really does, and how spectacularly unprepared for the job Hutchison really is. (You know, other than being spiritually prepared.) This is a woman whose professional career has consisted of decades of reading scripts off a teleprompter, followed by a several-year stint writing checks on behalf of an eccentric billionaire. She has no political experience, no business experience, and no administrative experience. And no, President of the Symphony Board is not an administrative position; that’s what the executive director is for. (Though if Hutchison wants credit for the Symphony’s dire financial straits—it’s currently making payroll by eating into its endowment—I’m happy to give it to her.)

I’m as cynical about politicians as the next guy (even of many of my fellow Democrats), but at least I care about government. I mean, honestly, David… if you’re just going to write off county government as “peripheral,” when in fact its functions are central to maintaining the quality of life in our region, then you have no right to complain about the quality of candidates we get.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KXabe-ufpc[/youtube]

Answering questions from attendees at Mercer Island’s Summer Festival on Saturday, King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison affirmed that she does indeed oppose the legal right of women to seek an abortion.

Well… she didn’t actually say that, and in fact, she pretty much tried to avoid directly answering the question. But if you read between the lines, her answer was clear.

A friend of mine ran into Hutchison at the festival where she was glad-handing potential voters (she’s apparently older in person than she is on TV), and decided to ask her a few simple questions, the first of which concerning her position on medical marijuana. Hutchison, very much the politician, replied that voters had approved medical marijuana, and that as Executive she would uphold the law of the land.

Notice how she avoided giving her own position on medical marijuana (my friend looks like a bit of a hippy, so she probably figured he was for it), but at least that “upholding the law of the land” bullshit conveniently set the ground rules.

Next my friend asked Hutchison about abortion, which she described as a “controversial” issue on which we need to have “national conversation.”

Again, she avoided answering the actual question, but the thing is, legal abortion is also the law of the land… yet she didn’t mention anything about upholding that.

Medical marijuana… uphold the law of the land. Abortion… we need to have a conversation.

Telling.

Now some might object to me reading into her answers a meaning that might not be there, but since Hutchison refuses to publicly have that conversation she claims we need, what other choice do we have but to parse her words as best we can?

Over on Crosscut, Ted Van Dyk expresses his disappointment with Joe Mallahan’s campaign:

At local level, I am concerned that Joe Mallahan, though having a financial advantage (his own wallet) over other mayoral challengers to Nickels in next month’s primary, has not waged the well-managed campaign I would have expected. Voters clearly want a positive change from Nickels, and Drago is Nickels in drag. Mallahan, however, has not stepped smartly into the breech and established himself in voters’ minds as the hard nosed, businesslike, managerial type — with actual knowledge of economics and budgets — badly needed after eight careless tax-and-spend years of city governance. I have been surprised by Mallahan’s seeming lack of knowledge of city issues that have been on the front burner for several years. With his funding advantages, I had anticipated that by now he would be running in the front of the Nickels-challenging pack. He has a month left to get there.

Considering Van Dyk’s impressive political resume (did you know he worked in the Johnson administration?) I’m not sure why he’s so surprised at Mallahan’s relatively lackluster performance thus far, for self-financed candidates often run disappointingly mediocre campaigns. No doubt having a pile of money to spend on yourself can be liberating, especially from the daily chore of “call time,” but as tedious, time consuming and unpalatable as some candidates find it, fundraising also presents a crucial opportunity to listen to voters, hone one’s message, and develop crucial campaigning skills. Indeed, some of the best politicians I know tell me that they actually enjoy fundraising.

Running for office isn’t easy, nor should it be, for as imperfect a metric as it is, the strength, efficiency and passion of one’s campaign is often a predictor of future performance in office. There are many ways in which we weed out weaker candidates, and one of these is through their ability to raise money. Thus by skipping over this crucial step and jumping to the head of the line, Mallahan has missed out on all the political training and preparation that would have come with it.

On the flip side, had Mallahan not kicked off his campaign by sinking $200,000 of his own cash into it, it’s unlikely his candidacy would have been taken as seriously, and thus his subsequent fundraising efforts would have been all the more difficult. But why Van Dyk would conflate a fat wallet and a successful business career into an automatic expectation of a “well-managed campaign” is beyond me.

Money is damn important in politics. But how you get it can be pretty significant as well.

I have written before about the Discovery Institute’s infamous Wedge Strategy, and I have, of course, repeatedly mentioned Susan Hutchison’s close connections to Discovery. But an email from a reader raises a very interesting point:

Of course, running an undercover former board member in a suddenly “non-partisan” race fits the wedge strategy pretty tightly.

Indeed it does. Hmm.

All the more reason for Hutchison to answer the question of whether she supports Discovery’s stated goal: to overthrow traditional science “and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”…?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WWWIYeS4Q4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

The Seattle Times editorial board argues that “Congress should enact consistent sales-tax laws to even playing field for Main Street businesses,” and I suppose that seems like a fair and reasonable enough objective. But do they understand that there’s no practical way of achieving this goal without putting tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs out of business, including many here in Washington state?

I know this because I started and ran a small software development and publishing company myself for about a half decade during the nineties, which at its peak consisted of me, my (not yet ex) wife, and a single employee. And had we had the burden of collecting and remitting sales taxes to forty-some states, we never could have afforded to stay in business.

The bulk of our sales during those years, maybe 70% of our unit volume, went through a handful of major mail order catalogs, and thus the bulk of our wholesale product shipped tax-free to the Airborne facility in Wilmington, OH. No problem for us there, and I don’t have much sympathy for big catalogs and online retailers who oppose efforts to collect taxes on interstate sales.

But the bulk of our profits came from direct sales, an outlet that would have been all but impossible to administer had we been required to collect taxes for every state and municipality in which we did business.

The mail order catalogs “purchased” our main product, a rhyming dictionary for Mac and Windows, at half the $49.95 MSRP, and generally resold it at the discounted price of $32.00. ($3.00 overnight shipping was pretty much standard at the time.) But I put “purchased” in quotes because that’s not really how the scam worked. Rather, we swapped product for co-op advertising, the price of a fraction of a page costing us thousands of dollars a month, per catalog, by the time we gave up.

If they sold enough product to pay for the ad, as they did every Christmas season, the catalog would purchase more, and we would make money. If they didn’t sell enough product to pay for the ad, as happened most Summer months, we would owe them money. The catch: they wouldn’t sell us Christmas if we didn’t advertise during the Summer.

We sold a lot of product over the years this way. But we really didn’t make much money.

Direct sales, on the other hand, that was mostly profit. At a $39.95 “discounted” direct price, plus about $4.50 shipping and handling for Priority Mail, we could realize 85% gross margins, and the credit card transactions went directly into the bank (as opposed to say, Multiple Zones, whose refusal to pay one Christmas season ultimately drove us out of business). It was a lot of busy work handling the direct sales, and they rarely amounted to more than a few a day, but I enjoyed dealing directly with customers, and the steady trickle of cash flow they created.

In our best sales year we grossed maybe a few hundred thousand dollars, but the cost of advertising was so high that we barely broke even on the 90% of units that went through retail. But the $20,000 to $30,000 a year in direct sales… that, plus a little contract work on the side, was often the difference between paying our bills and going deeper into debt.

And here’s where the Times’ sales tax proposal really strikes home, for had we been required to collect and remit sales tax for every sales tax state—and on any given year we shipped at least a few units each to every one of them—we never could have afforded to sell direct at all.

For example, for several years we displayed at the August MacWorld Expo in Boston, and sold product on the floor as a means of defraying some of the expense, and as such were responsible for paying Massachusetts sales tax on that few days of business. A hassle, but fair enough.

When we stopped exhibiting at MacWorld, and thus stopped filing taxes annually in Massachusetts, their Department of Revenue noticed, sent us a bill for a big late filing fee, and suddenly insisted that we file quarterly. For over two years I had to sporadically deal with Massachusetts’ demands, as late fees and interest accumulated, and threats escalated. I’m not really sure why they eventually dropped their collection efforts, but it probably would have just made sense to pay them the money I didn’t owe, rather than expending so much time and energy fighting it.

Now multiply that by forty-some, and you get an idea of what small businesses might face if sales tax could be charged on interstate sales.

Even the so-called Streamlined Sales Tax Project isn’t nearly streamlined enough for truly small businesses—and I’m not talking about the 100-person companies the Times thinks of as small, but rather mom & pop businesses like my own—if it requires multiple rates and remitting to multiple states. We never had the luxury of affording an accountant, and we certainly couldn’t have afforded one if the Times’ favored proposal had been law. In fact, with the accounting nightmare it would have created, we couldn’t have afforded to stay in business at all.

And thanks to the Internet and services like Ebay, the number of small time entrepreneurs making all or part of their living via direct, interstate sales has exploded over the past decade, taking advantage of an extraordinary online marketplace that would simply be impossible if every vendor had to take the time and/or expense to file taxes in every state that levies a sales tax. I have no gripe with the goal of protecting brick and mortar businesses from the unfair advantage enjoyed by the major online and mail order retailers, but not if tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs are flattened in the process, many of whom are just supplementing their income with a few hundred dollars worth of sales a month.

I’ve had this conversation with state legislators eager to stem the loss of tax revenue to interstate sales, and they’ve mostly brushed aside my concerns, telling me that third-party service providers will magically arise to fill the gap and process the sales tax for me… but at what cost?  5%…? 15%…? 20%…? And at what minimum transaction fee? At some point, and particularly on low cost items, selling direct ceases to be worth the effort.

Indeed, the whole Streamlined Sales Tax Project shows an utter lack of imagination on the part of legislators, and a total lack of appreciation for the role of really small businesses in our economy. For the bigger problem, at least here in Washington state, isn’t the loophole that allows interstate sales to go tax free, but rather our over-reliance on the sales tax itself. That the Times and our legislators would prefer to crush a vibrant economy of small, online retailers rather than address the real revenue problem, shows just how unready they are to lead our state into the 21st Century.

Talk radio hosts nationwide breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when Judge Jeffrey Ramsdell threw the book at Scott Brian White, handing him a 20-year sentence for the brutal axe murder of former KIRO talker Mike Webb.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg had only sought a 12-year sentence in exchange for White pleading guilty to 2nd-degree murder, and courtroom observers had speculated that he could have received as little as 8-years, a precedent that some disgruntled listeners might have found awfully tempting. (Only 8 years for taking an axe to Dori? Hmm.)

Fortunately for me and the rest of my radio colleagues, White’s more appropriate sentence sends a clear message that we’re still considered legally human, at least here in King County.

So I was at MacPherson’s Produce up on Beacon Hill, and I said “Washington bing cherries for only $1.99/lb? Oh my God,” and God said, “Eh. You think that’s good? Look to your left.” And there I found nice looking organic cherries for the same price.

“Go ahead, taste one,” God said. So I did.  And it was good.

“You like mangos?” God asked, but then my phone rang, so I had to cut Him off.

… And apparently, He talks back:

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

Susie talks about her time as the weekend newscaster in Hawaii, and how demoralizing it was when she didn’t get the weeknight slot when it opened up. And so of course, she turned to God.

… And about that time I was so discouraged, I found myself on my knees to the Lord one day saying, “Lord, I am ready; I am professionally ready to move on. Why aren’t you doing it for me?”

And He told me something then that I have never forgotten, and I think it’s of tremendous significance to all of us no matter where we are, and He said: “It’s fine, I want you to be professionally ready for your job, but it’s also essential that you be spiritually ready for the next step.”

And I realized that I was going to be in the public eye, and as such I was going to be an ambassador in a sense for Him. And so, I realize that there are other things more important or as important as being professionally ready for anything. And that is to be spiritually ready.

I’ve got to admit that I’ve never really gotten the whole God thing, but a couple of things stand out to me, besides the fact that when Suzie talks to God, He matter of factly talks back. (I mean, if I started quoting God in my blog posts, folks would accuse me of being a liar or a lunatic… but maybe she just meant this metaphorically?)

First, what is this thing with Christians praying for touchdowns and lottery tickets and news anchor jobs, and thinking that God doesn’t have more important things to do than answer their petty, materialistic prayers? Children are starving, people are dying of horrible diseases, we’re on the verge of catastrophic climate change, and somehow I’m to believe that the Almighty Lord is taking sides in NFL games (regular season, no less), or advancing one news anchor’s career over another?

“Why aren’t you doing this for me?” Susie asks God, to which the appropriate response might have been “Leave me alone, I’m busy preventing a giant asteroid from wiping your species off the face of the earth.”

The other thing that strikes me about this snippet is the intended message… that there are more important things than being “professionally ready” for your job. And that is to be “spiritually ready.”

So I guess, in that sense, despite her utter lack of adequate professional experience, Susie believes herself to be perfectly qualified to serve as King County Executive.

UPDATE:
It occurs to me that I might still have a radio show today, if only I had prayed.

Former KIRO TV news anchor Susan Hutchison has been surprisingly media-shy since announcing her candidacy for King Executive, but according to a report on BlatherWatch, she wasn’t nearly so reserved—or calculatingly non-partisan—last Fall when she joined in the Obama-bashing fun with the right-wing talkers over on KTTH:

Her can’t-we-all-get-along is now, but last year she was trashing Obama, and loving up Sarah Palin in a conversation we caught on the fly last Fall in election crunch as she guested on the very conservative David Boze Show (KTTH m-f, 3-6p) with the host’s wife, Peggy Oban Boze.

The conversation didn’t mean much at the time. We knew it was Peggy Boze, but we didn’t know it was Hutchison. We remember snorting when she said something like, (we’re paraphrasing) “Why don’t Obama’s supporters just write in Bill Cosby’s name?” The ladies had a good laugh over that and at the idea, we guess, that, if these silly people must vote for a black guy, Dr. Huxtable would be safer.

Obama’s “terrorist connections,” Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright were mentioned, naturellement.

Why not just write in Bill Cosby’s name? Ouch. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to describe the comment as racist (after all, she’s still encouraging folks to vote for a black guy), but it certainly strikes me as a tad racially insensitive.

But more importantly, despite her careful efforts to present herself as a moderate non-partisan (you know, mostly by refusing to talk about where she stands on any issues), Hutchison’s radio performance places her smack dab in the mainstream of the KTTH crowd… which of course, isn’t mainstream King County at all. And it certainly ain’t non-partisan:

The Boze Show isn’t some lifestyle talker, it’s hard right. Peggy Boze is not just Dave’s ever-lovin’, she’s a conservative activist and was the McCain-Palin Chairwoman For King County. She was a member of the laughable Palin Truth Squad, a sock puppet front to “set the record straight” after “false attacks, rumors and smears ” against Sarah Palin. It amounted to no more than a list of national Republican women they wanted to hitch to Palin to help gain independent women whose votes were going for Obama.

Don’t get me wrong, Hutchison has the right to her own opinions, extremist as they may be. But voters also have a right to know what these opinions are. And if Hutchison refuses to talk openly and honestly about her political allegiances, philosophy and ideology, then the media will just have to piece it together for ourselves as best we can.

NOTE:
And if Hutchison disputes the similar accounts on BlatherWatch and in The Examiner, she should demand that KTTH make the audio public.

UPDATE:
BlatherWatch has since posted a correction, but I’m not sure that it’s warranted. No, Hutchison did not trash Obama on the September 28th broadcast, but most of the other broadcasts from last Fall are not available online, so that doesn’t mean that it was the broadcast in question. (And yes, I searched for the show, and listened to the 9/28 broadcast before writing my post.)

Regardless, the point is that Hutchison is a conservative Republican, something she paraded openly even on the September 28th show (in which Peggy Boze kvells “You’re our Sarah Palin!”), but refuses to admit it now, and she should simply not be allowed to hide behind this nonpartisan bullshit.