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Eli Sanders has got the scoop on Slog:

May 24, 2006

Dear Church Leader:

We saw in the news media last week that organizers of Referendum 65, a proposed ballot initiative, have focused on working with churches to get enough signatures to place it on the state ballot. As the leader of a church that holds services on school district property through a building use permit, it’s important that you understand the legal restrictions on activities that take place on public property in order to protect your organization.

In fact, under Washington state law, the facilities of a public agency, i.e., the Lake Washington School District, may not be used directly or indirectly for the purpose of assisting a campaign for election of any person to any office or for the promotion of or opposition to any ballot proposition (RCW 42.17.130). Our attorneys have advised us that collection of signatures on any proposed ballot initiative on school property is a violation of that law, as campaigning for any candidate for elected office would be. Therefore we cannot allow your organization or another organization at your invitation to come onto district property for any efforts that would assist a political campaign of any kind.

While we have worked with political organizations that use our facilities to ensure their understanding of these restrictions, I recognize that we have we may not have made these requirements clear to other users groups. We will be adding this restriction to the building use guidelines so that it is clearly spelled out. Since we do not know if churches that use our schools may be participating in this event, we wanted to bring this concern to the attention of all churches using our facilities. I appreciate your cooperation on this issue, for the protection of both of our organizations. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Sincerely,

Janene Fogard

Deputy Superintendent
Lake Washington School District

Rev. Ken Hutcherson’s Antioch Bible Church was caught red handed last Sunday, canvassing for signatures on school property, which prompted the district to send the above letter to his and 7 other churches to which they rent space. Sanders wonders…

Could opponents of R-65, which would repeal Washington’s new gay civil rights law, go to court (or to state elections officials) and demand that all signatures collected on school grounds be invalidated? And if the Lake Washington School District alone has eight churches renting its facilities, exactly how many school districts state-wide have churches renting facilities from them, and how many of those churches collected R-65 signatures on public school property during Referendum Sunday?

I’ve been told the statute prohibiting political activity at tax exempt churches is “murky”, but the legal issues surrounding public schools are cut and dry. This is at very least a violation of the state’s public disclosure laws, subject to exactly the kind of complaint the Evergreen Freedom Foundation frequently files against teachers.

If these churches want to become so involved in enacting law, you’d think they’d at least have the decency to follow it.

Monday night I attended the emotional and informative town hall meeting at Aki Kurose Middle School, where schools slated for closure in the South East quadrant had the chance to air their grievances to the district’s Citizen Advisory Committee. Well over two hundred of my fellow members of the Graham Hill community marched down the hill to the meeting; you can see a clip of the coverage on KOMO TV.

I spent a lot of the night cornering CAC and school board members, and I intend to write up a bit of a report later on, but I wanted to briefly comment on an epiphany I had while rabble-rousing with parents from other schools slated for closure.

The CAC had belatedly suggested that Graham Hill’s Montessori program might be moved into another school if the parents wanted, but we all understand that this simply would not work. The Montessori program is a community, deeply tied to Graham Hill and its neighborhood. And it is a program that requires the active support of strongly involved parents to succeed.

For example, the school district requires that we waive our $290/month tuition to any applicant qualifying for free and reduced price lunch, but provides no additional money to cover its costs. Without the scholarship money raised by Montessori parents, we can’t keep the preschool open. I doubt half the families would stick with the program if moved outside our neighborhood, and without these families the program will fail. You might as well just start from scratch elsewhere.

And in talking to parents at other schools, I learned that this attitude was shared, particularly by the very passionate families at TOPS.

Possibly the most bewildering of the CAC’s recommendations was the decision to move the extremely popular, 530-strong TOPS program from the specially modified Seward building, into what is now Thurgood Marshal, a building with a capacity of only 420.

Of course, it makes absolutely no sense to recommend moving the TOPS program intact into a building with less than four-fifths the necessary capacity, unless…

Unless you don’t intend to move TOPS intact.

And that was my epiphany. In making this recommendation the CAC must have assumed that that Thurgood Marshal could accommodate TOPS, because in moving it, the program’s enrollment would dramatically decline. And more dramatically than the numbers at first suggest.

My understanding is that about a third of the students at TOPS come from the neighborhood, and choose it mostly because Seward is their neighborhood school. Seward is one of the nicest facilities in the city, and Montlake, the school proposed to take it over, has some of the district’s highest test scores. So we can assume that as much as a third of the students currently enrolled in TOPS will choose to remain at Seward. (It’s really the only way the 230-strong Montlake can even begin to take advantage of Seward’s 524-seat capacity.)

Likewise, we can assume that Thurgood Marshal is the reference school for a significant number of its students, and they too will choose to stay in large numbers, whatever prefix is slapped before the school’s name. So really, there’s probably only room for about half of TOPS students to move to Thurgood Marshal — which I’m guessing is about right, since many of its families will choose other, more stable options, within and without the district.

I personally had hoped to transfer my daughter into TOPS for middle school, but not anymore. I don’t want her to have her education disrupted by the transition years, in which the new, smaller TOPS gradually adapts to its new building and new community. It may be called “TOPS” but it won’t be the program we toured this winter.

The fact is, you can’t move a program like TOPS in this fashion, and expect to keep its community together. The CAC must have understood this, else they never would have believed they could fit the over-enrolled, long wait-listed program into a much small building. It just stands to reason.

Likewise, I take the belated offer to explore moving our Montessori program to another school as a nonstarter. If Graham Hill closes, so will its Montessori program, and neither its name nor its community will survive a move to a different school. The district will essentially be shutting down a program with some of the highest WASL scores in the city: 100% Reading, 83% Writing, 67% Math.

And I can only assume the CAC understands this too.

If Bank of America were to suddenly close a dozen branches throughout the city, what would be the result? Well, short term, they’d save some money. Long term, they’d lose customers.

I’m just saying….

In case you can’t guess, I’ve been reading the Seattle Weekly this morning, and you absolutely, positively must read Mike Seely’s piece on Sen. Maria Cantwell. Really.

Stepping in for Knute Berger in the “Mossback” column, Seely, who worked as Cantwell’s deputy press secretary during the 2000 campaign, presents the most honest and straight forward analysis of Cantwell’s strengths and weaknesses I have ever read. Finally, a Cantwell insider publicly says what most people who have worked for her at Real Networks or on the campaign trail will tell you privately, if you pour enough booze them… though probably not quite so emphatically.

Cantwell is far from perfect. In fact, she ranks high among the most difficult people I’ve ever worked for or with. The seven months I spent in her charge felt like seven years. The campaign, larded with her RealNetworks stock windfall, spent more money on Red Vines than most candidates spend on direct mail. And conspicuous consumption during happy hour became all but a necessity, as it was invariably better to be half in the bag when Cantwell, a paranoid hellcat of a boss who rolls through staff like toilet paper, would make her daily sweep through the office, berating everyone in sight.

On the trail, Cantwell often handled small groups of constituents in closed settings well. But she was not what you would call warm

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Did Port of Seattle CEO Mic Dinsmore violate election laws by using government facilities to recruit and support an anti-reform slate in the 2005 Port Commission election? The Seattle Weekly’s George Howland Jr., suggests yes, and at least two sitting commissioners agree:

But the two commissioners who are Dinsmore skeptics, midtermer Alec Fisken and newly elected Lloyd Hara, believe the CEO did violate the law prohibiting use of government facilities in political campaigns, based on evidence Seattle Weekly has collected. Says Fisken: “We could fire him. That would be good.” Hara, who was elected in November to an open seat, doesn’t support immediate termination but says Dinsmore should leave the Port at the end of his informal term of employment on Dec. 31, 2007. (Dinsmore does not have an employment contract.)

Commissioners Pat Davis and John Creighton, who prevailed in last November’s election with help from Dinsmore allies, say the evidence does not show that Dinsmore broke the law. Says Davis: “I don’t see anything wrong or illegal.”

Howland documents a campaign, at least partially run out of Dinsmore’s office, to influence the composition of the commission, and suggests the possibility of a quid pro quo between private companies that contributed $65,000 to the Davis and Creighton campaigns, and later received $120 million in public subsidies.

Curiously, in investigating this story, Howland never bothered to interview our friend, Richard Pope. Perhaps we can twist Richard’s arm into giving us a few comments in the thread.

Anyway, could be a scandal brewing, so read the whole thing.

I just checked the Seattle Times op/ed page, and still no apology for their vitriolic attack on Ron Sims back in 1988… or at least a public recognition that Sims was a local visionary on the issue of global warming. Perhaps tomorrow.

(Though they did strongly praise Sims’ proposal to provide health insurance to our county’s 16,000 uninsured children, so I guess I won’t be coming back in 18 years to demand another apology.)

The momentum continues to build for Darcy Burner in WA’s 8th Congressional District, with the announcement today that she has become the newest national “Netroots Endorsed” candidate. This is a huge accomplishment that will lead to national attention, and tens of thousands of dollars pouring in from online activists throughout the nation.

A couple weeks ago the national blogs Swing State Project, MyDD, and Daily Kos asked their readers for nominations — kind of like a national, online primary — and Burner won. As Matt Stoller wrote over on MyDD:

The next netroots candidate is Darcy Burner in Washington’s eighth Congressional district.  The district is trending blue, and Burner is incredibly smart and a natural camapigner going against vulnerable incumbent David Reichert.  She is also young (35) and web-savvy, having worked at Microsoft, and these traits will serve her well in a House that is desperately in need of new blood.  She has promised, for instance, to post on her Congressional web site a list of all meetings with lobbyists by her or any staff member, which is a fundamentally new approach to governance.

The Washington State blog community is one of the more mature blogging communities out there.  They don’t fall lightly for a candidate, so seeing this kind of note on the exceptional Horse’s Ass is quite meaningful.

I personally have known Burner for nearly a year, yet I didn’t start actively promoting her campaign until February, after I became absolutely convinced that she was not only a candidate who could win, but who would well serve the interests of the 8th district and the citizens of WA state. During that time I’ve watched her grow from just another passionate Camp Wellstone classmate, into a compelling campaigner and a formidable fundraiser. And the more I learned about her personal story, the more I became convinced that she was the perfect candidate to represent the demographically diverse 8th district.

Burner regularly attends Drinking Liberally, and was at the Pacific NW Progressive Bloggers Conference.  Her diaries at Kos are here.  She’s got a good shot to win this district, and she is part of a new wave of internet candidates who know what it takes to win and know what democracy really can mean.

Aww, gee… Matt called HA “exceptional”. But as much as I’d like this to be about me, it’s not. This is about Burner, the entire local progressive blogosphere (Andrew at NPI should be thrilled,) and the respect we’ve earned from the national netroots. But most of all it’s about the incredible support we receive daily from our readers; if you didn’t read us, nobody else would, and in the end our strength comes from our numbers.

So go check out Burner sitting at the top of the “Netroots Endorsed” page on ActBlue, and show her some love.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Please join us for cheers, jeers and beers as we discuss this week’s political happenings… but don’t talk to me unless you’re ready to hear me rant about school closings.

I may be a little late, as I plan to stop by Seattle’s Town Hall to hear Democratic political strategist Celinda Lake and conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway talk about their new book: What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live. 7:30 pm, 8th & Seneca, tickets are $5 at the door.

And if you happen to be a liberal drinker on the other side of the mountains, the Tri-Cities chapter of DL also meets Tuesday nights, 7 PM, Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd., in Richland. Go ask Jimmy for more details.

King County Executive Ron Sims delivered his State of the County speech today, and in it he made two major proposals.

The first is to provide health insurance to the county’s 16,000 uninsured children, a proposal that is both economically sensible and humane. Half these uninsured children are already eligible for state or federal programs, and the first phase of a pilot project will hire outreach workers to inform parents and help then complete enrollment forms. I’ll provide a full analysis of the entire proposal as soon as I have a chance to, um, analyze it.

But I want to briefly comment on Sims’ second major proposal: the creation of an Executive Office of Global Warming, that would coordinate the county’s response to climate change and advise the various departments in regards to the expected impact. For example, let’s say the county was planning to building a scenic shoreline road about 5 feet above sea level, but sea level is projected to rise 10 feet… well the Office might advise that the road be built a little further inland. Stuff like that.

The scientific community is virtually unanimous that global warming is real, and that it is caused by man’s carbon dioxide emissions, and that unless we start reducing emissions now, the impact is going to be devastating… facts that An Inconvenient Truth is going to drive home to audiences this summer. Nobody but hardcore propagandists and head-in-the-sand corporatists deny it. And so Sims’ proposal is not only creative, it’s downright forward thinking.

At least it would be forward thinking, if not for the fact that Sims first proposed such an office when he was a councilman, way back in 1988. And how did our region’s self-proclaimed paper of record respond to a politician thoughtfully preparing for the future? Well, read for yourself this embarrassingly vitriolic editorial in the Seattle Times from September 7, 1988:

IF THE “greenhouse effect” is exacerbated by political hot air, the world is in real trouble.

The hyperbolic clouds of rhetorical gas belched out on this issue in recent weeks could easily choke someone – or at least cloud the vision of otherwise rational people.

A local example: King County Councilmen Ron Sims and Bruce Laing have proposed creation of a new science-and-technology office to prepare this county for the greenhouse effect’s dire effects. The two-scientist office, costing taxpayers at least $100,000 a year, would study the matter and issue a report on what can be done to save King County.

Does the county really need another government office, which inevitably would grow into a mini-bureaucracy with a big staff and a fat budget? Nonsense.

“I don’t think anyone disputes the reality of the greenhouse effect,” said Sims, warning of rising water levels in Puget Sound and other apocalyptic local repercussions.

On the contrary, many reputable scientists dispute the reality of the greenhouse effect. Others seriously question its long-term impact. Human understanding of climate changes is admittedly imperfect, but some past variations appear to be cyclical and unrelated to human activity.

A climate model developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that average annual global temperature has often varied by as much as a few degrees over the past 400 years. Normal fluctuations in the climate may explain this, many climatologists believe.

S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that the greenhouse effect was by no means a given.

Between 1880 and 1940, global temperature increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit – “well before human influences were important,” Singer wrote. Then between 1940 and 1965, there was a temperature decline – even though fossil-fuel burning and automobile use increased greatly.

The point is that the sky-is-falling, icecaps-are-melting, oceans-are-rising rhetoric must be tempered by common sense.

If Sims and Laing want to study the greenhouse effect, they should buy themselves some tomato plants and a bag of steer manure – which shouldn’t be at all hard for such experienced politicians to find.

Uh-huh. I suppose Sims should expect a big apology from the Times, because he was right and the were not only wrong, they were complete and total assholes to boot.

More on this later too, including some pretty frightening visual aids.

UPDATE:
Just read the Seattle Times op/ed page. No apology. Guess that’ll come tomorrow.

There goes the neighborhood.

(Just kidding. The Seattle Times‘ David Postman is now the city’s newest political blogger. Now I’m gonna have to start my own newspaper.)

The other day we learned that Republican US Senate candidate Mike McGavick supports amending the US Constitution to prohibit states from recognizing gay marriage… the first time that hallowed document would contain language specifically denying a right.

But the Tacoma News Tribune reports that at this weekend’s annual gathering of the “Mainstream Republicans of WA”, McGavick took the exact opposite approach to the issue of gay civil rights:

McGavick refused to take a position on the gay civil rights bill the Legislature passed this year, saying it’s a state and not a federal issue. The mainstream group supported the bill, which bans discrimination in housing, jobs and other areas.

So, um… let me get this straight: McGavick is for writing discrimination into the US Constitution, but against writing anti-discrimination into WA state law. If the states, through their own legislative and judicial processes choose to confer the right to marriage to same-sex couples, then we need a Constitutional amendment overriding the policy. But when it comes to legislation prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment, insurance and lending… well, that’s a state issue, not a federal one.

Perhaps I’m missing his nuance here, but we’ll never know for sure, because his response was so weasely; McGavick refused to take a position on what for three decades has been one of the most contentious legislative issues in the state — an issue he may be asked to vote on this fall. But in the absence of a clear, honest statement, I think it is fair to view his silence in the context of his prior statements.

McGavick chose to speak out against gay marriage. Given the opportunity, McGavick chose not to speak out in support of gay civil rights.

To me, that speaks volumes about where McGavick stands on this issue, especially given that his comments (or lack thereof) came in the context of a meeting of self-described “moderate” Republicans — an organization of which McGavick made a point of saying he was not a member.

So anybody who still thinks that McGavick is a moderate Republican, I suggest you take him at his word that he is not.

Gov. Gregoire’s approval ratings continue to go up. President Bush’s support continues to go down.

Fuck the Seattle Times editorial board. That’s what I say… fuck ’em.

Generally, I try to be polite to reporters, columnists and editorialists, because I generally like them when I meet them, and because it’s kind of hard to be taken as credible by people who hate me. But fuck ’em anyway.

What I want to know is which one of them has such close ties to Montlake Elementary that they would be prompted to write such an indefensible defense of the CAC’s most blatantly bizarre decision:

Montlake Elementary School is an example. Manhas recommended shuttering the school and dispersing its students, an idea parents resoundingly and reasonably rejected. The current proposal would move Montlake to nearby Seward, keeping students together and a successful academic program intact.

Oh my God, gimme a fucking break!

If anybody has an easy case to make against the CAC’s school closure list, it’s the families of the TOPS program at Seward, who are being totally screwed to accommodate the selfish land-grab of the affluent, politically connected parents at Montlake.

“A successful academic program”…? Montlake isn’t a “program.” It’s a school that attracts wealthy professional class families from the neighborhood… families with the time and money to give their school resources most other schools can only dream of. And yet the district recommended closing it last year due to under-enrollment.

But not this year. No, this year they manage to put a Montlake parent on the CAC, and behold… not only is their school saved, it’s moved into one of the most beautiful facilities in the city, bumping out TOPS in the process, perhaps the most popular and sought after K-8 program in the district. Apparently Montlake also has a representative on the Times editorial board… and I’m more than a little bit curious as to who it might be.

I mean, let’s just look at how fundamentally stupid this proposal really is. According to the CAC’s own capacity analysis, Montlake currently has an enrollment of 247 students, while TOPS is bursting at its seams with 527 students — 6 more than the Seward building’s planned capacity of 521… a building that was specifically modified to accommodate the needs of middle school students.

Yet the CAC proposes moving Montlake into Seward — a facility more than twice the capacity it needs — while the over-enrolled TOPS is moved to Thurgood Marshall, a building with a planned capacity of only 422. To effectively handle the TOPS program in its current form, Thurgood Marshall is going to have to be expanded and renovated at great cost to tax payers, and with great disruption to the students. Yeah… voters are going to be all over that levy, especially after we just spent tens of millions of dollars renovating schools the district now wants to shut down (you know, like the $5.2 million at my daughter’s Graham Hill.)

If the Montlake “program” really needs room to grow, why not just move it to Thurgood Marshall, which is less than a 10 minute drive down MLK, and not much further than Seward? If Montlake’s high test scores are really the result of some special “program” rather than the money and parental involvement that comes from being situated in an affluent neighborhood, then surely it would flourish from its move into the larger (if rundown) Thurgood Marshall building on the edge of the Central District.

No doubt, Montlake’s a good school, its parents’ enormous contributions in time, money and passion are laudable, and there are plenty of good arguments to keep it open. But destroy the TOPS program in the process? That deserves being highlighted in the Times as one of the CAC’s better decisions? What the fuck?!

That alone is enough to completely destroy the Times‘ credibility on the school closure issue — they’re either not paying close enough attention to what is really happening, or they’re purposely spinning their readers. But they nearly top themselves with the following doozy:

The citizens panel appropriately stepped beyond closures to highlight equity issues, namely the scarcity of alternative schools south of the Ship Canal. The schools are popular, innovative and clustered largely in the northwestern section of the city.

And yet the CAC didn’t move a single alternative program into the South End, they didn’t provide a solution to the New School and Orca’s long standing (and long promised) aspirations to become K-8 programs, and they eliminated one of the only truly innovative, alternative programs in the region, the popular Montessori Pre-K through 5 at Graham Hill (not to mention the school’s special ed and autism programs.)

In case you can’t tell, lip service like this just really pisses me off. The Times‘ biased and premature editorial was a disservice to its readers, and a whitewash of a school closure list that is just as inequitable and inexplicable as the first… if different.

The Times should stick to subjects it knows well… like advocating for eliminating all taxes on the families of multi-millionaires. At least there they have their misleading rhetoric down pat.

The Seattle P-I reports today that initiative whore Tim Eyman is counting on evangelical churches to gather the 112,440 signatures he needs to put his anti-gay rights referendum on the ballot.

Though early reports indicated a lackluster response to the measure, Eyman is banking on an eleventh-hour surge from as many as 5,400 churches he hopes will participate in “Referendum Sunday.”

“That means that this weekend nearly 500,000 voters are going to hear about and talk about our effort to get a public vote on House Bill 2661,” Eyman wrote in an e-mail sent to the media and supporters. “They’ll be asked to not only sign the petition, but to take petitions home and fill them up and return them next Sunday.”

Hmm. According to the Washington State Department of Revenue, our state’s churches receive about $44 million in property tax exemptions annually — that’s tax burden that is shifted to ordinary citizens like you and me. But one of the prerequisites for maintaining this not-for-profit status is that these churches must refrain from actively engaging in political campaigns.

If tomorrow, on “Referendum Sunday,” these churches distribute petitions and/or canvass for signatures, or parishioners are instructed to do so, I would say that this would constitute a very real violation of the prohibition on electioneering, and would thus provide clear grounds for suing to have their tax exempt status revoked. Sound heavy handed? Well, no more heavy handed than say, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s penchant for filing Public Disclosure Commission complaints against school teachers who distribute political literature on school property.

So I strongly urge all my readers to show a little faith, and go to church tomorrow (focus on those evangelical mega-churches if you can,) and bring along a video camera or other recording device, just in case. And God forbid you find any prohibited political campaigning on church property, drop me an email.

If our state’s churches want to play politics, then they better be prepared to play political hardball.

Habeas corpus is for pussies.