Architectural rendering of Triad Development’s ironically named “Civic” Square.
When two independent expenditure campaigns were announced last week, one explicitly pro Seattle City Council president Tim Burgess (“United for Tim”) and one explicitly against Burgess’s challenger, former Tenant’s Union leader Jon Grant (“Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders”), I wasn’t the only one to read this as a sign that Seattle’s business establishment was very nervous about Burgess’s reelection prospects. Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders was on the record promising to spend about $200,000, while the insider buzz had United for Tim budgeting at least the same. That’s an awful lot of money to spend on an incumbent who is already outspending his challenger by six to one.
But now in the wake of the Triad shakedown scandal it appears we all may have been half-fooled: that “Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders” was never more than an unethical ruse.
Of course, the PAC’s threatened $200,000 war chest never appeared—and it never will appear—and while some might attribute this collapse to fallout from the shakedown scandal, it is reasonable to suspect if the committee’s sole purpose was to facilitate a shakedown in the first place. Think about it. The committee has its spokesperson go public with a $200,000 budget, while whispering that it would be accusing Grant of some sort of personal ethical lapse. Was the money ever real? Or was it just an elaborate political bluff created by those hoping to profit from a potentially lucrative real estate deal?
(Or even more conspiratorially, perhaps it was an effort to entrap Grant in an ethical lapse? Hmm. That might explain the otherwise inexplicable creation of a text message trail.)
To be clear, Burgess’s backers are clearly nervous. United for Tim has already raised $218,000, most of it from a Chamber of Commerce funded PAC. But that other $200,000? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was always a fiction. Which means this shakedown scandal could be a lot more scandalous than it first appears.
Somebody’s protecting a big cash cow. Wonder who that could be? Now, the mayor has kicked Triad out of the project to develop the city-owned hole in the ground where the public safety building used to be. Tenants Union sued Triad and the city to overturn a permit issued to Triad, lost in court, and appealed; a Triad bigshot strong-armed Grant to drop the appeal. Burgess says he knows nuthin’ about it ‘cept what he reads in the papers.
http://www.seattletimes.com/se.....akedown-3/
Interestingly, and tying into the Triad scandal, a Chapman University survey of Americans to determine what they’re most afraid of came up with this:
The #1 fear of 58% of Americans is corrupt government. That’s right, Americans are more afraid of their own government, and the politicians the other party’s voters elect, than they are of (#2) cyber terrorism, (#3) corporations tracking their personal data, (#4) terrorist attacks, (#5) government tracking of their personal data, (#6) bio-warfare, (#7) identity theft, (#8) economic collapse, or (#9) running out of money. And credit card fraud ranks way the hell down at #10. Moreover, 10% of Americans have purchased guns to protect themselves from the politicians the other party’s voters elect.
http://www.cbsnews.com/media/t.....st-2015/2/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Not hard to figure out what’s going on here. Paranoia is selling like hotcakes to the ignorant rubes who watch Faux Noise and read Free Republic, Drudge, Breitbart, etc. After all, there’s a scary black man in the White House, so what do you expect? The fact people don’t care very much about credit card fraud isn’t surprising, because it’s the banks who get stuck with the losses. For them, it’s a cost of doing business, and they don’t mind because credit cards are a very lucrative business. I’m kinda surprised that economic collapse and running about of money ended up in the cellar of this survey. These people must have a lot of a hell of survival crackers stashed away in their backyard bunkers, because they’re not worried at all about running out of food.
On the $200,000 they are depending on the magic of the internet and they expect their raisethemoney account to come through any minute.
I can’t think of any other explanation for the text message. However, has anyone examined McSchwinn’s cell phone or seen the two parties cellular records from their respective carrier. Do we know the message is authentic?