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Authorities don’t yet know what sparked this weekend’s tragic shooting by an off duty Pierce County deputy of his in-laws and himself. But we do know what enabled the shootings:  a gun.

I’m not pointing this out as an argument for gun control. The guy was a police officer after all, so it’s kinda unrealistic to expect him not to have a weapon.

But I would argue that this tragedy once again points out that generally, guns do not make us safer. Had this man not had easy access to a weapon, he would not have shot his in-laws or himself. He might still have gotten physically violent, but the result would likely not have been nearly as tragic.

I mean, honestly, how many shootings do we read of that are the result of horrible accidents or crazed crimes of passion? And how many are legitimate acts of self defense?

So own a gun if you want. It’s your 2nd Amendment right, the current Supreme Court tells us, and both hunting and target shooting can be reasonable pastimes, and even downright fun. Just know that your number one risk factor for being involved in a shooting is to own gun.

My friend Carla at Blue Oregon faced an interesting quandary over the weekend. Land use is her issue in the wonky/passionate way that tax restructuring is mine, and she thought she’d found her dream candidate for Washington County Commission:

I’ve been very supportive of the candidacy of Greg Malinowski, a farmer in District 2 who very much reflects my own concerns about Washington County. Malinowski has been an ardent defender of farmland and is extremely knowledgeable about county decisions and their impact on the community. Greg is very thoughtful and smart on this issue as well.

Then she caught wind of the soon to be released Oregon Family Council’s Voter Guide, in which Malinowski had filled out the questionnaire checking anti-choice and anti-marriage equality positions. As Carla described it, the news hit her “like a punch in the stomach.”

As it turns out, she finally had a chance to meet with Malinowski on Sunday, and came away comfortable with his positions, which while a touch inarticulate, come across as neither particularly anti-choice nor anti-marriage equality. Chalk it up to being a political novice or perhaps just not fully understanding the issues, but his values appear to be in the right place.

Still, Carla’s quandary raises a broader question about the limits of both litmus tests and political pragmatism.

For example, as Carla points out, while land use is by far the most pressing issue facing the county, there was no record of abortion services or marriage equality ever coming before the commission. So wouldn’t it be the pragmatic thing to support a candidate who was good on land use, no matter how repugnant you might find his stance on reproductive rights?

Maybe. But electoral politics is a lot more complicated than that, and a county commission win could also be a stepping stone to higher offices where these other issues would surely come into play. So wouldn’t it be equally pragmatic for Carla, a staunch defender of both reproductive and marriage rights, to take the long view, and withdraw her support, rather than help to launch the political career of a social conservative?

Not so simple is it?

We heard the argument from both Susan Hutchison and Dino Rossi, for example, that abortion shouldn’t be an issue in races for offices that have no impact on abortion policy: “I’m not running for the Supreme Court, nor do have an appointment there,” Rossi famously retorted during the governor’s race. But both Hutchison and Rossi have been named as possible U.S. Senate candidates, an office from which they could have a huge impact on the issue. Furthermore, these values are often a proxy for a larger set of values that impact policy decisions in numerous and often nuanced ways.

And most of us would agree that there are some litmus tests that are absolutely justified, regardless of the candidate’s other qualifications. For example, Carla noted “how difficult it is to find people who have the depth and breadth of knowledge on land use” and who won’t hand out zoning permits “like they’re bubble gum.” Yet most voters on either side of the land use issue would have zero quandary rejecting a candidate, no matter how knowledgeable, if he were, say, an avowed white supremacist.

So yeah, there are litmus tests in politics, and they are completely defensible, even if that means that we sometimes end up with the otherwise less qualified candidate. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that. But the same holds true in defense of pragmatism, for example, supporting a Blue Dog Democrat in a conservative district where a true progressive couldn’t possibly prevail. Or perhaps even supporting an anti-choice county commissioner who would do a kick-ass job on the issues that matter most at the local level. Perhaps.

In the end, Carla didn’t have to make a choice, because Malinowski turned out not to be as anti-choice as she briefly feared. But had she been forced to, she would have been justified either way.

The Seattle Times editorial board insists that “Seattle must move forward on tunnel now,” despite concerns that current legislation would leave Seattle on the hook for cost overruns from the portion of the project being built by the state. We simply can’t afford to delay any further, argues the Times, not even to fix and/or clarify an unfair and possibly unenforceable provision that could cost local taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

And yet, when it comes to the salaries and benefits of unionized King County government employees, it is suddenly the interests of taxpayers that is the cause of urgency, with the Times arguing that there just isn’t time to study the comparative wages of government workers with those in the private sector:

Governments have a tendency to study matters to death. A study feels like a delay tactic, a way of hoping healthier revenues return and the heat vanishes from the need to reduce worker costs.

See the difference? Big, expensive highway project worth billions of dollars of private contracts — the most expensive alternative of any Viaduct replacement option proposed — and the Times throws caution to the wind, local taxpayers be damned. But the livelihoods of unionized, government workers… well, we just can’t afford to take the time to study if they really are as pampered and overpaid as the Times implies. (Or perhaps, we can’t afford to learn the results?)

So yeah, it’s hard to believe that the virulently anti-labor Times truly has the taxpayers’ interests at heart in demanding union concessions, when it seems so eager to hang us out to dry on tunnel cost overruns.

Congrats to the Columbia City Bakery for being featured on the front page of the New York Times web site this morning. And while the Times lauds it for its incredible pastries, they also bake what I believe to be the best bread in Seattle.

No neighborhood is truly livable without a really great local bakery, and since ours is just a few blocks from a light rail station, I invite those of you who aren’t so lucky to hop on a train and share it.

Last week’s contest was won by Ken Oplinger, who correctly identified that the picture was of Faisal Shahzad’s home in Bridgeport, Connecticut (and thanks to mlc1us for providing the link).

As always, the contest picture is related to something in the news and can be facing east, west, north, or south. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Matthew 22:21
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

Discuss.

Very good news for state Sen. Craig Pridemore, running in WA-03 for the seat currently held by retiring Rep. Brian Baird, D-WA. (Props to Publicola.)

You kind of wonder if this will end the “Denny Heck is the frontrunner” stuff once and for all. What do I know, I’m just a sometimes-blogger, but you’d think Pridemore will be able to compete on the airwaves and also do the kind of grass-roots campaigning that wins elections.

The American Prospect raises the existential question for Dino Rossi and his closest advisors:

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn has a had a pretty tough year recruiting and protecting his candidates. They just keep running into trouble — from Charlie Crist fleeing the Republican Party in Florida and Bob Bennett’s primary loss in Utah to John McCain’s Arizona primary challenge and the Kentucky Rand Paul insurgency overwhelming the GOP’s chosen standard-bearer. So if you’re a Republican considering a run for Senate and Cornyn says, “I told him we will do whatever it takes to help him and that’s a fact,” do you take that to the bank?

That’s the question facing perennial Washington state GOP candidate Dino Rossi, who is mulling over a challenge to sitting Democratic Sen. Patty Murray.

And I’d wager the answer is “no.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, there are really only two possibilities here: either Rossi has already made his decision, or he hasn’t. If he’s made his decision, then he’s decided not to run, because there’s absolutely nothing to gain from delaying his campaign any further, while there’s not much to lose from keeping his name in the headlines. And if he’s still undecided, I’m guessing a large part of the process has to do with working out the logistics of raising enough money to be competitive.

Rossi raised about $11.6 million during his 2008 gubernatorial bid, and even assuming he could match that total in roughly half the time — averaging about $70,000 a day between now and the election — that would still leave him well short of Sen. Murray’s likely total… maybe by as much as $5 million. And that’s assuming he can take Cornyn’s promise to the bank.

So thanks, American Prospect, for raising that very important question. But as for the rest of piece, well, you really ought to do your research:

While Murray isn’t particularly vulnerable, in a tough anti-incumbent year and with a candidate like Rossi, who has come within 133 votes of winning the state’s gubenatorial seat, Republicans might have an opportunity to exploit.

Of course, that 133 vote margin was way back in 2004; Rossi lost by 194,614 votes in a 2008 rematch, after voters had the opportunity to get to know the two candidates better. Maybe you just confused “2004” with “2008” — after all, they both have “200” in them — but I’d argue that the more recent election is the more relevant one.

Except the Tea Party candidate will stay in the race no matter what happens in the primary. So will a self-funding millionaire conservative candidate. That doesn’t spell an easy chance for Rossi.

Yeah, um, except we have a top-two primary here in Washington state, so nobody will be on the November ballot other than the top-two vote getters. So while I love that whole Tea-Party-and-self-funded-millionaire-candidates-as-obstacles meme, and would absolutely love to run with it… well… if wishes were horses, and all that.

Moreover, Democrats are already doing everything they can to make Rossi the next Dan Coates — Coates, the former Indiana senator returning to run for Evan Bayh’s open seat, hit early troubles by slighting his old state and with his work as a Washington lobbyist. Thus far, they’ve been hitting him for not paying $20,000 in back taxes and his connections to a shady bank.

I’m confused by that last sentence. Does “him” refer to Rossi or Coates? Or both? (Factually, it does apply to Rossi, but that’s not so clear from your vague use of the objective personal pronoun.)

Rossi has had two heartbreakingly close statewide elections in the last two cycles.

“Two heartbreakingly close” elections? Really?

Surely 2004’s 133-vote margin was a heartbreaker (no doubt Rossi still believes he actually won), but the 194,614-vote, 6.5% margin in 2008… not so much. That’s about the same percentage of the national vote by which Barack Obama beat John McCain, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody describe that race as close, heartbreakingly or otherwise.

So yeah, while I agree with the American Prospect that Rossi should question whether Cornyn can help him all that much in a U.S. Senate bid, Rossi first has to answer the question of whether he can actually help himself. And based on his 2008 performance, the evidence isn’t all that convincing.

Right around the same time yesterday that State Auditor Brian Sonntag was telling reporters he would run for governor should there be a special election to replace Gov. Gregoire, I was telling a Republican friend of mine that I would actually vote for Dino Rossi should it come down to a contest between the two. Really.

The way I figure it, as long as we’re getting a conservative Republican who hangs with teabaggers, cavorts with Tim Eyman and endorses Susan Hutchison, we might as well get one who openly embraces the Republican Party label (or at the very least, the Grand Old Party Party label). That way, I can vilify the new governor coherently, and without constantly having defend my party from being branded with his anti-tax, anti-transit, anti-Democratic policies.

So yeah, in the hypothetical event of a Rossi v. Sonntag contest, I’m voting for Rossi. Though I’m guessing I’ll have to get myself pretty damn drunk to fill out that ballot.

According to the Seattle Times, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is likely to receive the $44 million it needs to make emergency repairs to the Howard Hanson Dam. Why…?

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray convinced her colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Committee to put the money into a supplemental spending bill the Senate is expected to vote on later this month.

And this is why I’ve already made the bold prediction that the Times will break with character this November and endorse the Democratic incumbent, even if her opponent is Dino Rossi. Because Sen. Murray delivers in a way that a Sen. Rossi simply couldn’t.

See, unlike Sen. Murray, Rossi wouldn’t have any colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and even if he did, he’d be the juniorest of junior members, most likely in the minority party, and with almost zero influence. The result: billions of dollars of federal money going to states that weren’t stupid enough to toss out one of the Senate’s most powerful appropriators… dollars that could’ve been coming to us.

Does that analysis sound craven? Does it reek of pork barrel politics? Well tell that to the thousands of homeowners and businesses in the Green River flood plain who risk having their lives and livelihoods washed away should the Army Corp not get the funding it needs to continue emergency repairs.

This is the way politics works. Patty Murray is simply too valuable to our state economy to toss out on mere ideological grounds. And business establishment types like Frank Blethen know it.

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It looks like Dino Rossi isn’t the only Republican with a moral hazard, and he might want to look to Ohio for a timely example of how one’s business “success” can turn into a political failure:

Republican John Kasich, the former congressman and Fox News host who is running for governor of Ohio, used to tout his eight years at Lehman Brothers.

But in the wake of the firm’s collapse, it’s Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland who is putting Kasich’s Wall Street ties front and center in one of the marquee races of 2010.

Co-founding Eastside Commercial Bank to help him and his associates cash in on the recent real estate bubble may have been a smart business move for Rossi, but now that his banks “unsafe and unsound” practices have come to light, he sure as hell won’t profit from it politically.

But if he can’t run as a successful businessman, what can Rossi run on? Almost winning the governor’s mansion in 2004? I’m not sure that’s enough to defeat Sen. Patty Murray, even in an anti-incumbency year.

It’s good to see that the Seattle Times editorial board has its priorities straight.

YOU do not have to be a technical whiz to know Craigslist is not to blame for the recent murder in Pierce County, a heinous crime that claimed the life of a loving father in front of his family.

No, you don’t. But despite this admission, the “Craigslist Killing” still kinda trivializes the rest of the Times’ editorial:

But it also doesn’t take too much to recognize the site must do more to rid itself of numerous posts that seem to promote or involve prostitution.

The Times urges Attorney General Rob McKenna to “step up his involvement,” but I think if local law enforcement is going to crack down on prostitution, I’d rather them focus on the hookers trolling Rainier Avenue, who occasionally have their Johns drive up the hill and park on the corner in front of my house, where they inevitably dump their empty beer bottles, used condoms and soiled paper towels on the sidewalk for the neighborhood kids to walk by on their way to school the next morning.

I mean, don’t you think that’s a bit more of a public nuisance than the more discrete, home delivery kinda services pitched online?

Personally, I find the whole notion of sex-for-money both degrading and, well, unhygienic, and I’m sure in favor of attempting to address the broader swath of social ills that leads women to engage in the sex trade. But when the transaction occurs between two consenting adults in the privacy of one’s own home or place of business, well, I find that much less troublesome than when it occurs in the backseat of a car parked outside my bedroom window at one in the morning.

But then, I suppose my priorities are bit different than those of the editors at the Times, perhaps because, unlike me, none of them live two blocks up the hill from Rainier Avenue.

I don’t doubt that the ads in the adult-services section of Craigslist are degrading and offensive, so unlike the Times’ editors, I never read them. But if, as the Times implies, these ads are “among the main ways officers track down sexually exploited juveniles and adults,” it strikes me that there’s a certain karma at play here, if not a useful check and balance on the sex industry’s worst excesses. After all, it’s easier and more efficient to patrol the adult-services section on Craigslist than it is our city’s streets, and during these tough budgetary times, law enforcement needs to prioritize its resources.

The truth is, men are dicks, both literally and figuratively, so there will always be a market for prostitution; I mean, you just can’t change human nature. So my concern is that if you crack down on Craigslist, you won’t stop these illicit services, you’ll just force them offline, underground… and into a car parked on that dark corner outside my house.

TPM digs into AmeriPAC, a right-wing political organization run by Bellevue’s Alan Gottlieb. The organization raised $1.3 million from people – primarily by playing upon unfounded fears that the Obama Administration is going after everyone’s guns – but only spent $1,300 on actual political campaigns. So where’s all the money going?

Most of the money raised by AmeriPAC has gone to Diener Consultants, a Lititz, Pennsylvania, firm whose pared down website boasts of “email marketing software and related professional services streamline production time to maximize your return on investment.”

Diener reportedly did work for Alan Keyes’ 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns. According to the Arizona Republic, Diener also ran the failed 2005 California congressional campaign of Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist. But he was none too pleased with their services, telling the paper, “I fired them the day after my campaign was over.”

And by the way, Gottlieb has previously served time for tax evasion.