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The debate over felon voting took an interesting turn today when King County Superior Court Judge Michael Spearman ruled Washington state’s voter disenfranchisement laws unconstitutional. Or more precisely, in issuing a summary judgement in favor of the plaintiffs in the case of Madison v. Gregoire, he ruled the state’s re-enfranchisement laws unconstitutional.

The case involves three indigent ex-felons who petitioned the court to have their voting rights restored despite their inability to pay their “legal financial obligations.” The plaintiffs argued that by conditioning restoration of their civil rights on their ability to pay LFOs, the state had essentially levied a poll tax on ex-felons. In granting a summary judgement and ordering that they may register to vote, Judge Spearman agreed:

Thus, the court concludes that the state has not shown a rational relationship between a felon’s ability to immediately pay LFOs and a denial of the right to vote. Accordingly, the Washington re-enfranchisement scheme which denies the right to vote to one group of felons, while granting that right to another, where the sole distinction between the two groups is the ability to pay money, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Sections 12 and 19 of the Washington State Constitution and is constitutionally impermissible.

Of course the state will likely appeal, but this decision has the potential to dramatically impact the way we administer elections. The counties and the state are spending millions of dollars purging ex-felons from the voting rolls… an expensive, complicated and flawed process that now may be entirely unnecessary.

It also casts a new light on last year’s gubernatorial election contest, in which by far the largest number of disputed ballots were those alleged to be illegally cast by ex-felons. Should Madison v. Gregoire hold up on appeal, it will turn out that most of the ex-felons in question had their voting rights denied unconstitutionally.

WA’s current felon disenfranchisement laws are not only morally outrageous, they are difficult to administer and counterproductive. Secretary of State Sam Reed supports full restoration of voting rights upon release from prison, if only to simplify the voter registration process. And no less an authority than the American Correctional Institute argues that restoring voting rights helps integrate ex-felons back into society.

I had despaired that WA’s legislators lacked the fortitude to make this sensible reform in the wake of the Rossi campaign’s hype over felon voters, but now it appears that the courts may force their hands. It’s about time.

Speechless? Here’s a few ideas for discussion:

• Cha-Ching! Safeco pays McGavick millions to run for the Senate. Now we know the details.
• Rove leads prosecutors to 250 pages of “missing” email from Cheney’s office.
• New British memo shows Bush was set on path to war in Iraq.
• Darryl wants to “can Esser’s ass.” Personally, I prefer raspberry jam.

I haven’t spent much time following this weekend’s Capital Hill shootings, because… well… I generally don’t enjoy reading media coverage of random horrors such as this. It’s heart-wrenching. It’s depressing. And the coverage usually doesn’t teach us all that much about what really happened, other than the details.

Instead, I prefer to wait until the play or the song or the poem comes out, because quite frankly, artists do a much better job of making sense of these tragedies than journalists.

Still, I was reluctantly browsing through the copious coverage on Slog this morning, when I came across a couple of posts from Dan and Josh, criticizing the Seattle Times editorial board for their “pathetic,” “reactionary,” so-called soul-searching.

An armed madman goes on a shooting rampage at a private house party… and what lesson did the wise and solemn scribblers at the Times learn from this tragedy?

Teen dance rules in our city must be thoroughly reviewed to see if they go far enough to protect young people. One of the six victims was apparently a 15-year-old Bellevue girl. What precautions or rules could have helped her? Could anyone protect her at a private party at a private home?

[…]

At this point, our community has to rethink late-night activities of young people. We must do what we can to prevent such a horrific incident from happening again.

Uh-huh.

Hmm. Let’s see if I can come up with a hypothetical parallel.

I’ve had the privilege of being invited to a couple of editorial board interviews over the past few years. Now suppose I were to show up for one at the Times, armed to the hilt, and in a homicidal rage over say — dishonest efforts to repeal the estate tax — I were to mow down two generations of Blethens and their assembled editorialists? Do you really suppose that the next morning they’d publish an editorial suggesting that our community “rethink the activities of editorial boards”…?

No, of course not. They’d all be dead.

But this practical consideration aside, such a blame-the-victim editorial would be patently absurd. The cause of the tragedy wouldn’t be the editorial board, it would be the armed nutcase. (In this case, me.)

As Dan points out, a reasonable reaction to the tragic shootings might be to discuss gun control or the adequacy of our mental health services. But…

Is anyone shocked to discover that the old farts at the Seattle Times searched their creaky old souls and came up with the same old garbage? Young people are scary. Their parties are scary. Teenagers shouldn’t be out of the house after 10 PM. The city should do something about it.

Pathetic.

Pathetic indeed. And if anybody at the Times takes issue with me, I’d be happy to come down to your offices and discuss this face to face.

We’ve all heard the angry rants from the angry right against government regulation… the nearly religious jeremiads against bureaucrats and politicians meddling in the affairs of the free market. Read my comment threads and you’d think that regulating commerce was a crime against God. (Although regulating a woman’s right to her own body is apparently God’s work.)

And so I thought I’d just point to an article in today’s Seattle P-I to remind folk how mundane and uniformly welcome most government regulation really is.

Last year, a little more than half the gas stations in Seattle had pumps that failed their measuring inspections. Four out of five stations inspected since 2002 have had pumps that failed, according to city inspection data analyzed by the Seattle P-I.

“The consumers are never going to notice it,” Tim Douglas, a city inspector, said of the small discrepancies. “Over time, the dealer will notice it. Some of these stations are pumping close to a million gallons a month. Pretty soon, a penny here and a penny there starts adding up to real money.”

According to the article, annual inspection cycles in Seattle and Spokane assure that drivers there get a fairer deal than the rest of the state, where some pumps haven’t been inspected in years. And Tim Hamilton, a petroleum industry lobbyist who represents independent gas station owners welcomes the government inspections:

“One thing we can’t have is we don’t want the public to lose confidence in the accuracy of pumps.”

Although the city’s primary concern is to protect taxpayers, Douglas said a program of consistent inspections in Seattle is creating a level playing field for gas stations.

See, contrary to what they apparently teach in bible class business school… there is no such thing as a “free” market. Markets rely on trust, and some form of regulation is absolutely required to make sure that everybody plays by rules. When we shop for gas we do so based on price or convenience or perceived quality; but we all assume that over time, we’re pretty much getting the same quantity of gas per gallon, regardless of station. And we assume this because we also assume that government regulators are periodically inspecting the pumps.

I’m not saying that all regulation is productive or that none of it is overreaching or poorly implemented. But for the most part, government regulation levels the playing field while protecting the health, safety and welfare of consumers and workers. That’s the humdrum role of most regulation and enforcement, and quite frankly, our economy wouldn’t function smoothly without it.

So for those ideologues who insist on absolute fealty to the “govmint bad” meme, I suggest filling up at the Admiral Chevron in West Seattle, where one pump was shorting customers by about a cup a gallon.

According to Time Magazine, the Republicans are up shits creek. As they should be.

The other week I was on the John Carlson Show discussing proposals to subject political blogs to federal campaign finance regulations, which not only would have forced unpaid bloggers like me to meet costly and time consuming public disclosure requirements, but would have also made it a felony to mention a candidate by name during the final 60 days before an election.

Well, the Federal Election Commission issued its proposed rules on Friday, and as Jerome Armstrong at MyDD explains, for the most part, they’re pretty darn good.

For a blogger, this is great news. However, for a campaign, I’m unsure of the implications of their ruling. From the sounds of it, Google ads and Blogads are now going to have to carry a disclaimer. I can’t imagine that even being practical for candidates to run disclaimers in their search-term ads.

As for me, I’m free to do what I do without any interference. In fact, I’m also free to do what I do and work as a paid campaign consultant, without subjecting HA to any reporting requirements.

Hear that candidates? The state’s most influential and effective progressive blogger is now available to help you develop and execute your new media strategy. Get me while I’m still cheap.

Wow. Over a half million people marched through the streets of Los Angeles today, protesting a proposed immigration bill that would amongst other things, build a 700 mile-long “security wall” across our southern border.

Hmm. You know, in addition to keeping people out, walls like this are also pretty good at keeping people in.

I’ve gotten a few angry emails over the last couple days, and I can certainly understand if some of you Green Party members and supporters mistakenly believe I’m just some Democratic Party hack. But local writer and activist Geov Parrish has impeccable progressive credentials, so perhaps you’ll accept his take on the Dixon fiasco as unbiased.

Writing in Eat The State (“Shame on the Greens and Aaron Dixon“,) Parrish berates the Greens for failing to vet their candidate.

David Goldstein and his readers at HorsesAss.org have been on a tear the last two days, destroying Dixon’s Senate bid and perhaps, along the way, permanently ensuring that nobody politically credible in town will ever take the Greens seriously again.

It pains me to write that. I like the Greens, in the same way, I guess, that fans root for the Chicago Cubs. Except the Cubs have winning seasons pretty often. And I like and respect Dixon, too. But the particularly painful thing about this is that it was all entirely preventable.

Parrish then goes on to summarize what has been gleaned from the public records thus far:

1) Eighteen criminal charges in the last 17 years, most (but not all) for traffic violations and unpaid traffic fines.
2) Massive debts from dozens of unpaid fines in both Seattle Municipal Court and King County District Court. A number are for driving without insurance (and yes, he can afford it.)
3) Dixon claims on his web site that the woman he currently lives with (and who is his campaign media contact) is his wife. She isn’t, and she’d better not be. He’s still in the process of divorcing his last wife.
4) And he owes thousands in unpaid child support to yet another ex.
5) Not only has Dixon not voted since registering in 1998 (which was reported Thursday), but he’s never voted before that, either. In other words, he’s never voted in King County. Ever, over an adult life spanning nearly 40 years. And his inactive voter registration lists a now-invalid address.

There’s probably more; the dailies will likely be all over Dixon now, starting this morning. And this is not to say Dixon is a bad guy; he wouldn’t be the first community activist whose personal life is a mess. But the point is, this is Campaign 101. You vet your own candidates, and you conduct opposition research, just like you know your opponents (if they take you seriously) will on you. Did the Greens expect not to be taken seriously, or are they just stunningly ignorant about how this “campaign” thing works?

Hmm. I’m guessing a bit of both. I don’t believe the Greens did take this campaign seriously… at least, not in the sense that they ever really believed that Dixon could win. So perhaps they just thought the media would play along with a wink and nod, giving their rhetoric a little ink as a fuck you to the incumbent?

I mean, let’s be honest, the media’s never taken the Greens seriously before… never bothered to scrutinize Green candidates the way they do real ones… so why should this race be any different? Because this ain’t your daddy’s media, folks.

It is stunning that such a supposedly progressive “party” has such an ass-backwards, 20th Century view of how the media works. For those of you who have criticized me for targeting Dixon… where have you been the past few years?! This is what I do! Dixon had muck in his past, and if I didn’t rake it, some other blogger would have.

Don’t blame me… blame the Greens. As Parrish points out, they recruited Dixon. They approached him because of his stature in the black community.

The Greens could and should have covered all this before ever talking with Dixon, and nobody would have been the wiser. And they could have found some other, more appropriate black community activist to run for U.S. Senate instead. They had no business not vetting Dixon.

[…]

Now, a good man is being publicly humiliated, his campaign badly damaged, and the Greens are a laughingstock. Ugly. Really ugly. And completely, absolutely unnecessary.

Once again, when it comes to learning the ins and outs of electoral politics, the upstart Green Party has proven to be an awfully green party.

It’s been an eventful week for The Stranger’s Cienna Madrid. First I took a few rhetorical potshots at her, and today she gets body-slammed by the Seattle P-I’s venerable Joel Connelly: “Cantwell’s vilification by left is bizarre.” And in case you missed it, listen to Cienna taking on both me and Joel in the latest installment of Podcasting Liberally.

And don’t forget to vote for HA in the Koufax Awards.

Oh man. I don’t mean to pile on poor Aaron Dixon… but Richard Pope — HA’s resident expert on quixotic election campaigns — has searched through court records and posted his findings in the comment threads.

Geov Parrish has a piece in the current issue of the Seattle Weekly on Green Party senate candidate Aaron Dixon, and while I disagree with Geov’s broad condemnation of Sen. Maria Cantwell’s voting record, I know from our conversations that we share a lot of common ground… like our mutual criticism of the Greens’ failure to do the hard work necessary to build itself into a real party.

When I was a kid, I thought the Minutemen were really cool. I used to don my three-cornered hat and pretend I was one in our local 4th of July parade. Now Danny Westneat tells me they’re a bunch of racists.

In one of his signature fits of truthfulness, Sen. John McCain told John Carlson that the 8th CD race between Darcy Burner and Dave Reichert will be “a close one to watch.”

Note to Stefan: it’s time to embrace a new scandal.

The Burien, Tacoma and Spokane chapters of Drinking Liberally all meet tonight. Wow. That’s a lot of liberal drinkers.