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Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

PROGRAMMING NOTE:
My show will be preempted again by a Seahawks preseason game next Saturday.

Gen. Paul Eaton knows what’s at stake in Iraq, and he knows what’s at stake in the next election. That’s why he urges you “to join me in doing everything you can to elect Darcy Burner to Congress,” and to participate in tomorrow’s virtual town hall on Iraq. If you haven’t already signed up for the town hall and sent in your question or YouTube video, go to www.darcyburner.com and do so now. And if you haven’t already given generously to our ambitious $100,000 netroots fund drive, you’re running out of time.

The local media hasn’t seemed to realize it yet, but we’re on the verge of making history in their own backyard. By pulling together the national and local netroots in an unprecedented effort, we’re within striking distance of raising more money for Burner than Bush raises for Reichert. The DC establishment is already in shock at our success thus far — nearly $67,000 in less than three days. Together we can blow through our target and add a little awe to their shock.

Even a ten dollar donation brings us ten dollars closer.So please give today.

Should the King County elections director be chosen by voters? The correct answer is no, but this becomes a far more complicated question now that Initiative 25 has qualified for a ballot.

I-25 next goes to the County Council, which should do us all a favor and put this measure on the ballot in such a way that it changes the rules not for next year’s elections, but rather for elections in 2009 or 2010. King County switches to all-mail balloting in April 2008, in the middle of a huge election year, with a presidential contest, congressional races and legislative races on the ballot in the summer and fall.

The county does not need to make this change amid all of that. The county does not need to make this change, period.

I-25, if adopted by the council and approved by voters as a charter amendment this November, would hold a special election this February to name the first elections director, with no primary contest, and an abbreviated last minute campaign. I consider I-25 sponsor Toby Nixon a friend of HA and of my radio show, but I have to say that I find this provision at the very least ill-conceived if not downright sneaky. Republicans look at this as an opportunity to seize control of the county’s election machinery, but to do so, they have to win. And a rushed, low-profile, nonpartisan race where a sudden influx of cash can make all the difference, is just about the only way for Republicans to win a countywide election these days.

Much fuss has been made about how the elections director is not accountable to the public and how if the elections director had been directly accountable to the public in the 2004 governor’s race, election mistakes would not have been made.

This is by now trumped up hooey, and a judge in a Republican county said as much after a lengthy trial on behalf of Republican Dino Rossi.

The elections director currently is accountable to the county executive. Challenger David Irons tried to pin the foibles of the election on Ron Sims in the 2005 campaign for county executive. Voters didn’t buy it.

Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where rhetoric and reason aren’t on the same side of the debate. An appointed elections director is in fact more accountable than an elected one because the appointment must be approved by the council, and the director can be fired at any time. Likewise, it is hard to imagine how electing the elections director, rather than just hiring a qualified professional, is the obvious path toward keeping politics out of our elections.

That said, it is equally hard to imagine voters rejecting the deceptively simple appeal of “more democracy.”

My only hope is that Democrats wake up to the larger agenda of the GOP, which has focused relentlessly on controlling Secretary of State and Attorney General offices nationwide… and to possibly devastating effect in places like Ohio and Florida. As they did during the legal contest over the disputed 2004 gubernatorial election, WA’s Republican minority now controls the offices of the Secretary of State, the state Attorney General, the King County Prosecutor and the US Attorney. Should they control the elections office, they could have absolute control over elections in the largest and most Democratic county in the state, as well as all offices wielding administrative and legal oversight.

And just in time for a presidential election and the Gregoire-Rossi and Burner-Reichert rematches. How convenient.

Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007 for the second straight year, led by a staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province, according to a new United Nations survey to be released Monday.

That said, this ambitious netroots fund drive was really only an afterthought a few of us bloggers put together around the Darcy Burner campaign’s ambitious plans to hold a virtual town hall on Iraq to coincide with President Bush’s $10,000/person funder for Dave Reichert. And I haven’t written nearly enough about the town hall itself.

The “Send a Message” Town Hall will be held Monday afternoon at 3pm PST at the Bellevue Westin, just three blocks from the Hyatt where Reichert and Bush will be holding their exclusive high-donor affair. Space is very limited, but don’t you worry because that’s where the word “virtual” comes in. The entire event will be streamed live a www.darcyburner.com, throughout Washington’s 8th Congressional District, the nation and the world. You are all invited to sign up, submit your questions, and then watch the town hall from the comfort of your own computer.

In addition to Burner, panelists will include:

Moderator Joan McCarter — Writing under the pseudonym “mcjoan” at DailyKos, where she is also a fellow, Joan is one of the best known and respected voices in the blogosphere. She writes regularly about the Iraq War, campaign strategy and other issues, and recently co-moderated the YearlyKos presidential candidates’ debate in Chicago. She is currently working on a book about the politics of the American West.

Jon Soltz — the co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, Jon is a veteran of the Iraq War, where he served as a captain with the 1st Armored Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is considered one of the country’s most authoritative voices on veterans and military issues and is a regular contributor to the MSNBC program “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann. He also blogs on military and veterans issues at the Huffington Post.

Navy Capt. Larry Seaquist (ret.) — a former US naval officer, Captain Seaquist commanded a number of warships including the battleship USS IOWA during his distinguished 32-year career. He also served as a senior security strategist in the Pentagon including an appointment as the Director of Policy Research in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. During the period leading up to the Gulf War he was Acting Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning. He currently serves in the Washington State legislature and writes regularly for major newspapers and defense journals.

Lorin Walker — serves as vice-president of VetPac, a political action committee dedicated to electing candidates who preserve the values for which veterans have served, fought and died. She is the daughter of Captain Bruce C. Walker USAF, MIA 1972. A resident of Washington State, she is active in veterans affairs and Democratic politics and works at Microsoft.

Professor Clark Lombardi — teaches comparative law at the University of Washington and is an expert on Islamic legal systems. He recently returned from a trip to Iraq, and speaks knowledgably about the difficulties the United States faces in Iraq in creating functioning civil institutions that are critical to the functioning of a stable and effective democracy.

Major General Paul D. Eaton (ret.), who went to Iraq in 2003 to lead the effort to recreate the Iraqi military from scratch, and who since his retirement has stepped forward to speak plainly about the Bush administration’s incompetence in conducting the Iraq War and callousness in treating its active duty forces and veterans, is unable to attend in person but has submitted a video statement for the “Send a Message” virtual town hall. The same is true of Ambassador Joe Wilson, who exposed the administration’s efforts to falsely hype the Iraqi regime’s efforts to acquire nuclear materials from Niger in the run-up to the war and has been forthright ever since in .

The participants will answer questions submitted over the web or via Youtube video clips and will offer their expertise on our current dilemma in Iraq and the impact it is having on our nation, our military, and our reputation in the world.

This first-of-its-kind forum promises to be as innovative and ground breaking as the netroots fund drive that sprang up around it. For further details about how you can participate, visit www.darcyburner.com today, and check regularly between now and Monday for updates.

And oh yeah… be sure to go to Burn Bush Act Blue page, and give whatever you can.

Yup, that’s the kinda “conscious-driven independent” who currently serves Washington’s 8th Congressional District. The kinda congressman who apologizes to fellow Republicans for voting with his constituents and against drilling in ANWR… but of course votes for drilling when the vote really counts. The kinda congressman who votes the way the Republican leadership tells him to vote, because he knows they are trying to protect him. The kinda congressman who is comfortable voting against education funding because he knows his leadership is putting together a bill to cover his ass. The kinda congressman who jokingly compares Democrats to the Green River Killer, trivializing the deaths of dozens of women… deaths that occurred on his watch.

And this is the type of leadership Darcy Burner would bring to Congress:

No wonder the national response to our Burn Bush for Burner campaign has been so overwhelming: over 1,420 contributers giving over $47,000 in just a day and a half! (Blue Majority totals included.) Wow!

That is simply amazing, but it’s still less than half-way toward our ambitious $100,000 target. This is not just about supporting a progressive netroots candidate like Darcy Burner when she needs us most — it’s about sending a message to other Republican candidates nationwide that they bring Bush into their district at their own peril. If we can meet or beat our target — if Darcy can possibly raise more money from Bush’s visit than Reichert — then we will have effectively neutralized the GOP’s most effective fundraiser, potentially costing other Republican incumbents millions of dollars by making the rewards of a Bush visit simply not worth the political and monetary price.

So if you haven’t already given, please give today. Every little bit counts.

As for my own, personal HA targets, it’s been equally amazing. Yesterday I asked for ten HA readers to match my own $100 donation (as most of you know, a financial stretch for me,) plus a total of 25 contributions of any amount over the next day. One day later we’re an encouraging half-way towards my $100 matching challenge… but you blew my one-day 25-person contribution request right out of the water. So far, 56 HA readers have contributed over $1,700! To put that in perspective, that ranks HA number five nationwide after powerhouses Daily Kos, Atrios, AmericaBlog and Blue Majority! And on a contribution-per-reader ration, nobody else even comes close.

So here’s what I want to do. Let’s keep my $100 matching challenge unchanged, but let’s shoot for a total of 100 HA contributors by midnight Sunday. Give whatever can — five or ten bucks is enough — and let’s show Bush, Reichert and the Republican and Democratic establishment that people-powered politics can beat a handful of rich folk any day of the week.

Yes, yes, everyone take a bow and gush over how much we need parks and how much we use them. It is all true, but that doesn’t make it any wiser that the county has become dependent on levies to run its park system.

Well, yeah, I think most tax structure experts would agree that it isn’t particularly wise to depend on dedicated levies to run our parks or anything else. But rather than presenting a constructive discussion of the circumstances that have led us to this situation, the Times merely adopts the lazy, anti-tax meme of blaming elected officials for failing “to make other, unpleasant budget cuts.”

Such as? Over 70-percent of King County’s general fund goes to the criminal justice system — a number typical for counties statewide. Shall we empty the jails? Cut funds for the courts or the sheriffs department? Slash salaries in the prosecutors office? Where’s the fat?

The Times doesn’t know, and they haven’t bothered to look. The editors have the reporting staff of the largest newspaper in the state at their disposal, yet I don’t see the expose on all the waste, fraud and abuse apparently sucking King County coffers dry. And I also don’t see a serious discussion of the reason the county was forced to go to special purpose parks levies in the first place: I-747’s arbitrary and unsustainable 101-percent limit on growth in revenue from existing construction.

The Times continues to editorialize on local property taxes as if they understand what they’re talking about, but I see no evidence of this from the cursory and muddled nature of their discourse. By setting a limit factor on revenue growth well below that of inflation, I-747 intentionally erodes the real-dollar value of regular levies over time. Indeed, the whole point of the initiative was to force local taxing districts to resort to special purpose voter-approved levies like the type the Times now disses; this is exactly the kinda “direct democracy” that Tim Eyman professes, and that the Times sacredly defends.

In fact, the only way for a district to secure a stable inflation-adjusted revenue stream under existing statutes is to run a multi-year lid lift, like the parks levies, which not only permits the district to replace the 101-percent limit factor with a more reasonable growth index, but also specifically requires that the levy be dedicated to a special purpose, and not supplant existing revenue in the general fund.

Ask nearly any government budget writer what they’d prefer, the current system that routinely forces the district to run special purpose levies, or a more reasonable limit factor — say, inflation or 4-percent, whichever is lower — and dollars to donuts they’ll choose the latter.

That’s the issue the Times should be discussing. But they don’t. Or they won’t. Or maybe, they can’t.

Last cycle it took an immense amount of local support for Darcy Burner to prove herself a national netroots candidate. This cycle, she has that national support right from the start.

Yesterday we launched an ambitious $100,000 fundraising drive to counter President Bush’s $10,000/person funder for Dave Reichert, and to coincide with Darcy Burner’s Virtual Town Hall on Iraq, Monday Aug 27 at 3PM. And while 380 individuals have already contributed over $15,000 via our Act Blue page alone, I’m hoping HA readers will be more than just a tiny asterisk in the final totals.

To that end I have personally donated $100 (and you all know I don’t have a lot of cash to spare,) and I’m hoping 10 of you will make it worth my while by matching it dollar for dollar. And for those who can’t afford to be so generous (or unlike me, are prudent enough not to make a donation you can’t afford,) ten bucks isn’t so much to ask, is it? I’d like to see at least 25 HA donations over the next day, in appreciation of the generous support we’re getting from our friends in the national netroots.

Send a message. Make a difference. Please give generously to Darcy Burner.

George W. Bush is coming to Seattle Aug. 27 to raise money for his friend and ally, Rep. Dave Reichert (WA-08), and to thank him for his unwavering support of the president’s policy in Iraq. Reichert hopes to raise over half a million dollars from this $10,000/person event, but this is our opportunity to send a message Reichert and his fellow Republicans that toeing the Bush line on Iraq just won’t pay off.

Over the next five days the Darcy Burner campaign will be releasing a series of videos, asking for your participation in a Virtual Town Hall forum on Iraq, scheduled to coincide with the Bush fundraiser. Meanwhile a coalition of national and local blogs is launching a coordinated drive to help Darcy counter the Bush visit. Our ambitious goal: $100,000 in netroots contributions to the Darcy Burner campaign between now and the end of the drive.

Sure it’s a lot of money, but money seems to be the only political currency Republicans understand. Reaching our target will not only send a strong message that we want our troops out of Iraq, it will also teach other Republicans that bringing in Bush isn’t worth the financial and political cost, thus neutralizing the GOP’s most effective fundraiser.

We have created a special Act Blue page just for this event, or you can contribute directly via this embedded form:

As we’ve learned from several recent disappointing votes, it is not enough to just send Democrats to Washington — we need to send progressive Democrats who will stand up for the values and concerns of their constituents. So please dig deep into your pockets and give generously before the Bush fundraising juggernaut gets off the ground, and rubberstamp Republicans like Reichert get out to an insurmountable lead.

Back in 1986, Kemper Freeman Jr. took a courageous stand against sidewalks. From the New York Times:

THIS onetime Seattle bedroom community, now the fourth-largest city in the state, has long been known as the city without sidewalks. It is virtually impossible, as a local reporter documented a few years ago, to walk continuously from one part of downtown to another.

In an effort to bring the biped back to Bellevue, the city is requiring the developer of the new $260 million Bellevue Place, the largest project in regional history, to build sidewalks, widen streets and contribute to transportation systems.

Kemper Freeman Jr., the developer, says the demands are ”unfair and unreasonable.” His supporters say the requirements will have a ”chilling effect” on other developers, but city officials say that those who cause the congestion should have to pay for it.

Bellevue has grown like crazy since then, so the sidewalk mandate didn’t seem to stunt development like Freeman said it would. Oh well, it’s just another thing he’s wrong about.

Oh man that’s funny.

A change in the state law regarding property taxes has silently transformed what have been temporary tax increases into permanent ones.

We say “silently” because the Legislature, which made the change, did not name what it was doing in the bill title or the bill reports. The change is something every voter should keep in mind as the election arrives Tuesday and more new taxes are proposed in November.

Hmm. You’d think before the state’s largest newspaper prints an editorial impugning the integrity and/or competency of the Legislature, it might have given legislators or their staffers an opportunity to explain themselves, huh? And you’d think just maybe, before warning voters that “new taxes will be permanent” — just days ahead of crucial levy votes in yesterday’s election — the Times might want to double- or even triple-check their facts, right?

But the Times didn’t. As a result, thousands of voters went to the polls yesterday angry and confused, and had any of the regional levy votes been close, the Times’ factual error and lack of editorial judgment could have flipped the outcome.

On the surface, Senate Bill 5498 allows fire districts and other special-purpose taxing districts to ask voters for multiyear tax increases. It is the same authority cities and counties already had.

That’s the one part of the editorial the Times got right, except for their implication that there is something nefarious beneath the surface. There is in fact nothing beneath the surface.

The nonobvious part of the bill changed the old rule that unless a tax levy said specifically it was permanent, it wasn’t. Under the old rule, after a levy expired, Washington’s 1-percent property-tax limit would be set as if the levy had never happened. If voters didn’t renew the levy, their taxes would go down.

And what makes this change particularly “nonobvious” is that it just isn’t there. Here’s the “old rule” the Times talks about:

(2) After a levy authorized pursuant to this section is made, the dollar amount of such levy shall be used for the purpose of computing the limitations for subsequent levies provided for in this chapter, except as provided in subsections (3) and (4) of this section.

That’s also the text of the new rule, except it now references subsection (5). What this means is that the default behavior of a lid lift is now, and always has been, to permanently raise the base on which the limit factor is calculated… except as otherwise provided. That was the default under the old rule. That is the default under the new rule.

Under SB 5498 — a governor’s-request bill passed by large majorities in both houses — unless a tax levy says it is temporary, its authority is permanent. So says the Department of Revenue in an official memo to county assessors.

A) It wasn’t a “governor’s-request bill.” It just wasn’t. B) If the Times’ editors don’t understand the difference between a “permanent” lid lift and a “temporary” lid lift, they really shouldn’t be editorializing on the issue without thoroughly researching the subject. All they’ve succeeded in doing is making an already confusing issue even more confusing, but I’ll try to clear things up.

The whole purpose of a permanent lid lift is to permanently reset the base on which the limit factor is calculated. For example, lets say a fire district levied $100,000 in taxes from existing construction in 2003, the year I-747 went into effect. Under the initiative’s arbitrary 101-percent annual limit factor, the maximum dollar amount the district could levy by 2007 would be $104,060. But due to inflation, the purchasing power of this revenue is really only equivalent to $91,920 in 2003 dollars. Year after year, the fire district would steadily lose purchasing power, and be forced to steadily cut back services.

Or, the district could put before voters a permanent lid lift with a dollar rate that would increase total revenues to $115,000 in 2008, a figure that would pretty much reset the district’s revenue to 2003 levels in inflation-adjusted dollars. The 101-percent limit factor would subsequently be calculated on this new base, but over the years, that too would be eaten away by inflation. Better than slowly starving to death, but not a stable means of securing a reliable revenue stream for longterm planning. And also, quite costly. According to public testimony, South King Fire and Rescue has spent over half a million dollars over the past six years running a string of successful permanent lid lifts.

Under the old rules, counties, cities and towns had an additional tool at their disposal. They could instead choose to put before voters a multi-year temporary lid lift (up to six years) which states a dollar rate for the first year (just like a permanent lid lift,) but also specifies an index to be used as the limit factor for subsequent years of the levy, superseding I-747’s 101-percent limit. Each of the parks levies passed yesterday did exactly that, raising an additional $0.05 per $1000 of assessed value in the first year, and authorizing annual increases on that amount indexed to inflation. The parks levies thus produce a stable revenue stream of inflation-adjusted dollars throughout their six-year term.

But these lid lifts are temporary under both the old and the new rules, and when they expire the basis for calculating revenue limits under I-747 reverts to the maximum amount it would have been had the parks levies never been passed. It appears the Times kinda-sorta understands this, but then at the same time kinda-sorta doesn’t:

To be deemed temporary, a measure has to say when the tax expires, and it has to limit itself to specific purchases.

Right, and the parks levies do both these things.

Otherwise, in the year after the last tax increase authorized by voters, the new tax limit is 1 percent higher. Even if voters don’t renew the levy, the taxing authority can keep pushing taxes up — at a slower rate, but still up.

Poorly phrased, but um… what’s your point? That’s what permanent lid lifts have always been intended to do. You know, the kind of permanent lid lift the parks levies are not.

King County Assessor Scott Noble, who drew our attention to this, has looked over the 11 property-tax measures that will be on county ballots Tuesday: two for King County parks, two for Redmond, one for a hospital district and six for fire districts.

“All of them are permanent increases in new levy capacity,” he says.

Um… no they’re not, and the Times being misled confused by Scott Noble being misled confused by a confusing DOR memo is no excuse for a string of sentences that clearly contradict each other. To be deemed temporary, a lid lift must limit itself to a period of time or a specific purpose, and the parks levies clearly do that. The new rules specifically state that “except as otherwise provided in an approved ballot measure under this section, after the expiration of a limited period … or the satisfaction of a limited purpose … subsequent levies shall be computed as if … the limited proposition … had not been approved.” The parks levies are temporary, and temporary levies by definition do not permanently increase levy capacity.

How can I be so sure? Well for starts I, um… read the fucking bill. And the RCW. And the WAC. And in the Times defense, this stuff is pretty damn confusing. So I called the House Finance Committee and asked a staffer to step me through it. He did. And he stands by the succinctly worded summary in the final bill report:

Any property taxing district with regular levying authority may seek multi-year lid lifts over a six year period in the same manner as counties, cities, and towns.

That was the clear legislative intent of the bill, and that is how committee staffers expect it to be written into the rules.

Of course, to the Times’ demerit, this stuff is pretty damn confusing, and so I simply cannot believe that they didn’t ask a legislator or staffer to step them through it before running such a hyperbolic and misleading editorial. The Times clearly considers foul-mouthed bloggers like me to be unserious, but at least I took the time to do my homework. Meanwhile Times editorial page editor James Vesely only compounds his paper’s error in a separate column, denouncing “a sneaky tax” he clearly doesn’t understand:

Voters should also pay attention to The Times editorial opinion on the fourth page of this section about an obscure change in state law that turns temporary taxes into permanent ones. Instead of asking for a four- or six-year levy increase on your property taxes, the new law takes the opposite view — that taxes are permanent unless they are specifically noted as temporary. It turns the approval of a levy from something voters see as binding for a few years into a perpetual tax that can be renewed, but at always higher levels.

No, no, no. Multi-year lid lifts are temporary by default, and remain so under the amended statute. Furthermore, Vesely clearly doesn’t understand the relative roles of permanent vs. temporary lid lifts, and now neither do his readers.

Sure, the lid lift statutes are complicated and confusing; hell, I didn’t get it right the first couple times I read through SB 5498. But the Times’ editors didn’t just get it wrong, they implied ill intent. Had the editors been strong supporters of the parks levies (or levies in general,) one wonders if they would have been so quick to jump to conclusions… or so eager to publish them just days before the vote?

Either way, the tone and timing of this editorial was simply irresponsible, and as such it deserves a retraction as prominently placed as the editorial itself. I eagerly await Sunday’s op/ed page.