Goldy

I’m heading off to Yakima for a day of u-pick and me-drink. So here’s a special Open Thread, Sunday Edition. Have at it.

… Chief Justice William Rehnquist is dead. May he rest in peace.

After dismally failing to adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina, FEMA Director Mike Brown must now prepare to weather the full fury of the MSM. The Boston Herald struck first, corroborating my post that reported Brown was forced to resign from his job at the International Arabian Horse Association. And now Knight-Ridder further exposes the stunningly unqualified Brown with a scathing bio that is sure to hit sunday papers across the US.

From failed Republican congressional candidate to ousted “czar” of an Arabian horse association, there was little in Michael D. Brown’s background to prepare him for the fury of Hurricane Katrina.

“He’s done a hell of a job, because I’m not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm,” said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief. “The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience.”

As Josh Marshall explains in his coverage on Talking Points Memo, Brown’s main qualification for the post — perhaps his only — is the fact that he was a college roommate of former FEMA head and Bush political fixer Joe Allbaugh. And as Knight-Ridder points out, Brown’s prior experience with disaster was a disastrous run for Congress.

Brown ran for Congress in 1988 and won 27 percent of the vote against Democratic incumbent Glenn English. He spent the 1990s as judges and stewards commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. His job was to ensure that horse-show judges followed the rules and to investigate allegations against those suspected of cheating.

“I wouldn’t have regarded his position in the horse industry as a platform to where he is now,” said Tom Connelly, a former association president.
…
“He just wouldn’t follow instruction,” said Bill Pennington, another former association president. “Mike was bullheaded and he was gonna do it his way. Period.”

It was Pennington who confirmed to the Herald that Brown was indeed asked to resign, and even Connelly, who speaks positively about him, calls Brown “abrasive.” This is consistent with emails I’ve received from a number of horse breeders — even those who respect him — who call Brown a “tough bastard” with a quick temper.

No doubt Brown had many enemies at the IAHA, and while there are conflicting stories as to the direct circumstances surrounding his resignation, he clearly fell victim to inside politics. Some say Brown was forced out by breeders angry at strict rules and enforcement, others say it was the burden of costly litigation. But the most convincing explanation I received was this inside report:

To help pay our mounting legal bills, there were people raising money for the IAHA Legal Defense Fund. Mike was suppose to be helping to raise some of the money. Mike it seems was trying to raise money for his own legal defense fund as well as IAHA’s and some people were willing to donate to him. There were two major problems with this. First, ALL of Mike’s legal bills including any personal ones were to be paid by IAHA. So he had NO legal bills so there was no reason for him to need this money to pay legal bills. Second, Mike was in a position that he needed to be seen as never playing favorites or having any loyalty to any individual. Many felt that taking this money would look very bad.

I was not personally at the IAHA Board of Directors Meeting when this occurred however I have been told about it by several people that were there and they all give the exact same story. There are many other things that people did not like about Mike’s job performance at IAHA but this is why he resigned.

Essentially, Brown was raising money from the very breeders he was charged with regulating, and that was the straw that broke the horse’s back.

But I don’t think the reason behind his resignation really matters. The point is, nothing in his IAHA tenure prepared him for running FEMA. Indeed, the fact that he fell victim to the inside politics of a horse breeders association, calls into question his ability to function amidst the high stakes political gamesmanship of the nation’s capitol.

The other issue that has become abundantly clear is that the misleading reference to the Olympics that was in the White House press release announcing Brown’s nomination was no accident. The transcript of Brown’s confirmation hearing shows virtually the identical wording used in the opening statement from Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

Prior to his current job, from 1991 to 2000, Mr. Brown was the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, an international subsidiary of the National Governing Organization of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Yet a number of IAHA/AHA members have made it abundantly clear that the organization is not in any way associated with the Olympics. Indeed, Arabians are not part of any Olympic competition. This was clearly an attempt by the White House to gussy up the resume of a man lacking the experience necessary to lead a major disaster relief effort… a lack of experience Brown has shown in his mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

More to come. The Denver Post is preparing a piece for Sunday, and the NY Times is working the story as well.

[Cross-posted to Daily Kos]

Update:
The NY Times article is online… third paragraph:

Mr. Brown has come under fire from critics of the federal government’s hurricane response, who describe him as a political appointee who had no disaster experience before joining FEMA.

Though he once worked as a municipal official in Edmond, Okla., Mr. Brown’s major previous job was as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, from which he resigned under pressure in 2001 after a controversial 10 years.

Not much, but it makes the point that Brown was a political appointee who had no disaster experience.

The LA Times has a nice lead:

The leader of the U.S. government’s much-criticized handling of hurricane relief efforts in the Gulf Coast came to Washington in 2001 with scant background in dealing with natural disasters. But he had an important connection: His new boss was an old friend who had managed George W. Bush’s successful campaign for the White House.

Michael D. Brown left his job in Colorado supervising horse-show judges to work for Bush’s longtime political aide, Joe Allbaugh, who was heading the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the new administration.

Brown had been a lawyer active in Republican politics whose most relevant emergency response experience was a stint supervising police and fire departments as assistant city manager in an Oklahoma City suburb.

But within two years, he rose from FEMA’s general counsel to deputy director and, when Allbaugh left, he moved to the agency’s top spot.

That’s the MSM’s take on this story: cronyism. And it’s a pretty good take.

The Denver Post weighs in, and with new information!

Former association board member Karl V. Hart of Florida alleges that in 2000 Brown improperly accepted a check for nearly $50,000 from a prominent breeder and put it toward his own legal defense for his work as commissioner. Board members thought this was improper because Brown already had protection, from the association’s legal team, Hart said.

Because of the money dispute, Brown was asked to resign, Hart said.

One of my sources had hinted at this, but was not a board member and only had hearsay, so I couldn’t use it. Nice reporting by Jeremy Meyer to follow this up.

And finally, my favorite take on this story comes from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

So let me see if I understand this. Brown’s a Republican from the southwest. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress when he was thirty-three. Then he bounced from job to job, finally getting into the sports business in mid-life, before getting canned. And then he used connections to land himself a high-powered position in the federal government for which he had no apparent experience at all.

How could such a fellow possibly be in the Bush administration?

Hmmm.

My 15 minutes of attention from the national blogosphere is bringing quite a few newcomers to HA, some of whom are apparently unfamiliar with the peculiar etiquette of discourse we’ve established here. For example, I just got the following email from Robert:

Oh, oh.. I can’t wait till we finally get into the streets and start the great purge. Horses ass piece of shit liberal opportunists will rue the day.

Fuck you shitface.

Um… in the future Bob, crypto-fascist, obscenity laden threats of violence belong in the comment threads, not sent via email. And oh… thanks for stopping by.

An absolutely must view video clip courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Horror Show

Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera were livid about the situation in NOLA as they appeared on H&C. When Hannity tried his usual spin job and said “let’s get this in perspective,” Smith chopped him off at the knees and started yelling at him saying, “This is perspective!” It was shocking.

Video-WMP-very big file so I had to compress it

Video QT

This is Fox News, for chrissake…! FOX FUCKING NEWS!!! (And don’t you trolls dare snipe back at me with your vicious, hate-filled comments until you watch the clip… the whole damn clip!)

I’m speechless… I’m literally crying. Six days later this isn’t a natural disaster… it’s a human tragedy created by callous and incalculable incompetence! This is a moral outrage!

If we were like Japan, a nation that at least feigns a deep respect for honor… then President Bush would be keeled over on the floor of the Oval Office with his sword in one hand and his guts in the other.

From the American Red Cross website:

Disaster FAQs
Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

• Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
• The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

You mean to tell me that the feds are withholding humanitarian aid in the hopes of smoking out the refugees? You mean like the thousands of sick and elderly who were physically unable to evacuate… or the tens of thousands of urban poor who lacked the cars or financial resources to do so? You mean like the untold multitude — men, women and children — starving and dying at the Convention Center, crying to the media for help for five days before a relief convoy finally arrived?

Is our government out of its fucking mind?

No wonder the Bush administration seems so taken aback by the sudden wave of criticism over federal relief efforts… they’re going exactly according to plan! It’s not that we couldn’t deliver aid to the victims of this catastrophe, it’s that we didn’t!

Teach a man to fish, and all that, I guess.

Yesterday was a busy day, as Daily Kos and a number of other national blogs picked up my story on FEMA director Mike Brown, whose prior disaster experience was being one. Slight bump in traffic.

Today, the story is starting to make it into the MSM, and the real journalists are both corroborating and expanding on what I reported. First to the virtual newsstand is the Boston Herald:

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.
…
Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,” she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

So how do you get a job like this with absolutely no qualifications? The Herald reports that soon after his resignation, Brown was brought into the administration by his old college roommate, Joseph Allbaugh, who was heading up FEMA at the time. When Allbaugh quit in 2003 to work for the president’s reelection campaign, Bush appointed Brown to replace him.

And how did his job at the IAHA qualify Brown to coordinate disaster relief? Well, I asked several former IAHA members, and this was the typical response:

“I personally can not think of any way that being the IAHA Judges and Stewards Commissioner prepared him to be the FEMA Director.”

There you have it, straight from the horse’s… um… mouth.

As my regular readers know, I am not often at a loss for words, but I’ve been struggling all day to give voice to my feelings about the horror we have watched unfold in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And so as I finish putting order to my thoughts, I’d like to quickly point you towards what the editorial boards of some major newspapers are saying, as collated by the folks at Editor and Publisher. Note that some of these are very conservative newspapers.

Dallas Morning News

Who is in charge?

Losing New Orleans to a natural disaster is one thing, but losing her to hopeless gunmen and a shameful lack of response is unfathomable. How is it that the U.S. military can conquer a foreign country in a matter of days, but can’t stop terrorists controlling the streets of America or even drop a case of water to desperate and dying Americans?

President Bush, please see what’s happening. The American people want to believe the government is doing everything it can do — not to rebuild or to stabilize gas prices — just to restore the most basic order. So far, they are hearing about Herculean efforts, but they aren’t seeing them.

The Washington Times

Troops are finally moving into New Orleans in realistic numbers, and it’s past time. What took the government so long? The thin veneer separating civilization and chaos, which we earlier worried might collapse in the absence of swift action, has collapsed.

We expected to see, many hours ago, the president we saw standing atop the ruin of the World Trade Center, rallying a dazed country to action. We’re pleased he finally caught a ride home from his vacation, but he risks losing the one trait his critics have never dented: His ability to lead, and be seen leading.

Philadelphia Inquirer

“I hope people don’t point — play politics during this period.” That was President Bush’s response yesterday to criticism of the U.S. government’s inexplicably inadequate relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina.

Sorry, Mr. President, legitimate questions are being asked about the lack of rescue personnel, equipment, food, supplies, transportation, you name it, four days after the storm. It’s not “playing politics” to ask why. It’s not “playing politics” to ask questions about what Americans watched in horror on TV yesterday: elderly people literally dying on the street outside the New Orleans convention center because they were sick and no one came to their aid.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

But whatever the final toll, the wrenching misery and trauma confronting the people of New Orleans is much greater than it should be — as it is, in fact, for tens of thousands of people along the strip of Mississippi that was most brutally assaulted by the storm. The immediate goal must be to ease that suffering. The second goal must be to understand how we came to this sorry situation.

How do you justify cutting $250 million in scheduled spending for crucial pump and levee work in the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), authorized by Congress in 1995?

How do you explain the almost total lack of coordination among federal, state and local officials both in Louisiana and Mississippi? No one appeared in charge.

Des Moines Register

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was the first practical test of the new homeland-security arrangements and the second test of President Bush in the face of a national crisis.

The performance of both has been less than stellar so far.

Katrina was a disaster that came with at least two days of warning, and it has been more than four days since the storm struck. Yet on Thursday, refugees still huddled unrescued in the unspeakable misery of the New Orleans Superdome. Patients in hospitals without power and water clung to life in third-world conditions. Untold tragedies lie yet to be discovered in the rural lowlands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

I’m posting the weekly open thread a little early today, because I’m trying write another piece on Hurricane Katrina, and I’m finding it exceedingly difficult to put the horror into words. But talk about whatever you want here.

“An unmitigated, total fucking disaster.” That’s not a quote from Mike Brown, but rather, a quote describing him. And most disturbingly, it’s not even a reference to his dismal performance as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This blunt critique was emailed to me from a regular reader who was apparently attracted to HorsesAss.org by her passion for politics and her love of Arabian horses.

I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.

I am telling you this after watching the fucking shipwreck in the Gulf. His incompetence is KILLING people.

Yes, that’s right… the man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.

And what of that misleading White House press release?

From 1991 to 2001, Brown was the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, an international subsidiary of the national governing organization of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

I can’t even begin to fact check the dates or IAHA’s alleged relationship to the US Olympic Committee, because of course, the IAHA doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s nothing to Google. But it begs the question… how the hell did his prior job experience prepare Brown to head FEMA?

Well, judging by his agency’s performance over the past few days… it didn’t.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos]

UPDATE:
Kos himself just picked up the story, and it’s sitting on his home page for his half million plus readers to see. This is a great example of how a comment or email from a single reader on a local blog can work its way up the blogosphere and eventually move headlines. Power to the people!

If Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn is the “rising star” of the KC GOP, their horizon looks awfully dim… as does Shaw Dunn in his 2-minute stint on the Seattle Channel’s 2005 Primary Election Video Voter’s Guide.

Shaw’s Dunn’s clip starts at about minute 37:40, and includes this curiously worded statement about the extremes he’s willing to go to reform King County government:

I was involved in the investigation and prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, also known as the 20th hijacker on September 11th… it was a hard working group, dedicated to a single purpose, and its the kind of effort we need to help reform and fix King County government.

Um… I assume Shaw Dunn meant to refer to the prosecutors, not the hijackers as a model for reforming King County government, but that’s not the way it came out on the video. (Though I suppose he has more than a few constituents who wouldn’t mind seeing a jetliner slam into the Ron Sims’ office at the King County Courthouse.)

But that wasn’t his worse flub. Thirty seconds later Shaw Dunn stumbles over a classic bit of speechifying that makes George Walker Bush sound like William Jennings Bryan:

Everywhere you look there is waste. It drives up our property values and makes our taxes more congested.

I couldn’t agree more. That is, if I could understand what the fuck he was trying to say.

Of course, Shaw Dunn is still a political novice, so misstatements like these are to be expected. But my understanding is that each candidate got four takes… and if this is the best of the four then he’s in need of some serious media training. Either that, or his lack of preparation (I mean really… how hard is it to memorize a two minute statement?) suggests he really doesn’t have his heart in this race. And why should he? With a powerful mamma like Eleanor Prentice Shaw Jennifer Dunn, King County Council must seem like an awfully low place to start his political career.

Or end it.

I’m feeling ornery this morning, so as long as I’m pointing fingers at our incompetent president, I thought I’d level some well-deserved criticism at us voters as well. An article in today’s Seattle P-I reports on a draft letter from the state Transportation Performance Audit Board criticizing the monorail authority, and suggesting that it was the wrong body to be doing transportation planning in the first place.

The letter recommends that the city immediately begin looking at whether monorail is the best technology for serving the West Seattle and Ballard corridors to and through downtown. The city is preparing a Seattle Transit Plan, and the audit board said that is the ideal vehicle for the city to ask how best to serve the two corridors.

After an investigation, the audit board “found no evidence” that non-monorail alternatives were ever considered by the Monorail Board or any other group.

“The review of viable alternatives is an integral part of transportation planning which was bypassed by legislation and at the polls in favor of a (m)onorail technology choice,” the draft letter says. “The lack of alternatives analysis then is being compounded by inadequate reviews now.”

The letter emphasized that the two corridors “suffer from congestion, which deserves relief.” But, the audit board said transportation planning to create “a coherent, integrated transportation system” should be done by the mayor and City Council within the city’s planning framework, not by “an independent, singly tasked authority.”

No shit, Sherlock. But while it’s become fashionable these days to slam the monorail and the board that’s trying to build it, I think it’s time voters started blaming themselves. The monorail wasn’t imposed on the city by some secret cabal of arrogant, out-of-touch politicos… four times the monorail went up for a vote before the citizens of Seattle, and four times it passed. Along with I-695 before it, and I-912 this November, the monorail is yet another example of why transportation planning via public plebiscite is a sure-fire recipe for boondoggles and/or gridlock.

The initiative and referenda process is simply a stupid and fickle way to build a coherent transportation infrastructure in a region as large and complex as the 21st Century Puget Sound. This type of critical planning needs to be done by experts, not by professional loudmouths like Tim Eyman or John Carlson or Kirby Wilbur, and the angry voters who rally to their cry to “send another message.”

Send a message?! To whom?

If you ask me, it’s us voters who are arrogant and out-of-touch.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, reports that the waters have apparently stopped rising in the streets of the Crescent City… but not due to some amazing feat by the Army Corps of Engineers. No, the credit goes to gravity. Lake Pontchartrain has finished draining itself into the city streets, to the point where the water is now level on both sides of the broken levees. The lake and the city have become one.

Thousands may lie dead in the nearly deserted city, their bodies floating in the streets or trapped in their attics where they drowned in the slowly rising flood waters. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, and estimates of damage now top $25 billion. And as a NY Times editorial scathingly points out, our president once again appears clueless in the face of crisis.

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast’s most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans’s levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane’s surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area’s flood protection?

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America “will be a stronger place” for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won’t acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.

For the past couple days I’ve tried to avoid politicizing this terrible, human tragedy… a fit of self-restraint I now deeply regret. If progressives should have learned anything from the aftermath of 9/11, it is that rallying around this president at a time of crisis only leads to further tragedy somewhere down the road. This is an administration whose arrogance is only matched by its incompetence and stupidity, and while Bush cannot be blamed for Hurricane Katrina itself, the lack of preparation for this inevitable disaster, and the slow response in its wake, is absolutely inexcusable.

As Philadelphia Daily News writer Will Bunch notes in an article that has been making the rounds of the internet, the Bush administration had nearly cut off desperately needed federal funds from New Orleans’ flood control projects… some of which would had been targeted directly at the 17th Street Canal, the site of the main levee breech. But even if the flooding couldn’t have been avoided, surely some of the chaos and loss of life could have. With 40% of its forces deployed overseas, the Louisiana National Guard lacks the manpower to conduct rescue operations and impose order on the flooded streets. And while forecasters knew days in advance that one of the strongest storms of the century was headed straight towards vulnerable areas of the Gulf coast… our military did nothing to prepare for rescue and relief.

If there is any bright spot in this whole debacle, it is that perhaps the people of Iraq will come to realize that our failure to rebuild their water, electricity and other essential infrastructure, or to ensure security, is not due simply to some malicious disregard for their welfare and safety. Apparently, we really are this incompetent.

A track record that doesn’t bode well for the people of New Orleans.

One of the reasons I love Carl at Washington State Political Report so much (again… in a manly, heterosexual way) is that he has a great eye for pointing out great posts at great blogs I don’t read nearly often enough. Like this terrific piece from Shaun at Upper Left.

Shaun answers a question posed by Jon on Evergreen Politics in response to the League of Conservation Voters early endorsement of Sen. Maria Cantwell… a story I first broke here. (Man, this is getting self-referential.) Jon asked:

I’m curious what you think — is it hard for you to get over Maria’s war-mongering, too? Or am I just being a grump? Am I under-estimating LCV’s grassroots mobilization prowess?

To which Shaun replies, “yes, yes and yes.”

Shaun then goes on to tell a great story about how he and Maria first crossed paths, and why two decades later she’s a US senator, while he’s just a lowly blogger like me. Great story. Read the whole thing.

David Irons wants to run King County, a government that serves two million citizens… a population greater than that of 13 states. But before we hand him the checkbook to KC’s $3.3 billion budget, perhaps it might be interesting to see how he budgets the finances of a considerably smaller concern, like… I dunno… say, his own campaign for county executive?

So I checked out his latest Public Disclosure Commission filing, and discovered that things aren’t looking so rosy for the Irons campaign. Of the $263,247.01 he’s raised thus far, he’s already spent $217,755.80, leaving him only $45,491.21 in cash on hand two months before the general election. Ron Sims, on the other hand, has raised $535,151.82, but spent only $156,926.23, leaving $378,225.59 in cash on hand… a better than eight to one advantage over his rival.

Of course Sims’ fundraising advantage is to be expected: he’s the incumbent. (Plus, he actually has a chance of winning.) It’s the expenditure disparity that caught my attention. While Sims has been marshaling his resources for the November campaign, Irons has been… well… perhaps one of his consultants can explain what Irons has been spending his money on. In case you’re curious, here’s a sampling of some of his major expense categories.

Consulting		$41,598.00
Payroll		$39,107.96
Printing		$31,845.45
Postage		$15,280.49
Food		$7955.64
Accounting		$6774.00
Balloons		$355.30

Hey Dave… here’s some consulting advice: next time, unless you have unlimited resources… don’t spend twenty percent of your budget on consultants. (My $4,200 invoice is in the mail.)

Break down the expenditures by percentage, and you get an idea of how an Irons administration might divvy up King County’s $3.3 billion budget: $640 million on consultants, $122 million on takeout, $9.6 million on his 20-year-old daughter Annette, and $5.5 million on balloons. Essential services might suffer, but the local consulting industry would boom, and the county offices would certainly take on a more festive atmosphere.

Of course we all know that at this point in the campaign, both candidates are still spending most of their time and money on fundraising… and Irons has seen a pretty crappy return on investment. With only 45K in the bank and two months to go, it’s really hard to consider Irons a serious challenger.

I suppose that explains why Irons has reportedly tried to shore up his support by quietly reassuring potential contributors and other party notables that he expects a $250,000 “independent” expenditure on his behalf prior to the general election. Which raises two important questions: 1) is Iron’s just blowing smoke out of his ass about this “independent” campaign, and 2) if he’s not blowing smoke, how “independent” could this campaign possibly be? If Irons is so privy to the details, it sounds to me like exactly the sort of coordinated activity our campaign finance laws expressly prohibit. This is not just a public disclosure technicality… it would be out and out fraud.

And that’s the type of headache that could lead Irons to spend another $1164.16 on wine from Hedges Cellars. (The equivalent of $17.9 million out of the county budget.)

UPDATE:
As a point of reference, Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn has raised about $239K in his race for the county council, with about $45K cash on hand. Combined with opponent Steve “The Hammer” Hammond, the KCGOP is spending more on a primary in a safe, Republican council district, than they are in the county executive race against a “vulnerable” Ron Sims. So tell me how the Irons’ campaign isn’t a joke.