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Santa Claus and a cute little elf visted Mike McGavick’s campaign headquarters today to deliver an early Christmas present from the insurance industry to their favorite little boy: $14. 3 million in stock options. (FYI, I heard from an eavesdropping reindeer that the McGavick staffer in the photo yelled at Santa. Talk about a war on Christmas….)

I’d already reported the $4.5 million in accelerated vesting that Safeco is giving McGavick as a parting gift, but while he claimed he was leaving the company at the end of the year, now it turns out he plans to stay on the payroll through January 26… just in time to vest another $9.8 million in options.

And McGavick must have been a very good boy indeed, as he’s also still eligible for an undisclosed 2005 bonus.

All this makes me wonder… if the insurance industry wanted to skirt the campaign finance laws and make huge contributions directly to the McGavick campaign… wouldn’t this be exactly how they’d do it?

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

In honor of tonight’s one-year anniversary of the Seattle chapter, and as a tribute to the NSA’s monitoring of our phone calls, emails and blogs, our fearless leader Nick has declared this “Tin Foil Hat Night.” The first beer is free for anyone who shows up wearing a tinfoil hat. That’s great news for me, considering I rarely leave the lead-lined safe room in my basement without one.

King County Executive Ron Sims announced this morning his intention to move the county to all mail-in elections, as early as 2006. With over 1 million registered voters, KC would become the largest county in the nation to conduct elections entirely by mail.

Council members Bob Ferguson and Julia Patterson joined Sims at a morning press conference endorsing the plan. Sims is instructing elections director Dean Logan to study the proposal and recommend a plan for implementing the change.

Over 70 percent of voters in the 2005 general election cast their ballot by mail, with the number expected to substantially increase over the coming years. Several independent reviews of the county’s election processes have recommended moving to an all mail-in system to eliminate the cost and inefficiencies inherent in operating to two completely different election systems, however the final proposal may include a handful of regional voting centers where voters could drop off ballots or receive assistance on election day.

UPDATE:
I wanted to quickly get the breaking story out there, but now I’ll take a few moments for some commentary, and I thought I’d start by quoting myself from a post back in March:

I have voted in three cities

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King County Executive Ron Sims will be joined by council members Bob Ferguson and Julia Patterson at 10 AM to make a “major announcement about King County elections.”

Our friend Stefan over at (un)Sound Politics is so atwitter with anticipation — like a little kid on Christmas Holiday morning — that he’s already speculating as to what the announcement might be. Stefan’s first guess is a reasonable one: that KC will move to all mail-in voting. But his second guess strikes me as wishful thinking; pointing out the absence of Dean Logan from the press conference, he’s guessing that maybe Logan has resigned. Maybe. Though I called elections on an unrelated issue yesterday and was told Logan was out of town due to a death in the family.

Here’s my guess. Considering it was Ferguson and Patterson who pushed for hiring the Elections Center to conduct an independent audit… and considering that the primary and overwhelming recommendation of the post election report was to consolidate elections operations into a single building… perhaps they are announcing their support for Sims’ previously rejected proposal to spend $22.8 million to build a centralized elections headquarters on Rainier Ave. South?

Just a guess.

Republicans have cynically attached a provision to the defense spending bill that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling… and Sen. Maria Cantwell is threatening to filibuster.

Sen. Maria Cantwell vowed Monday to keep the Senate in session until the brink of Christmas to defeat legislation that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

“If this language is allowed to stand, one of our nation’s most pristine wildlife areas will be lost,” Cantwell, a Democrat said as she outlined plans by her party and its allies to defeat language offered by Alaska Republican Ted Stevens to open ANWR.

“This is nothing more than a sweetheart deal for Alaska and the oil companies,” Cantwell said. “That’s why I am prepared to use every procedural option available to me as a senator to prevent this language from moving forward.”

Hmm. Alaska’s nutcase Senator Ted Stevens may end up ruing the day he turned Sen. Cantwell into an enemy, for in so doing he not only gave her a visible issue popular with WA voters, he also gave her a real life villain to oppose. I know people who worked with Sen. Cantwell at Real Networks, and whatever she lacks in terms of retail politics, she more than makes up for in tenaciousness.

Cantwell said she’s willing to challenge Stevens, who is widely regarded as one of the fiercest fighters in the chamber.

“Senator Stevens says he’s not holding up the process, but he is,” Cantwell said. “He knows very well that we could all go home today. We could pass these outstanding pieces of legislation regarding defense and other things and be gone. But he wants to stay here. If he wants to stay here, then we’ll stay here to fight.”

I think it’s gonna be one helluva fight. And my money’s on Cantwell.

So much to blog on, so little time. So I thought I’d do a little roundup post to point you to a handful of issues and articles that have piqued my interest.

MoveOn.org targets Reichert with anti-war ad
Our very own Rep. Dave Reichert is one of six vulnerable House Republicans being targeted by MoveOn.org with a TV ad campaign questioning their lack of support of an exit strategy from Iraq. 18 ads will run in Reichert’s 8th Congressional District this week on CNN.

“These are districts where the incumbent doesn’t support an exit strategy to bring the troops home and the challenger does,” said Tom Matzzie, MoveOn’s Washington director.

In other Reichert news, he just voted to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Evergreen Politics interview Gov. Gregoire
Lynn Allen of Evergreen Politics has posted another one of her excellent interviews, this time with Gov. Christine Gregoire. Lynn didn’t have as much time with the governor as she had hoped for, but she managed to get in some good questions, like the one addressing perceptions of Gov. Gregoire’s legitimacy:

CG: Well, they spent six months challenging the legitimacy of that election. The only result was a few more votes for me after lots of money spent on both sides. I believe we won that election from the beginning. With as much money as was spent to question the legitimacy of the election, I can see how people would be concerned and frustrated. We need to go beyond it now. I’m in office. We have a state to run. We need to run it. I think we’re getting phenomenal things done. I am looking forward to the new year. This issue will get behind us. I think that the citizens are concerned about what is important in their lives – health care, security, jobs, and education for their kids. These are difficult issues and I’m prepared to deal with them.

The citizen in me is happy to see the governor focused on her job… but the political strategist in my wishes she would pay more attention to correcting the public’s misconceptions about the 2004 election.

Onward Christian soldiers… to Olympia
State Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) was back on his Christmas Warhorse last Friday, attacking the blatantly offensive and anti-Christian phrase “Happy Holidays.” The Olympian has the story, and includes some good quotes from a prominent local blogger:

“It’s not a big deal. There’s nothing new this year,” said Goldstein, noting that the Capitol tree has been called the Kids Holiday Tree for more than a decade. “They are making something out of nothing right now, but with all the media tools they have at their disposal, people don’t realize it’s nothing.”

Goldstein said the danger of the debate is that it legitimizes intolerance of different religious groups, including Jews, Muslims and nonbelievers.

Man… that David Goldstein guy is sharp. Somebody should give him his own radio show.

Finkbeiner goes both ways
When Bill Finkbeiner was a state representative (and a Democrat) he twice voted in support of legislation extending state anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation, but as state senate minority leader (and a Republican) last year, he held his caucus firm in opposing it. Now that he’s resigned his leadership position, the Seattle Times’ Andrew Garber speculates about which way Finkbeiner might vote when the bill is reintroduced in the coming session.

“The X factor will be Sen. Finkbeiner,” said state Sen. Erik Poulsen, D-Seattle, a key negotiator in the Senate last year for the bill, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
…
Supporters of the bill see him as the weakest link in what’s been an unwavering Senate GOP blockade of the measure since it was first introduced more than 20 years ago.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to my regular readers. In analyzing Finkbeiner’s resignation as minority leader, I wrote:

… freed of the burden of leadership, don’t be surprised to see him vote his conscience on HB 1515 (prohibiting discrimination based on sexual preference) ….

I think it is clear from his prior public statements that Finkbeiner does indeed support the legislation. If he chooses to stand up to his party leadership and vote his conscience, I expect at least two other Republican senators to join him.

Whenever I hear a Republican official or groupie talking about “restoring faith” in King County Elections, I have to laugh, for the state GOP has done everything in its power to destroy that public faith. Of course they couldn’t do it alone, and most of the damage has come at the hands of our mainstream media through its institutional fetish for reporting scandal over all else.

How many times over the past year were we treated to front page headlines screaming about “felon voters” or the vastly misunderstood and overstated, so-called ballot “discrepancy”…? See, that’s a juicy story that gets Dean Logan stuttering, Chris Vance foaming at the mouth, and readers riled up in outrage and disgust. But what kind of front page coverage does KC Elections get for a job well done? Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. For example, the non-profit, non-partisan Election Center — a national association of elections officials — just issued a glowing report on KC Elections’ performance during the Nov. 8 election… and I didn’t see front page coverage anywhere.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

I guess the Seattle Times just doesn’t find this newsworthy, and while the Seattle P-I did cover the report somewhere in today’s paper, it certainly wasn’t mentioned anywhere near the front page. The report’s conclusion?

“We observed a good election, conducted under extremely difficult circumstances — multiple facilities, a changing work force and intense public scrutiny,” the three-member team said. “The (King County) elections section has reason to be proud of the progress that has been made.”

Of course, government employees doing their job right shouldn’t ordinarily be front page news… but in the context of the intense (and sometimes misleading) coverage of problems encountered during the 2004 election, it is totally irresponsible to leave voters unaware of the improvements that have been made. Yes, a clean and accurate election does not make for a sexy headline, but considering how Logan and his crew have been publicly ridiculed and vilified over the past year, aren’t they owed a little bit of that balance the MSM likes to brag about so much?

Just thought I’d ask.

Man… am I a trendsetter, or what? Just the other day I post a Christmas Happy Holiday carol parody, and today James Vesely publishes a song parody of his own in the Seattle Times: “I’ve got those 2005 blues.”

As a bit of a lyricist myself (I’ve got an Off-Broadway musical flop to my credit), I thought Vesely did an okay job. He was a bit loosey-goosey with the rhyme and meter, but you can get away with that with the blues. Still, he’s no Ira Gershwin, and I suggest he stick to prose if he wants to keep his day job.

There is one verse in particular on which I have a few comments though….

Eyman and Sims,
not exactly twins
each got a kiss,
not always bliss
From the mainstream
media.
Which now consists
of bloggers who twist,
in their own
schizophrenia.

First… rhyming “media” and “schizophrenia”…? Ouch. That may be a good enough lyric for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but no self-respecting lyricist would touch that one with a ten foot pole. I know a place where you can get a really great rhyming dictionary.

Second… are you suggesting that us bloggers are now part of the mainstream media? Is that meant as a compliment or an insult? And if I am now MSM… can I have a job?

Finally… we all know who you’re really talking about here, and I just have to say that I think it terribly rude and inappropriate to describe our friend Stefan as a schizophrenic. The more accurate diagnosis would be a paranoid delusional. (Perhaps with a bit of bipolar disorder thrown in.)

I was forwarded a couple precinct maps showing the vote on Initiative 912, and I thought the excerpt above was somewhat interesting. This map (PDF) shows those precincts which voted 70% or greater against I-912. Of course, the initiative was strongly opposed in Seattle, but look how poorly it did in Mercer Island, Bellevue and much of the Eastside.

I-912 — the love child of conservative KVI talk hosts John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur — was officially endorsed by the state GOP and many prominent Republicans… yet it went down big in traditionally Republican precincts. You might not know it yet by looking at the composition of the city councils, but these former GOP strongholds are steadily trending blue.

A year ago, in my post election analysis (“Subdivide and conquer: a strategy for a new Democratic majority“), I pointed towards this trend as one of the few hopeful signs coming out of the disappointing 2004 election:

Just like the Democrats lost their base in the South with their support of civil rights legislation in the sixties, the GOP risks alienating their moderate, suburban base by abandoning fiscal conservatism to focus on right-wing social issues at home, and military and economic imperialism abroad. The neo-cons may dominate the national Republican leadership, but they do not represent the majority of suburban voters.

Families move to places like Mercer Island for better public schools, cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods, and all the other public services that a higher property tax base provides. These are people who believe in government because they benefit from it every day, and they routinely tax themselves to pay for the services they want.

These are people with whom urban Democrats have common ground, and we have an opportunity to exploit the wedge the neo-cons have provided, to expand our base politically and geographically. For in addition to a shared belief that good government is necessary to maintaining a high quality of life, suburban and city voters have a mutual interest in maintaining an economically and culturally vibrant urban core.

One shouldn’t read too much into the precinct maps from a single election, but the vote on I-912 certainly does nothing to counter the trend we’ve been seeing for years. Even as Democrats have lost ground in Eastern WA and other rural areas, we have gradually become the majority party in many populous, close-in suburbs.

But my sense is that this shift is as much a result of what the GOP has done wrong as it is what the Democrats have done right (or even, simple demographics.) I’m constantly hearing from self-described moderate Republicans who complain that their party has left them, rather than the other way around. The challenge for Democrats is to convince these suburban voters to change their party identification, not just their votes, much the same way the GOP eventually accommodated and absorbed the old southern Dixiecrats.

This process could take decades, so if you’re a Democrat, I’d take the map above with a grain of salt. But if you are Republican, I advise you to take it with a couple of aspirins and fifth of whiskey, for there’s nothing about these trends that looks good for your party’s prospects.

Yesterday’s dramatic vote, in which the Senate failed to extend the Patriot Act, was a huge defeat for the GOP leadership and the ever weakening Bush administration. But though it is tempting to dwell on the inside politics, that would only serve to distract from the crucial issue at hand… whether the very basic human liberties we are supposedly defending against terrorists can survive our so-called “War on Terror.”

The Patriot Act had been hastily passed during the understandable hysteria that followed 9/11, with few legislators actually having the time to read the actual bill. But recognizing the importance of protecting the civil liberties that have made our nation the envy of all others, Congress wisely set an expiration date on the Act, so that it’s provisions could be more carefully reconsidered at a later time. Unable to get more protections into the reauthorization, Senate Democrats, along with several key conservative Republican Senators, threatened filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist needed 60 votes to close debate, but could only garner 52.

WA Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell both voted against cloture. Sen. Cantwell, who rushed back from observing the elections in Iraq to cast her vote, had this to say about her reasoning:

“The federal government has a responsibility to protect our nation from those who may bring terror into our homes. It also has a responsibility to respect our rights and honor our privacy. These principles are not mutually exclusive: we can and must achieve both.”

That is the type of balance we desperately need to maintain if we are really going to protect our freedom. And that is the type of balance we risk losing should we replace Sen. Cantwell and provide President Bush with another reliable Republican vote in the Senate.

UPDATE:
Ken gave a link to this article in the comment threads, and I thought it was worth adding it to the post.

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

The student had requested the book via an inter-library loan; he was told by agents that the book was on a “watch list” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered an investigation. So what’s the harm, you righties might ask?

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.

“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.

Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.

“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”

Of course, I suppose there are some on the right who might view this chilling effect as a happy little bonus.

Here’s your weekly sandbox. Poop away.

Wing-nuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack boots stomping through the snow,
Yuletide pundits join the paranoid choir
That claims that Christmas has a foe.

Bill O’Reilly knows this turkey of a president
Needs an enemy to fight,
So the ACLU, and George Soros too
Now find it hard to sleep at night.

They know the boobs who watch Fox News
Will blame the “War on Christmas” on the liberal Jews.
And every mother’s child will look in scorn,
To see if Soros really has devil’s horns.

And so I’m offering this simple phrase
To wing-nuts, one to ninety-two,
Although you’d prefer it be said different ways:
Happy Holidays… fuck you!

(With apologies to Mel Torme and Bob Wells… and nobody else.)

There are a handful of Republican senators who deserve a great deal of credit for standing up to the bullying of their own leadership.

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans’ privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill’s Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

Feingold and Craig want to extend the Patriot Act in its current form for several months so that the Senate has time to add more civil liberties protections, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has refused. The failure to close off debate and bring the bill to a vote came in the wake of today’s New York Times report that Bush authorized domestic surveillance of phone calls and emails of thousands of private citizens.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Hey… remember the good old 1990’s, when the right-wing, whacko, militia-types spouted their paranoid fantasies about government intrusion and “black helicopters” and all that? Should it be any surprise that now that these same wing-nuts are running the country, they’re attempting to use on the rest of us the exact same tactics they imagined were once being used on them?

Okay… maybe that’s overstating things. But to those ardent GOP loyalists who would defend the Bush administration turning our intelligence apparatus inward, authorizing domestic spying on US citizens without court order… would you be so cavalier about our civil liberties if the enormous power of the state rested in the hands of a Democratic administration? Because if we still have a democracy, you’ve got to expect that it will eventually.

You know, there’s this other local blogger who’s name escapes me at the moment, who claims to be all over election reform and all that, and I’ve been waiting all day to see his analysis of the reform package proposed yesterday by Secretary of State Sam Reed (a Republican)… but so far, nada. Hmm. I guess for some people election reform isn’t really election reform unless it makes it harder to vote.

Reed’s proposal (PDF), on the other hand, is actually quite sensible, and includes two major provisions: moving the primary to August, and allowing for online voter registration via the SOS website.

Ask any county auditor in the state, and they’ll tell you that their number one reform priority is moving the primary… preferably to the spring, but they’ll take August if that’s what they can get. Reed’s proposal moves the primary from the 3rd Tuesday in September to the 3rd Tuesday in August, giving elections officials a much needed cushion before ballots go out for the general election. Reed’s proposal also makes a few other tweaks in this area, increasing the time for certifying a primary from 10 to 15 days, and requiring military and overseas ballots to be mailed out 30 days before the election (an impossible timeline under the current system.) Reed would also ease the legislative fundraising freeze to help accommodate the accelerated schedule.

Reed’s other major proposal would allow voters with a WA state driver’s license or state ID card to register to vote online; the SOS would obtain the voter’s signature from the Department of Licensing to pull into the voter rolls. This is an incredibly progressive, efficient, cost effective reform that would make WA only the second state to allow online voter registration. The only reason I can see why someone might argue against it would be if they don’t want to make it easier for citizens to register to vote. (Um… I expect there to be some passionate opposition.)

There are a bunch of other lower profile reforms in Reed’s proposal, mostly dealing with cleaning up the election statutes, and clarifying some of the rules regarding ballot measure petitions. One change that immediate stood out to me would make it “a gross misdemeanor to circulate a petition that appears to support a measure that differs from the actual measure attached to the petition.” Hmm. I wonder if that would apply to say, the time Eyman printed a petition for a property tax cut initiative with the headline “No New Income Tax!”…? Sure hope so.

While there are other reforms I would like to see, all in all, I can’t find anything in Reed’s proposal that I might object to. After the recent escalation of partisan tensions over the GOP’s voter challenge debacle, I was kind of dreading Reed’s proposal, but once again he has pleasantly surprised me. This appears to be a package of reasonable, modest reforms, and I hope beyond hope that it receives the kind of bipartisan support it deserves.

My what a difference a year makes. It wasn’t so long ago that the national GOP had targeted Sen. Maria Cantwell as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in 2006, while WA state Republicans were drooling over what they saw as the inevitable backlash over the 2004 gubernatorial election contest. Now, less than a year before the election, things don’t look so hot for them.

Last week I reported that both Rasmussen and GOP pollster Strategic Vision show Cantwell at the magic 50% or better against anointed challenger Mike McGavick… and now the new SurveyUSA poll is the latest to show Cantwell’s approval ratings tracking up, 55% to 34%, her net approval rising 9 points since last month’s survey. Far from being vulnerable, Cantwell now ranks right in the middle of the 100 senator pack, and most impressively, she now enjoys positive net approval across nearly every demographic group in the state.

What explains her sudden popularity? Well, she’s finally getting a little press around here, but my guess is that voters are beginning to pay a little more attention now that the 2005 election is over and McGavick is making a little more news. Absent an opponent, approval ratings can be a little nebulous, but voters, particularly Democrats and independents, are beginning to view Cantwell in the context of a head-to-head with McGavick. Indeed, Cantwell’s biggest jump was with voters who identify themselves as liberals. There may still be some resentment in this group over a handful of Cantwell’s votes, but they’re realists; no self-respecting liberal is going to hand this seat over to an insurance industry lackey like McGavick.

There was a time when state R’s expected the national party to pour lavish sums into this race, but it’s beginning to look like that money would be better spent defending Representatives Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris. (And who knows… maybe even “Doc” Hastings.)