– Right now Thurston County voters have a real opportunity to vote for change, for what stands to be a better way for all rate-payers.

– UW people, here’s a chance to ride in the rain.

– RIP George McGovern and praise the lord if you’re paying high taxes.

– The most important endorsement ever.

– News Corp’s shareholders are not particularly happy with the way the company is being run.

– I’m not as big a sriracha person as the author of this piece (how could anyone be?), but by coincidence I was having some soup when I started reading it, and immediately decided to add some. It was exactly what it needed.

I’m not a fan of our nonpartisan election system here in Washington where we don’t have to register by party to vote in the primary. But I had thought when the national scandal about GOP operatives dumping voter registrations.

A campaign worker linked to a controversial Republican consulting firm has been arrested in Virginia and charged with throwing voter registration forms into a dumpster.

The suspect, Colin Small, 31, was described by a local law enforcement official as a “supervisor” in a Republican Party financed operation to register voters in Rockingham County in rural Virginia, a key swing state in the Nov. 6 election. He was arrested after a local business owner in the same Harrisonburg, Va., shopping center where the local GOP campaign headquarters is located spotted Small tossing a bag into the trash, according to a statement Thursday by the Rockingham County Sheriff’s office. The bag was later found to contain eight voter registration forms, it said. The arrest was reported Thursday night by WWBT-TV in Richmond.

But maybe not as tough as I’d thought.

In Virginia, where the Pennsylvania man working for the state GOP was arrested Thursday, Chesterfield County’s General Registrar Larry Haake was seen explaining to Richmond’s CBS 6 in late September that he had received complaints of Strategic employees discovered doing the same thing in a library last month.

“They were responsible for people that appeared in some libraries in Chesterfield County, supposedly to conduct voter registration drives,” Haake said, “but they were asking voters for whom they are going to vote.”

Haake says he informed the GOP of the incident at the time, but, apparently, no action was taken.

If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.

I think this is what you get when people keep screaming ACORN, ACORN, ACORN. They think they’re just leveling the playing field.

That Seattle Times staffers are upset about The Seattle Times giving Rob McKenna free advertising. But honestly, this would be a lot more meaningful if the newsroom felt like it had stood up to Frank Blethen on newsroom issues.

It threatens the two things we value the most, the traits that make The Seattle Times a strong brand: Our independence and credibility.

Ultimately, The Seattle Times’ independence and credibility are harmed more by, for example, Truth Needle segments that say things that are true are false if Democrats say them and ignoring things GOP candidates says that aren’t right. The newsroom has an obligation to independence and credibility. They’d be better able to withstand any fallout from their publisher being in the bag for McKenna if their paper hadn’t been in the bag for him and much of the GOP.

When the paper reads like a free ad for a certain type of GOP elected official, it’s tough to complain that there’s a free ad for a certain type of GOP elected official.

– This story about puppy mills in Lewis County will break your heart.

– The Burden of a Black President

– Before spending millions on Initiative 1240′s unproven charter schools that admit only a tiny fraction of students, with no guarantee of improved performance, let’s do what the state Supreme Court has told us to do

– Charming people watching the previous debate.

– I love this XKCD piece on presidential election conventional wisdom.

This is a terrible decision from The Seattle Times.

The Seattle Times Co. jumped directly into two of the state’s hottest political contests Wednesday, launching an $80,000 independent-expenditure campaign promoting Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna and announcing a similar effort in support of the referendum to legalize gay marriage.

I don’t like either of these, but the R-74 ad makes a tiny bit of sense on its own. They look like they might win a squeaker, so the Seattle Times can say, “oh look our ads made the difference.” I don’t think that’s good for the brand of independent minded fair people, but at least I could see a path to it working. But since McKenna is losing, and will probably lose, the pitch will be buy an add, it won’t help you? Or do they think it will turn it around?

– Great endorsement, Seattle Times.

– I think Oliver is somewhat selective, but yes, there are many areas where liberal ideas clearly are the default, for now.

– This post on Obama’s popularity in Ireland contains some of the worst puns in human history.

– Yet another Biblical family.

– Good luck to the SeaTac Fuelers who have their day in court today.

– I’m not so sure about you.

Seriously, what is this?

The food had been served, the patrons were long gone, and the cutlery cleaned when Rep. Paul Ryan, his wife, three kids and photographers pulled up Saturday at a St. Vincent de Paul food kitchen in Youngstown Ohio.

Ryan and his wife put on aprons and washed several pans that already appeared to be clean, and then were off to the airport

I’d guess something on the order of 80% of photo ops are more waste of time than actual help. But at least the politician usually does something, even if more could be done without them. Oh, and by the way:

“We’re a faith-based organization: We are apolotical because the majority of our food is from private donations,” Brian Antol told The Washington Post. “It’s strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors.

…

“I can’t afford to lose funding from these private individuals,” he said. “If this was the Democrats, I’d have exactly the same problem.”

The Seattle City Council actually does something decent.

The Seattle City Council approved new campaign finance rules today. Under the changes, candidates for local office can’t roll over campaign funds from one election to the next and can’t start fundraising until Jan. 1 of the year before an election.

Vote was 7-2 with Council President Sally Clark and Councilmember Tom Rasmussen voting no.

Council members said they took the steps to limit the influence of money on local elections and reduce the amount of time that elected officials are fundraising at the same time they’re making policy.

They’ve still given themselves the chance to transfer their money into their next election, because of course they did. But over the long run, this is a positive step to getting good challengers who aren’t scared off by the large piles of money in the incumbent’s war chests.

– I’m sure all of the reporters who were concerned about Darcy Burner’s inelegant explanation of her Harvard degree will be equally upset with Brad Toft’s makie uppie degree.

– Me too, too.

– Important news about the Northwest in national publications.

– Those who know the history of state hotline slipups involving Republican governors is clearly the greatest phrase ever.

– Gee, it’s almost like running a campaign full of racist dog-whistles and overt racism attracts racist supporters! GO FIGURE!

– Happy Reloan Day, people on Kiva

– Yay for parks; boo for the accompanying picture that I can’t put my finger on it but creeps me out.

– No question about why these creep me out.

– The attempt to elicit sympathy for Romney by anecdotal proxy is a poor enough of a play. The decision to do so via an anecdote about a tragic car accident in a debate with Joe Biden means you’re either a sociopath or possessed of an idiocy of immeasurable power.

– Biblical family.

– Merry Christmas, Yakima.

– I would like to see some random questions from children in the next debate.

Even in this fairly straight AP piece reporting on McKenna’s supposed moderation, there’s this:

A political action committee funded by unions has been running attack ads with the message that McKenna is “not who he says he is.” A recent ad from the group tries to tie McKenna – in misleading or incorrect ways – to Republican positions on abortion, the national budget and health care.

I don’t have a TV, so I’ve only seen the ad once with the sound on. But it seemed more fair than not to me. The article mentions McKenna’s support of abortion rights (a better characterization might be that he knows he doesn’t have the votes to win on the issue), although abortion rights will probably be worse in the state after 4 years of McKenna than 4 years of Inslee. And the the other ones seem about right to me.

McKenna put himself, as the article notes several times, at the forefront of opposing the health care law. And while he personally only claimed to be opposed to part of it in court, that isn’t what his lawsuit argued. So he was happy to be part of that GOP extremism.

And as to the budget: well he has supported GOP budgets at the state that would have gutted education and social services. Maybe the ads should have focused on those instead of the federal budget, but they’re coming from the same place.

Finally, although the races for President and Congress will be the bigger story on election night, the races for governor will be part of that picture. And a McKenna win (or the aggregate of GOP victories at the state level including his) will be used at the federal level to argue for more restrictions on abortion and deeper cuts to social services. So maybe it’s not fair, but it is the reality.

Mike McGinn has a post on his city blog where he thanks several companies for pitching in and helping to pay for the streetcar in South Lake Union.

Today we gathered in South Lake Union to thank four local employers who are investing $204,000 to increase service on the Seattle Streetcar. These employers – Group Health, Amazon.com, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and UW Medicine – know that more frequent service on this line is a good thing for their employees, and are stepping up to the plate to make a private investment in a public service.

Now to be clear, I’m glad they pitched in. And thanking them for it is perfectly appropriate. More frequent trips are good. And if this is the way you do it, well fine.

Fine, but not great. Because if we need more frequent trips, the city government should be able to figure out a way to pay for it that doesn’t rely on the generosity of a few large employers.

– The Bill of Reproductive Rights.

– I know Brad Owen is pretty shitty. But Democrats who don’t like him should have put some effort into a primary challenge instead of supporting a Republican.

– Romney Proudly Explains How He’s Turned Campaign Around ‘I’m Lying More,’ He Says

– The headline style of the Baptist Press, on the other hand calls for them to capitalize only the first word, followed by lying nonsense pretending that contraception and abortion are the same thing.

– Lord Player is now Archbishop Poopypants

– What could go wrong?

That if you were reading The Seattle Times’ endorsement of Rob McKenna, and you came across this paragraph:

McKenna has an independent mind. He is willing to work with Democrats and he is willing on occasion to buck his party. He defended Washington’s top-two primary before the U.S. Supreme Court, despite pressure from his own party seeking to overturn it. And he won.

You might reasonably say to yourself that they got the bucking his own party bit out of the way, so it’s time for an example of him working with Democrats. The next paragraph will surely mention the vast amounts of working with Democrats he did.

No?

It’s just an awkward transition to complaining that Democrats have mentioned that he’s a Republican. OK then.

I can only think of two reasons that Reagan Dunn has decided to make an issue of the end of the free ride area a week after it ended and several months after the decision was made. First: he thinks it’ll be to some advantage in his AG race against Bob Ferguson. Second: poor people are now getting services in his district and it’s scaring his constituents.

I suppose you could make an argument that he’s doing it because he cares about the issue. If you decide to make that argument, you’ll have to explain why he’d start to push it now. Why he thinks there ought to be a discussion after the policy is a done deal, voted on, passed and implemented. Why previously his problem with the policy was that there wasn’t a vote on the car tabs part.