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Apparently, State Attorney General Rob McKenna is too busy representing the people of Florida to do his job representing the people of Washington, at least as evidenced by his announcement yesterday that he would no longer represent the state Department of Natural Resources in its legal fight against Okanogan County’s condemnation of Common School Trust land to build a PUD transmission line.

McKenna’s shirking of his constitutional obligations (he is, after all, the state’s attorney) leaves DNR, which has already laid off about 9 percent of its workforce, scrounging for money to hire an outside attorney in order to defend income producing public trust lands.

Which raises the question: who the hell does McKenna work for?

I thought he worked for us, the people, or more directly for the various state agencies for which his office is required to provide legal services, but McKenna apparently takes a more cavalier approach to his job. In defiance of both the Governor and the Legislature — our state’s policy setting bodies — McKenna was quick to use his office to join Florida’s lawsuit to repeal federal health insurance reform that is slated to bring hundreds millions of dollars a year of new federal funding to the state. But when Public Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark needs the AG to represent the interests of the people of Washington state, McKenna can’t be bothered to perform the mundane duties of his office.

Let’s be clear: it’s not McKenna’s job to determine the merits of the case or weigh in on the policy decisions guiding it. He’s DNR’s attorney, not it’s judge or jury, and his ethical and legal obligation is to represent his client to the best of his ability. And that, he is clearly failing to do.

The result? Okanogan PUD’s bifurcation of public trust lands with transmission lines and maintenance roads will reduce the value of the land and the income it produces to the state, while increasing both the fire risk and the cost of maintaining and patrolling it. This takes money out a public trust that has generated over $3 billion for public school construction over the past several decades.

It’s time for McKenna to put aside his 2012 gubernatorial campaign and start doing the job for which he was elected.

Boston Globe Tailors Print Edition For Three Remaining Subscribers

Following up on Carl’s suggestions for saving the Times, the Onion has a few ideas of its own.

There’s a memorable scene in the 1972 disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure (my favorite movie of all time… when I was nine) in which the main characters come across a second group of survivors shuffling down a hallway toward the bow. Gene Hackman’s character tries to convince them to follow him toward the stern of the capsized ship, and counterintuitively up to the engine room, but to no avail. The unfortunate group is presumed drowned moments later when the deck floods.

That’s kinda how I view the 2010 election cycle.

No doubt this is going to be a very bad year for Democrats, an outcome as predictable and unavoidable as the fate of the doomed cruise ship Poseidon the moment the captain first got word of an earthquake off Crete. But while Republicans are looking forward to a Big Red Wave™, the surest path toward electoral survival is proving to be not so clear once your world is flipped upside down. Just ask the bevy of NRSC endorsed candidates who will be watching the November general election from the sidelines.

And yesterday’s primary results don’t add any more clarity. In a supposedly profoundly anti-incumbent year, embattled U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas managed to win a run-off election, a not inconsiderable feat, while establishment Republicans went on to win top of the ticket primaries in California. Yet in Nevada, former frontrunner Sue Lowden became the latest machine GOPer to fall victim to internecine rivalry with the Tea Party Express.

But, apart from a handful of high profile Republican incumbents defeated by challengers from the far right, and party-switcher Sen. Arlen Specter’s loss to a challenger from the slightly-left-of-center, this presumably anti-incumbent primary season has thus far produced little evidence of actual anti-incumbency. 395 House members have sought or are seeking reelection this year, and so far only three have lost their primaries. That’s less than one percent. Try reading them tea leaves.

The one thing that is clear is that the Democratic Party appears to be holding steady, at least ideologically, while its Republican counterpart is lurching wildly to the right, a shift that doesn’t help the GOP’s efforts to retake either house. I guess there are some states in which crazy wins; I mean, you can’t get much nuttier than retiring Sen. Jim Bunning, though in Rand Paul, Kentuckians appear to have found their man. But I’m not sure if the best way to exploit a throw the bums out mentality is to put up challengers who make Newt Gingrich look like Adlai Stevenson.

Like I said, it’s a bad year for Dems. A mid-term election in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Nothing good can come from that. But with the political tsunami capsizing Republicans and Democrats alike, the morning after the general election might not look as grim as a lot of folks expect.

TPM’s got the morning after analysis, but just remember, you read it here first.

Another Tuesday, another primary election night. Okay, not so much in Washington, but there are some interesting (and odd-ball) races to watch this evening. It all adds up to an excuse to join us for an evening of electoral politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 325 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

Two Egyptian Christians fly to New York to join the whack-job protest of the mosque being built near Ground Zero – and have to be rescued from the other protesters who refused to believe that they weren’t Muslims.

Looks like Rep. Dave Reichert has drawn himself a teabagger challenger, and he appears to be a doozy.

Ernest Huber, with 21 years of service to his name in the United States Army, Air Force and Navy (what… he couldn’t hack the Marines?) has now officially filed with both the SOS and the FEC, and has some pretty harsh words for the incumbent:

Reichert has sold us out and has disqualified himself for office.

In 1997, King County Executive Ron Sims, a Progressive, appointed his friend Dave Reichert as King County sheriff.  Sims and Reichert endorsed each other in 1997 and 2001.  In 2004, Reichert was elected as a Republican to Congress from the Eastside’s 8th Congressional District.  He has voted against our party in Congress hundreds of times, and has had no bills enacted.  He’s a follower, not a leader.  Reichert has been called a RINO, but he is much worse.  His ideology is “moderate” Progressivism.  Our district is not Progressive.  He does not represent us. Reichert has to go.

Reichert’s sole job is on the corrupt Progressive Charlie Rangel’s House Ways and Means Committee.  It oversees borrowing by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt from the private Federal Reserve bank.  It allocates money, then writes the nation’s tax bills and raises revenue to pay for the debt.  This Committee is a cesspool of pork, earmarks, lobbyists, and bankers.  Reichert is also on its Oversight Subcommittee, which theoretically investigates wrongdoing by Obama’s administration. Remember that as you read the following samples of his voting record, because Reichert is an insider who knows exactly what he’s doing to us, our district, and our nation.  This is cold-blooded betrayal.

And Huber only gets more strident from there, as he launches into a 9,000 word “Conservative Manifesto” that includes such teabagger staples as repealing health care reform, eliminating both the IRS and the Federal Reserve, closing off the Mexican border and deporting all “invaders,” and immediately deposing the “radical communist” Obama:

After his election, Obama and his followers began incrementally overthrowing our government and installing a dictatorship. They must be immediately arrested and jailed by whatever means necessary. Impeachment can come later.

Now that’s the kinda plain spoken patriotism that makes one proud to be an American, and if our local Tea Partiers have any integrity or balls, you’d think they’d rally to Huber’s support, rather than sheepishly collude with a RINO who appeases environmentalists (or “Leninists,” as Huber calls them) and votes Yes on “Soviet-style” cap and trade.

But of course, our Tea Partiers don’t have integrity or balls — they’re just pawns of the usual corporatist suspects — so don’t expect Reichert to spend much time looking over his shoulder to the right this cycle, as he instead tries to patch up his moderate image after the embarrassing leaked audio fiasco.

While Rep. Eric Pettigrew can reasonably blame his tiny iPhone screen for him missing the party preference field in the online candidate filing form, a number of other Democratic incumbents have no such excuse for failing to know the proper name of their own party.

“Prefers Democrat Party.” That’s the party preference currently filed for Democratic legislative incumbents Paull Shin, Chris Marr, Tracey Eide, Sharon Nelson and most egregiously, House Speaker Frank Chopp, plus a number of hopefuls.

Of course, the party they prefer is the Democratic Party, not the nonexistent “Democrat Party,” the latter misnomer having become a Luntzian pejorative of sorts, I suppose after research concluded it polls worse than our party’s proper name.

You can’t get much more emblematic of the Democratic tendency to suicidally embrace Republican frames than this. Sheesh.

It’s candidate filing week in Washington state, and an eagle-eyed colleague emailed me a WTF over the filing of state Rep. Eric Pettigrew (D-37), which surprisingly lists “States No Party Preference.” WTF indeed.

So I emailed Pettigrew to ask him if this was a mistake or a statement, and he quickly responded:

Im in NY/Boston for the week. I filed on my iphone (which has a small screen) and I must have missed the pref. line…I am, have always been will ALWAYS be a Democrat.
Thanks
EP

Sent from my iPhone

While I in no way doubt Pettigrew — he always has been a BIG Democrat in every sense of the word — this incident does suggest an exciting new PR strategy for crisis-challenged politicians, executives and other public figures, a technique I dub the “Sent from my iPhone Effect.”

For example, BP CEO Tony Hayward could have quickly shifted the blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster with a simple, believable, typo strewn email:

Waz using iRig app to trigger blowout preventr when lost 3g coverage. Damn ATT!
TH

Sent from my iPhone

Or imagine former President George W. Bush’s ready-made excuse for failing to heed the August 6, 2001 daily security briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US”:

In crawford cutting brush. Couldnt reed on iphones small screen.
W

Sent from my iPhone

The possibilities are endless.

HA READER CHALLENGE:
In the comment thread, imagine your “Sent from my iPhone” responses to some of history’s greatest scandals and disasters.

With less than a month to go, it looks like the I-1068 campaign is not going to get the help it needs to get on the ballot. Using only volunteer gatherers (I’ve collected roughly 500 signatures myself), it’s still less than half-way to its signature goal. As Josh reports, the SEIU had initially considered funding paid signature gatherers to ensure it gets on the ballot in November – in part because it would greatly increase turnout among younger voters. If I-1068 gets on the ballot, supporters were looking to use Hempfest as a huge voter registration effort.

Instead, Democrats and the SEIU balked. With an initiative already on the ballot in California to provide some good data points, it’ll be interesting to see whether the backers of I-1068 are correct about how much value there would have been for Democrats to have a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot – if it doesn’t make it.

Making things even more interesting, we would be able to compare the fates of both Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray; both incumbents, and both being challenged by well-known candidates with big pockets (assuming Fiorina makes it through her primary tomorrow). Although, to add an extra twist, Boxer inexplicably came out against California’s initiative at the beginning of April, and has since seen her favorability plummet since then. It’s not clear whether her opposition was the main reason for that huge drop (or if there just aren’t enough polling points yet to know how big the drop really is), but coming out against an initiative that remains extremely popular with both her base of liberal voters and independents certainly wasn’t smart.

It’s entirely possible that if I-1068 makes the ballot that Murray would follow in Boxer’s clumsy footsteps and publicly oppose it anyway. But if I were Dino Rossi, I’d be breathing a little easier about the likelihood of not having something on the ballot that encourages more younger and liberal voters to show up in November.

	Deep-bore Tunnel	University Link
Cost	$1.96-$3.1 billion 1	$1.9 billion
Length	2 miles	3.15 miles
Exits	0	2
Projected Daily Traffic (2030)	72,000 vehicles	70,000-142,000+ people 2
Capacity per hour	8,800 cars 3	48,000 people 4
Fare	$0.94-$2.25 5	$2.00 6
Overruns paid by	? 7	Sound Transit

Via Seattle Transit Blog. Click through for full post and footnotes.

It’s pea season in Seattle, and why everybody in the city with a patch of land and little bit of sun doesn’t grow peas, I don’t know. We humans might not have enjoyed these past few damp weeks, but my garden has loved it, and a mere ten-foot row of snow peas and sugar snaps are already producing about as fast as we can eat ’em.

It’s gonna be a bumper crop. Yum.

It’s also an incredible bargain. For the cost of a bag of compost, a packet of seeds, a cup or so of bonemeal and maybe an hour of work, my daughter and I will enjoy all the fresh organic peas we can eat throughout the entire month of June. Delicious yes, but you also can’t get much healthier or thriftier than that.

Sorry for straying from the angry, partisan politics, but I just needed to celebrate the profound pleasure that comes from growing, eating and sharing one’s own food.

Last week I posted a commentary suggesting that “It’s Gov. Gregoire who needs to take the lead in pulling the tunnel cost overrun provision,” not Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn.

My premise was simple. If, as the Governor suggests, Mayor McGinn’s focus on the cost-overrun provision “is just something to hang his hat on” in his effort to scuttle the Big Bore tunnel, and if the cost-overrun provision is as unenforceable as she says it is, and if the Governor is really promising to sign a bill that would remove this provision… then why not just take the lead in doing exactly that, thus swiping the Mayor’s hat peg?

I’m on record as opposing the tunnel, but if the goal is to move forward with this project as quickly as possible, I argued, the Governor and the legislative leadership should just swallow their pride and promise to push through what she claims to be a mere symbolic legislative fix. It was, I thought, a pretty damn constructive proposal coming from somebody on the losing side of the tunnel debate. But you wouldn’t know it from the comment thread, which proved particularly vitriolic and disinformative even by HA comment thread standards.

Indeed, this thread is pretty much emblematic of the “Fuck Seattle” attitude that often seems to dominate political discourse throughout the rest of state. “I hope Seattle fucking chokes on the cost overruns,” one commenter writes, while another insists that Mayor McGinn deserves “a taste of his own medicine.” While I magnanimously proposed a way to politically move forward, my critics clearly remained focused on extracting retribution.

Ah well. So much for attempting to be the voice of reason.

Ironically, in objecting to the advisory vote in which Seattle voters rejected both a tunnel and a rebuild, one of my most vocal critics in the thread inadvertently makes a pretty damn strong case against sticking the city with the cost-overruns:

Get it straight. Highway 99 is not the property of the city of Seattle. It is a STATE FUCKING HIGHWAY. It happens to run through Seattle, and through a hell of a lot of other municipalities. One hell of a lot of people depend on Highway 99 who are not Seattle residents, and their tax dollars damn sure support that highway.

The state built it. The state maintains it. The Legislature controls the purse strings…

Okay, it’s a “state fucking highway.” Great. Then let the state pay for it. Including any cost-overruns. Especially considering that, unlike the existing Viaduct, the new deep bore tunnel will include no exits or onramps.

Did you hear that folks? No exits or onramps! This is a tunnel explicitly designed not to serve downtown Seattle, but rather folks seeking to drive through it, and because of the lack of exits comparable to those northbound at Seneca and Western, and the rush hour traffic backups they create, the tunnel will be much better suited to this particular purpose than any of the other proposed options.

So don’t give me this shit about how if Seattle wants its “gold-plated tunnel” Seattle taxpayers should have to pay for it. Yes, the removal of the existing Viaduct will open the waterfront to redevelopment, but the much cheaper surface/transit option would have done same while providing far better ingress and egress to downtown Seattle than a deep bore tunnel with no exits.

In fact, the only people who will benefit from the tunnel over the surface/transit option will be those seeking to drive through downtown Seattle without being slowed down by the street traffic above.

So yeah, Highway 99 is a state highway, and the state rejected the less expensive surface/transit option in favor of the deep bore tunnel so as to better meet the needs of the thru-traffic driving on it. You win some and you lose some. I can live with that. And I’m guessing, in the long run, so can the Mayor.

But the Governor and the Legislature are making an awfully big mistake if they insist on giving McGinn no political exit.

Apparently, after four years of championing Rep. Dave Reichert for his “conscience-driven independent streak,” the Seattle Times editorial board finally suspects that he might be a little “cynical.”

WHAT was 8th District Congressman Dave Reichert thinking?

Reichert, three-term congressman from Auburn, told a recent gathering of Republican precinct committee officers that to remain in office there are “certain moves, chess pieces, strategies I have to employ.”

He said he toes the party line most of the time but suggested a few select environmental votes keep environmental groups from spending millions of dollars to defeat him. How cynical.

And in tomorrow’s editorial, the Times finally admits that Reichert did not catch the Green River Killer.