Goldy

Man was I wrong.

In a little more than seven months, 361 HA readers have now contributed a total of $30,090.39 to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark… over $4,600 coming during the last 24 hours. Wow.

Your incredible generosity has already accomplished two very important goals. Your contributions helped demonstrate the grassroots support that brought big donors and the DCCC into these campaigns. Without you, these races never would have become competitive.

And… your contributions have also helped demonstrate the growing power and efficacy of the netroots. If we were a PAC, our $30,000 would have made us one of the largest grassroots PACs in the state. This is the kind of money that forces politicians to take notice.

HA’s fundraising is even more amazing when you put it in perspective. Over the past seven months HA’s daily readership has averaged about 2,500 unique visits a day. (It’s now up to about 3,300.) That means on average, about one in every seven HA readers has contributed via our Act Blue page. Even more impressive, we’ve raised about $12 for every reader — that’s about four to five times the dollar-per-reader ratio of high profile sites like Daily Kos. Astounding.

So I want to thank all of you for your generosity and trust. When I first started pitching for Darcy and Peter, you had no assurances that either would make their race competitive. I promised you that you wouldn’t be throwing your money away, and you trusted me with your hard-earned cash. So again, thank you.

That’s it. I won’t be asking you for any more money this election cycle. But if you still want to contribute to Darcy and Peter they could definitely use your time. Personally, I plan to contribute a few hours via MoveOn’s innovative Call For Change program. Just sign up online and MoveOn will give you a script and some phone numbers to call.

Both races are going to be awfully close. Whoever turns out the most voters wins. Let’s do whatever we can over the next 10 days to make sure that the winners are Darcy and Peter.

Pope’s colleagues at the King County Bar Association rate him as “not qualified,” their lowest category, citing him for a history of unprofessional conduct. The Times suggests a vote for his opponent, judge pro-tem Frank LaSalata, whom the association pegs as “well qualified.”

So congratulations Richard, on the Times editorializing against you. It puts you in great company.

Since then, 25 of you have contributed an additional $2,666.00, taking us more than halfway towards our target in only 10 hours. Our running total of $28,090 leaves us a tantalizing $1,910 short of our goal.

This is it… the final 14 hours of HA’s last fundraising drive of the 2006 election. With your help, we can take back the House. So please dig deep into your pockets and give now.

UPDATE:
Peter Goldmark has officially been added to the Fourth Wave of the DCCC’s Red to Blue program. It’s the generous support of people like you who have helped Peter take WA-05 from a safe Republican district into one of the most competitive in the nation.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
8 AM and we’re up to $29,560.39! Three hours left in the drive, and only $440 to go. Who wants to put us over the top?

But it’s not simply Boehme’s far-right religious beliefs that make him out to be so nutty… although they do — Boehme has written that Satan controls our public schools and that America needs “a severe spanking.” It’s just that when Boehme says “I am a prophet,” and claims that God audibly talks to him, well… it gives one pause considering the man’s unstable family history.

Specifically, I’m talking about Boehme’s father, who the candidate proudly mentions in the opening paragraph on the About page of his campaign website:

His father, Robert Boehme, arrived in Port Orchard in 1950 at the request of the local Chamber of Commerce who were looking for more doctors. “Doc Boehme” served the medical needs of South Kitsap for over thirty years.

And, um, you know what else Robert Boehme served? Three years in prison for attempting to murder his third wife. That, after having been previously acquitted of attempting to murder his second wife. According to a Seattle Times article from July 11, 1986:

Boehme, 66, was a successful Kitsap County physician in 1961 when he was accused of trying to kill his second wife, Dorothy, by injecting poison into her arm with a syringe.

Boehme was acquitted of that charge in 1962. Three months after the trial, Dorothy Boehme, who had stood by her husband during the trial, died of staphylococcal meningitis.

But don’t you worry, Robert Boehme quickly rebounded from the tragedy.

In July 1963, Boehme married a former airline flight attendant who had been divorced from Boehme’s brother, a San Francisco physician. They are still married.

In September 1965, Boehme was charged with trying to kill that wife, Mary, by injecting her with a poison.

Oops. On TV they call that an M.O.

Robert Boehme was convicted in 1966, and served three years in prison.

So… here’s a self-proclaimed prophet who hears voices in his head and thinks Satan controls the public schools, and… well.. it just makes you wonder what curious personality quirks Boehme might have inherited from a father who infamously poisoned at least one, if not two of his three wives. (No word on what sad fate befell wife number one.)

But mostly, it makes you wonder how such a fringe candidate managed to win the Republican primary?

The worst is Initiative 920, to repeal the state estate tax. Paid for by a handful of multimillionaires, it slashes taxes for a handful of multimillionaires. The kicker: It all comes out of the hide of education, just as schools are laying off librarians or cramming 30-plus kids in classes. If ever an initiative deserved a thrashing, this is it.

Of course, the most vocal of these millionaires is Times publisher Frank Blethen. Nobody could possibly believe that there is uniformity of opinion on this issue over at the Times, but until now, nobody has had the nerve to publicly break ranks.

Danny and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I’ve always respected his work. This reminds me why.

The Republicans are now spending millions of dollars on two seats they never thought they’d have to seriously defend, and it would be a shame if Darcy and Peter missed out on the Democratic wave because they were outspent during the final week of the campaign. (That’s exactly what happened to Dave Ross two years ago.) It is time to dig deep down into our pockets and give until it hurts.

So here’s our target, and I know it’s ambitious, but I also know that we can do it. 317 readers have already given $25,424.38 via HA’s Act Blue page. Over the next 24 hours, I want you to help us hit the $30,000 mark.

This is perhaps the most important congressional election in a generation, so I am asking all of you to give as much as you can. A single reader could bring us most of the way towards our target simply by making the maximum $2,100 donation to each candidate, and surely, at least a few of my readers can afford this. I myself have worked my way into debt over the past year, rejecting paying work so that I could devote myself fully towards political activism, and yet I have just put another $200.00 on my credit card, split between Darcy and Peter. My hope is that a dozen or more of you will follow my lead with donations of equal or greater value.

This will be looked back on as an historic election, the one in which netroots activists truly started to reshape the political landscape. Please join me in making history. Please give what you can today.

In a rather odd audio clip available from McGavick’s web site, the candidate talks about Katrina, and the “the one image that cements it for my wife and I of why to run for the United States Senate.” No, it’s not the desperate refugees at the Superdome or the bloated bodies floating in the streets, and it’s not New Orlean’s poor trapped in the muck of their flooded city for days without food or fresh water. It was the politicians on TV attempting to exploit the disaster for “partisan advantage” that he and his wife were “most offended by.”

“That is wrong as wrong can be,” McGavick angrily told his audience.

Hmm. Perhaps that anecdote was just unartfully phrased, but it seemed to lack a certain, gee, I dunno… compassion. Of all the things to be offended by while watching our federal government fail to adequately respond to the desperate plight of the poor and displaced, political partisanship did not top the list.

(Indeed, I would argue that when the party in power so totally fucks up as to put lives at risk, it would be negligent of the opposition not to seek partisan advantage in an effort to seize control. But no, I suppose McGavick would have preferred the nation to rally around the president during our time of crisis the way we did in the aftermath of 9/11… the same sort of blind following the blind that ultimately led to our disastrous war in Iraq. But I digress.)

So. What kind of man could watch the tragically bungled emergency response that resulted from the dismantling of FEMA under President Bush, and conclude that our most urgent problem was not the incompetence of the current administration, but rather the political partisanship of those complaining about the incompetence? Well, a man who has little or no empathy for the suffering of others, and who is totally out of touch with the plight of America’s underclass, I guess.

As harsh as that conclusion might be, it is further reinforced by a comment McGavick made on Wednesday before the Bellingham City Club, in which he talks about the “comfortable lifestyle” of America’s poor:

“While the spectrum of wealth, from the wealthiest to the non-wealthy has become wider, it’s not true that all boats aren’t being lifted. The fact is that it is still better to be poor in America than any other nation on Earth. Because the fact is that we are able to provide a comfortable lifestyle across that spectrum.”

Uh-huh. The poor never had it so good. And you know McGavick knows what he’s talking about because until recently, he spent most of his life being poor himself… that is, if your definition of being “poor” is not having $28 million.

Kind of reminds me of an equally clueless comment made by the President’s mother after surveying Katrina refugees in an emergency shelter set up at the Houston Astrodome:

“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

I guess those are the types of lessons people like McGavick take away from disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

UPDATE:
In the comment thread Darryl blows a hole in my theory, pointing out that Katrina couldn’t really have been McGavick’s primary motivation, as he announced his intention to quit Safeco and explore a run for Senate over a month before Katrina hit. But then, I guess that’s what I get for believing Mike McGavick.

Boeing does not mention, either on its Web site or in its annual report, that Jeppesen’s clients include the C.I.A., and that among the international trips that the company plans for the agency are secret “extraordinary rendition” flights for terrorism suspects. Most of the planes used in rendition flights are owned and operated by tiny charter airlines that function as C.I.A. front companies, but it is not widely known that the agency has turned to a division of Boeing, the publicly traded blue-chip behemoth, to handle many of the logistical and navigational details for these trips, including flight plans, clearance to fly over other countries, hotel reservations, and ground-crew arrangements.

[…] A former Jeppesen employee, who asked not to be identified, said recently that he had been startled to learn, during an internal corporate meeting, about the company’s involvement with the rendition flights. At the meeting, he recalled, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said, “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights

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