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Earlier today, Goldy discussed the race for Seattle City Attorney and incumbent Tom Carr’s attempts to misrepresent his opponent’s qualifications for the office. Pete Holmes initially became Carr’s opponent in this race after he became so infuriated by his attempts to deal with him from his position as the attorney on the citizen’s police oversight board that he decided to challenge him. Here’s the latest polling on the race:

The results show a nearly 3:1 lead for Tom Carr, but 70% of the electorate remains undecided. Women and voters 35-49 both have an undecided count over 70%. It’s over 80% for Republicans. Of decided voters, Carr still maintains a margin of nearly 4:1 amongst respondents 50-64 and over 4:1 with those 65 and older.

The vast majority of voters just aren’t paying attention to this race. But they should be. Tom Carr has been the City Attorney for Seattle for the past eight years and has repeatedly shown himself to be overzealous in pursuit of nanny state crusades and completely out of touch with the voters of the city. Dominic Holden recently provided a recap of his horrendous track record:

– Tom Carr fought against I-75, the initiative to make marijuana law enforcement the lowest priority of Seattle Police.

– Since the passage of I-75, Carr has actually prosecuted a higher percentage of the pot cases referred to his office.

– After a citywide sweep called Operation Sobering Thought, Carr tried to send 27 bar employees to jail for up to a year for various offenses such as serving minors (none of them were successfully prosecuted).

– Carr used city resources to unsuccessfully appeal – all the way up to federal court – a free speech case against a balloon artist who claimed he didn’t need a permit to do his thing at Seattle Center, and has threatened to waste even more money appealing it to the Supreme Court.

– He aggressively impounded the cars of people with unpaid parking tickets until the state Supreme Court ruled that he was breaking the law. The fiasco later cost the city $1.3 million in a class-action lawsuit.

– He once briefly attempted to threaten several Seattle Times reporters with jail time if they didn’t reveal their confidential sources.

As Dominic mentioned, the office of City Attorney in most other places is not an elected official. While it feels nice to have direct influence over the person who does this job, what tends to happen instead is that political creatures like Carr can hold onto an office because voters tend to have too little bandwidth to follow these smaller races. But this one’s too important for that now, and Seattle really can’t afford another four years of this.

Join us tonight at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

Tonight’s crowd will, no doubt, be filled with wisdom and empathy.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KDExqKZBIU[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 332 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to get lost at.

That’s what Eli Sanders is reporting over at Slog, and if true it would be very good news indeed.

Cantwell’s apparent opposition to a public option was always a bit puzzling, which made her low hanging fruit for organizations and activists looking to move a few crucial senators from nay to yea. All those constituents who made phone calls, sent emails, showed up at rallies and otherwise kept the pressure on Cantwell deserve a ton of credit for their effective grassroots activism.

As Erica reported yesterday over at Publicola, the whisper campaign regarding Seattle City Attorney candidate Pete Holmes is no longer a whisper, with both incumbent Tom Carr and his campaign manager Cindi Laws now publicly and repeatedly challenging Holmes’ eligibility for the office.

Today, Carr reiterated that view. “The charter provision says that you have to be both active [with the bar] and engaged in the practice of law in Seattle,” Carr said this morning. “He has not been practicing law—taking on clients, giving advice, doing the things that lawyers do.”

Well, here is what the City Charter says about the qualifications for the office of City Attorney:

The City Attorney shall be an attorney of the Supreme Court of the State, and have been in the practice of his or her profession in The City of Seattle for at least four years next prior to his or her election.

And here is what the Washington State Bar Association says about Holmes’ status as an active attorney:

Clearly, Holmes has been an “attorney of the Supreme Court of the State” since 1986 (five years longer than Carr, by the way), so that part of the requirement seems beyond dispute. As for the requirement that the City Attorney have been in the practice of law in Seattle for at least four years prior to the election, here’s what Holmes told me via email:

My Washington bar license has always been on “active” status. After 16 years in the private sector, City Council appointed me as the lawyer member of the OPA Review Board in 2002 (which expressly requires a WSBA member in good standing), where I practiced my profession in public service until the last quarter of 2008. I’ve been in private practice at Crocker Kuno PLLC since the first quarter of 2009. I was fully authorized to practice law during my OPARB tenure; I just didn’t accept private, fee-paying clients—and presumably Carr hasn’t either since 2002.

Now, I’m no attorney (much to my mother’s chagrin), but I don’t read anything in the City Charter that says anything about taking on private clients. If Holmes has been an active member of the Bar, and such membership was a requirement of his appointment to the OPA Review Board, then that sure sounds like practicing law to me, for why require an active attorney if not to benefit from his legal advice? And how, in this sense, is Holmes legal service to the city really any different from Carr’s legal service, except by volume?

But all this niggling, legalist nitpicking is really beside the point, for if Carr truly believed that Holmes was technically ineligible to run for the office of City Attorney, the appropriate course of action would have been not a whisper campaign, but rather a legal challenge to his eligibility under RCW 29A.68.011, alleging that Holmes’ name “is about to be wrongfully placed upon the ballots,” and to be filed in King County Superior Court “no later than the second Friday following the closing of the filing period for nominations for such office“… a deadline long since passed.

I mean, Carr is the sitting City Attorney for chrisakes. I assume he knows this stuff.

No, instead Carr and Laws appear to be raising questions about Holmes’ technical qualifications merely as an underhanded means of raising questions about Holmes’ professional qualifications for the office. “Hey look… this guy is such a crappy lawyer he doesn’t understand the law enough to realize he isn’t even eligible to run for the office!” That seems to be the message coming out of the Carr campaign.

What this sort of cynical, political maneuvering says about Carr’s own professionalism, I’ll leave up to you.

David Brewster thinks Susan Hutchison will be hard to beat because, amongst other things:

King County is a safe place to indulge in a protest vote, since the government is so peripheral.

Really, David?

In size, budget and population served, King County government is larger than that of twelve states. That’s why the Executive’s office is seen as a stepping stone to the Governor’s Mansion… in responsibilities and duties, it is equivalent to being governor of a small state. And increasingly, the county has been forced to deliver crucial services the state is no longer willing or able to provide.

If Brewster is right, and much of Hutchison’s apparent appeal comes from her being a “protest vote,” then our media has an obligation to explain to voters what King County government really does, and how spectacularly unprepared for the job Hutchison really is. (You know, other than being spiritually prepared.) This is a woman whose professional career has consisted of decades of reading scripts off a teleprompter, followed by a several-year stint writing checks on behalf of an eccentric billionaire. She has no political experience, no business experience, and no administrative experience. And no, President of the Symphony Board is not an administrative position; that’s what the executive director is for. (Though if Hutchison wants credit for the Symphony’s dire financial straits—it’s currently making payroll by eating into its endowment—I’m happy to give it to her.)

I’m as cynical about politicians as the next guy (even of many of my fellow Democrats), but at least I care about government. I mean, honestly, David… if you’re just going to write off county government as “peripheral,” when in fact its functions are central to maintaining the quality of life in our region, then you have no right to complain about the quality of candidates we get.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KXabe-ufpc[/youtube]

Strange Bedfellows at the P-I reports that labor is coming up with a new way of supporting candidates, although I’m not sure I’d agree with their headline that includes the term “fundraising war.” Sounds more like moving into the more modern, agile internet age to me.

The Washington State Labor Council on Monday said it has created a new political action committee that would funnel money directly to candidates it feels supports their causes and not to House and Senate party funds controlled by party bosses. Washington State Labor Council President Rick Bender said labor had previously given hundreds of thousands of dollars to those funds

Now the Labor Council will urge members and individual unions to give to the ‘Don’t Invest in More Excuse’ (DIME) PAC. Bender also said the Labor Council would change how it evaluates candidates and look beyond individual votes taken. Bender said unions will take a more holistic approach, considering things like action not taken as opposed to how politicians vote on certain bills.

Yeah, the days of dumping money into party committees probably should have ended long ago. There’s still a place for that, and there’s no reason the state labor council (or other groups) can’t pump money into party committees as situations warrant. But the system of kissing rings in Olympia has broken down, at least as I see it from SW Washington. Candidates that could have scored major upsets have been sold short, and squishy, milquetoast types get an automatic nod. That’s a sign of institutional sclerosis.

Sizing up political candidates is an inexact science anyhow, and it would be great to see this labor initiative develop into a flexible apparatus that can put pressure on Republicans and Democrats who act like Republicans, and maybe throw some money at supposed long shots now and again. Kind of a “49 district” strategy, if you will. Whether people like it or not, there is a “gamesmanship” aspect to politics, and for too long our side has been hampered by outdated traditions and tactics.

There’s no logical reason that party institutions need to have such overwhelming control, and you can make the argument that a great deal can be done outside normal party channels. Obviously labor is only one (albeit important) constituent part of the party. Could this be the beginning of a new and vibrant era where all progressives support each other to a greater degree?

If there’s one hallmark of progressivism, it’s a hope to wed practical ideas with hopeful ideals. Busting up the business as usual, business lobbyist clique in Olympia is a necessary precondition to advancing all progressive causes, from education to health care to protecting the environment. Sure, there will be differences and bumps along the way, but at long last it appears labor has determined that it should practice a more nuanced and effective form of politics.

Please don’t misunderstand me, it’s quite valuable to have a strong party structure, and the ranks of the Democratic Party in this state are filled with many fantastic, talented individuals. It’s the party leadership that has failed, not the rank and file.

But this seems to represent a fundamental change in how Democrats are going to be elected. I think we’re all going to be better off because of the labor decision.

Answering questions from attendees at Mercer Island’s Summer Festival on Saturday, King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison affirmed that she does indeed oppose the legal right of women to seek an abortion.

Well… she didn’t actually say that, and in fact, she pretty much tried to avoid directly answering the question. But if you read between the lines, her answer was clear.

A friend of mine ran into Hutchison at the festival where she was glad-handing potential voters (she’s apparently older in person than she is on TV), and decided to ask her a few simple questions, the first of which concerning her position on medical marijuana. Hutchison, very much the politician, replied that voters had approved medical marijuana, and that as Executive she would uphold the law of the land.

Notice how she avoided giving her own position on medical marijuana (my friend looks like a bit of a hippy, so she probably figured he was for it), but at least that “upholding the law of the land” bullshit conveniently set the ground rules.

Next my friend asked Hutchison about abortion, which she described as a “controversial” issue on which we need to have “national conversation.”

Again, she avoided answering the actual question, but the thing is, legal abortion is also the law of the land… yet she didn’t mention anything about upholding that.

Medical marijuana… uphold the law of the land. Abortion… we need to have a conversation.

Telling.

Now some might object to me reading into her answers a meaning that might not be there, but since Hutchison refuses to publicly have that conversation she claims we need, what other choice do we have but to parse her words as best we can?

Over on Crosscut, Ted Van Dyk expresses his disappointment with Joe Mallahan’s campaign:

At local level, I am concerned that Joe Mallahan, though having a financial advantage (his own wallet) over other mayoral challengers to Nickels in next month’s primary, has not waged the well-managed campaign I would have expected. Voters clearly want a positive change from Nickels, and Drago is Nickels in drag. Mallahan, however, has not stepped smartly into the breech and established himself in voters’ minds as the hard nosed, businesslike, managerial type — with actual knowledge of economics and budgets — badly needed after eight careless tax-and-spend years of city governance. I have been surprised by Mallahan’s seeming lack of knowledge of city issues that have been on the front burner for several years. With his funding advantages, I had anticipated that by now he would be running in the front of the Nickels-challenging pack. He has a month left to get there.

Considering Van Dyk’s impressive political resume (did you know he worked in the Johnson administration?) I’m not sure why he’s so surprised at Mallahan’s relatively lackluster performance thus far, for self-financed candidates often run disappointingly mediocre campaigns. No doubt having a pile of money to spend on yourself can be liberating, especially from the daily chore of “call time,” but as tedious, time consuming and unpalatable as some candidates find it, fundraising also presents a crucial opportunity to listen to voters, hone one’s message, and develop crucial campaigning skills. Indeed, some of the best politicians I know tell me that they actually enjoy fundraising.

Running for office isn’t easy, nor should it be, for as imperfect a metric as it is, the strength, efficiency and passion of one’s campaign is often a predictor of future performance in office. There are many ways in which we weed out weaker candidates, and one of these is through their ability to raise money. Thus by skipping over this crucial step and jumping to the head of the line, Mallahan has missed out on all the political training and preparation that would have come with it.

On the flip side, had Mallahan not kicked off his campaign by sinking $200,000 of his own cash into it, it’s unlikely his candidacy would have been taken as seriously, and thus his subsequent fundraising efforts would have been all the more difficult. But why Van Dyk would conflate a fat wallet and a successful business career into an automatic expectation of a “well-managed campaign” is beyond me.

Money is damn important in politics. But how you get it can be pretty significant as well.

I have written before about the Discovery Institute’s infamous Wedge Strategy, and I have, of course, repeatedly mentioned Susan Hutchison’s close connections to Discovery. But an email from a reader raises a very interesting point:

Of course, running an undercover former board member in a suddenly “non-partisan” race fits the wedge strategy pretty tightly.

Indeed it does. Hmm.

All the more reason for Hutchison to answer the question of whether she supports Discovery’s stated goal: to overthrow traditional science “and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”…?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WWWIYeS4Q4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Over at EffU, I broke down the dumbest post to appear at the orange clown car this year, Jim Miller’s bizarre follow-up attack on Rick Steves for things that only seem to exist in Miller’s imagination.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc[/youtube]

The Seattle Times editorial board argues that “Congress should enact consistent sales-tax laws to even playing field for Main Street businesses,” and I suppose that seems like a fair and reasonable enough objective. But do they understand that there’s no practical way of achieving this goal without putting tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs out of business, including many here in Washington state?

I know this because I started and ran a small software development and publishing company myself for about a half decade during the nineties, which at its peak consisted of me, my (not yet ex) wife, and a single employee. And had we had the burden of collecting and remitting sales taxes to forty-some states, we never could have afforded to stay in business.

The bulk of our sales during those years, maybe 70% of our unit volume, went through a handful of major mail order catalogs, and thus the bulk of our wholesale product shipped tax-free to the Airborne facility in Wilmington, OH. No problem for us there, and I don’t have much sympathy for big catalogs and online retailers who oppose efforts to collect taxes on interstate sales.

But the bulk of our profits came from direct sales, an outlet that would have been all but impossible to administer had we been required to collect taxes for every state and municipality in which we did business.

The mail order catalogs “purchased” our main product, a rhyming dictionary for Mac and Windows, at half the $49.95 MSRP, and generally resold it at the discounted price of $32.00. ($3.00 overnight shipping was pretty much standard at the time.) But I put “purchased” in quotes because that’s not really how the scam worked. Rather, we swapped product for co-op advertising, the price of a fraction of a page costing us thousands of dollars a month, per catalog, by the time we gave up.

If they sold enough product to pay for the ad, as they did every Christmas season, the catalog would purchase more, and we would make money. If they didn’t sell enough product to pay for the ad, as happened most Summer months, we would owe them money. The catch: they wouldn’t sell us Christmas if we didn’t advertise during the Summer.

We sold a lot of product over the years this way. But we really didn’t make much money.

Direct sales, on the other hand, that was mostly profit. At a $39.95 “discounted” direct price, plus about $4.50 shipping and handling for Priority Mail, we could realize 85% gross margins, and the credit card transactions went directly into the bank (as opposed to say, Multiple Zones, whose refusal to pay one Christmas season ultimately drove us out of business). It was a lot of busy work handling the direct sales, and they rarely amounted to more than a few a day, but I enjoyed dealing directly with customers, and the steady trickle of cash flow they created.

In our best sales year we grossed maybe a few hundred thousand dollars, but the cost of advertising was so high that we barely broke even on the 90% of units that went through retail. But the $20,000 to $30,000 a year in direct sales… that, plus a little contract work on the side, was often the difference between paying our bills and going deeper into debt.

And here’s where the Times’ sales tax proposal really strikes home, for had we been required to collect and remit sales tax for every sales tax state—and on any given year we shipped at least a few units each to every one of them—we never could have afforded to sell direct at all.

For example, for several years we displayed at the August MacWorld Expo in Boston, and sold product on the floor as a means of defraying some of the expense, and as such were responsible for paying Massachusetts sales tax on that few days of business. A hassle, but fair enough.

When we stopped exhibiting at MacWorld, and thus stopped filing taxes annually in Massachusetts, their Department of Revenue noticed, sent us a bill for a big late filing fee, and suddenly insisted that we file quarterly. For over two years I had to sporadically deal with Massachusetts’ demands, as late fees and interest accumulated, and threats escalated. I’m not really sure why they eventually dropped their collection efforts, but it probably would have just made sense to pay them the money I didn’t owe, rather than expending so much time and energy fighting it.

Now multiply that by forty-some, and you get an idea of what small businesses might face if sales tax could be charged on interstate sales.

Even the so-called Streamlined Sales Tax Project isn’t nearly streamlined enough for truly small businesses—and I’m not talking about the 100-person companies the Times thinks of as small, but rather mom & pop businesses like my own—if it requires multiple rates and remitting to multiple states. We never had the luxury of affording an accountant, and we certainly couldn’t have afforded one if the Times’ favored proposal had been law. In fact, with the accounting nightmare it would have created, we couldn’t have afforded to stay in business at all.

And thanks to the Internet and services like Ebay, the number of small time entrepreneurs making all or part of their living via direct, interstate sales has exploded over the past decade, taking advantage of an extraordinary online marketplace that would simply be impossible if every vendor had to take the time and/or expense to file taxes in every state that levies a sales tax. I have no gripe with the goal of protecting brick and mortar businesses from the unfair advantage enjoyed by the major online and mail order retailers, but not if tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs are flattened in the process, many of whom are just supplementing their income with a few hundred dollars worth of sales a month.

I’ve had this conversation with state legislators eager to stem the loss of tax revenue to interstate sales, and they’ve mostly brushed aside my concerns, telling me that third-party service providers will magically arise to fill the gap and process the sales tax for me… but at what cost?  5%…? 15%…? 20%…? And at what minimum transaction fee? At some point, and particularly on low cost items, selling direct ceases to be worth the effort.

Indeed, the whole Streamlined Sales Tax Project shows an utter lack of imagination on the part of legislators, and a total lack of appreciation for the role of really small businesses in our economy. For the bigger problem, at least here in Washington state, isn’t the loophole that allows interstate sales to go tax free, but rather our over-reliance on the sales tax itself. That the Times and our legislators would prefer to crush a vibrant economy of small, online retailers rather than address the real revenue problem, shows just how unready they are to lead our state into the 21st Century.

Last week’s contest was won by N in Seattle. The correct location was Lariat Loop Rd. just outside of Golden, CO.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!