Goldy

Impeach Dick Cheney, or invade Iran. Your choice.

Shit. I hate it when I agree with the Seattle Times editorial board. (Actually, I kinda like it when I agree with Times, but it’s a lot more fun to trash them.)

The Times takes former real estate salesman Dino Rossi to task for his faux “nonprofit, nonpartisan” think tank, that’s really just a dodge for running his 2008 gubernatorial campaign without revealing its contributors.

Rossi’s group could well be legal, but falls in a gray area. The group is keeping Rossi’s potential gubernatorial candidacy alive through speeches and travel. […] The state Public Disclosure Commission is doing preliminary work before beginning an investigation on Rossi’s group and may not conduct a full investigation. It should decide whether such a group is legal under campaign laws or if such activities violate the spirit of our laws, which is more likely.

[…] Voters have a right to wonder why Rossi invented a group and pretends it is not part of a campaign.

The Times goes on to say that even if he technically managed to skirt our state’s public disclosure laws, “Rossi ought to announce contributors and the amounts donated.”

Yeah, fat chance. The Stranger’s Josh Feit talked with Forward Washington executive director Ted Dahlstrom today, who said: “We have not violated any rule. We have no plans to disclose our list.”

If anything, the Times’ admonishment was too reserved. Forward Washington is a ruse, and everybody knows it. It doesn’t just allow Rossi to hide the identity of his big money contributors, it also allows them to vastly exceed campaign contribution limits. And oh yeah… Rossi gets to draw a salary… expressly forbidden in a real campaign. Sweet.

Rossi ran in 2004 as an agent of change, promising to shake things up in Olympia after two decades of Democratic governors. Now we see the kind of change Rossi was talking about.

UPDATE:
You know what…? The more I think about it, even I was being too reserved:

I first posted this back on December 23 of 2004. In this Public Disclosure Commission filing, Rossi declares that he is running for governor in 2008, and if you look above his signature you’ll see that he certifies that this report is “true, complete and correct.” And he continued to file with PDC until February of 2006.

So then… what happened to the $324,000 he’d raised for his official 2008 campaign? What happened to the computers, office furniture and other assets his 2008 campaign bought? What happened to the $79,000 he had left over in the bank? Did he really shut down his campaign and start Forward Washington, or did he just hang a different shingle on the door?

Now Rossi claims that he was only raising money to pay for his lawsuit? Well, he was either lying to the PDC back in December of 2004… or he’s lying to the PDC (and the public) now.

There’s no question that Rossi is intentionally skirting the law, but if the PDC determines that this is technically legal, than he has laid out a roadmap for killing public disclosure and campaign contribution limits in Washington state. Every candidate can be “undeclared” or “undecided” until officially filing. Every candidate can run a shadow campaign, hiding contributors, and directly drawing a salary.

The public has a right to know: who is paying Dino Rossi’s bills? The only thing stopping this disclosure is Dino Rossi.

There’s a lot of speculation going on as to why Mariner’s manager Mike Hargrove would quit the team in the midst of a promising season and an eight-game winning streak. Well I’ve got my own theory: al-Qaeda.

And in the face of such an imminent threat there’s only one thing the Mariner’s can do if they want to save their season. We must bomb Iran. And Pakistan. Preferably with nuclear weapons.

Destroy “America’s pastime” and you destroy America. It is time for an preemptive strike.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: Are you afraid?
The headlines keep screaming about “massive car bombs” in London and Glasgow, but fifty gallons of gas, a propane tank and some nails is no Oklahoma City. Are you willing to give up your civil liberties and commit to “The Long War” to battle threats like this? Is the greatest economic, political and military power in the history of the world really threatened by attacks such as these?

8PM: Is the Clinton Obama nomination inevitable?
Hilary Clinton was long assumed the inevitable Democratic candidate for President, but the second quarter fundraising results suggest it won’t be quite that easy. While Clinton estimates about $27 million raised for the previous quarter, Barack Obama will raise a record $32 million, for a total of $56 million from an astounding 256,000 contributors over the past six months. Is President Obama inevitable?

9PM: Do we have the Will to fix our transportation problems?
Fellow HA blogger Will Kelley-Kamp joins me in the studio to share some unconventional wisdom on the upcoming Sound Transit II/RTID proposal. Are we willing to tax ourselves to build 50 new miles of light rail? And will our grandchildren forgive us if we don’t?

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

Well, HA is still pretty fucked up. Posts keep disappearing. Then reappearing. Then disappearing again. A moment ago, the site loaded back on the old server. And now we’re back on the new, technically challenged one.

I’m not sure I’ll get this addressed until the real support staff come in on Monday morning. So please bear with me.

With the discovery of Mike Webb’s badly decomposed body today, the mystery surrounding the former 710-KIRO host only deepens. His body was found under a tarp, stuffed in the crawl space of his Seattle home, weeks after being reported missing. The King County Medical Examiner’s office has determined that Webb died of multiple stab wounds. The talk-radio blog Blatherwatch is providing ongoing coverage.

I introduce each hour of my weekend show, proudly announcing that I am “bringing liberal political talk back to Newsradio 710-KIRO.” I always emphasize the word “back,” and in doing so, I’m always referring to Mike Webb, who sat in front of that very same microphone, infuriating local conservatives for nearly a decade.

But while I’m proud to carry on Webb’s legacy of speaking truth to power, I must confess that I rarely listened to his show. So Saturday night during the 8PM hour of my show, I’ll play a few clips of Webb at work, and unable to present a fitting tribute of my own, I’ll ask his friends and fans to call in with their own remembrances of Webb and his radio career.

The site was down, sorta, for I don’t know how long, or exactly why. Apparently, most people could still access the site via Internet Explorer, but not via Safari or Firefox, and nobody could leave comments. Odd.

Anyway, dealing with this has killed my morning. Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE:
My hosting company claims it made no changes one way or the other, so apparently, HA magically fixed itself… you know… just the way free markets do.

Netroots favorite Darcy Burner may yet face a challenger for the Democratic nomination in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, but she’s already reinforced her standing as the primary front runner, hiring Dan Kully of Laguens, Hamburger, Kully, Klose to produce TV and radio spots for her 2008 campaign.

And man does he work fast.

Widely acclaimed for his work on U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s high profile win in Montana — including the memorable hair cut ad — Kully has become one of the hottest properties in the business. And, after an impressive, come-from-nowhere 2006 campaign that brought her within a couple points of the Republican incumbent, Burner found herself aggressively courted by some of the nation’s top media firms.

That Burner and Kully chose each other, says a lot about the kind of campaign we can expect to see in 2008. From this blogger’s perspective, it’s a “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” kinda fit.

Burner is likable, funny, quirky and damn smart — qualities that never fully came across in her well-produced but run-of-the-mill TV spots. Sure she’s young, and a bit of a geek, but those should be pluses in a district that’s home to Microsoft and many of our nation’s high tech leaders.

Kully’s genius is at communicating a candidate’s strengths, even if they’re not quite the strengths the inside the Beltway crowd typically focuses on. He’s creative, aggressive, incisive and not afraid to flout convention. And as a huge bonus, he’s local, heading up LHKK’s Seattle office. Not only does Kully know the region and the state — he did the highly effective media for the No campaigns that helped defeat I-912 (gas tax repeal) and I-933 (takings) — he’s geographically situated to give Burner the attention she needs as the campaign unfolds.

The spot above, the first fruit of the Burner/Kully collaboration, is a good indicator of where this campaign intends to go… and where it should have gone in the final months of the 2006 season. It is a parody of Dave Reichert’s derisively sexist “job interview” ad, and hits back hard at the congressman’s own poor performance in office. If Burner’s biggest perceived weakness is lack of experience in public office, it is also one of her greatest assets, especially with Reichert continuing to carry water for an unpopular President on many of our nation’s most pressing issues. Burner is put forth as an agent of change, a role for which political outsiders are particularly well suited.

The spot also displays a willingness to be as creative as the candidate, and that’s a welcome change from the focus-grouped messaging of the 2006 campaign, and the paint-by-numbers look-and-feel of its media.

Burner is in the process of putting together a team that should strike fear into the heart of Reichert’s handlers, and reason into the minds of potential Democratic challengers. Burner is also on track to come out of the quarter as one of the top candidates nationwide, but she’s still about $20,000 shy of her target. So if you want Burner to be the candidate in 2008, send a message now by sending her some money.

It’s gonna be a helluva a campaign.

Since dropping its racial tiebreaker in the face of a lawsuit by parents, Seattle’s high schools have grown dramatically less integrated. And now that the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a sweeping, 5-4 decision ruling Seattle’s racial tiebreaker unconstitutional, school districts across the nation will swiftly re-segregate.

Indeed, but for some caveats in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion, the Roberts Court has all but overturned the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to desegregation throughout the South and the rest of the nation. Writing in dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer warns that this is a decision we will all regret.

Finally, what of the hope and promise of Brown? For much of this Nation’s history, the races remained divided. It was not long ago that people of different races drank from separate fountains, rode on separate buses, and studied in separate schools. In this Court’s finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. For Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. It was the promise of true racial equality.not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the Nation’s cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one Nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live.

Not everyone welcomed this Court’s decision in Brown. Three years after that decision was handed down, the Governor of Arkansas ordered state militia to block the doors of a white schoolhouse so that black children could not enter. The President of the United States dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, and federal troops were needed to enforce a desegregation decree. See Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1 (1958). Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this Nation have changed dramatically. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. The long history of their efforts reveals the complexities and difficulties they have faced. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. The plurality would decline their modest request.

The plurality is wrong to do so. The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.

Seattle is gradually becoming a segregated school district. Those on the right who cheer this decision, and who cheer their success at establishing a rigidly ideological majority on the bench that has no use for the doctrine of stare decisis and no respect for the wisdom of those justices who came before them, will be held politically accountable for the consequences of their agenda. Unfortunately, politics will come four years too late to save our nation from the Roberts Court.

Republicans should beware. This is a court, that should it live up to its principles, will overturn Roe v. Wade. And that disaster would surely lead to the unraveling of the Republican Party, if not its permanent destruction.

Yet another tragic consequence of liberalism’s misguided efforts to gut the Second Amendment….

A three-year-old boy died after shooting himself in the chest with a handgun in Clarkston.

Police say the boy was apparently playing with a 9mm semi-automatic at the home of his mother’s boyfriend on Monday. The name of the child, who is from Lewiston, Idaho, and his mother have not been released.

Police say the boy went inside to use the bathroom, and apparently found the gun in a bedroom drawer.

If only everybody was armed, perhaps another three-year-old could have stopped him.

My righty critics sometime email 710-KIRO, accusing me of being a “hate talker,” apparently in the hope that I’ll be fired from my weekend hosting gig. (Tip to righty critics: management sometimes actually listens to my show.)

Well, if I’m a hate talker, what do you call this…?

Over at AMERICAblog, John Aravosis responds, “If you or I said this, we’d be arrested.”

Hmm. Would we? Let’s give it a try:

If I’m going to say anything about Vice President Dick Cheney in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.

There, I said it. Come and get me. It’s Tuesday night, so you know where I’ll be… sharing a beer or two with my fellow terrorists at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E., Seattle.

Washington State Democratic Party Chair Dwight Pelz has sent a letter to King County Council members, urging them to approve Executive Ron Sims proposal to purchase additional ballot tabulating machines, and in it he makes an important point about the integrity of elections in King County and throughout the state:

In 2004 ballots were tabulated by the existing Diebold-based system. Subsequently there was a machine recount, followed by a manual hand re-count – the ultimate possible audit. In each case the accuracy of the present Diebold – based system was confirmed. While the vote did change between the original tally and the machine recount and the hand re-count, changes in the vote totals were always attributed to ballots added or subtracted to the mix, such as the “voter intent” ballots ruled on by the Canvassing Board. In fact, the current system has experienced numerous recounts over the years, with no identified failures by the hardware or the software.

I wouldn’t trust Diebold touch-screen voting machines as far as I could spit, but even the most paranoid election watchdogs must admit that our statewide hand recount was indeed “the ultimate possible audit” of the paper ballot tabulating machines. And the audit found that there was absolutely, positively no tabulating fraud.

Read the full text of Pelz’s letter here. (And check out my nifty new plug-in.)

Just another reminder to those who forgot, that the race to succeed the late Norm Maleng as King County Prosecutor is a partisan race, and that Republican Dan Satterberg is not Norm Maleng.

Dan Satterberg, the acting King County prosecuting attorney, has promised to keep his office out of politics by explicitly barring his 250-lawyer staff from contributing money or endorsements to his election campaign.

But that, in his lawyerly interpretation, doesn’t prevent one of his top deputies from aggressively seeking political endorsements for Satterberg from a long list of the county’s most prominent lawyers and law firms. They include many who do work — some in the millions of dollars — for the prosecutor’s office.

Satterberg said Friday that there is nothing inconsistent between his admonition to his staff “to remain above politics” and the effort of Sally Bagshaw, chief of the prosecutor’s civil division, to ask members of numerous law firms not only to endorse the interim prosecutor but to encourage friends and lawyers in their firms to do likewise.

Nothing inconsistent. I guess that depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Here is what Bagshaw wrote to about 100 attorneys at the region’s top law firms, some of which get millions of dollars of business directly from the division she runs:

Judy Maleng and I are supporting Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecuting Attorney. […] Our goal is to get the top lawyers in King County to endorse Dan early, and I would like to place 1000 lawyers’ names onto the website this week. I have two requests: may I add your name to our growing list of supporters, and will you help me garner endorsement support from others in your law firm? We’d like to get as many people from within your firm as well as your lawyer friends outside the office to add their name to our list. I appreciate your taking the lead on this.

And here is what Satterberg wrote to his staff in announcing his candidacy:

I will be proud to continue the policy that Norm established to not permit members of the office to either contribute money or a personal endorsement to my campaign. There are strong historical reasons for this prohibition; it is best for the office for employees to remain above politics.

Apparently, Bagshaw can “remain above politics” while asking attorneys who do business with her to “help me garner endorsement support from others in your law firm.” Apparently, “supporting” and “endorsing” are not the same thing.

A lawyerly interpretation indeed.

Imagine if President Bush had pledged that his administration would remain above politics in 2004, only to have Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld send out an email soliciting support from the nation’s top defense contractors. This is kinda like that.

Nobody is suggesting that Bagshaw’s email violates the law or any ethical code, or that such political solicitations are even unusual. It’s just that Bagshaw’s political efforts, and Satterberg’s lawyerly defense of them, clearly don’t meet his pledge to keep his office above politics.

And while nobody is suggesting a quid pro quo, firms that received over $7.2 million in contract work from Bagshaw and the PAO, certainly know on which side their bread is buttered. As do the junior attorneys. Don’t kid yourself that a lawyer doesn’t know what’s expected of him when his boss asks him to endorse a candidate. It’s not just endorsements that this email is intended to generate, but tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

And this isn’t just speculation. Democratic hopeful Bill Sherman said that he has been contacted by attorneys at firms all over town, complaining about the pressure they were receiving.

“It made them uncomfortable because of business their firms do with the county,” Sherman said. “They were telling me they feel like they were put in an awkward position by an important client.”

Satterberg can’t have it both ways. He can’t claim to keep his office above politics at the same time he grants approval to a top aide to use the prestige of the office to garner endorsements and contributions. The fact is, this is a political campaign, and Satterberg and his supporters are doing what it takes to win. And regardless of Satterberg’s best intentions, we should never forget that this is also a political office.

If Satterberg is going to run on Maleng’s legacy, it is only fair that he be judged on his actions as well as his words. And while Maleng surely earned the admiration and respect with which he has been memorialized, it is also important to remember that he was a political animal himself. Maleng had unfulfilled aspirations for higher office, and as much as he tried to keep politics out of the PAO, he used his position and prominence to raise money and garner support for his fellow Republicans. No doubt Satterberg would do the same.

By all accounts, Bill Sherman and Dan Satterberg are both professionally qualified, in their own ways, to administer the prosecutor’s office. But to insist that somehow a Satterberg administration would in some way be less political, is just plain silly.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: Has King County Elections gone to the dogs?
This week we learned that a woman registered her dog to vote. I’ll explain why this is an example of an elections system that works.

8PM: Does liberal talk radio work?
The Center for American Progress this week released a report, “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” that finds that 91-percent of weekday talk radio programming is conservative. Imagine that. Um… why?

9PM: Faith-based capitalism
Fellow HA blogger Lee joins me for the hour to level his critique on “faith-based capitalism.”

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

It’s hard to be a loyal Republican these days.

When Vice President Dick Cheney refused to comply with an executive order regarding classification and declassification of government materials — asserting that his office “does not consider itself an entity within the executive branch” — even arch-conservative Instapundit criticized the argument as “politically idiotic and legally self-defeating.”

The Vice President really isn’t an Executive official, and isn’t part of the President’s administration the way that other officials are — for one thing, the VP can’t be fired by the President: As an independently elected officeholder, he can be removed only by Congress, via impeachment. (In various separation of powers cases, the Supreme Court has placed a lot of weight on this who-can-fire-you test).

[…] But here’s the thing: Whatever executive power a VP exercises is exercised because it’s delegated by the President, not because the VP has it already. So to the extent the President delegates actual power (as opposed to just taking recommendations for action) the VP is exercising executive authority delegated by the President, but unlike everyone else who does so he/she isn’t subject to removal from office by the President (though the President could always withdraw the delegation, of course). However — and here’s where the claim that Cheney is really a legislative official creates problems for the White House — it seems pretty clear that the President isn’t allowed to delegate executive power to a legislative official, as that would be a separation of powers violation. So to the extent that this is what’s going on, the “Cheney is a legislative official” argument is one that opens a big can of worms.

It certainly does. And Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is striking back with the inevitable retort, introducing an appropriations amendment that would eliminate funding for Cheney’s office.

“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. […] However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President should be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the Vice President’s funding is consistent with his legal arguments.”

While it is fun to ridicule Cheney for his “man-size” safe, his disappearing emails, and his penchant for spying on White House staffers — Fox News commentator Juan Williams described the VP’s machinations as “a game in order to keep Dick Cheney in, I guess, some sort of secured undisclosed bunker of his mind” — these latest revelations are also somewhat frightening. That Cheney would even attempt to argue that his office is legally exempt from both executive orders and congressional oversight is an offense to the Constitution, and a shocking example of just how fragile our democracy can be in the hands of man who does not respect our democratic institutions.