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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. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels will be stopping by tonight, so please join us for some hot conversation, washed down with some icy cold brew.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

Yesterday I announced a break from my longstanding (near) zero-moderation policy, warning that blatantly off-topic comments, copyright violations and sock puppetry would no longer be tolerated. Today Slog announced a “new” comment moderation policy of its own:

The Stranger’s Blog Comments Policy

We remove comments that are off topic, threatening, or commercial in nature, and we do not allow sock-puppetry (impersonating someone else)—or any kind of puppetry, for that matter. We never censor comments based on ideology.

Define “threatening.” But other than that, that’s pretty much the same standard we intend to follow here on HA. Repeat violators will be banned, joining the infamous JCH in comment thread purgatory.

I’d say the HA community has been very cooperative, and overwhelmingly supportive. I’ve personally only deleted a single comment thus far… and that was a mistake. Thanks.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: Is nothing sacred?
Politics is a dirty business, but are there any areas of a candidate’s life that is absolutely off limits? Writing on Slog, Josh Feit frets that it is “tacky to report on a politician’s religion,” before proceeding to report on Rep. Dave Reichert’s active membership in the ultra-fundamentalist Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. If Reichert’s religion is off limits, why not John Edwards’ haircut or Bill Clinton’s sex life… or the fact that Laura Bush killed her boyfriend?

8PM: But what about the pie crust?
King County bans Crisco! Oh no! Erika Nuerenberg, Senior Advisor to King County Council member Julia Patterson, and Trent House, Dir. Government Affairs for the Washington Restaurant Association, will join me for the hour talk about the county’s ban on trans-fat, and new nutritional labeling requirements for chain restaurants.

9PM: Prison overcrowding: supply or demand?
We’re running out of space in our region’s local jails. Is it time to start building more prisons, or maybe start treating drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a criminal one?

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

Over at the Seattle Weekly (yeah, the Weekly,) Aimee Curl has been digging through recent PDC filings, and they don’t look so good for state House Republicans. Sixteen months before the next election, the House Dems’ official campaign committee already has over $450,000 in the bank, compared to the Republicans’ measly $40,621. Wow.

The organizing committees are the party machines that give campaign funds directly to candidates. “It’s amazing how big the disparity has become,” marvels former state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. […] Vance credits this year’s Democrat cash explosion in part to House Speaker Frank Chopp’s machine. “In terms of Olympia that’s the shadow that looms over everything,” he says, adding that Republican challengers are as good as on their own in 2008.

“The financial advantage is so massive it will put the Republicans completely on the defensive,” Vance says. “The Democrats can force the Republicans to have to worry about their incumbents. Now you have to take whatever money you’ve got and defend them and you’ve got no other money to help challengers.”

Progressives like me sometimes question Chopp’s willingness to use his near-super majority, but we have no qualms about his ability to build and maintain it. Folks smarter than me about these things tell me that House and Senate Dems have stretched the limits of attainable majorities given current electoral realities, but I wouldn’t expect a GOP comeback in 2008.

Still, I’m not entirely comfortable with Chopp’s incrementalist approach, and can’t help but wonder if he took away the wrong lesson from the Republican landslide of 1994. Conventional wisdom asserts that voters punished state Dems for overreaching during the previous session, and it is hard to argue that this didn’t play some role, at least in the rhetoric of the 1994 campaign season. But I think that the important lesson to learn from the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 — and the Big Blue Wave of 2006 — is that electoral politics can shift dramatically, seemingly overnight, and sometimes for reasons apparently beyond your control.

If Chopp thinks Dems can sustain a working majority indefinitely, he’s deluding himself. And even if he does maintain control of the House, that’s no guarantee that the Senate or the Governor’s mansion won’t suddenly fall into GOP hands. Sure, there’s no compelling reason to toss out Gov. Gregoire in 2008, but in this notoriously fickle and ticket-splitting state, voters don’t need one. The Dems are always just one bad campaign away from finding themselves mired in gridlock… or worse.

I suppose one can imagine a rosier political scenario than the one currently facing state Dems. But one would be foolish to expect it.

This week the Seattle Times finally acknowledged that Rep. Dave Reichert is conservative, “maybe too conservative for his district,” and that was brought home again yesterday when Reichert voted for a Republican-backed amendment that would have cut off Title X funds for Planned Parenthood. The amendment was defeated 231 to 189.

“Congressman Reichert was one of 189 House members voting for this mean-spirited amendment,” said Karen Cooper, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. “The Title X program provides birth control to low-income Americans and Planned Parenthood clinics play a key role in actually delivering those services,” Cooper said. “There are already a number of restrictive policies in place that ban any federal money from being used to pay for abortion care, and the notion that law makers would also try to deny low-income people birth control is very troubling,” she added.

“Millions of Americans rely on Planned Parenthood clinics for basic health care services every year,” said Cooper. “I find it unconscionable that Reichert and his anti-choice cronies in Congress tried to single out an organization that provides cancer screening, breast exams, and birth control and target them for a ban on family planning funding just because some Planned Parenthood clinics also provide abortion care,” she said.

“Reichert’s vote in favor of the Pence amendment was just another reminder of how truly out-of-step he is with the pro-choice voters of the 8th Congressional District,” Cooper said. “It is clearly time for a change,” she concluded.

I’ve been told that polling conducted in the wake of the 2006 election showed that a substantial proportion of pro-choice 8th District voters were not aware of Reichert’s staunch anti-choice/anti-birth control stance on reproductive issues. I’m guessing voters might be better informed next time around.

I’m filling in for Frank Shiers again tonight from 9PM to 1AM on Newsradio 710-KIRO, and, well… I’ve got a jam-packed show.

9PM: Open lines with Allan Prell
Former KIRO host Allan Prell joins me for the hour to talk about his knew book Ka-Ching, and talk about talk radio in general. (Perhaps he’ll give me some tips!”

10PM: Ask the candidate, with Bill Sherman
Bill Sherman, Democratic candidate for King County Prosecutor joins me for the hour to give us a campaign update, and take your calls. Have questions about the criminal justice system? Here’s your chance to ask an expert.

11PM: Is your food safe to eat?
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing today on “Diminished Capacity: Can the FDA Assure the Safety and Security of the Nation’s Food Supply?” And, well… it wasn’t pretty. Ben Huh of Itcmo.com joins me for the hour for detailed report on today’s hearing, and the latest on our smoldering food safety crisis.

Midnight: Filibustering the war occupation in Iraq
Debate on the Senate floor is ongoing as I type, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threatens to continue it all night long? Will the Republicans filibuster? Will the Democrats fold? Tune in and find out.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

“If we invested one tenth of the amount of time, money, and effort that we do on the war on terrorism on these food safety poisonings, we would reduce, probably by a factor of ten, the poisonings of Americans, which are in the tens of thousands every year. I would suggest in this hearing if we think of this threat in these terms, then we will respond accordingly.”

That was Congressman Jay Inslee at today’s House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’ hearing on “Diminished Capacity: Can the FDA Assure the Safety and Security of the Nation’s Food Supply?” (Itchmo has thorough coverage of the hearing.) And in fact, the situation is much worse than even Rep. Inslee describes. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control:

An estimated 76 million cases of foodborne disease occur each year in the United States. The great majority of these cases are mild and cause symptoms for only a day or two. Some cases are more serious, and CDC estimates that there are 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths related to foodborne diseases each year.

I conclude my piece in The Nation by highlighting that in the six years since 9/11, ten times as many Americans have died from foodborne illness than died in the terrorist attacks. Rep. Inslee rightly points out that had Osama bin Laden been responsible for the E-Coli, melamine and other poisonings, we would do something about it, and at only a fraction of the cost of Bush’s “war on terror.”

But of course, that would require an administration that actually believes that ensuring the safety of our domestic food supply is a legitimate role of government.

PROGRAMMING NOTE:
I’m filling in for Frank Shiers tonight on 710-KIRO, and Ben from Itchmo will be my guest in the 11PM hour, talking about today’s food safety hearing.

I’ve gotta throw my 2 cents in on Lou Guzzo. Carl has already given us some of the highlights of his blogging, but even the great video below doesn’t truly reveal the full range of batshit crazy this man is capable of. Maybe my all time favorite Guzzo “idea” is his “Foster Nation program”, which he describes as such:

The proposal is that the United States would immediately cancel every aspect of its foreign-aid program, stop sending any funds to all nations, and create a new program called the Foster Nation Program. Instead of sending our taxpayers’ billions to Second and Third World nations, most of which winds up in the pockets of the overlords, politicians, and theocratic dictators anyway, we would adopt the underdeveloped and poorest countries as America’s foster nations.

We would select those nations one by one. Instead of sending them our foreign-aid dollars, we would send them our best minds in a variety of fields — industrial development, agriculture, the professions, education, development of natural resources, new housing, transportation, communications, and every other field. Our goal would be to raise the standard of living in each of the foster nations and improve their economy to match ours. When our team of experts, adequately paid by us, finished its ground-breaking effort in one country and made certain that every field of endeavor was in capable hands, it would move on to another needy country.

It would mean we would have to develop an outstanding cadre of experts in each field, with substitutes trained and ready to take over at any time. A Foster Nation program would, of course, require sufficient governmental funds to attract the best minds and to keep the program going.

As I noted at Effu at the time, considering that we’ve basically been trying to do this in Afghanistan and Iraq for years and have gotten nowhere, doing it for each third-world country on earth one by one would probably take between 1000 and 2000 years to complete.

Guzzo isn’t just a lunatic when it comes to foreign policy, though, he has some interesting “ideas” when it comes to the nanny state as well:

That brings me to the main point of this commentary: I believe Congress and all 50 legislatures should act to ban professional, organized gambling everywhere in the U.S. and to order heavy fines and even prison terms for those who break the law and set up high-stakes gambling,

Considering his animosity for the entire state of Nevada (“Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised about anything that happens in Nevada, properly designated as the nation’s cesspool”), I’m kind of hoping that Rossi keeps him around for more ideas. Before long, Guzzo may be advocating that Washington state should invade Nevada and send our brightest minds down there to clean that place up.

So David Postman and Josh Feit have been doing some excellent reporting on Dino Rossi’s Idea Bank. What I find most fascinating is that Lou Guzzo and Matt Manweller of WhackyNation, according to Postman, “review submissions to his Idea Bank,” on a supposedly bi-partisan committee (and apparently have some lousy nettiquette). Now there are some things that Manweller has said that are annoying, like attacking the notion of helping pay for middle class children’s health care and his assumption that if we just impose capitalism on Iraq, then everything will be fine. But Manweller is pretty much a standard issue Republican. He’s annoying, sure, and against most of what Washington voters stand for, but isn’t every Republican in the state? Who I want to talk about is Lou Guzzo!

Feit describes him as a, “former D Governor Dixy Lee Ray staffer” and I’m guessing that’s where Idea Bank’s supposed bi-partisanship comes from. But if you think Rossi’s current employee might make his project a model of bi-partisanship, well let’s take a look at the record. This sampling is by no means complete.

It’s tough to know where to start with Guzzo, but I guess for this post, it might be a good idea to go with his repudiation of the Democratic Party. So, um, he seems to think that most Democrats may be surprised to learn that FDR existed. Oh, and by the way, he was totally a Socialist:

Completely ignored by the columnist and by virtually all of his Liberal mouthpieces in the print and broadcast news media is the fact that the real identity crisis now exists not in the Republican Party but in the Democratic Party, which has obliterated its once-honorable past and assumed a character that is anything but “democratic.”

Frankly, I don’t believe the Left Wing columnists and the rank-and-file in the so-called Democratic Party aren’t aware of what has happened to the party in the past half century, dating back to the days Franklin Delano Roosevelt assaulted the U.S. Constitution with a barrage of Socialist programs.

So you can totally see how he’s bringing balance to Rossi’s Idea Bank. But you know what I bet the ol’ Idea Bank needs? War mongering mixed with some sexism!

Shame on the Democratic Party! With its vote to defy the President’s authority as commander in chief and to withdraw its support for American troops and their mission in Iraq, the Democrats have also tried to destroy our role as the world’s peacemaker and our mission to bring freedom and democratic government to oppressed people.

The howling Democrats, led by their new standard bearer, Big Momma Nancy Pelosi, have also delivered a loud slap to the memories of their own Democratic Presidents of the past — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy — all of whom pursued Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy to “speak softly but carry a big stick.”

So now FDR’s brand of Socialism is now a good thing? And by the way, one of Kennedy’s policies he talks about is Viet Nam, and speaking of Viet Nam, oh sweet God.

It was a war we could easily have won. Because of the withdrawal of support at home, our generals, admirals, and Air Force leaders were persuaded to pull back their ground, sea, and air units and to table the final assault they knew could have routed the Communists and put an end to the war in Vietnam. It was clearly a war we could have and should have won. Instead, we permitted the Communists to swallow up South Vietnam, and we begn our humiliating retreat.

And no, “begn” isn’t a word. But don’t worry, that isn’t the only place that Guzzo draws a parallel between Iraq and Viet Nam, but um, not the one you think.

It bears repeating. We should have won the Vietnam War and made it possible for Vietnam to become a democratic republic, instead of the Communist nation it is now. The crucial battle in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, was actually an American victory and would have led to the defeat of the Viet Cong Communists. But the loud-mouthed peaceniks at home and their allies in Congress withdrew support and funds from our military forces in Vietnam, with the assistance of that traitorous scamp, Jane Fonda — who is at it again today.

But don’t think it’s just foreign policy. Oh no, Guzzo, a former KIRO 7 commentator and PI Managing Editor has also recently engaged in some media criticism. Basically, why don’t members of the media read people’s minds?

I wonder if the political editors of the print and broadcast news media, the politicos at the national and local levels, and particularly the leaders of the two major political parties are aware of a most interesting pattern of thought that seems to be going on in the minds of all the men and women who have their eye on nominations for the presidency in the 2008 election.

If any of them have glommed onto the “pattern of thought” but are wary of putting words to it for the press and the public, they are doing a good job of hiding it. And just what is the primary name that goes with that pattern of thought these days? It is the name of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

Seriously, you can read the whole thing but it won’t make any more sense. But one of the things I especially like is his obsession with Silent Spring. In the less than a year he’s been writing on WhackyNation he’s written at least 7 posts on the subject. Including calling for murder charges for the people who got DDT banned.

After the Carson book was published, the Liberals and environmental fanatics attacked DDT because, they said, it has infected the eggs in eagles’ nests, a fairy tale without substance. And, even if the eggs were affected, how does anyone in his or her right mind prefer 3,000,000 deaths a year to the possible cracks in eagles’ eggs — even though the latter was something of a fairy tale, or nightmare?

I still say the perpetrators of the DDT ban should be put on trial for murder!

Anyway, I’m not sure if any of that is Rossi’s official position, but it’s one of the Idea Bank’s vetters. So you know the project is both non-partisan and totally legit. I’m sure old school Seattle people will remember other things about him from KIRO and the PI, but that’s it for me.

(cross posted)

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. What better way to beat the heat than some icy cold beer, and… um… air conditioning?

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

UPDATE:
Almost forgot… King County Prosecutor candidate Bill Sherman will be dropping by tonight. I would publicly endorse him tonight, but I’ve pledged to keep Drinking Liberally above politics.

In announcing his candidacy for King County Prosecutor, acting prosecutor Dan Satterberg made a big show of promising to keep his office “above politics,” instructing his staff that he would “not permit members of the office to either contribute money or a personal endorsement to my campaign,” yet when civil division chief Sally Bagshaw emailed attorneys at the region’s top law firms, saying she was “supporting” Satterberg, and asking for their endorsements, Satterberg said he thought it was “an appropriate thing to do.”

Huh. That’s a pretty fine parsing of the meaning of the word “endorsement.” So since I obviously lack his sharp legal mind, perhaps Satterberg could explain to me how his admonishment against staff contributing a “personal endorsement” is consistent with Bagshaw’s name appearing on his own web site’s list of… um… personal endorsements…?

SNIDE ASIDE:
On a tangential note, in her controversial June 9 email, Bagshaw stated that “Our goal is to get the top lawyers in King County to endorse Dan early, and I would like to place 1000 lawyers’ names onto the website this week.”

One month later she seems to be about 700 lawyers short of her goal.

Joel Connelly mounts his high horse today and launches some invective at anyone and everyone who’s been pointing fingers at Chief Kerlikowske over police oversight issues. Josh Feit has already responded, easily swatting down Connelly’s lazy accusation that The Stranger has been hypocritical when it comes to dealing with the accuracy of police reports. But the real hypocrite here is Connelly, who actually writes the following two paragraphs in succession:

The loudmouths should allow Hizzoner’s panel to do its work. Our 1960s-era activists should recognize that “this due process thing” (as a media colleague calls it) applies to police chiefs, even to police officers.

Overseers of our law enforcement agencies ought to appreciate the requirement that complaints get acted upon quickly, or dismissed. Our cops have a pretty tense job, filled with judgment calls. It makes no sense to leave a line officer, working under pressure, hung up in the city’s preoccupation with “process.”

So we should recognize that due process applies to police officers, but when dealing with police officers, we shouldn’t be preoccupied with “process?” Huh?

I caught a lot of grief for my post last week calling for Kerlikowske to resign. Since then, another group, the Minority Executive Director’s Coalition (MEDC), has also called for the chief to be replaced. And James Kelly of the Urban League, who was originally defending Kerlikowske, now also agrees that the chief should be explaining himself in writing when he fails to act on the recommendations of the existing police oversight panel.

The evidence that there’s a problem with oversight at SPD has been pretty substantial since the beginning of this story and has been well documented by both The Seattle Times and The Stranger. So when Connelly invokes the idea of this just being about “1960’s-era activists”, that’s when I tune him out. As someone who was born after the end of the Vietnam War, I don’t carry any of that baggage. Instead, I’ve seen a different set of civil rights issues – the Rodney King trial, “Driving While Black”, record numbers of African-Americans being hauled off to our prisons, many of them for doing things that well-off white kids get away with every day. In my lifetime, I haven’t seen the racial divide in this country disappear as much as I’ve seen it ignored. Progressives proclaim that affirmative action is saving the black community but then bury their heads in the sand about why we have 6 times the percentage of African-Americans in jail than South Africa ever had of their native population under Apartheid. And some of the worst states in this trend are blue states like California, Illinois, and New York.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, according to a survey from 2000-2001, Seattle’s racial disparity in drug arrests is higher than any other city of comparable size in the United States. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that this case is focused on two cops (one with a long history of problems with the black community) who made a drug arrest this January of a black man in a wheelchair who claims that the cops planted drugs on him and later roughed him up while in custody. After video of the arrest surfaced showing some inaccuracies with the officer’s report (and not showing any clear evidence that drugs were taken from the suspect), the charges against the man were dismissed. This case, and the way that both the chief and the mayor have been quick to defend the police involved, have been at the heart of the calls for Kerlikowske to resign. There simply isn’t an excuse for the mayor and the chief to be so incurious as to what really happened to George Patterson that night.

Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, a Rhodes’ Scholar who came into office determined to fix the endless violence that has plagued that city, is now pointing his finger at the drug war and calling it an economic genocide against black communities. But here in Seattle, where the black community has less clout, the mayor and the chief happily continue the war. This case obviously goes well beyond just drug law enforcement, as The Stranger continues to find new instances of general police brutality against people of color here. But the guise of keeping drugs out of the black community is the mandate that problem officers like Greg Neubert have in order to treat every person in the black community as a suspect. It’s a recipe that begs for situations to escalate.

Connelly ends his column by making a comparison to the oversight of road repair and wondering why people who are angry at the Department of Transportation can’t stir up the kind of shitstorms that people who are angry at the police can. I’ll explain that to him in more detail the next time I see him at DL, but it helps to look at the very last paragraph:

Leaving rubber behind on Second Avenue, a fiendish thought flashed across my mind: “If only I were a street drug dealer, protesting a bust, I could raise hell in this town.”

He’s referring to Patterson, the man arrested in January. There’s only one problem. Patterson insists he’s not a dealer, and the charges were dropped. And basic common sense tells you that a man in a wheelchair isn’t a very effective person to have as a street dealer in a business where people steal from and shoot each other. But for Joel Connelly and much of Seattle’s “progressive” community, due process may not be for everyone. And sometimes, the relationship between Democrats and the black community can be eerily similar to the relationship between Republicans and the military.

There will be some gnashing of teeth by the Washington State Republicans to this July 3rd press release from Governor Gregoire:

Governor Chris Gregoire today designated the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) as a voter registration assistance agency and directed the agency to appoint a voter registration assistance officer, efficiently help citizens register to vote and work with the Secretary of State’s office to ensure compliance with established voter registration procedures.

“It is one of the primary duties of government to make available to all citizens the opportunity to register to vote and, if needed, provide registration assistance,” said Governor Gregoire. “Our social service agency serves a diverse group of people every day and therefore is an ideal place to help more Washingtonians register to vote.”

Governor Gregoire also encouraged all state agencies to provide on their web sites a link to the Secretary of State’s voter registration page and to consider other ways in which they might support and promote voter registration.
[…]

This is the way government ought to work. It should take concrete steps to maximize opportunities for all eligible citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It is curious, then, that over the last decade the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. (Luke Esser looks prescient with his 20-year-old disenfranchisement satire.)

We saw the Republican vote suppression in action days before the 2005 election when Lori Sotelo (apparently inspired by a Karl Rove briefing, filed an error-prone series of voter challenges. Subsequently, the Washington State laws were changed to prevent such abuse.

Under the worst of circumstances, the Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement becomes operational through a Republican-controlled government…. In 2000, we saw a massive, and error prone disenfranchisement operation undertaken in Florida, under the supervision of Secretary of State Katherine Harris—an operation that almost certainly swung the presidential election by inappropriately purging thousands of African Americans from the voter rolls. A US Commission on Civil Rights report summarized it this way:

…poorly designed efforts to eliminate fraud, as well as sloppy and irresponsible implementation of those efforts, disenfranchise legitimate voters and can be a violation of the VRA. Florida’s overzealous efforts to purge voters from the rolls, conducted under the guise of an anti-fraud campaign, resulted in the inexcusable and patently unjust removal of disproportionate numbers of African American voters from Florida’s voter registration rolls for the November 2000 election.
[…]

African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged.
Florida easily could have, and should have, done much more to protect the voting rights of African Americans and other Floridians.

(They also found other ways that African American voters were disproportionately disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.)

On the face of it, the Republican problem seems to be paranoia, with the biggest cheerleader of paranoia being Karl Rove. Don’t you believe it. If there is anything that Republican strategists learned from the 2000 election is that disenfranchising voters works for Republicans! Karl Rove almost certainly knows he is feeding the Republican masses a load of horseshit.

Republican voter fraud “paranoia” is really theatre in two acts, designed to disenfranchise subpopulations that vote Democratic.

The first act shakes the confidence of ordinary voters in the election system—that is, it spreads paranoia through unfounded fears of widespread (presumably Democratic) election fraud.

We certainly saw this fear-mongering played out in Washington State in 2004. During the election contest trial, Republican lawyers opened with a bold statement about how they would prove election fraud. The trial proceeded without any evidence of election fraud being offered. Judge Bridges Oral Decision stated:

There is no evidence that anybody associated with any of the candidates in the governor’s race had anything to do with causing the errors. There is no evidence that has been produced in this Court to suggest that the errors resulted from partisan bias. During the 2004 general election, the various polling sites across the State were populated by inspectors, judges, Accuvote judges, observers, attorneys and the media. No testimony has been placed before the Court to suggest fraud or intentional misconduct. Election officials attempted to perform their responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner. There is no evidence before the Court to question ballot security as to those ballots actually counted.

The second act in the G.O.P. theatre is to make registration and/or voting more difficult for “certain voters.” That would be the poor, people of color, and people living in urban environments. You know, various schemes to cancel registrations, laws to require photo IDs at the polls, that sort of thing. These gimmicks particularly hit poor people of color—people that some Republicans believe shouldn’t even have a right to vote.

That is why Gregoire’s memo will cause some political consternation and constipation among state Republicans. We all know who uses DSHS: the same people Republicans build gated communities to keep out.

Editor & Publisher summarizes today’s editorials slamming President Bush for commuting convicted felon Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Here are a couple of poignant ones:

From the [New York] Times’ Tuesday editorial: “Mr. Bush’s assertion that he respected the verdict but considered the sentence excessive only underscored the way this president is tough on crime when it’s committed by common folk …

“Within minutes of the Libby announcement, the same Republican commentators who fulminated when Paris Hilton got a few days knocked off her time in a county lockup were parroting Mr. Bush’s contention that a fine, probation and reputation damage were ‘harsh punishment’ enough for Mr. Libby.

“Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons. But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “President Bush’s commutation of a pal’s prison sentence counts as a most shocking act of disrespect for the U.S. justice system. It’s the latest sign of the huge repairs to American concepts of the rule of law that await the next president.”

San Jose Mercury News: “Other presidents have doled out pardons and the like, usually on the way out of office. It’s never pretty. But few have placed themselves above the law as Bush, Cheney and friends repeatedly have done by trampling civil liberties and denying due process. Chalk up another point for freedom. Scooter’s, at least.”

Read the rest of ’em here.

(Story and photo via AmericaBlog.)

Republican hypocrisy was on full display today. The supposedly “tough on crime” President George W. Bush commuted part of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Literally, Bush gave Scooter a “get out of jail free card.”

Tough on crime my ass.

Libby is still a convicted felon, will have to pay $250,000 and will be on probation should his appeal fail. (The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Libby’s request to remain free on bail while his appeal is under way, so the writing is on the wall as to the persuasiveness of his rather unorthodox legal arguments.)

Apparently obstructing justice, committing perjury, and making false statements is not really so bad if you are a Republican…at least, not bad enough to spend time in prison over.

The hypocrisy is overwhelming. While Governor of Texas, George W. Bush oversaw the execution of over 100 people, including three people who were borderline mentally retarded. Apparently, death is the right sentence for criminals who lack the mental capacity to fully understand their crimes. But Libby, a lawyer who rose to an important position in the White House, who knew full well he was obstructing a very serious criminal investigation, and who presumably has an IQ greater than 70…he walks. Maybe “selective on crime” is a better tag line.

(On the other hand, maybe Bush does not have the mental capacity to understand what he has done? I mean, really, has George W. Bush ever done anything that would peg his I.Q. at over 70?)

Here is how Dubya tried to justify his soft-on-crime decision:

Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.

Excessive? Umm…pardon my cynicism, but wasn’t Judge Reggie Walton appointed precisely because he had a no-nonsense, tough-on-crime attitude?

In the end, the hypocrisy should be overshadowed by the simple logic of what just went down. Libby took a bullet for Dick Cheney, who clearly orchestrated a smear campaign against Valerie Wilson. Libby is convicted (instead of Cheney). Bush takes the sting out of Libby’s sentence. Pure and shameless abuse of power. Mark my words…in the end, Bush will pardon Libby.

I mean, that’s just the way organized crime works.