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In the aftermath of a sometimes contentious legislative session, Ken Vogel reports in The News Tribune today on a heartwarming display of bipartisanship… plans by the Democratic, Republican and Libertarian parties to reach out across the aisle(s), join hands, and sue the state in federal court to scrap the “Louisiana style” Top-Two primary system enacted by Initiative 872 last November.

Rarely does an issue serve to bring political foes so close together: Democrats and Republicans, Paul Berendt and Chris Vance… Goldy and the Snark?!

Yeah, that’s right… both Stefan and I came out against I-872, and rather strongly. Stefan called it a “dumb idea,” cogently arguing that it would weaken parties.

Those who don’t like political parties might think this is an attractive outcome, but bear in mind that parties provide important services to the democratic process (that’s why all democracies have them). These services include: organization, fund-raising, coalition-building, candidate recruitment and training, and most importantly the development of stands on issues and the ability to help voters identify candidates with a particular set of positions. If the parties wither away, other institutions will step in to fill the void.

Yeah, um… like the BIAW. Just look at their influence in the so-called “nonpartisan” race for the Supreme Court, where they single-handedly got Jim Johnson elected to the bench. And as Stefan explains:

In the absence of party organizations that tie candidates to platforms and identifiable coalitions of interest groups, elections will degenerate even more than they are into personality contests. Candidates who already have, or can purchase name recognition will have an even greater advantage than they have today: incumbents, wealthy individuals, moneyed interests and celebrities will all come away with even greater advantages than they have today. So will those who control media organizations and would be in an even stronger position to promote their favorite candidates.

Of course, the tool that he is, Stefan might just have been acting as a mouthpiece for his GOP overlords, but I choose to take him at his word (as long as it suits my purpose.)

In my own pre-election endorsements, my stated opposition to I-872 was decidedly more blunt:

“Waaahhhh! I want my blanket primary!”

That’s pretty much what voters and editorialists have been crying ever since the Supreme Court threw out Washington’s odd “blanket” or “open” primary.

Well get over it!

Besides, contrary to popular belief, I-872 does NOT restore the blanket primary… instead it replaces it with the equally odd but decidedly more stupid “Louisiana-style” top-two primary. Yes, I-872 gives you more choice in the primary, but it does so by giving you less choice in the general election… and that, after all, is when the majority of people actually vote.

I always felt reducing choice in the general election was the most compelling argument against top-two, but it would inevitably reduce choice in the primary as well. As it stands, Vance strongly discourages primary challenges in key statewide races (I don’t call him “GOPolitburo Chair” for nothing,) and the top-two format only serves to incentivize this antidemocratic trend towards strict party unity. For example, Democratic runner-up Mark Sidran nearly out-polled Rob McKenna in the September primary. If this had been a top-two primary, and McKenna had faced a serious challenger, only Sidran and Deborah Senn would have made it to the November ballot.

As the TNT reports, the parties understand this, and that is why they are planning to opt out of the primary system while they wait for their lawsuit to wend its way through the courts.

In the meantime, in the eight counties holding partisan elections this fall, the parties are trying to bypass the September primary, the first one under the new Top Two system. Instead, they’re pledging to use caucuses and conventions in which party activists pick candidates.

“That’s not what the voters thought they were voting for,” said Chris Vance, the state Republican Party chairman.

Yeah, no kidding Chris.

This maneuver will likely spark a second lawsuit. The state GOP has sent a letter to King County Elections:

“Only the candidates nominated by the Republican Party will be eligible to use the Republican name in the September primary,” the letter reads.

Not so, said King County elections director Dean Logan. He plans to send a response this week stating that anyone who files to run as a Republican will appear on the primary ballot as such.

As soon as Logan puts his decision in writing, Vance plans to sue King County, arguing the top-two violates his party’s First Amendment right to associate… and both the Democrats and Libertarians plan to join in. They will ask the court to reinstate the Montana-style system, or at the very least, allow the parties to chose their nominees via convention or caucus.

What I find most fascinating about this whole issue is that despite their rare show of bipartisan unity and cooperation, the parties have managed to blunder their way into the current disaster. The old blanket primary is probably starting to look pretty good to Berendt and Vance right about now.

Don’t get me wrong… I thought the old primary sucked. An open primary is an oxymoronic method for a party to choose its nominees, and ridiculously susceptible to gaming the system with cross-over votes for weak candidates. I should know: I’m an unrepentant Ellen Craswell and John Carlson voter.

But while I was as happy as anybody to see the old system tossed, you’d think the geniuses who challenged its constitutionality might have thought a little bit ahead about what might replace it. Was it really so hard to imagine that in a state that routinely uses the initiative process to send a big “Fuck You” to Olympia, the electorate might finger the party bosses with something worse?

If anything, this whole debacle just serves to prove the value of divisive, partisan politics. After all, just look at the shit they get themselves into when the parties are in total agreement.

I hope the Seattle P-I forgives me for pushing the “fair use doctrine” beyond its limits, and reprinting this Letter to the Editor from Monday’s edition, in its entirety:

I am a correctional officer at a major state correctional institution. I am a supporter of Gov. Christine Gregoire.

Reading of the Republicans’ assertion that statistics support the likelihood that felons voted for Gregoire, I have to raise a big red flag.

Based upon my observations of felons in prison, it is highly unlikely that most felons voted for Gregoire. It is more likely that felons would have voted for Dino Rossi.

During the long election contest, many inmates expressed their opinions to me. Inmates seemed attracted to Rossi because they would rather vote for a man and also because Rossi was promising to shake up state government.

The biggest reason felons are unlikely to have voted for Gregoire is her former occupation: state attorney general. Convicted felons do not support prosecuting attorneys. Many felons expressed concern that Gregoire might be too tough on them.

As one of my history teachers used to say, “Facts lie, and liars have facts.” The statistical analysis of the Republicans is not valid, because there are too many other factors that affect the way felons vote. Criminals do not support attorneys general.

Greg Senderhauf
Forks

Senderhauf’s comments reminded me of a Letter to the Editor in The Olympian, back in February. Brydon Stewart, recently released from a federal prison after serving 16 months for growing marijuana, wrote that the vast majority of his fellow inmates favored Republicans. Why?

Because in their view, Republicans were the virile, tough, action-taking, man’s-man party, while liberals and Democrats were reviled as soft, weak, passive, femme

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Just a reminder that the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets again tonight (and every Tuesday,) 8PM, at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. I can’t make it tonight, but I’ll pop open a PBR at home in a show of solidarity.

Also, The Olympian will be holding a live chat with WA Speaker of the House Frank Chopp, tomorrow at noon. If you have a question for Frank, you can submit it here.

I just downloaded Dean Logan’s 476-page deposition. Actually, the “redacted” version the Republicans provided to the Seattle Times is only 436 pages. That’s still a helluva lot of pages, but you can’t blame me for being curious about the GOP’s “40-page-gap.”

Needless to say, I haven’t had time yet to read the deposition for myself, so I’m not ready to comment on it directly, but please feel free to read it for yourself and use this thread to start debating the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view.)

David Postman and Keith Ervin do a bit of preliminary reporting in today’s Seattle Times. Amongst the somewhat newish tidbits revealed, the number of mishandled provisional ballots in King County was closer to 785 (122 of which were unverifiable), three additional absentee ballots were found in the base of voting machines, some valid ballots were mistakenly rejected due to errors in the voter-registration database, and 208 ballots were set aside because they needed further research (some of which were later determined to have been valid, post-certification, after um… further research.)

When Logan was asked about his failure to implement recommendations issued last May in an Elections Oversight Committee report, Logan said that he simply didn’t have the time:

“We had to consider what changes in polling processes were the most easily achieved in time for a brand-new election in September in a manner that could contemplate the literally thousands of election-board workers being able to absorb and comprehend those changes in time to administer the fall elections,”

This is completely consistent with what was previously explained to me in my conversations with Logan and his staff. Prior to release of the report, they had already started implementing a new voter registration system — including all new software — and their primary focus was completing this transition as smoothly as possible before the September primary and November election. They knew about problems with provisional ballots, and they knew about inefficiencies in the voter credit process… but they had to complete the implementation of the new voter registration system before they could move on to other priorities.

As Adams County Auditor Nancy McBroom (a Republican) told me, “it’s hard to wave your wand or twitch your nose and fix everything at one time.” Given unlimited resources, perhaps Logan and his staff could have addressed more issues at once… but then, he wasn’t given unlimited resources, was he?

Yes, mistakes were made. But it in evaluating this election it should be remembered that while evidence of additional errors and mishandled ballots have been trickling out for months, giving the appearance of an election department in a constant state of disarray, the majority of these errors actually occurred all at once, in an intense and compressed period time, on election day and in the first few days that followed. Whether mishandled provisional ballots were discovered and revealed on one, two, three or more occasions is immaterial, for they were all mishandled on election day. And while handfuls of misplaced ballots have been discovered on several occasions, they were all misplaced at the same time.

And in a final irony, many of the errors by King County Elections workers — which Rossi and his surrogates have attempted to spin into a tale of Democratic corruption — actually disadvantaged Christine Gregoire! Remember, if that infamous batch of “no signature on file” ballots had been properly processed, Gregoire would have won the machine recount, and Rossi would have been widely perceived as a poor loser for paying for a hand recount that would have expanded Gregoire’s lead.

Whatever.

I’ll slog through the deposition and come back with my observations later. But I think Democratic attorney David McDonald’s savvy observation likely sums up its legal impact:

“If the transcript was available this morning and they didn’t have a press conference this afternoon, my conclusion is they probably didn’t pick up much.”

For a Rossi team that has fought this contest at least as aggressively in the court of public opinion as they have in the court of a law, their silence is deafening.

While we’re in reporting-the-obvious mode, ooops….

Allegations that Terri Schiavo had been abused or mistreated were international news in the final days of her life. Now the truth is being revealed about those baseless charges, but nobody is paying attention.

Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer ordered the release of nine abuse reports compiled by the Department of Children and Families at the request of the St. Petersburg Times and other news organizations. The reports list 89 complaints between 2001 and late 2004 about Schiavo’s care, including dozens that came in around the time her feeding tube was removed for short periods in 2001 and 2003.

The number of complaints substantiated by state investigators who made unannounced visits to Schiavo: 0.
…
They often praised the care Schiavo received, and they never found Michael Schiavo withheld care from his wife or was discourteous.

So I’m guessing all you self-righteous righties who attacked Michael Schiavo as an abusive monster, are going to take this thread as opportunity to post a sincere apology, right?

Ooops….

In his final report, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has gone “as far as feasible” and has found nothing, closing an 18-month investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion.

“As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible,” wrote Charles Duelfer, who led the Iraq Survey Group. “After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted.”

No WMDs in in Iraq? Let’s see now, how can we spin this? Um… uh… I know: mission accomplished!

It always struck me as odd, the Bush administration’s vehement opposition to the reimportation of American-made pharmaceuticals from Canada, where they are often available for as little as half the U.S. price. The administration cites “safety concerns” as the reason it blocks Americans from buying drugs from other countries… a truly absurd notion when we’re talking about Canada for christsake.

Yeah sure, Canadians are technically foreigners… in the same way that the Scottish aren’t British and the Taiwanese aren’t Chinese. But to paint Canadians as “the other” is kind of like saying that North Dakotans are somehow less Dakotan than South Dakotans. I mean, let’s be honest… here in Seattle, we have a helluva lot more in common, culturally and politically, with our neighbors in Vancouver, British Columbia than with our fellow countrymen in say, Columbia, South Carolina.

It is thus laughable to “protect Americans” from half-priced statins, while a truly noxious Canadian import like Alan Thicke is permitted to freely cross the border.

Like most Democrats, I had simply dismissed the Republicans’ hard stance on Canadian drug reimportation as payback for millions of dollars in political contributions from a U.S. pharmaceutical industry eager to protect its huge profit margins. But recent events have suggested an ulterior, more devious motive.

Pharmacists across the nation are now refusing to fill prescriptions for morning-after pills and other forms of birth control, saying that dispensing such medications violates their personal religious beliefs.

An increasing number of clashes are occurring in drugstores across the country. Pharmacists often risk dismissal or other disciplinary action to stand up for their beliefs, while shaken teenage girls and women desperately call their doctors, frequently late at night, after being turned away by sometimes-lecturing men and women in white coats.

“There are pharmacists who will only give birth control pills to a woman if she’s married. There are pharmacists who mistakenly believe contraception is a form of abortion and refuse to prescribe it to anyone,” said Adam Sonfield of the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, which tracks reproductive issues. “There are even cases of pharmacists holding prescriptions hostage, where they won’t even transfer it to another pharmacy when time is of the essence.”

That is what happened to Kathleen Pulz and her husband, who panicked when the condom they were using broke. Their fear really spiked when the Walgreens pharmacy down the street from their home in Milwaukee refused to fill an emergency prescription for the morning-after pill.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Pulz, 44, who with her husband had long ago decided they could not afford a fifth child. “How can they make that decision for us? I was outraged. At the same time, I was sad that we had to do this. But I was scared. I didn’t know what we were going to do.”

Legislatures in twelve states have already passed or are considering passage of “conscience clauses” to protect pharmacists who refuse to dispense medication they find personally objectionable. In many areas of rural America, where a trip to the next closest pharmacy might entail a 100-mile drive, this exercise of conscience on the part of the pharmacist can effectively trump the medical decision of doctor and patient. And with giant retailer Wal-Mart displacing small town pharmacies throughout the nation, millions of Americans could find their access to birth control and other medications resting in the hands of a single corporation… a corporation that has already proven itself sympathetic to, and easily cowed by, pressures from the extreme, religious right.

Make no mistake… the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who have seized control of the Republican leadership are not only intent on outlawing abortion, but most, if not all forms of birth control as well. And so it occurred to me… what is the use of limiting access to birth control in this country, if it can be easily purchased from our neighbors to the North?

Now some might think it a paranoid reach for me to conjecture that the current ban on reimportation of drugs from Canada is somehow connected to the religious right’s war on birth control. But it would be naive to believe that the Dobsons and Perkins and DeLays of this world aren’t at least as devious as me. It is hard to say to what degree the right’s moral agenda drives its unshakeable opposition to drug reimportation, but you can be sure that the thought has certainly crossed their minds. These are people, after all, who have shown themselves to be exceedingly imaginative at devising ways to impose their world view on others.

And so, while Bush is clearly a shill for the pharmaceutical industry, it is fair to wonder if there is more to his firm opposition to drug reimportation than meets the eye. This is a religious war… and as in all wars, it is of paramount importance to secure one’s own borders.

From the day it was launched, Pacific Northwest Portal instantly became a must-have bookmark for anybody interested in perusing progressive news and views from the Pacific Northwest. The Portal aggregates feeds from dozens of blogs in Washington, Oregon and Idaho (including yours truly,) and serves as a one-stop-shop for progressive news and information resources.

Andrew at the NW Progressive Institute has been hard at work making the portal even better, including a new Highlights section and the addition of fourteen new blogs, for 106 in all. You can read about the changes on the NW Progressive Blog… which by the way, has received some significant updates of its own.

UPDATE:
As TJ points out, Andrew has posted a diary about Pacific NW Portal to DailyKos, and it needs only a couple more “recommends” to make the hot list:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/25/11208/6109

If you haven’t already done so, please read Frank Rich’s column on Justice Sunday in the New York Times: “A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time.”

Anyone who doesn’t get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of “people of faith.” But “people of faith,” as used by the event’s organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it’s a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight’s presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to “sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers,” according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with “Justice Sunday,” R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a “false and unbiblical office” but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that “any belief system” leading “away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil.”

Another great column by Rich. Read the whole thing.

In a rare fit of frankness, our good friend Stefan over at (un)Sound Politics recently posted the following comment:

The P-I is almost as eager to expose King County corruption as is that blog with the veterinary proctology fetish.

This is an admission that, by comparison, Stefan is “eager to expose King County corruption.” So eager, that it clouds his judgment.

For example, in reporting on the depositions of Dean Logan and Bill Huennekens, Stefan concludes that King County “fraudently [sic] certified” the November election, constituting a “Class C felony.” Of course, Stefan hasn’t actually seen the depositions, but that’s okay, because he got the information directly from a totally reliable, objective source: GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance. Um… Vance hasn’t actually seen the depositions either (nobody has… the court reporter hasn’t made the transcripts available yet,) but you can be sure his information is rock solid… because it came directly from Rossi’s attorneys. And as we all know, a lawyer representing a client in a legal case is always the best place to go for objective, spin-free, totally reliable information.

Not!

Yes, Stefan is so eager to uncover corruption, that he bases his conclusions on Vance’s spin of Rossi’s attorneys’ selective presentation of Logan’s recollection. And then he has the gall to follow up this exercise in irresponsible journalism by attacking the P-I for not covering these “damaging revelations”…? You know, revelations like….

3) there was inadequate accounting on blank ballots. How many were printed, how many were returned unused; how many ballots were printed “on demand” in the office, or which of the office staff even had the access and ability to print ballots on demand

4) polling place inspectors (who were appointed by the Democrat Party this year) got blank ballots to take home on Friday before the election; the number is known only to the nearest 20. The inspectors were not asked to account for and return any remaining unused ballots after the polls closed. They were simply instructed to destroy them.

Wow… Democrats printed blank ballots on demand, took them home, and never accounted for them! I can see how one might easily conclude that this damaging revelation is evidence of Democratic corruption… but since neither Stefan nor I are experts at election procedures, I decided to ask somebody who is… the always helpful Lawyer X. And as he explains, there’s no revelation here at all.

[The inspectors] get a shrink-wrapped package of sequentially numbered ballots in a quantity estimated to be what they need, rounded up to the next 20. On election day they bring the shrink-wrapped ballot to the polling place where they join the democratic and republican judges and observers. There have been no complaints that anyone showed up with the shrink wrap broken. The election workers are required to write down the ballot stub number they start with and the one they end with, to return all unused ballots to king county and to account for all ballots used or spoiled. There is no news here.

There are records of the purchases of the ballots, which are printed by Diebold and come shrink wrapped. It is correct that the software for the ballot on demand system does not record the number of ballots printed but the ballots are only printed at the counter in the main election office, in response to over the counter absentee ballot requests or at MBOS in order to make a replacement ballot.

I’m still not exactly sure what the “ballot on demand” system is, but I understand that King County is not the only county to use it. So what we’re talking about here are standard procedures which may sound suspicious to people who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about, but which in the end are really unremarkable, um… standard procedures.

Still, if you’re eager to find corruption, even standard procedures look pretty damn suspicious.

As I said in my interview on Up Front with Robert Mak, Stefan started with the conclusion that Democrats stole this election, and he has gone about desperately trying to twist the evidence into supporting his thesis. That’s fine. That’s a lot of what partisan bloggers do. And that’s why he’s perfectly comfortable drawing conclusions from third-hand accounts of depositions on election procedures he knows nothing about.

But real journalists, like those at the P-I, see their job as reporting the facts. And my guess is that they’ll continue to refrain from reporting on the depositions until they actually see them. Even then, it wouldn’t surprise me if the P-I got a few of the facts wrong… but at least it would be an honest effort, as opposed to the kind you get over on (u)SP.

I’m not kidding… these theo-fascists are scary, scary folk, intent on establishing God’s dominion over earth… which of course really means their dominion over us. They despise our Constitution as a document of the Enlightenment, and seek to replace it with a theocratic republic. But short of a military coup, they cannot achieve their Dominionist agenda without first undermining the independence of the judiciary, destroying a check and balance crucial to keeping America the world’s oldest functioning democracy.

However as the Los Angeles Times reports, impeaching judges apparently takes too damn long, so Evangelical Christian leaders and top Republican lawmakers — impatient to reach the end of times — are plotting a short cut: shutting down the courts entirely.

Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.

An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.

Both Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay participated in the conference, which was led by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and Focus on the Family founder (and certified nutcase) James C. Dobson. The conference discussed all sorts of creative ways of punishing, hindering or removing judges who don’t strictly adhere to biblical orthodoxy.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to take a black robe off the bench,” said Perkins.

Man… what is this thing religious extremists have against cats?

Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was “prominently” discussed. “What they’re thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them,” Perkins said.

He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to “just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he’s just sitting out there with nothing to do.”

For his part, Dobson was even more focused and sinister in his approach. He doesn’t much like the composition of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but unfortunately, judges take way too long to die. (By natural causes.) His solution?

“Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court,” Dobson said. “They don’t have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s gone.”

That’s right, just click your heels together and we’re all in Kansas.

These people have no respect for man’s law. They hate secularism. They hate the Constitution. They hate America.

The right-wing Evangelical extreme is taking over the Republican party, and for all you economic conservatives out there who look at your alliance with these people as a cost of maintaining a Republican majority, I have a warning for you: when they’re finished with people like me, they’ll be coming after you next.

Time for the weekly sandbox. Here’s a starter for the culture of life crowd… felinicidal maniac Bill Frist isn’t the GOP’s only cold-blooded killer. Tom DeLay killed his father, and Laura Bush ran over and killed a boyfriend. (That should get things rolling, but please feel free to rant on whatever you want.)

On a lighter note (well… unless you are a cat,) I point you to an amusing image posted over on Upper Left, that reminds all Americans that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a cold, heartless cat killer.

No, really. As UPI Science and Technology Editor Dee Ann Divis reported back in December of 2002, Frist is a kind of kitty-cat Dr. Mengele, carving up kitties he fraudulently adopted from animal shelters.

Frist acknowledged in a 1989 book that he routinely killed cats while an ambitious medical student at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s. His office said it had no record on how many cats died. Frist disclosed that he went to animal shelters and pretended to adopt the cats, telling shelter personnel he intended to keep them as pets. Instead he used them to sharpen his surgical skills, killing them in the process.

Well so much for the “culture of life.”

Yeah, I know, you self-righteous, knee-jerk Frist defenders are going to whine that such actions are moral because cats don’t have souls… but then, neither apparently does Frist. These are kitty cats, and if not for their fraudulent adoption by Dr. Death, they may have lived out their lives as somebody’s beloved pet.

But what I find most disturbing about this little biographical tidbit is not that it shows what a heartless, unfeeling prick he is. We already knew that. It’s that it shows a pattern in Frist’s life of sacrificing ethics in the name of his personal ambition.

A man who could so callously carve up a cute little kitty is capable of anything.

UPDATE:
Reading the comments in the thread, it seems to me that a lot of you righties miss the point, so let me spell it out for you:
“F R A U D”

It’s not that he dissected cats, it’s that he fraudulently adopted them from shelters. The guy is a total puke, with no moral or ethical compass. (And… he hates cats.)

The local story that’s making national headlines is the tale of the pansy-ass hypocrites at Microsoft who withdrew their longtime support for HB 1515, the gay and lesbian anti-discrimination bill, after pressure from a Redmond-based, Evangelical mega-church.

Sandeep Kaushik apparently broke the story in The Stranger, before it swept through the national blogosphere (Slashdot and AMERICAblog, and landed on the pages of the New York Times: “Microsoft Comes Under Fire for Reversal on Gay Rights Bill.”

While I’ve been pretty darn loud in expressing my personal disgust over the defeat of HB 1515, I totally missed the boat on Microsoft’s role — or lack thereof. Fortunately a lot of other local bloggers have provided excellent coverage, including Evergreen Politics and Pacific Views. But the best local commentary I’ve seen thus far comes from Columbian Watch, both on the Microsoft debacle and on yesterday’s defeat of the bill.

This is a really important issue, and not just because HB 1515 was a deserving bill, or because it’s fun to stick it to Microsoft. It is important because it demonstrates how powerful the right-wing religious extremists have become, and how dangerously close they are to establishing their neo-fascist theocracy. That a powerful company like Microsoft, with a long history of supporting gay rights… or a politician like Sen. Finkbeiner, who has previously supported the legislation… would feel compelled to bow to pressures from the Dominionist forces, should scare everybody who naively believes that our basic human rights are somehow protected by that yellowed scrap of parchment on display at the National Archives.

I need to run out, but I have a lot more to say on this issue. And I intend to say it while I still can.

Tim Eyman’s career as a grassroots initiative sponsor ended a couple years ago. (Actually, it probably ended with I-695, but let’s not get too technical.)

And so, when on election night, in an effort to deflect attention away from the spectacular defeat of his gambling industry backed Initiative 892, Tim announced to the media his plans for a performance audits initiative, I was more than comfortable predicting that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance of qualifying for the ballot without the financial support of a sugar daddy.

Well, as David Ammons of the AP reports, Timmy’s pinched his pigeon:

Michael Dunmire, 60, a wealthy investment executive from the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, has contributed nearly $240,000 to Eyman’s Initiative 900 and says more could be on the way. The initiative, now circulating for signatures, would require regular performance audits of state agencies and programs.

The Dunmires have also given $20,000 to Tim’s personal compensation PAC “Help Me Help Myself” (or whatever he calls it.)

Oh, I could go on and on about how Tim hasn’t qualified a grassroots initiative for the ballot in over two years, and about how people need to get it through their heads that he is just a shill for wealthy special interests, and about how Dunmire is just propping him up. But I think the expert quoted in the AP story sums it up best.

Eyman critic David Goldstein, a Seattle software designer and blogger, said Dunmire is “basically propping up Eyman. People should finally get it through their heads that Eyman is not some grassroots guy. He is a front for the monied special interests.

“It’s not scary. It’s disappointing. There is no way he gets on the ballot without a Sugar Daddy. Clearly, Eyman is no longer a grassroots activist in any way whatsoever. For two years running, he couldn’t get a grassroots initiative on the ballot.”

Now that guy knows what he’s talking about.

I hate to give incredibly wealthy right-wingers, eager to distort our political system, any free advice, but the Legislature just passed a very thorough performance audits bill, so perhaps you could have marshaled your resources a little more efficiently, huh? Hey, I know… how about financing a bill that legalizes discrimination against gays and lesbians!

Anyway, so now we know why Tim chose this dog of an initiative in the first place: Dunmire told him to… and the customer is always right. Sure, I-900 generates about as much excitement as a Pam Roach Pin-Up Calendar… and yeah, it’s almost totally superfluous now that the Legislature has passed its own performance audits bill. But Timmy knows a meal ticket when he sees one, and Dunmire is his a free pass to, um… less irrelevance.

My only hope is that Dunmire is as sharp a businessman as he claims to be, and eventually realizes what a crappy investment Tim Eyman really is.