HorsesAss.Org

*** NETROOTS FUND DRIVE IN PROGRESS; PLEASE GIVE TO BILL SHERMAN! ***

With over one million registered voters, a third of the state’s electorate, and two congressional seats, King County comprises an election jurisdiction larger than 16 states plus the District of Columbia. And yet this two-to-one Democratic county at the heart of WA’s progressive majority risks ceding control of its elections operations to a Republican Party with a proven national agenda of voter intimidation and suppression.

Should I-25 pass this November as expected, the county elections director could switch from an appointed professional to an elected officer, chosen in a “non-partisan,” low-profile, February special election — the perfect opportunity for a Republican to sneak into office. Meanwhile, Democrats are fighting to break the GOP’s sixty-year lock on the office of Prosecuting Attorney — the equivalent of the Attorney General of a small state. With these two offices come two of the three seats on the King County Canvassing Board, and the ability to disenfranchise any voter or disallow any ballot, on a simple two-to-one vote.

Republican voter suppression campaigns cannot be taken lightly in a county where Republicans, following the lead of their Summit County, Ohio counterparts the year before, challenged thousands of voter registrations just days before the 2005 election, sowing confusion, suppressing turnout, and forcing many voters to cast provisional ballots. Despite the fact that many of these challenges were in error, and against the legal advice of the attorney his own office assigned to provide expert counsel to the board, PAO Chief of Staff Dan Satterberg repeatedly voted to uphold challenges that did not include the voter’s current address as required by law. And despite the fact that KCGOP officer Lori Sotello signed thousands of affidavits declaring “under penalty of perjury … personal knowledge” that she did not have, Satterberg and his office refused to even investigate allegations of perjury.

Now Satterberg is running as a Republican for Prosecuting Attorney, and should he win, local, state and federal elections could hang in the balance. Not because Satterberg is corrupt, but because he subscribes to a political philosophy that views the franchise as a privilege, not a right, and because he belongs to a party with an established record of fighting to invalidate otherwise qualified ballots based on the tiniest discrepancy or voter error, while choosing to ignore the technical violations of those bringing the challenges. His is the party that pioneered turn-out friendly vote-by-mail in Republican dominated jurisdictions, yet fights it tooth and nail in our state’s most populous and Democratic county. His is the party that attempted to exploit the 2004 election controversy by proffering election “reforms” whose singular purpose seemed to be to make it harder to vote.

Despite Satterberg’s protestations to the contrary, the PAO is a partisan office, and always has been, and as the Seattle P-I noted in the wake of the bogus voter registration challenges, Satterberg’s longtime mentor Norm Maleng was “a partisan politician.” Party affiliation matters because it denotes a set of values, and in this election, Democrat Bill Sherman’s values are much more closely aligned with those of the vast majority of county voters.

Satterberg and his surrogates have gone on the attack because they know that negative campaigning works, and given their two-to-one money advantage this gives them a good shot at winning in November. Please, don’t let Republican money decide this election, when so many future elections could hang in the balance.

On Tuesday we launched a netroots fundraiser for Sherman, seeking to raise $5000 from 200 contributors over five days. As of this morning, 52 supporters have given $3240 — that’s a tremendous start, but still far short of our donor target. A surge in dollars and donors makes it easier for Bill to raise money from other donors, so if $10 is all you can afford, that’s more than enough.

Please give to Bill Sherman today, in whatever amount you can afford.

Really…he isn’t.

I first met Bill Sherman during his unsuccessful legislative run last year, and I came away quite impressed. So much so, that when I saw the somewhat disappointing field shaping up for this year’s Seattle City Council races, I urged Bill to throw his hat into the ring. Okay, I kinda begged him.

This was a race, I assured him, he could win… a suggestion that Bill literally laughed off, telling me had absolutely no plans to run for office again. He loved being a prosecutor, Bill explained, and only entered the 43rd LD race after Norm Maleng assured him he could keep his job while serving in the part-time legislature, a not uncommon arrangement. (For example, Luke Esser worked in the state AG’s office while serving in the state senate.) City Council, on the other hand, is a full time position, and Bill had no interest in swapping his “dream job” for a life on the council.

I mention this conversation as an answer to Dan Satterberg’s habit of smearing his opponent with the foul taint of political ambition. Satterberg points to Bill’s back-to-back campaigns as evidence of an opportunistic politician intent on using the PAO as a stepping stone to higher office, but in fact Bill had no plans to run for office, because there was no elected office he could serve while continuing his career as a prosecutor.

That is, until longtime King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng suddenly passed away.

I cannot assure you that should he win, Bill won’t someday run for higher office, but then, it would be wrong to demand such assurances from our candidates. Maleng himself ran for state attorney general once, and for governor twice, and I never heard anybody criticizing him for his political ambition. I have even heard Republicans imply that Bill’s 43rd LD campaign was a calculated effort to position him for a run at the PAO, a conspiratorial suggestion of Shakespearian proportions. What next… Bill poured poison in Maleng’s ear? Nobody expected Maleng to retire anytime soon, let alone die at such a relatively young age, and so I think it fair to take at face value Bill’s prior assurance to me that he had no plans to run again for public office.

We take the opportunities that come our way, and right now we have an opportunity to elect a Prosecuting Attorney who will prosecute voter suppression and intimidation as vigorously as he will prosecute voter fraud. Nearly two full days into our netroots fund drive we have already raised $2340 toward our five-day $5000 goal, but have only registered 34 new donors toward our target of 200. Please give whatever you can, even if it’s only five or ten bucks.

Via Atrios, the New York Post reports:

October 10, 2007 — ODDEST couple of the decade: lifelong Democrat Andrew Stein and arch-conservative cutie Ann Coulter. The former city council president (when there was such a title) first took Coulter – author of “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans” – to the black-tie Lincoln Center Film Society gala two weeks ago, where they turned heads. More recently, they were at Soho House “in passionate liplock,” according to a witness. Stein told Page Six: “She’s attacked a lot of my friends, but what can I say, opposites attract!”

For some reason, it reminded me of this:

“I’ve found you can do pretty much anything you want if you do it with a smile on your face. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you do it with a smile on your face.”
— Dino Rossi, September 11, 2007

Looks like Dino Rossi has set up yet another sleazy front group to shill his non-campaign. Check this one out…

It’s amazing how the narrative that Rudy Giuliani is a 9/11 hero stays alive even as New York’s former mayor gets loudly booed at Yankees Stadium. Dave from Queens has more.

This is an open thread.

Yesterday we kicked off a netroots fund drive for Bill Sherman, Democrat running for King County Prosecuting Attorney, and so far we’re kinda-sorta off to a pretty good start. We want to hit $5000 and 200 new donors by the end of the day Saturday, and while the $1770 we’ve raised thus far ain’t bad, it came from only 23 contributors.

We want to prove to the big donors that Sherman has the broad grassroots support necessary to win, so if you only have ten bucks to give, please give it now. And, as an extra incentive to put your money behind Sherman, the next $600 raised today will be matched dollar for dollar by Progressive Majority. Turn your $10 donation into $20. Turn your $25 donation into $50. (Etc, etc… you do the math.)

Republicans are counting on their huge, two-to-one money advantage to lead them to victory. It may sound like an odd argument, but the only way to prevent money from trumping values, is to give Sherman the money he needs to get his message out. So please give to Bill Sherman today.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Come join us for some hoppy ale and hopped up conversation.

Last week Gen. Wesley Clark dropped in unannounced… this week, who knows? The folks from Simple Majority will be there telling us why we should all vote Yes on 4204, and writer, pundit, activist Ari Melber (formerly of Seattle, now of The Nation) plans to drop by to slum with us bloggers in the political backwater he left behind.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s thirteen Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

*** NETROOTS FUND DRIVE IN PROGRESS; PLEASE GIVE TO BILL SHERMAN! ***

Both Republican Dan Satterberg and Democrat Bill Sherman have reputations for being nice guys, and so I was taken aback when I hosted the two King County Prosecuting Attorney candidates on the Dave Ross Show last week, when Satterberg went on the attack right out of the gate. Satterberg is clearly the status quo candidate… the acting Prosecuting Attorney… the entrenched bureaucrat with 17 years as chief of staff in an office controlled by Republicans for over a half century… the guy supported by those with the most at stake in making sure things don’t much change at the PAO. He’s also the candidate with by far the most money. And so while the office is technically open, I’ve always thought of Satterberg as the pseudo-incumbent, and Sherman as the challenger.

But that’s not the way things played out on the air. Satterberg attacked Sherman personally, risking his nice guy image in what appeared to be an attempt to shake up the dynamics of the race. Incumbents aren’t supposed to do that, and so it had me wondering if Satterberg knew something about the state of the race that I didn’t?

Well if his internal polling numbers are anything close to those of Sherman, the answer is a resounding “yes,” and it sure would explain Satterberg’s aggressive (dare I say, partisan) line of attack. In a Sept. 18-20 survey of 1000 likely voters conducted on behalf of the Sherman campaign, Sherman led Satterberg by a significant 47% to 35% margin, with 18% still undecided. Sherman’s margin came from Seattle/North King County, where he led 55% to 24%; the two were virtually tied in East and South King County. The poll had a margin of error of 3%.

Of course, it’s just a poll, and six weeks out at that, and thus the only thing it really tells us for sure is that contrary to some of the early conventional wisdom, Sherman has a damn good chance of winning… if he can get his message out and successfully fend off Satterberg’s increasingly negative attacks. And that’s an awfully big “if” considering Satterberg’s inherent money advantage. Satterberg has already raised over $230,000 — over $100,000 more than Sherman — and unlike Sherman, he didn’t have to spend his war chest in a contested primary. That’s gonna buy an awful lot of direct mail pieces slamming Sherman and his qualifications, and the money keeps pouring in. There are a lot of very wealth folks with a vested interested in maintaining the status quo in the PAO, and they’re willing to do what it takes to help their guy win.

Are we willing to do the same? I’m betting yes.

And so I am proud to kick off WA’s first ever netroots fund drive for a local candidate, setting a target of $5,000 and 200 new contributors over the next five days. That’s somewhat less than the $100,000 target we set for Darcy Burner’s successful national fund drive, but actually quite a bit more ambitious considering the much smaller size of our local audience.

The goal is not simply to give the Sherman campaign a quick influx of cash, it is to prove to the traditional donor community that Sherman has the kind of broad, grassroots support necessary to win in November, thus spurring additional contributions across the board. It is also another opportunity to send a message to the political and media establishment that the netroots represent a growing progressive movement that is increasingly becoming a direct player in state and local politics that cannot be dismissed or ignored.

Back in August, we made history, focusing national resources on a congressional race in a way that had never been done before. We didn’t just raise $125,000 for Darcy Burner, we knocked Rodney Tom out of the primary, changing the dynamics of the 8th CD race.

Now we have the opportunity to achieve the same sort of impact in the King County Prosecutor’s race, that we did in the 8th CD, by giving Sherman the financial edge he needs to put him over the top in November.

So please go to Bill Sherman’s netroots fundraising page and give whatever you can — if it’s only ten bucks that’s ten bucks more than he had before — if you can afford to give more, please give more. (Or even if you can’t afford it… hell, I just chipped in $100 I don’t have.) A thermometer has been posted to Sherman’s home page tracking our progress, and the campaign will provide me with frequent reports.

The only way Republicans can win this race is by dramatically outspending us. Don’t let that happen. Please give to Bill Sherman, and help elect our first Democratic Prosecuting Attorney in over sixty years.

Campaigning as a Republican in a 2-to-1 Democratic district, I suppose Dan Satterberg thought it clever to make non-partisanship the central theme of his campaign for King County Prosecuting Attorney, but I’m thinking he probably should have read his Lakoff first. For the more Satterberg protests that the office should be non-partisan, the more he raises the issue, thus automatically reminding voters that this is, after all, a partisan race between a Republican and a Democrat. Don’t think of an elephant, and all that.

Of course, the other problem with this meme is that it just isn’t true, and before the editorial boards buy into this inviting notion that a politician can somehow be apolitical, I hope they first read their own editorials… such as the following Seattle P-I op-ed editorial from back in December of 2005. (The emphasis is mine.)

Voting Disputes: Maleng turns it up

King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng is right in saying that it’s time for political parties to “lower their voices” over disputed voter registrations. So why raise his own voice on the issue?

Maleng is a respected public official, but he is a partisan politician. The Republican Party has tried to criminalize election issues by alleging that nearly 2,000 voters violated the law by registering at mailboxes and mini-storage units.

Of the roughly 200 of those challenged voters who cast ballots in the Nov. 8 election, the King County Canvassing Board this week rejected the challenges on 141 of them.

Dan Satterberg, Maleng’s chief of staff and one of three members of the Canvassing Board, voted to accept the challenges but was outvoted 2-1 by Elections Director Dean Logan and Democratic County Councilman Dow Constantine.

Maleng says the board took a “strict construction” view, with which he, like Satterberg, disagrees. Maleng wants to push the point by calling for Attorney General Rob McKenna and Secretary of State Sam Reed to issue opinions on the matter.

The state is already on the way to solving many voter registration issues with next year’s use of a statewide voter database.

If the laws or lines of authority are unclear, the fix is legislation, not executive fiat.

Maleng has actually turned the partisan volume not down, but up.

How partisan were Maleng and Satterberg in support of the KCGOP’s bogus voter registration challenges? While they publicly criticized the Democrats on the Canvassing Board for taking a “strict construction” view, it must be noted that the Board’s legal interpretation was actually adopted on the advise of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office itself. In a series of memos and emails to the Canvassing Board, Janine Joly — the Sr. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney assigned by Maleng and Satterberg to advise King County Elections — addressed the legal issues in depth, laying out the grounds for dismissing insufficient challenges:

“The challenger’s failure to allege an actual address either in her challenge form or at the hearing is a fatal flaw and should invalidate the challenge. Any other decision would be contrary to the plain language of the statute even if it appears from the other evidence provided that the challenged voter is not registered at a valid residence address.”

Can you get much more partisan than attacking Democrats for following the legal advice given by the attorney you assigned to advise them in the first place?

Don’t get me wrong, I liked and respected Norm Maleng, and I believe he generally carried out his duties in a professional, fair and nonpartisan manner. But as the P-I editorial makes clear, it is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that Maleng was not a political animal, or that he never used his office to turn up “the partisan volume.” And despite his protestations to high-minded editorialists, this is exactly the partisan legacy that Satterberg promised to continue when speaking to fellow Republicans at a Mercer Island GOTV drive back in August:

“I am a Republican office holder in King County. There aren’t many of us – well, actually there aren’t any of us around. We’ve been lucky enough to have a Republican in the King County Prosecutor’s Office for 60 years, and my fear is that there is a little pressure on me if we lose it that it is going to be 60 more years before we get another one.

[…] You’re going to walk up long driveways and knock on doors and there are going to be dogs barking. I just want to warn you about the dogs — they can be dangerous but I would ask you be polite. This is King County so many of them are registered voters.”
[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/satterberg1.mp3]

The crowd laughed in approval because, you know… we Democrats, we’re all a bunch of cheats and crooks, and KCRE is just laughably corrupt and incompetent. Yeah, that’s the sort of non-partisanship we can expect from Satterberg, should he be elected.

The fact is, the PAO is a partisan office and always has been, and while Satterberg could have run as a Democrat or an independent, he didn’t. Satterberg chose to run as a Republican because that is the party that best reflects his values — values that will inform his prosecutorial judgment, and values that will guide him to use the prestige and influence of his office to help elect more Republicans. That is the nature of politics.

Dan Satterberg is an elephant, and to suggest otherwise, as Satterberg frequently does, is simply disingenuous.

Because you can never have enough bullshit.

*It’s pretty much bullshit that Democratic candidates have to come out in favor of science. Can you imagine that being an issue in 2000? I’m sure that every Democrat will be able to boast something similar, but the fact that it’s even an issue should tell you how far we’ve gone into crazyville these last 8 years.

* It would be bullshit to bomb these people.

* President Bush’s 4th veto of his term pretty much is for the same reason as his last three: he’s for more dead people.

* Not that your mainstream media would dare put it in those terms. Maybe they’re frightened?

* Maybe we should be frightened of Blackwater setting up shop in the States.

* And how about we let military spouses stay, you know, in the states.

Locally,

* I-960 is a bad idea.

* Activists who take time out of their weekend to doorbell in the B’ham area are not a conspiracy. And when that’s the best you’ve got, it’s sad sad sad.

This is an open thread. Enjoy.

That’s the same Jim Horn who was shitcanned by Bellevue and Mercer Island voters back in 2004. He’s also the guy who thought it a good idea to build another six lane freeway east of I-405. The Sierra Club and the teachers worked hard to kick him out of office.

It’s only a rumor, but I hear he’s thinking about going after the guy who beat him in ’04, Sen. Brian Weinstein.

How anemic is the suburban GOP? The Democrats are building a deep, deep bench with candidates like Maureen Judge in Mercer Island and Keri Andrews in Bellevue. Jim Horn’s spending his days carrying water for Dino Rossi and attacking light rail. I don’t know if he’s got another campaign in him. But let’s hope so!

The Federal Communications Commission will soon announce the location of the sixth and final public hearing on proposed changes in media ownership rules, and Jonathan Lawson of Reclaim the Media tells me that it will be Seattle. The hearing could take place as early as November, although the date won’t be confirmed until the announcement is official.

Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have previously held two unofficial hearings in Seattle, but this will be the first and only time all five FCC commissioners will attend a hearing in the Northwest. Previous hearings have been held in Los Angeles, Nashville, Harrisburg, Tampa and Chicago.

At stake are FCC rules placing limits on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in a single market, and on how many TV and radio stations a single company can own. The FCC’s 2003 attempt to weaken our already lax ownership rules created a huge public and political outcry, and might have been blocked by Congress had Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert allowed it to come to the floor for a vote. Ultimately, the Third Circuit Court sent it back to the FCC for further deliberation and public hearings. So far, public testimony has overwhelmingly supported maintaining or strengthening rules limiting media concentration.

There aren’t a lot of hot-button issues on which I find myself enthusiastically allied with the likes of John Carlson and Frank Blethen, but I can think of few trends that more threaten the health of our democracy than the ever growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few corporations. Media ownership concentration doesn’t just lead to a loss of localism and a decline in the quality and diversity of content, it also directly and indirectly undermines the ability of the press to serve its crucial democratic role as a watchdog of our institutions, both public and private. There is no democracy without a free press, and there is no truly free press in an industry where the only sure path to promotion is to echo the political leanings of your corporatist masters.

It is the inherent inability of anybody to own the blogosphere that makes it so exciting and vital, but do not kid yourself that this revolution in citizen journalism is anywhere close to challenging the corporate media for audience or influence, or that the corporations who own the networks willingly provide us unfettered access to the mass market of content consumers. It is also important to remember that as online consumers increasingly come to expect and demand streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive content, the growing cost of producing and serving this content will require not-insubstantial sums of capital investment if we are to truly compete for audience share. There is plenty of room for individuals and small companies to innovate, but in an environment that allows unlimited ownership consolidation, the traditional venture capital infrastructure that fueled our region’s high-tech boom is not well suited toward the goal of building a robust and independent new media. As evidenced by today’s acquisition of Newsvine by MSNBC, when profit is the only motive of investors, and ownership concentration knows no bounds, the media conglomerates will simply fatten their portfolio and strengthen their market control by purchasing those few public and venture-backed corporations that manage to gain a competitive edge.

There may yet come a day when the Internet is nothing but a content-neutral utility through which nearly all media is distributed, thus making corporate ownership of our airwaves, and even cable, irrelevant. But the growing power and influence of our media conglomerates makes that day a dim and distant vision.