HorsesAss.Org

Again, I understand the rules of the game, and the simple virtue of owning a newspaper grants you the right to use the op/ed pages to push the agenda of your choice. But I am constantly amazed at how ham-fisted the Blethens are in promoting their own narrow self-interest.

For the second time since the election, the Seattle Times has seen fit to editorialize against the estate tax, first the federal and now the state. Yeah… the war in Iraq, the economy, widespread electoral fraud… none of that is apparently as important to the owners of our state’s “paper of record” than assuring that the very wealthy pass on their estates undiminished.

In fact, I’m not sure the Blethens are really all that concerned with anybody else but the Blethens, as they constantly argue their case by raising the specter that an estate tax might force their heirs to sell out, ending decades of local ownership… by the Blethens.

And readers should be concerned because…?

I’m sure their rhetoric has a powerful emotional appeal — to the Blethens — but it ignores a couple realities. A) Any change in tax policy has winners and losers, and eliminating WA’s estate tax would either cut services or shift tax burden to those who can least afford it, making what is already the most regressive tax system in the nation even more unfair. B) Eliminating the estate tax would not ensure Blethen family control; the Times is already half-owned by Knight-Ridder, and a single disgruntled heir looking to diversify their portfolio (according to the Blethens, the Times is a money pit) could shift control of the paper.

(FYI, my former hometown newspaper, the Knight-Ridder owned Philadelphia Inquirer, is a highly respected and editorially independent publication that makes the Seattle Times look like, well… the Seattle Times. All you expatriates from NY, DC, LA and other big cities with real big city papers… you know what I’m talking about.)

But then, it was just an editorial so we don’t really expect intellectual honesty, or even respect for the law:

Now a group of heirs that has had to pay the state tax has sued. On Sept. 30, they argued their case before the Washington Supreme Court. That court has not yet ruled.

How strong their legal case is we do not know, but we hope they prevail.

Yes, the Blethens “hope they prevail”, regardless of how strong the legal case is. I guess that is what the Times means by “political courage”… justices who are willing to rule on policy rather than the law.

Oh… and one more thing. It’s called an “estate tax”, goddamnit, and no matter how many times you call it a “death tax” (eight times in six paragraphs) it is still an “estate tax.” (RCW Title 83)

Perhaps Knight-Ridder could lend the Times a fact checker.

How important are provisional ballots in determining the outcome of the governor’s race? The WA State Democratic Party is planning to sue the King County Elections Department to gain access to the list of voters whose ballots have been ruled invalid.

In response, state GOP chairman Chris Vance made one of his usual ill considered stupid comments:

“I’m now becoming very worried that the Democrats are going to try to turn this into Florida,”

I can’t blame Republicans for trying to run out the clock, but this habit of ridiculing Democrats for wanting to count every vote shows just how little the R’s respect the electorate. Turn this into another Florida? How fucking arrogant can you get? If votes are left uncounted, then this is another Florida.

Apparently, Republicans only respect the will of the voters when it agrees with them.

I encourage you all to read the excellent column in today’s Seattle Times by Rep. Fred Jarrett (R-Mercer Island): “Legislative progress possible if we ‘risk’ civil discourse“.

It may seem a bit odd for me — an admitted partisan rhetorical flame thrower — to be supporting a Republican legislator’s call for bipartisan civil discourse. But just because I understand my role, doesn’t mean I can’t dream of a better world.

A couple readers have complained that they don’t want to read my nightly updates on the projected winner in the governor’s race. So don’t look.

The count continues to trend in Rossi’s favor, predicting a 4400 vote victory.

For those who want a glimmer of hope, I could not verify that the “ballots left to count” numbers include provisional ballots, of which more than a third are from King County. If these break strongly in Gregoire’s favor, she still has a shot.

As I predicted yesterday, Tim Eyman’s latest initiative garnered little media attention… a single, obligatory AP newswire story that appeared last night in the online edition of the P-I, and was excerpted in today’s Olympian. Quite a step down from the media circus that accompanied the introduction of I-892 last March.

Media fatigue has steadily grown for the-boy-who-cried-tax-revolt, and it seems likely Tim’s performance audits initiative will continue to draw a collective yawn from reporters and voters alike.

It’s not that performance audits are necessarily a bad idea (I’ll reserve comment on the merits of Tim’s initiative until I read the specific language.) It’s just that it’s not a particularly controversial idea, and controversy, after all, has long been Tim’s currency in the public debate. D’s and R’s have repeatedly passed competing performance audit bills through the state House and Senate, and now that the D’s control both houses of the legislature, it seems likely the new governor will have an opportunity to sign something into law.

Of course, if that happens, Timmy will claim credit for forcing their hand. Don’t you believe it.

Only the most politically unobservant legislators are still cowed by Tim’s threats of voter backlash, or impressed by his frenetically maintained celebrity. Gone are the days when Tim can qualify an initiative for the ballot on the strength of $200 contributions from kitchen-table conservatives. And his attempts to feebly display grassroots support have been pathetic — the last few times he emailed his 3600-weak list to ask them to show their passion by joining him at an event, you could count the turnout on one hand.

Sure, Tim may yet find some special-interest sugar daddy to bankroll another for-profit initiative… though his talk of pushing slot machines again naively assumes his mini-casino buddies are bigger chumps than their customers. And even a politically marginalized Eyman will maintain a degree of media appeal in a state inordinately blessed with boring politicians. So I’m not suggesting we let down our guard and relax our rather effective efforts at refuting his lies.

But as an initiative sponsor, Tim’s track record over the past two years speaks for itself.

To call Tim a paper tiger would be to exaggerate the dangers of paper cuts.

Yes, there’s a big chunk of ballots yet to count in pro-Gregoire King County, and yes the provisional ballots could still buck the trend… but if current margins hold up, my spreadsheet projects Rossi to win by 3091 votes. This is the exact same number projected by the folks at conservative SoundPolitics.org, so I’m guessing my math checks out.

Man that sucks.

For me, I’m guessing that the biggest news story in tomorrow’s papers will be the lack thereof. Specifically, the relative absence of Tim Eyman from the headlines.

In an election night effort to draw attention away from his dismal failure with Initiative 892, Tim announced that he would be filing a new “performance audits” initiative on Nov. 9 (today). In the past, such events have drawn TV cameras and a gaggle of reporters.

This time… not so much.

In fact, unless it’s a real s-l-o-w news day, Tim might not make the morning newspapers at all.

There are a couple of reasons for the media’s sudden lack of interest in all things Timmy. First, this is definitely a none-event. You can’t file an “Initiative to the People” until January, so any trip to the Secretary of State’s office would be an obvious hoax.

Second… well… Tim is increasingly… irrelevant.

In the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world of political news coverage, Tim hasn’t really done much lately.

Two years in a row, his “sure-fire”, “I’ve never seen supporters so excited” initiatives have failed to even qualify for the ballot. And while the million dollars of gambling industry money behind I-892 firmly established Tim as a professional initiative sponsor, its embarrassing showing at the polls only further eroded his reputation as a successful one.

With over sixty initiatives filed every year, only the best financed or truly outrageous initiatives manage to garner much news coverage — and Tim’s “performance audits” initiative promises to be neither. Oh Tim’s political circus will continue to get more than its fair share of headlines, but he’s gradually becoming more of a side-show freak than a big top performer.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not ready to write Tim’s political obituary. But I’m looking forward to an Eyman-free 2005 November election.

I’ve been following the returns on the governor’s race all week, plugging them into a spreadsheet, and for the first time since election night, my projections show that Dino Rossi will win… by about 650 votes. In fact, this number is pretty conservative, as it is based on total average winning margins, as opposed to the most recent totals. Rossi’s margins have actually improved (generally) as the count has gone on, and suggest a victory of a couple thousand votes is possible.

I’m not saying Gregoire will definitely lose. But it looks grim.

From the Seattle Times today: “Rob McKenna made his case“.

Oh gimme a break!

I’ve had my nauseating fill this past week of gloating, pompous Republicans accusing Democrats of being sore losers for not obsequiously bending over and taking a political colonoscopy from our half-wit fuhrer and his vengeful cohorts. But the Times’ self-congratulatory piece of history-rewriting fluff is little more than partisan cheerleading.

Rob McKenna made his case? Yeah… sure… if by “making his case” you mean sitting back and reaping the rewards from $3 million of out-of-state special-interest, negative attack ads tearing down Deborah Senn.

If the Times editorial board really believes voters made an informed decision in the AG race, then it shows how incredibly isolated and out-of-touch they are. Hey guys… believe it or not, the rest of us did not have an opportunity to sit down and have a tete-a-tete with the candidates.

Of course, I think the Times fully understands that there was nearly no public debate on issues or qualifications, and that’s why they feel it so necessary to build up their candidate with fictionalized platitudes. I’ve never met McKenna (like most voters, I’m not on the Times’ editorial board), so I can’t attest to his “first-class temperament”. But I’ve listened to his public statements, examined his resume, and heard comments from former classmates and coworkers, and when the Times’ talks about his “combination of experience [and] brains” I am struck by his remarkable lack thereof.

When I make personal attacks like that, I generally like to back them up. But you know what? The Times started it… so let them prove to me why McKenna isn’t a mediocre intellect with a mediocre record.

Oh, and to their post-election pretensions to an even-handed analysis of Deborah Senn:

In her old job, we thought the line between zeal and grandstanding had been breached too often. But Senn was a smart, capable AG candidate.

Eat me.

The Times trashed Senn in the primary and the general election! They happily allowed her to twist in the wind as out-of-context charges branded her a corrupt incompetent. And now they throw her a compliment?

It’s not the editorial board’s partisanship that pisses me off — I’m at least as partisan as they are — but I’ve got the honesty to be out in the open about it, whereas the Times’ cloying efforts to masquerade manipulation as analysis not only makes for a bad public debate… it makes for bad writing.

Post-election conciliation my ass. It’s too late for rhetorical make-up sex… Senn has already been screwed.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah mandate my ass! Blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah reach out across the aisle and compromise this, blah blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah moral vote? Eat me! Blah blah blah.

Blah.

My head filled with dark thoughts in the days following yet another stolen election (oops… forgot to wear my aluminum hat), I totally forgot to read Collin Levey’s latest column: “Bush’s religious base bolsters support for Israel.”

Happily, any such temptation is likely to be nipped in the bud by a serendipitous and growing alliance between Jewish pro-Israel voters and the “Zionist” Christians of the president’s conservative base.

Yeah… see, Collin… the only problem with this serendipity is that these “Zionist” Christians are pro-Israel because they believe it will lead to the total destruction of the Jewish people.

I’m assuming Collin is Jewish like me, and perhaps like most Jews, she hasn’t spent much time reading the New Testament. As a piece of nonfiction I find it rather boring and preachy compared to the Torah… and I must say I find some of the gospels transparently self-serving on the part of the authors.

I’m sure many Christians might disagree with my critique. There’s no accounting for taste.

But as I’ve said before, Revelations is, well… a revelation.

The prophecy requires that before the Second Coming the Jews must return to the Holy Land (check) and rebuild the Temple… (Oops! That would require tearing down the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest mosques in Islam.)

Anyway… and what happens next? Well, a third of the Jews convert to Christianity, and the rest of us are destroyed in Armageddon. (The good news is, it finally ends over two thousand years of anti-semitism.)

This “Zionist”, evangelical Christian Republican base with which Collin is so eager to ally herself, may indeed be passionately pro-Israel… but they are most definitely not pro-Jew.

These are people who are happily looking forward to Armageddon… who eagerly await “The Rapture” (which my brother-in-law Dan reminds me, could be a boon for the schmatte business.) These are people who fervently believe the end-of-the-world is coming, and not a moment too soon.

And these are the people we want driving our foreign policy?!

Collin — from one Jew to another — I’ve got only one word to say to you: Oy!

Hey… why didn’t Eyman send out his usual gloating email on this: “Ruling: Sound Transit can continue collecting vehicle tax” …?

Oh yeah, that’s right… he lost.

The folks at SoundPolitics.com made fun of me for my election night lament that “I cannot imagine being convinced that this was a free and fair election.”

First of all, considering our national electoral catastrophe, I believe we all deserve a little time off to sit shiva for our democracy. Second, considering our nation’s documented history of voter intimidation and electoral fraud, I don’t believe my lament was all that nutty. (They called me “aluminum hat boy.”)

Remember, you’re not paranoid if everybody really is against you.

And so I point you to a piece by investigative reporter Greg Palast, a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine: “Kerry Won…”

Palast documents what I’ve been privately ranting about to family, friends and complete strangers the past couple days, that the gap between Ohio’s exit polls and the votes tallied was too large to be explained by survey errors. 53% of Ohio women and 51% of men thought they had voted for Kerry. And yet Bush managed to win 51% to 49%.

How is this possible? As Palast explains, thousands of ballots cast simply were not recorded. And the majority of these came from African Americans.

Scary. Depressing. But not surprising.

Well, I can gleam one great piece of news from Tuesday’s election, and that is that initiative campaigns in Washington state just got quite a bit more expensive.

To qualify an initiative for the ballot you need a number of valid signatures equal to 8% of the votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election. For the past four years that number came to about 198,000 signatures. Due to fraud, duplicates and other errors, campaigns generally shoot for a cushion of about 20% over the minimum, so 240,000 has been the magic number.

The bar just got higher.

The final count isn’t in, but it looks like approximately 2.85 million votes were cast for governor on Tuesday, resulting in a qualifying threshold of about 228,000 signatures. Add a 20% cushion, and campaigns are looking at a qualifying target of over 273,000.

Long gone are the days when signatures are gathered by an army of energized volunteers. Tim Eyman pioneered reliance on paid petitioners in Washington state, and no campaign has successfully attempted an all volunteer effort in years.

My impression is that Tim’s core base of support is limited, and shrinking. There is a ceiling on the number of volunteer signatures the true believers will gather for him… so those extra 35,000 signatures are going to cost him $1.50 to $5.00 a pop.

It’s been three years since Voters Want More Choices has raised near enough money to qualify an initiative for the ballot — both I-807 and I-864 fell well short of the mark. Depending on the language, Tim’s proposed “performance audits” initiative may not actually be terrible policy… but it certainly won’t be exciting enough to generate the necessary influx of $200.00 contributions.

Throughout the I-864 signature drive Tim told his supporters he needed $400,000 to reach the ballot. He raised a little more than half that. Add the expense of another $100,000 in signatures, and it looks like Tim’s “populist” days are over.

I’m not writing Tim off. He’s done a great job selling himself as a professional initiative whore (and if you ask I-892’s major financial backers, they’ll tell you they’ve been royally screwed.)

But it is ironic that a man who made his career railing against powerful special interests is now entirely beholden to them.

As my regular readers know, I have spent a fair number of pixels reporting on the shady business practices of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation, owner of four Seattle-area mini-casinos. For the most part, the local media has caved to threats of a Canadian libel suit, and refused to report on allegations of loan sharking, profit skimming, prostitution, mob connections, drugs, rape and other crimes at their casinos in B.C. and abroad.

One reporter even privately pooh-poohed my efforts to brand the recently defeated I-892 a “Great Canadian Initiative.” He said I was “reaching.”

Well, reach for this:

Great Canadian Gaming will analyze the outcome of initiative 892 and will plan a course of action for its operations in the State.

That’s from a press release issued by Great Canadian, discussing the results of their initiative. An initiative that — according to reliable sources — came about after Tim Eyman met with Great Canadian Executives.

Tim is already talking about a sequel:

On I-892, Eyman said it’s clear voters had concerns about the measure, and he intends to address those in a new initiative that “maintains 892’s positive aspects” and addresses the concerns.

I suppose that means that son-of-892 won’t legalize slot machines?

Not bloody likely. We all know that initiative whore Eyman fronted this gambling initiative for the money. And we all know that there is so much money to be made off slots, that Great Canadian is not going to let this issue die.

So I’m not going to let the story about pimping, loan-shark-infested Great Canadian die either. In fact, the story keeps getting better and better.

This week, Texas-based Allegiance Capital is up in Vancouver preparing to file their racketeering lawsuit in Canadian courts… and they don’t appear to be too worried about the libel suit Great Canadian has filed against them.

See, under Canadian law, the burden of proof is on the accused. And let’s just say that Allegiance won’t find it such a burden.

I’ve got the dirt on Great Canadian — including allegations of loan sharking and dealers cheating at their Washington state casinos. And I’m going to enjoy sharing it with you as I verify the details.