HorsesAss.Org

Just a reminder… Drinking Liberally meets tonight, at 8 PM, Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Ave E. Once again, my daughter won’t let me attend, but I encourage you all to meet for a drink and some good conversation.

The Tacoma News Tribune editorial board has come out strongly in favor of HB 1226, a bill that would extend the current cap on individual campaign contributions to “non-partisan” races, including judicial campaigns. (“Good for the politicians, good for the judiciary.”) This is a common sense proposal, but Republicans are opposing it because they have recently used this glaring loophole to their advantage.

At the center of the controversy is Jim Johnson, who won a November election to the state’s highest court with the help of $232,000 in contributions from the GOP-allied Building Industry Association of Washington. If Johnson had been running for another statewide race

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We think money set aside in the public trust to promote worker safety should be spent on worker safety.

So say Sen. Mark Doumit (D-Cathlamet) and Rep. Bill Fromhold (D-Vancouver) in a must read guest column in Tuesday’s Seattle P-I: “State’s ‘retro’ program needs repair.”

Doumit and Fromhold do an excellent job of explaining what retro is, how it works, and why the BIAW has been able to exploit its inequities to finance their partisan political agenda. To summarize, employers can choose to pay their worker’s comp premiums into “retro groups” run by associations like the BIAW, who pool the funds, and forward the money to the Department of Labor and Industries. At the end of the year, rebates are paid back to associations with favorable safety records… savings that are supposed to be passed on to the members.

But the size of the rebate is based as much on the size of the group as it is on the its success at preventing injuries. The largest groups get the largest rebates, even if their safety records are mixed.

The BIAW runs the state’s largest retro group.

It is also one of the greatest beneficiaries under the current system. In one year, 96 cents of every dollar the group paid into workers’ compensation was paid out to injured workers. But because the group is so large, it received 24 percent of its premiums back in the form of a rebate.

In other words, the association received a rebate of more than $25 million even though the difference between premiums paid in and losses paid out amounted to a little more than $3 million.

Then, the association turned around and charged its own members a 20 percent fee, generating millions of dollars more than the cost of administration. This money could have been used to promote worker safety or to reduce workers’ compensation premiums. Instead, it was funneled into political campaigns.

This is the money that bought Jim Johnson his seat on the State Supreme Court, and that financed $750,000 of independent expenditures on behalf of Dino Rossi before the election, and god knows how much since. This is the money that paid for those $10.00 checks the BIAW used to defraud voters of their signatures.

But reforming retro is more than just partisan retribution — although the BIAW certainly deserves any retribution it might get. As Doumit and Fromhold point out, this is about fixing inequities in the program and returning to its original intent of helping small and medium-sized businesses.

Despite an unenviable safety record, the association was able to draw millions of dollars away from groups that had shown more commitment to safety simply because it runs one of the largest retro groups in the state. Calling the money the association received a “rebate” is misleading, since it never actually belonged to the association.

This is inherently unfair. Companies that uphold their commitment to worker safety should be rewarded. Money dedicated to worker safety should be spent on worker safety, not funneled away as a cash cow for organizations that have no right to it.

Republicans like to talk the talk about helping small businesses. It’s time they walk the walk, and join Democrats in reforming retro, so that more of the savings go back to the businesses to which it belongs.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Times editorializes on the BIAW’s “political sleaze.”

The Olympian will be holding a live, online chat with WA State Democratic Party Chair Paul Berendt, Wednesday at noon. But you can submit a question in advance.

So if you truly believe that Paul is some criminal mastermind, bent on destroying our state’s democracy, here’s your chance to ask him point blank: “Paul, are you a criminal mastermind, bent on destroying our state’s democracy?”

Or you could pose the kind of useful question a sane person might ask. It’s up to you.

I don’t feel like brewing up a pot of insightful, clever commentary this Monday morning, so here are some links to freeze-dried, instant commentary from some of the Northwest’s more caffeinated bloggers.

(un)Sound Politics: Democrats are crazy!
Okay, we all know Stefan at (u)SP is a partisan flame-thrower, and we strongly suspect he’s a little unstable… but I never expected he could be so shamelessly derivative. Only hours after I poke a little fun at his mental health, he’s throwing my rhetoric back at the Democrats. I write that Stefan inhabits “the middle of the lunatic homeland” and he refers to “the Democrats’ lunatic mainstream.” I call Stefan a paranoid delusional, and he calls Paul Berendt a paranoid schizophrenic. If he had actually referenced my slam-piece as a springboard, I suppose this laziness would have been excusable by context, but it appears he’s not only a lying, hate-mongering, nutcase… he’s also a plagiarist.

Also Also: King County complied with all state requirements
TJ has posted Part II of his report on his extensive interview with Assistant Secretary of State Steve Excell, who assured him that a certain paranoid delusional blogger is full of shit. (Though not exactly in those words.) This interview goes a long way towards explaining the certification process, the role of the SoS, and the fact that the Evergreen Freedom Foundation is a bunch of lying, partisan bastards. (Again, not exactly in those words.) I plan to comment in more detail on this later, but I thought it deserved a heads up.

blatherWatch: Dave Ross outs BIAW grifters
It looks like it was Dave Ross who first broke the story about the BIAW defrauding voters of their signatures through a sham housing survey. While the BIAW told the Seattle Times that they had found “about 20” questionable signatures, a BIAW spokesperson told Ross that they found no suspicious signatures among the 120 checks returned. Oh my… could the BIAW have been lying?

Columbian Watch: Land use initiative creates chaos in Oregon
Looking to Oregon’s “Measure 37” as an indicator of things to come in Washington? “If the states are laboratories, then unfortunately Oregon has fallen victim to some mad scientists when it comes to land use. We can’t ever let it happen on this side of the river.” ‘Nuff said.

Pacific Views: Stop the bankruptcy boondoggle
I’ve always appreciated Pacific Views for providing a sober, thoughtful, constructive forum on issues of national importance… freeing me up to spew obscenities and insults from my usual drunken stupor. The credit card industry is in the midst of sliding a cruelly selfish bankruptcy bill through Congress. While the provisions reinstating debtors prison and public floggings were softened in committee, the main thrust of the bill is intact: protecting the banks from the inevitable result of shamelessly pushing credit cards on people they know can’t handle them. Pacific Views provides the details, and asks you to contact your representatives.

Preemptive Karma: Harsh reality television
Carla takes a break from gardening, watches TV, and slaps the tookus of litter-bearing, fertility-treatment couples, for not selectively aborting a few of the backup fetuses. Man, that’s not a politically correct thing write… which is more than enough to deserve a link from me.

WA State Political Report: Don’t piss off Goldy
Carl Ballard points to an amusingly mean-spirited critique of Stefan… by me! (How meta.)

Stefan Sharkansky apparently suffers from paranoid delusions. I know this, because the men I’ve hired to trail him assure me it is true.

Take for example, his latest effort to revive media interest in the now-discredited voter-credit “discrepancy” hoo-hah. Has he found new incriminating evidence? No. Did he bother to actually look at the poll books? Naah. He just goes back to his same old, cranky Excel spreadsheet, punches in some “slightly improved” numbers, and concludes… oh my god… “The election was genuinely stolen!”

The only thing crazier than doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results… is to actually get them. As we have heard from election officials across the state and around the nation, the voter credit data says absolutely nothing about the integrity of an election — and the fact that Stefan repeats his debunked claim yet again, only louder, doesn’t make it any more “genuine.” But here’s the scary part: I think he actually believes it.

Like his fellow, unscientific conspiracy theorist, the BIAW’s Tom McCabe, Stefan never needed any actual evidence to conclude the election was stolen. In the angry, polarized, imaginary universe that the most rigidly partisan tend to construct for themselves, Dino Rossi’s brutally close defeat was proof enough of Democratic evil-doing. If, as Stefan amusedly describes me, I am a “lunatic-fringe blogger,” then he must be blogging from smack-dab in the middle of the lunatic homeland. It is a strange, disorienting, occasionally frightening place, where your opponents are at once laughably incapable of exercising even the simplest demands of their elected office, while at the same time masterminding a criminal conspiracy so brilliantly devious, it would have remained undetectable if not for the heroic labors and superior intellect of Stefan himself.

Stefan dives into the numbers with such absolute confidence that they will prove his theory of official corruption, that when they don’t… well, that merely proves that the numbers themselves are corrupt. And so the debate on (un)Sound Politics plays out like some Paranoid Fantasy Baseball League, where the champion is predetermined through mass psychosis, and the season consists of attacking, undermining, and ridiculing any statistic that suggests otherwise.

Is this attack on Stefan’s mental health unjustified or unfair? Well, borrowing from his own topsy-turvy logic, “the ball is in his court” to prove otherwise.

Fortunately for Stefan, in the real world, Christine Gregoire is governor, and she will surely sign HB 1154, a bill that requires health insurers to cover mental illness the same as they cover physical ailments. It very well may be that for Stefan, the only prescription for a free and fair election is, well… a prescription.

Washington ski resorts may be suffering for want of snow, but folks are hitting the slopes in Hell this week, as I once again toss kudos in directions I usually fling insults. A couple days ago I blogged in support of a forward-looking higher-ed funding proposal from two of the state GOP’s best legislators. And today I’m enthusiastically linking to a piece posted on (gasp…) Sound Politics!

Matt Rosenberg quite rightly ridicules State Sen. Don Benton (R-Vancouver) for missing the first 17 meetings of the Early Learning, K-12 and Higher Education Committee, before suddenly showing up at a hearing to grandstand on one of his own bills. And there’s plenty more to ridicule Benton for, as Columbian Watch so aptly chronicles here, here, here… and here.

Reading the comments on Matt’s blog entry, it appears some of (u)SP’s regulars have taken umbrage at Matt for daring to criticize one of their own… but their outrage is misdirected. Benton is more likely to appear on the side of a milk carton than at a committee hearing, and as Elizabeth Hovde points out in The Columbian, he simply isn’t doing the job for which he was elected.

Critics of Benton must be giddy. Not only has the senator made himself an easy target, giving fiscal conservatives a bad name, he isn’t around to exert his influence on various issues. As a person who would vote the way Benton does much of the time, especially on spending issues, I find it maddening that Benton foes are getting a better deal out of his re-election than his fans.

Matt deserves some credit for criticizing Benton’s job performance — however much he may agree with his ideology — and for doing so on a forum that tends to denounce Republicans only for perceived violations of party loyalty. I don’t generally agree with his politics (and I thought his take on my “Horse’s Ass” initiative to be particularly humorless,) but Matt has always struck me as more intellectually honest than most of his fellow unSounders.

Well, the bad news for Republicans is, that in contacting names on their list of 1,100 allegedly illegal voters, the Associated Press found that two out of three claim to have voted for Rossi. The good news is, it turns out none of these three actually voted illegally. Or maybe that’s the bad news. I’m confused.

The Associated Press contacted three of those on the alleged felon list. Two said their voting rights had been restored and one said he was pulled over for drunken driving in 2003, but the charge was reduced. Two of those three said they voted for Rossi.

The Seattle Times reports finding three more people wrongly included on the list, including a 57-year-old disabled man, who had his voting rights restored in 1994.

“You make one mistake in your life,” the man said. “It’s something that happened 21 years ago, and then to have it come up again; it’s devastating. I’m in tears.”

Oh yeah… he voted for Rossi too.

In fact, news organizations around the state started finding so many inaccuracies in the list that according to the Seattle P-I, the Democrats hastily called a press conference to accuse the Rossi camp of releasing a list that “smears the names of innocent people.”

“I think it’s time that people start asking Dino Rossi, ‘When are you going to do your homework, when are you going to stop damaging people’s names in your quest for power,’ ” said David McDonald, an attorney for Democrats.
…
McDonald said it took only “a matter of minutes” for his team to quickly discern that the supposed illegal votes on that list could easily be explained. To illustrate the point, the Democratic lawyers showed blown-up copies of pages from various King County poll books.

In one example, a copied page appears to show that a woman who the GOP alleges voted twice only signed for one ballot. A poll worker’s notation under the woman’s signature apparently got counted as a second signature.

In another example, the Rossi camp claims someone voted in the name of a dead woman, but a copied poll book seems to show that a voter accidentally signed on the wrong line — one line below his correct space.

Of the 15 names initially turned over by Republicans last week, the Democratic lawyers said, they’ve yet to verify a single illegal vote.

You mean Rossi’s people still haven’t looked in the poll books?

Man… and Republicans accuse Democrats of being incompetent.

As most of you know, I have been forced to crack down somewhat on pointless, off-topic comments that were making the threads unreadable. Nobody’s been banned, per se, but you’ll notice a certain individual hasn’t been around since I started to hold his comments for approval.

To balance the unaccustomed order, I’ve decided to create a weekly “Open Thread” where you are free to post on whatever subject you want. I hope you will all play nice, and use this as a forum for real debate — however angry and vitriolic — but this is your sandbox, so shit in it if you want.

In exchange, I ask you all to try to stay on-topic in the other threads. I understand that debate sometimes wanders in unexpected directions, so tangents are fine. But if you feel the need to hijack a thread for your own personal agenda, this is the thread to hijack.

We’ll see how this experiment goes.

The Democrat who Republicans most love to hate, Seattle’s own Congressman Jim McDermott, is now “the world’s least senior blogger.” Check out is diary on dailyKOS, “Social Security: Don’t buy the Fear Factor!“

One of the elements of this ongoing election dispute that I have found most difficult to wrap my mind around, is the passionate and apparently genuine belief by some on the other side, that Democrats are all lying, deceitful thieves, willing to do anything to get their candidates in office.

Well, our friends at the BIAW suggest one possible explanation for this delusional group-think: projection.

According to The Seattle Times (“Builders group uses trickery to check out voters’ signatures“), the BIAW sent out a “housing trends survey” to 400 King County residents, along with a $10.00 “thank you check.” Only, it wasn’t really a survey, and those 400 “residents” just happened to be the 400 absentee voters for whom Democrats collected signature affidavits during the initial count. Oh, and that check… that was just a clever way of capturing their signatures.

It was an out-and-out lie… a sham… exactly the kind of dirty, end-justifies-the-means deceit that the BIAW-backed Rossi camp clearly expects of Democrats. They think that we can’t be trusted, because quite frankly, they can’t be trusted. Classic projection.

“Boy, those BIAW people are so devious.”

That understatement comes from the rarely understated Paul Berendt, who appears in shock and awe at the depths to which his opponents will stoop. But he shouldn’t be so surprised… the BIAW wants to see him behind bars. Indeed, they truly believe he should be behind bars, and regularly fantasize about gleefully popping corks the day Paul is led away in leg irons.

He was after all, the real target of the BIAW’s little fraud. They weren’t just fishing for evidence to help Rossi; they hoped to dredge up criminal charges against Berendt and the Democratic volunteers. So deep is their hatred — and so shallow is their own moral and ethical framework — that they cannot help but assume the absolute worst of those who oppose them. In their eyes, Berendt is a criminal, and they’ll find the evidence if only they look hard enough. In the words of BIAW Executive Vice-Bastard Tom McCabe:

“Scientists say that you shouldn’t do an experiment if you have a conclusion already. I had a conclusion. I thought they had cheated.”

That’s right, he thinks Berendt is so corrupt and so brazen — and apparently, so stupid — that he would orchestrate a fraud that could so easily be traced back to him. That’s projection, and it suggests to me that it’s the BIAW’s own activities that warrant a criminal investigation.

Ironically, their efforts have only managed to shed light on more innocent explanations for why signatures don’t always match. The BIAW claims “about 20” signatures have raised suspicions, and the Times’ David Postman interviewed a few.

Christina Spears-Bartunek said her husband endorsed the check, and she was not happy about the deceptive survey: “I think it’s crappy.”

Cheryl Triplett said she has a “generic signature” and an “official signature.” The survey got the generic. The affidavit got the official.

She does that out of fear of identify theft, she said. She doesn’t want to put anything through the mail with her official signature.

In fact, that’s what got her ballot tossed initially. She used the generic signature on the absentee ballot because it was going through the mail. When it didn’t match her signature on file at King County, her ballot was rejected.

She said she thought she had been tricked into giving her signature.

“I think you should be honest about it. If the Republicans would have come to my door, I would have said, ‘This is my signature.’

“I just think that’s an underhanded way to go about things.”

“Crappy,” “underhanded,” “deceptive”… it’s all that and more. It also demonstrates how fundamentally distrustful the Rossi camp is, of not just Democrats, but the voting public in general. They couldn’t “be honest about it” because every irregularity or mismatched signature, is in their eyes, evidence of official corruption or the insulting paranoid fantasy some right-wing bloggers call “distributed vote fraud.”

The sad truth is, the BIAW and other lunatic-fringe Rossi diehards expect the worst of Democrats, because that is what they expect of themselves.

The Election Reform Task Force released its report (download PDF,) calling for the following improvements to the state election process:

• Moving the date of the primary election at least four weeks earlier to give election supervisors sufficient time to certify the primary results, mail the general election ballots and prepare for the general election.
• Requiring voter identification to get a ballot at the polling site. Voters without identification would be issued a provisional ballot.
• Improving voter registration records. To assure the voter rolls do not include illegitimate voters or duplications, the task force recommends a strong effort to bring a new statewide voter database online as soon as possible.
• Improving military ballots. Moving the primary date earlier would improve the ability of service men and women to participate in elections. The task force also recommends a system of deployment notification and ballot delivery tailored to those members called up and expected to be away from home on Election Day.
• Assuring statewide procedural consistency by giving the Secretary of State a stronger role to bring about a more consistent election process between counties.
• Providing clearer warnings and stronger enforcement of voter fraud. The Legislature should evaluate whether current penalties are enough of a deterrent to voter fraud and whether sufficient funding is provided to investigate and prosecute this type of fraud. The task force recommends clearer warnings in voter material and on the back of ballot envelopes.
• Setting a consistent date for certifying results. To minimize the perception of impropriety, the task force recommends that all counties certify their results on the same day.
• Modifying provisional ballots. Provisional ballots should be a different color than regular ballots and provisions made to halt such ballots from being read by the optical scanners at the polling sites.
• Providing for mandatory review or audit. The task force believes that, to restore trust in the elections systems, a strong, structured review or audit program should be conducted by the Secretary of State’s Office.

The only one of these recommendations I have any qualms over is the one requiring ID, for pragmatic reasons I intend to get into later. But the rest of the reforms seem pretty uncontroversial.

In fact I’m sure the biggest criticism of the report will be that it doesn’t go far enough. For example, I believe it is critical to mandate voter verifiable paper trails for electronic voting machines, whereas some of you on the right would probably prefer much tighter voting procedures… you know, like restricting the franchise to propertied, white males.

I’d like to take some time to really explore election reform in detail, but before I start pontificating, I thought I’d open this thread as an opportunity for all of you to tell me what kind of election reform you want to see. I want to hear your suggestions. Really. Even all you righties. (Well… most of you righties.)

So let’s try to keep this relatively civil — by HorsesAss.org standards — and on topic.

I don’t know what’s going to flummox some of my readers more, the fact that I’m about to endorse a piece of state legislation authored by a couple of Republicans, or the fact that I’m largely agreeing with an editorial in The Seattle Times? [An idea for higher-ed going, going, gone]

Reps. Fred Jarrett (R-Mercer Island) and Skip Priest (R-Federal Way) are struggling to get a hearing on HB 1434, a bill that would inject a long-term perspective towards funding our college and university system. According to the times:

House Bill 1434, and its companion Senate Bill 5868, would establish a framework for funneling new revenue to higher education as the state economy improves.

By 2012, the current higher-education budget of about $1.2 billion would increase by about one-third. The difference would pay for another 30,000 student spots and more state investment in research. While the bill would permit tuition to increase dramatically, it would add in a more aggressive financial-aid component. The bottom line is, no family would pay more than 30 percent of a student’s education cost.

I’m not necessarily convinced about all the specifics, but then, this is a bill, not an initiative, so there is plenty of opportunity for deliberation and compromise. And I’d caution that The Times’ ebullient description of the bill as “THE best, most forward-looking” higher-education proposal, should include the caveat that HB 1434 may be the only forward-looking proposal being actively pitched at the moment.

Still, it’s hard to argue with the bill’s main principles, as outlined in an editorial Rep. Jarrett wrote, and forwarded to me:

HB 1434 has four guiding principles: Any reforms must be based on long-term strategic plan; they must address both the changing needs of today’s students and our economy; they must make higher education more affordable and accessible for all Washingtonians, and, most importantly, they must establish a system of accountability for taxpayers so we can be confident the first three principles will be met.

Yeah, yeah, sure… all that stuff is good. But the part of the proposal that intrigues me most involves the shift of state funding from flat per-slot subsidies to more of a financial aid model. HB 1434 would result in substantially higher tuition, but would provide financial aid grants to assure that total tuition eats up no more than 30% of any family’s income. This is a change I have long supported, indeed, way back on July 17 I wrote:

We need to move away from subsidizing all students equally, towards a means-tested system where tuition approaches market prices, and students receive generous financial aid based on need.

In fact, while I’m quoting myself, I’d like to point out for the umpteenth time that education is our state’s single most important economic engine, and well… you get the economy you pay for:

Just as individuals invest in their own future by attending college, our state invests in our future economy by making college more accessible. Education consumes the single largest chunk of our state and local taxes, so when Tim Eyman talks about eliminating “government waste” this is what he has in mind.

You get what you pay for. If we buy ourselves a second-rate educational system, our children will inherit a second-rate economy.

Reps. Jarrett and Priest should be commended for their forward-looking proposal, and for championing some solutions which likely won’t be greeted with much enthusiasm from either side of the aisle. My hope is that it generates genuine bipartisan dialogue on a higher-education funding crisis that is putting our future economy at risk.

A quick link to Knute Berger’s Mossback column in the current Seattle Weekly: “It’s All Downhill.”

Knute scales the “slippery slopes” of Seattle politics, from publicly financed stadiums, to sweetheart land deals, to the monorail, before planting his flag atop City Hall, where he sees few council members willing to question the city’s priorities.

But the problem is bigger, and I’m not talking about the mayor’s girth. Greg Nickels is heading for re-election virtually unopposed. The neighborhoods have no local hero to put forward; the town’s newly energized Republican minority seems satisfied with being blog blowhards; and liberals are willing to accept Nickels’ No Billionaire Left Behind policies as long as he says “yes” to everyone.

Hmmm… Republican “blog blowhards.” I wonder who he could be talking about?

But I found Knute’s final comment most intriguing:

How far have we slid down this slippery slope? There isn’t even an amusing gag candidate on the horizon.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Naaaah… what would I do if I won?

Longtime readers know that problem gambling is one of my pet issues. That’s why I am so pleased to see Senator Maria Cantwell taking the lead on our nation’s fast growing epidemic of underage gambling.

In a letter sent Monday to Surgeon General Richard Carmona, Cantwell lays out the relationship between underage gambling and “other risk behaviors” such as alcohol abuse and smoking. According to Cantwell, as many as 8 percent of young people may have a gambling problem, and nearly half start gambling before the age of ten. She asks the Surgeon General for his help in raising pubic awareness of youth gambling addiction.

Children are also three times more likely to become addicted to gambling than adults. I am particularly concerned that childhood exposure to gambling is increasingly widespread — exposure that may tragically result in later compulsive gambling addictions. For example, games of chance are used to market many products that also have public health consequences, such as the consumption of high calorie foods and soda. Children are exposed to gambling every time there’s a scratch-off card at a fast food restaurant, or a prize under a soda bottle cap liner.

Not to mention the youth poker craze, that is being fed by ESPN coverage of poker tournaments.

Cantwell is working on this issue with Senator John McCain, who has previously sponsored legislation restricting gambling on youth athletic events. I expect underage gambling and addiction to become a high profile issue over the coming years, as the fast growing gambling industry develops a new generation of its best customers: compulsive gamblers.

In Washington state, legal gambling has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, and gambling addiction has grown with it. And yet Washington currently does not spend a penny on problem gambling treatment or prevention. As a result, the state has only a handful of licensed counselors, and not a single treatment facility.

The Gambling Commission also provides inadequate oversight and enforcement. As I have previously reported, the Gambling Commission conducted a sting operation at seven Seattle-area card rooms, and was surprised to find that a “very young looking” sixteen-year-old was able to gamble and purchase alcohol at three of the seven.

The Legislature is currently considering HB 1031, a bill that would permanently fund treatment and prevention programs, but at about $500,000, the proposed appropriation was little more than symbolic. Hopefully, Sen. Cantwell’s national leadership role will help push the Governor and the Legislature to seriously address this public health crisis at home.