HorsesAss.Org

The front page of Sunday’s Everett Herald featured a story about the Snohomish County town of Gold Bar, and how it is struggling to stay incorporated in the aftermath of tax-cutting initiatives. [Cash-strapped town could fall off the map]

The reason Gold Bar and numerous other cities around the state are struggling financially can be traced to the passage of the car tab initiative in 1999, which lowered licensing fees to a flat $30 rate. Since then, Gold Bar has lost about $707,000 in revenue, according to the Association of Washington Cities. That loss is bigger than the city’s 2005 general fund of about $508,000. The city already has tightened its belt, cutting expenses on staff training, laying off staff and restructuring the police service contract with the county, which has saved the city about $194,000, said Hester Gilleland, the city’s clerk and treasurer.

Gold Bar Mayor Collen Hawkins realistically acknowledges that the deepening financial crisis could force the town to disincorporate, forcing Snohomish County to take over services. Residents would lose local control of local services, while facing uncertainty over who would run the local water system, which counties are simply not set up to do.

And they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

Hawkins said she finds it ironic that even she voted for Initiative 695 – the major cause of the city’s financial headaches.

The town’s registered voters supported the initiative by a vote of 354-138. Courts eventually struck down the measure, but state lawmakers heeded the will of the people and adopted $30 license tab fees anyway.
…
In 2002, voters approved a second car-tab initiative, which eliminated a $15 license registration fee that Snohomish County and several other counties had been charging. That money was earmarked for street repairs. As a result, the street fund in Gold Bar dropped from $17,200 in 2002 to nothing in 2004, Gilleland said.

“Even though these initiatives are appealing, they are giving a death warrant for local government,” Hawkins said.

Some might argue that these are the unintended consequences of ill-conceived initiatives like I-695, but I’d say it was intentional. While many voters — and even some mayors — didn’t realize the local impact of these statewide measures, many of their strongest and most vocal proponents knew exactly what they were doing.

We are witnessing the gradual devolution of state and local governments. Small towns across the state will be forced to disincorporate as tax revenues continue to dry up, possibly pushing some Eastern Washington counties into insolvency as they struggle to provide additional services.

Meanwhile, the structural deficit built into our antiquated state tax system has created a cycle of perpetual, multi-billion dollar budget gaps that makes it impossible for Olympia to lessen the blow, or assume more of the burden itself. When Republicans talk about cutting government waste, they’re no longer talking about making government more efficient, they’re talking about cutting programs entirely. They’re not interested in convincing the public to embrace a dramatically smaller and limited form of government… they know that if they just sit back and patiently defend the status quo, they will achieve this vision, with or without public support.

It is time for the Republican leadership to come clean about its agenda. If they don’t believe in shuttering city halls across the state, if they don’t believe in denying health care to tens of thousands of children, if they don’t believe in mediocre public schools and a university system that can’t possibly grow to meet the needs our rising population… then they need to tell us how they intend to pay for these and other basic services without raising taxes. But if what they truly believe in is minimal government and zero regulation, then they need to let voters decide on this agenda for themselves, instead of dishonestly relying on our broken tax structure to enact it by default.

I reproduce for your reading pleasure the lyrics of a little song my 7-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old cousin wrote tonight, spelling mistakes intact. I’ll buy a beer for the first person who correctly deciphers the content.

Prosint Bose is stopied and men.
Prosint Bose looks like a piall of po.
Prosint Bose is men,
and we are geting out of here.

And yes, there is a point to posting this online, which I will get to later.

UPDATE:
Mark gets the beer, but Scott deserves credit for decoding most of it. The correct translation is:

President Bush is stupid and mean,
President Bush looks like a pile of pooh,
President Bush is mean,
And we are getting out of here.

I should mention that when I asked my daughter to translate the spellings, she could hardly stop laughing as she sang me the song. Children have a natural predilection for scatological humor, and often take great joy in mocking adults… so what could be funnier than comparing the president of the United States to a pile of pooh?

Like any doting parent I spent some time pondering the lyrics as we drove home from her cousin’s house, and a couple observations came to mind that prompted me to blog on her little exercise in political satire.

First, it struck me that her commentary was not really all that more childish than the level of discourse that sometimes runs through the threads on this blog. One might argue that “a pile of pooh” is as apt a political metaphor as any, for describing the Bush administration; indeed, I could probably write a couple thousand words expanding on the analogy. But on its own, it’s just the kind of empty (if sometimes funny) personal attack that too often substitutes for real policy debate. President Bush may very well be stupid and mean, but until my daughter backs it up with evidence and analysis, she’s not going to persuade many of her peers.

However, my second observation runs a bit deeper, and it is one which I am happy to see has already been touched upon in this thread. My daughter comes from a very politically passionate family — you might be surprised to learn, even more so on her mother’s side than her father’s. Even without direct instruction, she is being raised through osmosis, to be a liberal Democrat, in the same way that a child might be raised a Catholic or a Jew… in the same way that her Seattle-born, Irish Catholic mother and her Philadelphia-born Jewish father were both raised with a shared political philosophy.

Just like the friends of mine who describe themselves as “recovering Catholics,” there are certainly many children who grow up to reject the political tendencies of their parents, through some combination of thoughtful conversion and sheer rebelliousness. But politics and party identification tends to run through families… and it runs deep.

No doubt there are many voters who are politically secular, with no loyalty to one party or another, but it is safe to bet that few if any of you who regularly join me in this blog fall into that category. We are the political hardcore; for most of us, our political ideology is deeply rooted in our childhood, even for those who rejected the politics of their parents. Thus, our politics are integral to our personal identity.

I myself am a liberal, and while I may be persuaded to adopt a traditionally conservative position on particular points of policy, I am no more likely to accept Karl Rove as my savior, as I am Jesus Christ.

But as a liberal, I am also proudly a moral relativist. I do not believe that those of you with whom I disagree with politically, are evil. Wrong, but not evil. (Well… maybe Cynical.)

For the umpteenth time I want to repeat that I don’t mind the name-calling and invective, indeed, I encourage it if it makes an otherwise wonkish policy debate a little more entertaining. But I also encourage a little more self-awareness… an understanding that your core political beliefs are not nearly as much a product of reasoned introspection as you would like to imagine, and that the political “other” is not really so different from yourself. It is rhetorically convenient to demonize the opposition as a bunch of liars and thieves, willing to do anything to seize power, but if you truly believe this, then I suggest you need to look deep into your own heart — and your childhood — to confront your own inner demons.

So here’s hoping we can all continue to walk together through the dog park of Washington politics, avoid stepping in the occasional “piall of po,” and sometimes even learn something from one another.

Andrew Garber has done an excellent job in today’s Seattle Times, of explaining in layman’s terms why it is the state government faces cutting services, even as existing taxes are producing an estimated $1 billion in additional revenues over next two year budget: “State budget writers tangle with high cost of just standing still.” I hope the Times doesn’t mind if borrow one of their graphics, to help explain:

What we have is a “structural deficit,” where the costs of maintaining existing services at current levels are rising faster than tax revenues. The economic figure that most close tracks growth in demand for public services, is growth in personal income, yet because our tax structure is so heavily dependent on sales and excise taxes (only New Hampshire is more dependent on a single tax) government revenues simply cannot keep up with demand.

Excise taxes, like those on gasoline, alcohol and tobacco, are taxes on volume, not price, and as such rise slower than consumption over time, as inflation raises the price of the product and eats away at the value of the dollar. For example, while the Legislature added a nickel a gallon to the gas tax last year, the gas tax is now half what it was a couple years ago as a percentage of the retail price. While that is a dramatic example, it illustrates the impact of inflation on excise taxes in general.

The general sales tax, which is by far our largest source of revenue, also becomes less adequate over time, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that we only tax goods… an ever decreasing portion of our post-industrial service economy. At the same time, inflation, particularly in health care, is hitting the state budget much harder than it is the private sector.

Nowhere is the state’s inflation problem better illustrated than in health care, which has been described as the “Pac-Man eating the state budget.”

For example, a single dose of Avinza, a prescription pain-relief medication, jumped $72 in the past year to $208 a dose. The cost of an electric hospital bed went up $101, to $1,407. And the cost of a wheelchair increased by $98, to $2,366.

Add cost and caseload increases to expected cuts in federal Medicaid spending, and the state suddenly finds it needs about $695 million in additional funds over the next two years to maintain existing health-care services for the poor.

Some would argue the solution is to simply cut health-care services for the poor. But even if one were to follow such a Hobbesian policy, it would end up costing our economy more, not less. Poor people will continue to get sick, showing up at emergency rooms at more advance stages of illness, when treatment is more expensive, and shifting the costs to the rest of us. Whatever savings we might see in lower taxes will more than be eaten up in higher insurance premiums.

And the inflationary pressures aren’t just limited to health-care:

To maintain existing levels of service, the state needs to come up with an additional $90 million to pay for prisons over the next two years, $164 million to run colleges and universities, $383 million for public-employee pensions and $444 million for public schools. That doesn’t include pay raises or benefits increases.

Of course, Republicans argue that the solution is simply to reign-in spending, but their usual metaphors fall flat. Running a government is not like running a business, or balancing your household budget. Increasing class size does not make teachers more productive, and we just can’t cut federally mandated “No Child Left Behind” requirements, like a family might cancel cable TV.

Indeed, the whole anti-tax movement that is partially responsible for our perpetual budget crises, has government finances exactly ass-backwards.

After all, people want the services, said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. Perhaps the true question is, “how much [money] do we need, to do what we want to do?”

Exactly!

We levy taxes to provide the services voters want; we don’t provide services simply to spend the tax dollars we have. What’s missing from the debate is the real debate… the debate over the proper size and scope of government. Republicans don’t want to have this debate because they know they’ll lose, and because they know that without the debate, we’ll just continue continue hobbling along with the status quo, gradually defunding and eliminating government programs, until their dream of a libertarian dystopia is achieved by default.

In the end, Washington state will be faced with the choice between implementing an income tax… or becoming Mississippi. There are many in the Republican leadership who would greatly prefer the latter.

A big thanks to fellow blogger Stefan, over at (un)Sound Politics for his help in uncovering massive, pro-Rossi vote fraud! According to Stefan’s analysis of the polling book accountability worksheet, there were 30 more ballots than voters at Bothell Regional Library, Precinct 3271.

A quick glance at the King County election results showed Dino Rossi leading Christine Gregoire by a 226 to 198 margin in Precinct 3271. Using the “proportional analysis” methodology Rossi’s attorneys are proposing in his election contest, and applying it to the 30 “mystery ballots,” this clear example of organized fraud by Rossi supporters cut Gregoires lead by two votes — over 1.5% of her final margin — in this single precinct alone. Extrapolate this out to all 2616 precincts, and Gregoire would have won the election by a 5,361 vote landslide!

None of this should come as a surprise, since as we all know… Republicans are more likely to cheat than Democrats.

The New York Times’ Frank Rich writes about “The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told,” an absolute must-read column on so many levels. Rich recounts a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner, just two-and-a-half weeks after 9/11.

The ensuing avalanche of Viagra jokes did not pull off the miracle of making everyone in the room forget the recent events. Restlessness had long since set in when the last comic on the bill, Gilbert Gottfried, took the stage. Mr. Gottfried, decked out in preposterously ill-fitting formal wear, has a manic voice so shrill he makes Jerry Lewis sound like Morgan Freeman. He grabbed the podium for dear life and started rocking back and forth like a hyperactive teenager trapped onstage in a school assembly. Soon he delivered what may have been the first public 9/11 gag: He couldn’t get a direct flight to California, he said, because “they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

There were boos, but Mr. Gottfried moved right along to his act’s crowning joke. “A talent agent is sitting in his office,” he began. “A family walks in – a man, woman, two kids, and their little dog. And the talent agent goes, ‘What kind of an act do you do?’ ” What followed was a marathon description of a vaudeville routine featuring incest, bestiality and almost every conceivable bodily function. The agent asks the couple the name of their unusual act, and their answer is the punch line: “The Aristocrats.”

As the mass exodus began, some people were laughing, others were appalled, and perhaps a majority of us were in the middle. We knew we had seen something remarkable, not because the joke was so funny but because it had served as shock therapy, harmless shock therapy for an adult audience, that at least temporarily relieved us of our burdens and jolted us back into the land of the living again. Some weeks later Comedy Central would cut the bit entirely from its cable recycling of the roast. But in the more than three years since, I have often reflected upon Mr. Gottfried’s mesmerizing performance. At a terrible time it was an incongruous but welcome gift. He was inviting us to once again let loose.

Read the whole thing.

I thought last week’s open thread was unusually civil and informative. I don’t know if that makes for an entertaining blog, but it was certainly a nice change-up from our usual name-calling.

So here’s a new sandbox to play in — or shit in — at your discretion.

Writing in today’s Seattle P-I (“We’re complacent about our own Osamas,”) New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff warns:

We don’t have to go to Saudi Arabia to find violent religious extremists steeped in hatred for all America stands for. Wake up — they’re here.

Discussing the proliferation of home-grown hate groups and violent attacks on judges and their families, Kristoff takes as a springboard the recent murder of the husband and mother of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow. Suspicion immediately fell on the followers of white racist leader Matt Hale, who is currently jailed for seeking to murder Judge Lefkow. It was widely reported that postings to racist websites joyfully celebrated the murders.

And now this morning we hear about the fatal shooting of a judge in a Fulton County, GA court room.

Whether these recent acts of violence against our judiciary were carried out by angry individuals or organized hate groups, Kristoff warns of a disturbing trend that threatens to undermine our judiciary:

Threats to federal judges and prosecutors have increased sharply since they began to be tabulated 25 years ago, but the attack on Lefkow’s family, if it was related to her work, would take such threats to a new level. Who would want to be a judge if that risked the lives of loved ones?

None of this happens in a vacuum, and as anti-government rhetoric continues to grow not only in tone and volume, but in respectability, we need to be aware that there are those among us who might actually act on their anger.

As a service to my many right-wing readers, I just thought I’d tactfully mention the fact that CHRISTINE GREGOIRE IS GOVERNOR! I know a lot of you are still in denial, but fortunately, her first major act as GOVERNOR was to sign the Mental Health Parity Act… so now you can all get the grief counseling you desperately need.

In other news, Stefan continues his hunger strike until King County Elections finally releases the “big binder”… um… even though they’ve already released the binder to Rossi’s attorneys. Whatever.

And speaking of Rossi (who parenthetically, is NOT governor,) it’s been 128 days since his “official” gubernatorial campaign ended, but he still hasn’t disbanded his campaign staff yet. Ever wonder what they do down at campaign headquarters all day? Well I think this little gleaning from his monthly PDC expenditure report says it all:

02/18/2005      DIRECT TV              $88.94
                PO BOX 60036
                LOS ANGELES, CA 90060

(I know there’s a good joke in here somewhere about his favorite TV channel. Any suggestions?)

I have voted in three cities — Philadelphia, New York, and Seattle — and to tell the truth, I miss those clunky, lever machines back East. Those big old booths with their dozens of levers made casting your vote feel physical and real; pulling that big lever at the end, hearing all those gears click into place and that curtain grind open, was the electoral equivalent of cracking your knuckles, or sinking your teeth into a thick, crusty sandwich… it delivered an odd, satisfying finality that you just don’t get from silently feeding your ballot into a scanner.

Ah well, the days of the voting machine are passing by. They are hulking and cumbersome, prone to breakdowns, and expensive to maintain, transport and warehouse. And while my personal experience as a poll worker assures me that they are exceedingly difficult to tamper with, recent events have left me more than a little uncomfortable with their inherent lack of an audit trail.

New York State is preparing legislation that would phase out mechanical voting machines, and replace them with newer technologies. Legislators will rightly require touch-screen voting machines to produce voter-verifiable paper trails, but as a recent New York Times editorial laments, they appear to be caving to lobbyists by ignoring a more reliable, cost-effect voting technology: good old, optical scan.

The big voting machine companies, which are well connected politically, are aggressively pushing touch-screen voting. These A.T.M.-style machines make a lot of sense for the manufacturers because they are expensive and need to be replaced frequently. But touch-screen machines are highly vulnerable to being hacked or maliciously programmed to change votes.

Security concerns should give Washingtonians pause as we rush towards voting reform in the wake of a disputed election whose main problem was its extraordinary closeness. Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org has made a sport of demonstrating to election officials how quickly their systems can be hacked. And Paul Lehto and Jeffrey Hoffman have produced a 29-page study documenting touch-screen irregularities in Snohomish County, that they say may have cost Christine Gregoire thousands of votes.

Given security concerns and high costs, the NY Times suggests that touch-screen machines should not be used at all.

The best voting technology now available uses optical scanning. These machines work like a standardized test. Voters mark their choices on a paper form, which is then counted by a computer. The paper ballots are kept, becoming the official record of the election. They can be recounted, and if there is a discrepancy between them and the machine count, the paper ballots are the final word.

Optical-scan machines produce a better paper record than touch-screen machines because it is one the voter has actually filled out, not a receipt that the voter must check for accuracy. Optical-scan machines are also far cheaper than touch-screens. Their relatively low cost will be welcomed by taxpayers, of course, but it also has a direct impact on elections. Because touch-screen machines are so expensive, localities are likely to buy too few, leading to long lines at the polls.

Of course, all this may end up being a moot point in Washington state, where two-thirds of the electorate chose to vote absentee during the last election; as this trend continues, the rationale for maintaining two distinct voting systems becomes less and less tenable. It seems likely that we will inevitably follow Oregon to an all vote-by-mail system, thus making Snohomish and Yakima counties’ spanking new touch-screen machines prematurely obsolete.

I’ll miss going to the polling place at least as much as I miss cranking the lever on those hulking, old machines. But at least I’ll be assured that my ballot will be counted using the most accurate and auditable voting technology available today: optical scan.

It’s been a long day, so I just quickly want to mention Wednesday’s editorial by Bruce Ramsey in the Seattle Times: “What kind of law let’s your neighbor shut you down?”

Ramsey writes about the plight of a Greenlake B&B that has run afoul of a local zoning ordinance after complaints by an ornery neighbor. Councilman Richard Conlin, who wrote the law in question, says shutting down such B&Bs is not what he intended, and that the ordinance may need to be modified. But the owners are suing to have the ordinance tossed out entirely on grounds that it unconstitutionally restricts their right to earn a living. As Ramsey points out, this could have far reaching implications if they prevail:

It suggests that your neighbors shouldn’t be able to stop you from working at home unless your work harms them in some verifiable way

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Do not trust a single thing you read on the political blogs. Really. We can’t be trusted. Some of us simply aren’t all that bright. Some of us are propagandists, or out-and-out liars. And some of us are just plain nuts.

But stupid, lying, or crazy, most all of us have an agenda, and it influences nearly everything we write.

Take for example, Jim Miller of (un)Sound Politics, who proudly claims to have coined the phrase distributed vote fraud. Based on the core assumption that “Cheaters are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans,” it is this offensive (and ultimately self-defeating) theory that some of the more self-righteous and non-introspective Republicans rely upon to explain away their long history of electoral failure in Washington state.

(Could it be that the majority of voters prefer Democrats? Naaah… they cheated!)

In his latest contribution to (u)SP’s ouvre of partisan paranoia, Jim shows that his inherent mistrust of the other extends well beyond his own unscientific musings.

One of the minor mysteries of the election is why the Seattle Times endorsed Dino Rossi. I don’t take their own explanation at face value, and I suspect I am not alone in my cynicism. My guess is that some on the editorial board went along with the endorsement because they thought he had no chance to win. They could pose as nonpartisan without cost. It is, when you think about it, rather extraordinary how little support the Times has given to “their” candidate since the election.

Forget for a moment the obvious reason why the Times endorsed Dino Rossi (um… Frank Blethen told them to?) or Jim’s absurd notion that the board might appear “nonpartisan” by endorsing the Republican. It is his final sentence that is truly revealing, for it clues us in on Jim’s view of the primary role of the media, mainstream or otherwise: supporting their candidate.

Jim finds it downright suspicious that the Times would endorse Rossi, and then not overtly use its enormous power of the press to undermine Christine Gregoire’s legitimacy. Because the Times is not reporting all the paranoid propaganda being foisted as news on (u)SP, Jim attacks it for not investigating at all. But what he’s really attacking is not the Times’ failure to investigate the election, but its failure to support his conclusion that it was stolen.

In his mind, if the Times really supported Rossi, it would be working harder to undermine and overturn this election, journalistic ethics be damned. If that is the role that he expects of our state’s largest newspaper, imagine the low journalistic standards he demands from mere bloggers like himself.

Unlike his fellow (un)Sounder, Stefan, who frequently lets his inner demons seize hold of his thesaurus, Jim tends to write in a more measured, detached style, that a less critical reader might attribute to dispassioned thoughtfulness. But the truth is, he is a partisan propagandist, pure and simple.

I myself have long admitted that there is a propagandistic element to much of what I write, starting with the subjects on which I choose to editorialize. And I have also had more than my fair share of fun taking shots at the Seattle Times… including my months-long obsession with dipping Collin Levey’s journalistic ponytail in my digital inkwell. (I think I love you, Collin!)

So this is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. But then, I’ve never pretended to be all shiny and polished.

The point is… don’t uncritically trust the blogs! Read between the lines, scribble in the margins, hold us up to the light, in front of a mirror, and under a microscope… and then spin us backwards on an old turntable if that’s what it takes to reveal our subliminal message.

Don’t fool yourself… we’re no better than the mainstream media. We’re just different.

With no court proceedings scheduled in the election contest, I expect that both sides are now hunkering down, gathering data, and sorting through the evidence. So I asked HA’s expert legal analyst, Lawyer X, for his take on what we can expect in the coming weeks.

I expect the “discrepancies” will begin to fade out of the discourse as the analysis of the “big binder” comes into vogue since everyone knows that the crediting of voters is not particularly relevant to anything.

Well X… not everyone knows. Those who rely on partisan bloggers (or the voices in their head) for their election contest news, haven’t quite figured that one out yet. But I digress….

We don’t know what the real situation was yet in terms of proper ballot handling on election night but the big binder analysis will give a more accurate picture than any credit analysis. But even if the “big binder” shows the possibility of more provisional ballots being accidentally fed into ballot boxes than the 348 that have been alleged in the press, the overwhelming majority of those additional ballots will be from registered voters and be valid votes. Bottom line, there will likely not be much effect from provisional ballots, even if the GOP is allowed to use proportional analysis of the invalid provisionals.

Hmmm… “proportional analysis.” We’ll get back to that in a moment, but first I want to make a couple clarifications about the provisional ballots.

Some have questioned how King County was able to account for 341 of the 348 provisional ballots known to have been improperly scanned at the polling place. The answer is rather simple. Upon receiving a provisional ballot, the voter signed in the back of the poll book. So… those voters who signed for provisional ballots, but for whom envelopes where not received, are assumed to have improperly scanned their ballots at the polling place. Of these, 252 were later verified to have cast valid ballots.

As Lawyer X notes, it is possible that an exhaustive examination of the binder and the poll books could find more improperly scanned provisional ballots, but the majority of these would likely be verified as valid too. You’re not hearing much about provisional ballots these days, because there really isn’t that much to talk about.

The Rossi team’s main focus has been on the “felon vote,” an issue that plays well with the home crowd, and is quite frankly, the only place they’re likely to find a substantial number of clearly illegal votes. We don’t yet know what the actual number really is, but given the GOP’s history of inflated claims, it is probably somewhat less than the 1100 originally touted.

Rossi’s attorneys and spokespeople continue to hold to their stance that we can’t trust a felon to tell us how he voted. And with good reason — an attorney should never ask a witness a question to which he doesn’t already know the answer. Plus, the felons are not likely to give Rossi’s attorneys the answers they want.

That’s why they’ve pinned their hopes on the dubious prospect of the court accepting a proportional analysis. Rossi’s only chance of prevailing is to prove enough illegal votes and errors in heavily Democratic King County, so that Gregoire’s extrapolated margin of victory in these disputed ballots is greater than her actual margin statewide.

But as Lawyer X explains, the felon vote is not that simple.

If the “felon vote” turns out to be factually based, I would expect the ratio of men to women in that pool of voters to be 3 to 1 or so. As a result, it is not representative of any county’s voting population. There is no reason to expect it to vote in proportions similar to the rest of the population and I doubt proportions could be used to any particular benefit for the GOP after any reasonable adjustments are made for the gender bias. Frankly, I expect the GOP is still looking for enough votes to prove their case even under a proportion theory.

(Suggestion: if you cast an illegal vote in King County, and you suddenly receive a check from the BIAW… don’t cash it.)

Personally, I can’t imagine the court wanting to get into proportional analysis unless the numbers are just absolutely overwhelming. At the evidentiary hearings, the judge will surely be treated to dueling demographers wielding statistical analyses so obtuse, they’ll make Stefan’s spreadsheet look like, well… Stefan’s spreadsheet.

But even if the court were to accept a proportional analysis, Lawyer X suggests Rossi’s evidentiary hurdle may be a little higher than his cheerleaders imagine.

One other thing to keep in mind, as an academic point, anyway: even if the Court were to allow the GOP to use proportions, that would only apply to those voters for whom no other information was available. To the extent that voters do disclose how they voted, that disclosure will prevail over any guess based on proportions. In that context, there may be a lot of work remaining for both sides to do before the case is ready to move on. Based on newspapers reports of how people voted, I would say Rossi is more than 129 votes behind at this point.

That’s right… Gregoire could actually come out of the evidentiary hearings having expanded her margin. If the Democrats start deposing felons who voted for Rossi, the GOP will have to match them by deposing felons who voted for Gregoire. Thus despite Rossi’s protestations that felons can’t be trusted to reveal their vote, I wouldn’t be surprised if both sides are already hard at work, quietly deposing felons.

Of course, all this is speculation. But then, Rossi’s attorneys have built their entire case on speculation, so why should I be any more intellectually rigorous than them?

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.”