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Sen. Maria Cantwell’s proposal to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil by 40 percent over the next 20 years was narrowly defeated on a mostly party-line vote. The proposed amendment to the Senate’s energy bill failed 53-47, with only three Republicans joining all but one Democrat.

Cantwell, D-Wash., expressed disappointment with the outcome, noting that Democrats, Republicans and President Bush have all agreed that the nation should move to lessen its dependence on foreign supplies. The United States currently imports 58 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil it consumes every day.

“Unfortunately, the concern we’ve been hearing from the president and Republican leaders about America’s dependence on foreign oil is just empty rhetoric,” Cantwell said. “They had a chance to throw a strike for the economic and national security of our nation, and they balked.”

Yeah, well… that’s because Bush’s financial patrons make a butt-load of money importing oil… so we wouldn’t want to do anything to upset the status quo. Besides, without all that foreign oil to protect, how would we ever justify the trillions of dollars we spend on the military industrial complex?

Whatever. Kudos to Sen. Cantwell for calling the administration’s bluff.

KING 5 has posted the names of the 95 voters whose absentee ballots were left uncounted in King County. The list was obtained through a public records request… not by guestimating.

Now these are people who deserve to be angry at King County Elections. If I were Dean Logan, I’d send them each a personal apology.

That said, looking at the precincts, it is likely that the votes were fairly evenly distributed between the candidates, so they would not have changed the final margin by more than a handful of votes.

The Seattle Times today reports on a proposal that would allow the University of Washington to become more like a private university, allowing tuition to rise towards market rates, while dramatically increasing need-based financial aid.

The idea would be to increase financial aid to students on a sliding scale based on income to help offset a large increase in tuition.

There are skeptics wary of such a move, but university officials pitch it as a kind of Robin Hood plan, where the families of rich students pay more to help subsidize tuition for students from middle- and low-income families.

I have long supported such measures — indeed I think it is inevitable — but I need to correct a mischaracterization in the above statement. Right now, taxpayers subsidize all students equally… even the children of the wealthy. Under the proposal, it is not fair to say that “the families of rich students pay more to help subsidize tuition for students from middle- and low-income families;” rather, the rich will simply be less subsidized than the poor. No tuition covers the full cost of a college education, and all students are subsidized to some degree, through taxes, endowment, research grants and other revenues.

I expect that many will have a knee-jerk reaction against this proposal, as low tuition is uniformly appealing. But Washington state is in the midst of an education funding crisis, where we simply do not have enough four-year slots to meet the growing needs of our expanding population. If taxpayers and legislators are unwilling to pay the cost of expanding our current system of across-the-board subsidies, then means-testing is really the only solution. The alternative is to let our university system decline, while denying access to an ever-growing number of applicants. This would not only be disastrous for our children, but in the long run, a disaster for our economy as well.

Another nit to pick in the article is that the reporters didn’t include comments from Reps. Fred Jarrett (Mercer Island) or Skip Priest (Federal Way), Republican legislators who deserve a lot of credit for a similar proposal that was part of their broader, education package, HB 1434. Due to the partisan nature of the previous legislative session, and the sponsors’ minority status, the bill got little consideration. Gov. Christine Gregoire sounds serious about exploring the UW tuition proposal, and I hope her education task force considers the entirety of the forward-thinking Jarrett/Priest bill… she may be surprised to find some strong bipartisan support.

Gregoire said she knows some lawmakers are worried about the idea, but said she wouldn’t endorse any approach that reduces access or hurts the middle class.

Still, something needs to be done, she said. “When I talk to companies about coming to Washington state and staying in Washington, not one of them has talked to me about the B&O [business and occupation] tax. Every employer has talked to me about education and whether the state is committed to education.

“We can’t allow budgets that are being consumed by skyrocketing health-care costs and unfunded mandates to lead our institutions to mediocrity. That’s what I see, stepping back, is happening.”

It’s comforting to know that Gov. Gregoire clearly understands one of our state’s most pressing problems. She’s got three years and five months to prove to voters that she can fix it.

Equal Rights Washington is planning to run an ad in the Eastside Journal, targeting State Senators Bill Finkbeiner and Luke Esser for their votes against HB-1515, the Anti-Discrimination Bill. They are asking for your help to choose the ad that sends the right message. (And while you’re there, you might as well contribute a few bucks as well.)

If Microsoft really wants to make amends for spinelessly pulling its support for the bill during the last legislative session, I’d suggest they pay for this ad campaign themselves.

For those who read (or write) the blogs and wonder, “why bother?”… well, here’s another great example of how persistent blogging can move the MSM: “Web puts ‘Downing Street Memo‘ in spotlight.”

The issue of the “Downing Street Memo,” as it has come to be known — and what it does or does not prove about the actions of the Bush administration before the 2003 invasion of Iraq — burst suddenly into the open last week.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were asked about it at their joint news conference in London. The topic was raised by interviewer Gwen Ifill when Blair appeared on PBS’ “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” show. Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” asked Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman on June 5.
…
The story has been kept alive in the United States largely by Internet sites. Organizers of the sites say the memo proves Bush lied to Congress and the American public when he denied having made a decision to go to war.

I blogged on the topic way back on May 2, and again several times since. While I don’t claim to have been personally influential in forcing the MSM to address this issue, I was part of the larger cacophony of dissent that did.

Tomorrow, amidst growing media scrutiny, Rep. John Conyers (MI), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will hold a “forum” on the memo. Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has not only refused to hold a formal hearing, he’s refusing to allow Democrats to use any committee hearing rooms. This is exactly the sort of arrogance of power that led the Bush administration to invade Iraq on a lie.

We all need to keep up the pressure on both the MSM and Congress, so that circumstances behind this war can be properly investigated, and the truth revealed to the American people.

Terry Schiavo’s autopsy report is being released at this moment, and the AP has the first few details:

Terri Schiavo did not suffer any trauma prior to her 1990 collapse and her brain was about half of normal size when she died, according to results released Wednesday of an autopsy conducted on the severely brain-damaged woman.

Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin concluded that there was no evidence of strangulation or other trauma leading to her collapse. He also said she did not appear to have suffered a heart attack.
…
“The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain. … This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.”

The autopsy also concludes that Schiavo was blind, due to the fact that the vision centers of Schiavo’s brain were destroyed.

I’m guessing the autopsy report will settle the issue as to Schiavo’s condition… except for those people who choose to believe otherwise. For example, one “Pro-Life” blog prepared readers for the report by predicting it would be “outlandish:”

While I don’t know what the autopsy report will say, I’m going to go out on a limb here: I predict that the autopsy report will, in at least a tentative way, offer a conclusion that Terri was in a PVS.

I say this for three reasons:

Firstly (and perhaps this is just my cynicism coming out), it would fit the generally unfortunate and dishonest way that the rest of the Terri Schiavo saga has played out.

Secondly, doctors with whom I have discussed the Schiavo case share my pessimistic outlook. Dr. Peter Morin, a Boston neurologist interviewed for my March 16 NRO article, said that he anticipated “gross overstatements regarding the implications of the neuropathology.”

Yes, well… that’s the kind of open mindedness that we’ve come to expect.

This was a private, family tragedy in which cynical politicians shamelessly exploited a brain-dead woman for political advantage. Many, many people owe both Michael and Terri Schiavo an apology.

In the months between his infinitesimally thin loss at the polls and his mile-wide drubbing in court, there has been a lot of speculation that Dino Rossi might challenge Maria Cantwell for her US Senate seat in 2006.

Um… I don’t think so.

Rossi has clearly stated on a number of occasions that he will not run for the Senate in 2006. It’s not so much his public protestations I find convincing… I am convinced by little of what he says in public. But more than one person close to Rossi — people who respect him and trust him — have told me that Rossi has privately assured them he would not run against Cantwell. They believe him, and I believe them.

So who will Karl Rove choose to face off against Sen. Cantwell? Media speculation has focused on former US Rep. Rick White, Safeco CEO Mike McGavick, and (wait… don’t laugh…) the state GOP’s whining, unlikable Chairman, Chris Vance.

Um… I don’t think so.

Of the three, only Vance has statewide name recognition… and it isn’t exactly the good kind. None of these potential candidates particularly strike fear in the hearts of Democrats; indeed a recent Strategic Vision poll (a Republican pollster) showed Cantwell losing to Rossi, but with a solid lead over other pretenders.

                          Maria Cantwell
Chris Vance        35%               55%
Rick White         38%               50%
Mike McGavick      36%               50%
George Nethercutt  38%               51%
Jennifer Dunn      39%               50%
Dino Rossi         52%               40%

Surely, Rove and the national GOP will try to get Rossi to go back on his word… something local Republicans have been known to do. But I’m going to make a bold prediction, and break the news that the stealth candidate in this race is (tada)… Attorney General Rob McKenna.

Yeah, I know… he’s only one-eighth into his first term, so it seems an unlikely candidacy, but McKenna is an ambitious man with designs on the White House (I’m not kidding) and in that context the AG’s office is only a stepping stone to a stepping stone. Besides, there are lots of little dots that when connected make the outline of giant arrow pointing towards the ’06 election. So I asked McKenna’s communications director, Greg Lane, if his boss would “categorically rule out a Senate run in 2006,” to which I received the following non-denial denial:

Rob’s position about this has not changed since he was elected in November. At that time, this ran in the SeattleP-I (Nov. 8, 2004):

Asked about his political future, McKenna said, “Who knows what will happen going forward? I see this (service as attorney general) as a minimum of an eight-year commitment, and I can even see 12.”

Nothing has changed. Rob is completely focused on making the AGO the most effective it can be, leading to a re-election run in 2008.

Hmmm. I guess Greg’s answer kinda, sorta sounds pretty definitive, but it didn’t really answer my question, did it? I mean, he could have cast any doubt aside by replying “Yes, Rob categorically rules out a Senate run in 2006.” And it doesn’t help his case any, that the article he cites to dispel the rumors was headlined: “Attorney general-elect McKenna boasts Gorton-like ways.”

For a guy who plans to hang out around the Capitol for a decade or so, it seems awfully odd that McKenna has no plans to move his family to Olympia. Nor, by the way, do some of his top aides. Especially those who have been hired on two-year contracts. And maybe I’m reading a bit more into this than I should, but I’m just a touch intrigued by the rumor going around that one of McKenna’s daughters, when asked if it was “cool” that her dad was elected AG, was nonplussed in answering, yeah, I guess so… but soon they’d all be moving to D.C. when her dad became Senator.

Ooops. Loose lips and all that.

In this context, a few other events start to make sense, like the inappropriate timing of his shameless pandering to the BIAW during the midst of the election contest. And more interesting, the hiring of State Sen. Luke Esser to a position in the AG’s office. Trust me, it wasn’t for the money — starting Assistant AGs are paid crap — so an AGO job hardly seems worth Esser sacrificing his state senate seat. Unless of course, he’s being groomed to replace McKenna as AG in the ensuing special election.

Just remember, you heard it here first.

If there was anybody set up to be a fall guy during the election contest trial it was King County Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens. And, well… he’s fallen. KC Elections just sent out the following press release: “King County Recruits for New Superintendent of Elections.”

Effective July 11th, King County Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens will move to a new role in the Elections Section as Project Manager for the county’s compliance with provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)

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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. For those of you who missed the opportunity last week to celebrate Dino Rossi’s capitulation by buying me a beer, I have graciously extended my invitation another week. I hope to see you all there tonight.

I hardly know cynically-appointed-and-soon-to-be-former King County Councilmember Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn; I met him before his first Council meeting, shook his hand, and wished him good luck. But his pretty-boy good looks, political grandstanding, and nepotistic background made me quickly suspicious.

Still, for all I know, Shaw Dunn might eventually turn out to be a reasonable, trustworthy and effective politician. Once he grows up.

Reagan Dunn is showing his age: He’s what, 6 years old?

How else to explain the antics of this political child who said he would “personally … honor” the decision of the King County Republican Party on who should be entered in the fall primary? Dunn, 34, a Metropolitan King County councilman from Bellevue, lost the GOP nomination for the 9th District seat Saturday to fellow Councilman Steve Hammond, R-Enumclaw, 234-209. In no time, Dunn ditched his pledge to “personally plan to honor the process.”

Yeah… Nicole Brodeur really sticks it to Shaw Dunn in today’s Seattle Times, and deservedly so. Shaw Dunn was apparently willing to “personally … honor” the convention results when he thought he was a shoe in to win, and his justification for breaking this promise turns out to be just as selfish as the act itself.

“Look at it through my eyes,” Dunn urged me. “I have been working on this for six months, on the phone four hours a day.”

Oh boo-hoo.

I just finished Camp Wellstone, an intensive, three-day campaign training session, and one point that was hammered home to potential candidates is that elections are not about you… they are about the community. I’m guessing that the GOP regulars who comprise the delegates at caucuses and conventions could sense Shaw’s Dunn’s inherent narcissism, and that’s why with all the official party support and most of the money, he still lost to Hammond.

The top-down discipline both parties are trying to impose has democracy exactly backwards. The candidates are there to serve the voters, not the other way around. Perhaps when Shaw Dunn grows up, he’ll realize that his mother has only one vote.

Now that the election contest is over, so too are the heady days of bombarding the public with half-baked, uncorroborated tales of official misconduct and fraud. So everybody’s favorite right-wing, aluminum hat boy — our good friend Stefan — has taken to the more daunting task of sharing his personal paranoia and distrust… one voter at a time.

Lacking the actual names on the 96 ballots King County found uncounted in their absentee envelopes, Stefan has not only used his superior deductive powers to narrow the list down to 300 individuals… he’s started to personally notify them that their vote didn’t count. These are voters, according to Stefan, who with “reasonable certainty” were “apparently disenfranchised.” Voters like Wendy Stansbury.

Needless to say, she was upset by this news.

No kidding.

Of course, Stefan has earned a reputation for coming to conclusions that are not always grounded in the facts… like when he confidently predicted a Rossi victory just days before the ruling. But it’s an awesome responsibility to be the sole purveyor of the apparently reasonably certain truth, so if Wendy was needlessly upset, I suppose that’s just the price Stefan is willing to pay.

… and who the fuck cares?!

As was previously noted, Saturday’s triumph of Steve Hammond over political momma’s boy Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn was not only surprising, it was downright hilarious. Vying for the party’s nomination in the King County Council’s 9th District, Hammond eked out a narrow 25-vote victory out of the 444 ballots cast at the GOP’s county convention. The funny part is, that there were only 436 delegates seated. That’s right… there were more ballots cast than delegates who voted!

Let’s see now… 8 divided by 436… that’s a discrepancy rate of 1.83 percent. If the Republicans had staffed KC Elections, and had achieved the same startling accuracy rate, we would have seen a discrepancy of about 16,500 more ballots than voters. And on Saturday they only had to deal with 436 delegates (…or maybe it was 444) instead of the 900,000 KC voters who participated in the November election.

And the problems didn’t stop there. According to Republican Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer and others, the entire convention was chaotic.

Von Reichbauer wants the convention process reviewed, because the date conflicted with school graduations, delegates couldn’t vote by absentee ballot and soldiers fighting overseas couldn’t participate.

So the Republicans couldn’t reconcile the vote, and they disenfranchised military voters!

“It was an inconvenient process,” von Reichbauer said. But then, “inconveniencing” voters has been a mainstay of Republican voter suppression strategies for decades… so I’m sorry if I’m wary about Republican proposals for electoral reform.

So much for party unity
Before the May 18 caucuses and in the weeks that followed, both Hammond and Shaw Dunn indicated that they would abide by the convention’s outcome, and not run in the September primary if they didn’t win the GOP’s official nomination.

But after yesterday’s vote, Dunn said he would file anyway, although he didn’t know whether he would do so as a Republican.

“I can’t abandon this campaign because of 24 votes in June,” he said, referring to Hammond’s victory margin (and getting his math slightly wrong).

How convenient. But then, the GOP is not only the party of convenience, it is also the party of poor losers.

A reader tipped me off to a column by Thomas Oliphant in the Boston Globe, discussing Dino Rossi’s ungracious and telling mischaracterization of the Washington State Supreme Court. It was interesting to read an out-of-stater’s impressions of our election contest.

What Rossi said was not that the battle was over and that no matter how maddening the situation was, it was time to accept the judgment. What he said was that he was halting the legal battle ”because of the political makeup of the Washington State Supreme Court.”

Rossi’s implication was in one sense accurate in that Democrats nominally predominate there, but what struck my eye was the implication that there is a direct connection between ”makeup” and assumed result. In his eyes, judges were no more than robots, a source of votes in a case instead of reasoned opinions on the legal merits.

Indeed, after two recounts of the disputed result by machine and then an exhaustive tally of the state by hand that produced the Gregoire lead, the Republicans went judge shopping for their court case. That search, of course, assumed that ”conservative” county or ”conservative” judge implied an expected connection between the adjective and the anticipated result.

What was missing was the political argument first framed in 1968 by Richard Nixon and used ever since by Republicans in campaigns to encapsulate conservative legal philosophy as a presumed antidote to the presumed excesses of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren’s presumably activist US Supreme Court.

As Nixon first articulated it, the idea was that judges interpret law, they don’t ”make” it like legislators. They interpret law and the Constitution strictly, moreover. If the words aren’t in the founding document, they can’t be grafted onto it by judges. If the words don’t say Uncle Sam can do something, that something is reserved for the states and the people, as the Constitution says. The essence of judging is not the achievement of a desired policy result but the application of law. Agree or disagree with the philosophy, it is cogent and clear and deserves respect.

As Oliphant points out, Rossi went judge shopping, and Judge Bridges gave him every chance to win his case — according to the law. The Judge clearly laid out before trial the standard and burden Republicans would have to meet, and admitted nearly every piece of evidence the Republicans presented. In the end, Rossi simply failed to prove his case, and Judge Bridges held to his “conservative” principles… by holding to the statute.

Of the GOP invitation to theorize, he noted pointedly that ”to do so would constitute the ultimate of judicial egotism and activism.”

Contrast this classically conservative ruling with Antonin Scalia’s silly invention in 2000 of a 14th Amendment ”right” in stopping a statewide recount of Florida’s disputed presidential vote as belatedly ordered by that state’s supreme court.

And contrast Rossi’s crabby reference to the makeup of Washington’s supreme court with Al Gore’s gutsy, gracious acceptance of what was really an effort to keep the House of Representatives from having to elect George Bush.

Conservative legal philosophy lives on, but much more so in Washington State than in Washington, D.C.

Oliphant clearly saw this election contest for what it was. It wasn’t about fairness or justice, it was about winning. And Rossi has proven himself to be a poor loser.

While I was busy getting candidate training at Camp Wellstone, at least one prominent local Republican was getting taught a lesson of his own. King County Republicans picked their official candidates today at a county convention… I haven’t seen any confirmation yet, but I hear there was at least one huge upset: in the KC Council’s 9th District race, anointed mamma’s boy Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn apparently lost the nomination to Councilman Steve “The Executioner” Hammond, a favorite of Christian conservatives.

If true, this would be a stunning defeat for one of the KC GOP’s fastest rising stars. Shaw Dunn is the son of former Congresswoman Eleanor Prentiss Shaw Jennifer Dunn, and was clearly being groomed for power. In deference to his mother, the party leadership had stacked the deck in Shaw’s Dunn’s favor, and he came out of the May 17 caucuses with a substantial lead over Hammond. But in an unexpected show of strength by Christian conservatives, Hammond apparently turned out more of his delegates… enough to garner a narrow, 20 vote victory.

If I were GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance, I’d be worried. This not only represents a challenge to party unity, but in a post I-872 environment, where party officials are determined to choose candidates at convention, this rebellion indicates the willingness and ability of a well organized religious right wing to steer the party towards surefire losers in the Ellen Craswell mold.

One can only hope.

UPDATE:
From the Seattle Times:

In the 9th District, 436 voting delegates were seated

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