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Some amount of attention has been paid in recent years to the enormous amount of special interest money that has flooded into our state Supreme Court races. This is part of a nationwide pattern in which the US Chamber of Commerce alone has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade targeting judicial races, successfully building pro-business, conservative majorities on benches in state after state.

But here in Washington we elect all our judges, from the Supremes all the way down to our local municipal court… low profile races that, given the restrictions on the candidates (they are actually barred from talking about issues), often turn on name recognition more than any other factor. And to gain name ID, you gotta spend money, mostly in the form of expensive direct mail campaigns.

Take for example the race for King County Superior Court Position 22, a three way contest between Julia Garratt, Holly Hill and Rebeccah Graham. This is one of those rare, easy judicial races for me because Graham is not only an extremely qualified attorney who has presided over thousands of cases as a Superior Court pro tem judge… she is also a close personal friend. That said, I hadn’t intended to write about the race because I don’t feel particularly qualified to judge judges, and I don’t think my personal endorsements hold much sway.

But this race illustrates a deeper problem with the way we elect judges, a problem which deserves a broader dialogue.

Take a look at the “Cash Raised” column in the PDC reports, and it looks like a pretty damn competitive race, with Garratt, Hill and Graham raising $14,370, $14,595 and $11,240 respectively. That’s the amount of money folks like you and I have given to the candidates, but in this race it tells much less than half the story, for while cash contributions represent the sum total of what Graham has raised thus far, Garratt has loaned her campaign an additional $12,600, while Hill has invested a staggering $70,000 in personal funds into her own race.

$70,000! That’s more than twice the total contributions raised by nearly every other candidate running for King County Superior Court, and from what I know about local judicial races, it’s gotta make Hill the hands down favorite. It just blows her opponents out of the water, and you can be sure that this was exactly her intent.

I don’t bring this up as a personal knock against Hill; while she doesn’t come anywhere near the valuable bench experience Graham has accumulated over her six years as a pro tem judge, I’m told Hill is both a good attorney and a good person. But are all our citizens really best served by a judiciary where personal wealth—and the willingness to use it—becomes the most important qualification?

Of course the real solution is to stop electing judges in the first place. I’m about as engaged a voter as you’ll find, and I generally have no idea who to vote for in judicial races. (I usually ask Graham and my other lawyer friends for advice.) But no matter how wise, this state is never going to vote for less Democracy, so the system we have is pretty much the system we’re stuck with.

But what we can do is move toward a system of public financing that would lift the fundraising burden from our judicial candidates (who aren’t even allowed to directly solicit funds in the first place), and remove the distorting role of money from races for offices that I think we all agree should remain scrupulously apolitical.

Unless, of course, you’re a free market ideologue who believes that society is best served when everything—even justice—goes to the highest bidder.

Now this is a great political ad.

This week, former State Department counter-narcotics official Thomas Schweich wrote a bitter piece in the New York Times Magazine about how his attempts at fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan were undermined by everyone. I did my best to unravel this man’s grand delusions.

No, the headline isn’t referring to I-1000 mentioned below, the sensible and humane statewide initiative that would allow physicians to (legally) prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients under narrow circumstances. Rather, I’m talking about Eric Alterman’s column in today’s Seattle P-I, chronicling the slow, sad death of our daily newspapers.

The flight of readers and advertisers to the Web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku.

For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the(ir) lowest point in modern history.”

When losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed $3.9 billion in value in just the first 10 trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of those companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone.

It’s been nearly 2 1/2 years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.”

And yet the strategy continues unabated.

The accountants may tell you that the logical thing to do is to cut expenses in line with declining revenue, but I’m pretty damn sure newspaper publishers would be better off heeding Ivans’ commonsense observations than those of the bean counters. The newspaper industry is in the midst of a rapid and dramatic transformation that does not have to lead to its death. Now is the time for innovation and risk taking; those who gamble right will win and thrive, while those who gamble wrong may perish. But those who don’t gamble at all—who merely continue to do the same old thing, but less of it—will slowly and surely drift off into oblivion, their own obituary dominating the front page of their final edition.

And that’s a death without dignity.

Personally, I’m rooting for the Times and the P-I to gamble right. I know there are some at those papers who take my relentless criticism as some form of deep seated hostility, but I’m a child of Watergate, an avid newspaper consumer who grew up idolizing reporters. Yeah, sure, I’m a tough critic… but only because I care.

And if anybody in management at either daily ever wants to sit down and talk with me about my ideas for reimagining the newspaper business (some of which don’t even include hiring me), I’m always up for a cup of coffee or a beer. You know how to reach me.

Former Governor Booth Gardner’s Death with Dignity Initiative (I-1000) officially qualified for the November ballot this week. Carla Axtman from Blue Oregon reflects on the campaign to bring the original Death with Dignity law to Oregon ten years ago.

“As if the cost of gas and food weren’t high enough, the Seattle City Council is planning a twenty cent tax on every grocery bag, and a costly ban on take out food containers… Enough is enough!”

“We don’t need another hit to our pocketbooks,” the exasperated voice on the radio ad tells us… but who exactly is “we”…? A consumer protection organization? Advocates for the working poor? Knee-jerk, anti-tax ideologues like my good friends at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation?

No, as Paper Noose reveals over at Blogging Georgetown, the ad is produced and paid for by one of Seattle’s most beloved and engaged civic organizations, the… uh… American Chemistry Council.

Actually, this radio ad is a creation of the ACC’s faux environmental arm, Progressive Bag Affiliates, whose stated mission is to promote “the responsible use, reuse, recycling and disposal of plastic bags,” and whose oh so “progressive” members include:

• Advance Polybag, Inc.
• The Dow Chemical Company
• ExxonMobil Corporation
• Hilex Poly Co., LLC.
• Inteplast
• Superbag Corporation
• Total Petrochemicals USA, Inc.

Yup. You can’t get much more progressive than that.

So as you listen to the ad, remember that polyethylene bags aren’t the only kind of plastic garbage these chemical companies produce. They’re also pretty damn good at astroturfing.

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/7801.mp3]

Former Washington State Supreme Court justices Faith Ireland and Robert Utter have notified Attorney General Rob McKenna and county prosecutors that they intend to file suit against the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) and the Master Builders Association alleging massive public disclosure violations, unless prosecutors take action within 45 days. From a press release issued this morning by their attorneys:

A secret campaign war chest created by leaders of a statewide builder’s association to influence this fall’s gubernatorial election has been openly challenged by a group that includes two prestigious former State Supreme Court justices: Robert Utter and Faith Ireland.

The amount of money amassed by the BIAW has been estimated at upwards of $3.5 million. Contrary to state law, the BIAW and the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish County (MBA) are not registered as a Political Committees, nor have they publicly disclosed the sources of their campaign money.

[…] Former Justice Faith Ireland supports the effort to force transparency in the electoral process. “Washington has good public disclosure laws and when they are enforced, we will have a transparent, accountable political process. Without enforcement, sneak tactics and last minute ambush can unfairly influence the outcome of important races,” Ireland stated.

Former Justice Robert Utter agrees. “I believe the actions of the BIAW violate the letter and spirit of the public disclosure law in this campaign season and in past seasons as well. The law provides for a process to test these concerns. I look forward to a successful determination of the issues.”

I’ve only quickly skimmed the Notice of Intent to Sue, but the arguments look pretty compelling and well supported, and it’s hard to believe a couple of former Supreme Court justices would get behind such a suit if they weren’t pretty damn confident about the legal underpinnings.

Attorney Knoll Lowney calls the BIAW’s actions perhaps “the most significant violation of campaign finance laws in state history,” and the consequences could end up being much, much greater than just a PDC fine. Almost as an afterthought the press release mentions another pending case:

In a related matter, a class action suit (RE Sources v. BIAW) is pending in Thurston County. That lawsuit, filed by BIAW trust beneficiaries, alleges that BIAW funneled trust money that was earmarked for marketing and promoting worker safety into their political activities. That class action seeks accounting, preservation and restoration of the BIAW trust fund. Questions relating to this action may also be answered at the press conference.

If successful, this suit could force the BIAW to pay back into the trust fund the millions of dollars it has illegally spent on political campaigns over the years, essentially bankrupting the association. Gee, I sure hope our state’s radio and TV stations are getting cash up front for all those lying BIAW ads.

By a 16-2 margin, the Sound Transit board voted today to put a $17 billion, 15-year Phase II expansion package on the ballot this fall. King County Executive Ron Sims and Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer voted no, while state DOT director Paula Hammond proved earlier rumors wrong, voting yes after pushing through a last minute amendment to front-load expanded bus service.

The package expands light rail north to Lynnwood, south to Federal Way and east to Redmond, and includes a 25% expansion of ST express bus service and a 65% expansion of Sounder commuter rail, along with street car connectors on Capitol Hill and in Tacoma. All this would be paid for with a .5% increase in the sales tax; that’ll cost you about $69 per year on average, roughly equivalent to the cost of a single tank of gas. (Personally, I wish ST had a less regressive revenue source at its disposal, but it doesn’t, and so our choice at the moment is to build the infrastructure we need with the taxing authority we have, or build nothing at all. That’s reality.)

TANGENTIAL NOTE:
During their frequent appearances on my radio show, I routinely locked horns with The Stranger’s Erica Barnett and Josh Feit over last year’s “Roads & Transit” package. They opposed Prop 1, arguing that Sound Transit would come back the next year with a better package, sans roads. I thought they were being politically naive, and argued that the powers that be would never allow ST to come back with a transit-only package in 2008, and would be picked apart by the “governance reform” vultures well before 2009.

I am not at all unhappy to admit that they were right and I was wrong.

Jesus… did Dino Rossi whack somebody or something? I mean, if Republicans have to seal off Rossi events like a crime scene, what does that say about Rossi? I can only assume he has something to hide?

More than a little giddy after forcing the local media to finally pick up the Doug Sutherland sexual harassment story (as a blogger, that’s the kinda shit we live for), I headed off to Netroots Nation with some hastily printed business cards in hand. On one side was the HA Seattle logo and all my HorsesAss.org contact info, while the other side mockingly sported a Seattle Times logo and the self proclaimed title of “Volunteer Ombudsman.” The card proved a big hit with my fellow bloggers.

Well it looks like I may also have to print up a Seattle P-I version of the card, as nine days after the story broke, our city’s second daily has finally decided its customers deserve to read the facts too. And as it so happens, it is also nine days since P-I reporter Chris Grygiel, in an email to The Stranger’s Erica Barnett, defended his paper’s decision not to run with the story:

“Sutherland and the woman had different accounts of what happened… According to the documents, Sutherland met with the woman at her request and followed through on other antiharassment protocols she had suggested… No disciplinary action was taken and there was no payment of state funds in any settlement. We decided to pass on the story. People can certainly second-guess our decision, but that was the reasoning at the time.”

So what’s changed between then and now to cause the P-I to second-guess its own editorial judgment? Nothin’. Except, maybe, the fact that they probably felt more than a little silly sitting by quietly while the rest of the local print and broadcast media jumped on such an obviously sexy and relevant story.

The dailies still have an enormously larger audience than us lowly bloggers, and they likely always will, but the days when they were the exclusive arbiters of what is or is not news are now over. You gotta think that’s eventually gonna weigh heavily on future editorial decisions about stories like this.

What they said…

MERCHANT bankers from Australia have offered a small box of concessions to win friends for their planned capture of Puget Sound Energy. Their little box has mollified a lot of folks, but it is not enough.

State utility commissioners Mark Sidran, Patrick Oshie and Philip Jones, who have full authority to put a stake through this takeover, should do so, in the name of the public interest.

As a Seattle City Light customer, I’ve got no skin in this game, but why on earth would the state approve a highly leveraged buyout—four cents on the dollar—that delivers nothing to rate payers but a monopoly utility company with billions of dollars in new debt?  Given the power to stop this deal, why wouldn’t we?

Over the next few decades PSE could use its profits to invest in its existing infrastructure, to, for example, prepare itself to respond more quickly to mass outages like the one that knocked some of its customers off the grid for weeks following the 2006 windstorm.  Or, it could invest its profits in build green generating capacity, like solar and wind farms.

But instead, under the proposed deal, PSE will need to squeeze every penny it can out of ratepayers just to service its enormous debt.

Rejecting this deal is just common sense.  So common, that even the Times and I agree.

Danny Westneat thinks thinks that despite a down economy and rising gas prices, our local elected officials are “as tax-crazy as an IRS agent on Ritalin.”

A $75 million Pike Place Market levy. A $146 million Seattle parks levy. A $17.6 billion, tri-county light-rail package. Roughly $300 a year, in total, for the average Seattleite

Oh, and don’t forget that 20-cents-per-grocery-bag Green Fee!

If this is proceeding with caution, what will “full-steam-ahead” look like?

And while Danny reassures us that “I like all these things,” he can’t help but wonder…

… where’s the restraint? There’s no hint that government has any sense of limits.

I’ll tell you where the “restraint” and the “sense of limits” comes from, Danny… from the voters, that’s where.  See, nobody’s raising anybody’s taxes, at least not without our approval at the polls, so this familiar refrain of blaming politicians for putting tax measures on the ballot, well… it just plain pisses me off.

When voters approve measures that cut taxes, we’re told that’s “the will of the people,” their ballot a sacred text that is somehow inviolate.  When Tim Eyman passes one of his stupid, selfish and ill conceived initiatives, we’re told that’s “the will of the people” too.

But apparently measures that raise our taxes are entirely different.  Apparently, we voters simply can’t be trusted to resist the natural temptation to tax ourselves, especially for frivolous things like parks and transit.  And if God forbid we voters are foolish enough to tax ourselves the equivalent of a single tank of gas a year to extend light rail south to Federal Way, north to Lynnwood and east to Redmond, well, apparently, it’s our elected officials who deserve the blame for their obvious lack of restraint in giving us the opportunity to decide these issues for ourselves.

I’m just sayin’.