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Embattled Seattle Parks and Recreation Dept. Superintendent Ken Bounds has announced his retirement effective February 2007, saving Seattle City Council the bother of forcibly retiring him in 2010.

Bounds, you’ll recall, was the major inspiration for Charter Amendment #8, the successful council-sponsored citywide ballot measure last month which stipulated that the heads of Parks and two other departments, now serving at the permanent pleasure of the Mayor, be subjected to four-year reappointments by City Council. Only Police and Fire are now exempt from the requirement; all eight other department heads must now go before council after fixed terms.

City Council (and Peter Steinbrueck in particular) in turn pushed the charter amendment because Bounds had in 2006 reached the apex of a long career of high-handedly pissing off neighborhood groups by stoking separate controversies this year at Gas Works Park, Woodland Park (both the zoo garage and a skatepark), Occidental Park, City Hall Park, Freeway Park, Loyal Heights Playfield, Magnuson Park, the wetlands abutting Union Bay, and, um… others. The Gas Works flap (over a back door city deal with One Reel to host its Summer Nights concert series and give One Reel $150,000 worth of park utility infrastructure upgrades) resulted in a successful lawsuit against the city. So did the Occidental Park remodel, though not in time to save the trees that lawsuit was intended to save.

Bounds, in other words, was costing the city and his close ally, Mayor Greg Nickels, both goodwill and money. Many of these controversies, like the concerts and the zoo garage (in anticipation of a new events complex), have commercial or property value elements, leading critics to charge that Bounds was doing Nickels’ bidding (so to speak) in offering up the city parks as a lucrative new source of income streams.

Nickels was effusive today in his praise of the outward Bounds. But you can bet David Della’s Parks Committee (with Della in a 2007 reelection year) and the full council will give whomever Nickels nominates to replace Bounds a careful, careful going over. Demands for more transparency and accountability will be prominently featured. And a bunch of neighborhood groups will be celebrating happy hours together this week.

The righties had a field day attacking Senator-elect Jim Webb (D-VA) for the following exchange with President Bush:

“How’s your boy?” Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb said coldly…

Republicans and their toadies in the media accused Webb of being rude to Bush and disrespectful to the office of the President. But as it turns out…

Today we learn that Bush was warned to be “extra sensitive” about asking Webb anything about his son. While Bush’s partying daughters were causing a diplomatic row in Argentina, Webb’s son had a close call with a car bomb and almost died the day before in Iraq. But Bush being Bush—and being Bush means being an asshole—couldn’t resist the opportunity to piss on Webb.

As the WP reported, Webb tried to avoid Bush but “it wasn’t long before the Bush found him.” So Bush sought Webb out, and asked him about his son.

Because, as Dan Savage points out, President Bush is an asshole. But then, that’s not really news, is it?

(Notice! This post is not by Goldy. Read the byline!)

John Madden, the famous football coach, once said about Packers quarterback Brett Favre, “he’s so good, he could beat you with yours.” You see, Favre is so good, he could be swapped to the other and lead the other guys to victory. With all the recent introspection by right-wing bloggers, I’d be a failing our conservative friends if I didn’t put forth my own ideas. Does this Democrat think he could beat Democrats with his own ideas? Hey it’s worth a shot. If they don’t like my ideas they can go back to those bullshit sex offender mailings!

First off, my GOP friends, who’s running things back at HQ? Mike Hargrove? After Chris Vance quit as party chief, the GOP base passed on the ‘establishment’ candidate to replace him and picked Diane Tebelius. She was supposed to be a departure from “Vance-style centrism,” which irritated the base. While Tebelius can’t be blamed for everything, she has to go. A huge loss like this must result someone (other than your candidates) losing their job.

Education. Here’s a haymaker you can use on Democrats. Why not call their bluff on teacher pay and per pupil funding? Try this: Increase teacher pay by 100%, but make it much, much easier to fire the bad ones. Pay science and math teachers more than others. Keep superstar teachers from leaving their field for higher paying jobs at Microsoft. Young teachers will love it, and good teachers will earn more money.

While money isn’t everything, our per pupil spending is too low. We’re at about $9,000. Instead of bumping it up a few hundred bucks, let’s really show folks we’re serious about educating our kids by boosting that number up to, say, $15,000. Now hold your (Gold)water, my conservative friends. Instead of sending that money directly to school districts, let’s send it to the parents of school children so they can choose which school is best for their kids. Contrary to the fears of liberals, most parents won’t leave their public schools. Parents with kids stuck in bad schools with have a real ‘out.’ The problem with most GOP voucher plans is that they are stingy with the money!

Speaking of money, let’s talk taxes. Let’s say it: Income tax. Folks, it’s coming whether we like it or not. This stuff is complicated, but one thing is sure. Our tax system sucks. Let’s swap the B&O tax for a state income tax (one that WA taxpayers can write off on April 15th). Let’s do like Rep. Toby Nixon said: a flat income tax with plenty of write-offs for poor and middle class folks. Liberals will yelp that it’s not progressive, but that’s the beauty of it. If you get there first, you can set the terms of the debate. The Democrats can’t amend the state constitution without your votes, so bargain hard and make ’em squeal.

One final note, and it’s on transportation. You guys got murdered in the suburbs. No wonder… THEY LIKE ROADS, AND THEY LIKE TRANSIT!!! I know how much you guys hate Sound Transit, but face it, dudes; it’s looking a lot better these days. Do like the GOP did in Denver: approve big increases in the sales tax to build light rail to the suburbs. When moderates, swing-voter suburbanites start taking the train, they’ll reward the folks who brought it to them. Make sure that’s Reagan Dunn and not Ron Sims! While GOP stalwarts like Kemper Freeman may not like light rail, try this instead: run light rail right under Bellevue Square! It’ll bring folks to his mall! As for highways… well, you’re going to have to give up on I-605, or any such nonsense. We’re out of the freeway business, boys. It’s better to focus on keeping current infrastructure maintained.

I hope ya’ll find this useful. It’s the best I can do. If you want to discuss this more, feel free to drop by Seattle’s Drinking Liberally every Tuesday at 8:00pm. I’ll be there… with the rest of the winning team.

Here are a few links (most local, some not) for your evening pleasure.

• Whose side is Larry Corrigan on? thehim sets the record straight:
  

  According to Stefan, he’s a Ron Sims Campaign contributor, which is true, but kind of like describing Lou Gehrig as a famous cripple.

  From what I remember, Lou Gehrig hit a few homeruns too.

• Here’s the question. My answer? Yes, absolutely. Why? Because it works pretty well for Seattle. We have a not only a “strong mayor” system but a “big mayor” system.
• If you like comedy and protecting a women’s right to choose, go here. If you don’t like comedy or protecting a women’s right to choose, go hunting with Dick Cheney.
• Some ballots from just east of Issaquah to be recounted. Cue frothy rightwing post decrying non-existent election fraud.
• There are lots of reasons to question a potential Barack Obama candidacy in ’08. His age or his middle name ain’t one of them.
• Here’s a post that shows why zoning and environmental laws are actually good things. Imagine if that absolutely piece of garbage, I-933, had passed? How worse could it have been?

OK, so apologies for the fact that my first post here is both kind of boring and somewhat contrarian. I’ll try not to let the former happen again.

I was also at the FCC hearing last night, and beyond Goldy’s (and Andrew’s) posts below, and Frank the Dog-Shooter’s self-aggrandizing introductory remarks, I came away with another take.

I remember having come out of the March 2003 FCC hearing on ownership deregulation, held at UW’s HUB Ballroom, feeling euphoric. A huge crowd showed up to give the FCC an earful on its destructive rulemaking proposal to allow greater deregulation of media ownership, specifically, crossownership in the same city of radio/TV stations and newspaper and cable companies.

After an unexpected sea of public comment and Congressional criticism, the inevitable decision by the Commission’s Republican majority was overturned in federal appeals court. And, so, last night, the FCC was back in town, for a virtually identical hearing on a virtually identical rulemaking proposal. So either I’ve changed a lot politically in three years (which I doubt), or the expectations that now come with a new and remarkably powerful media democracy movement are vastly higher, which I think is more the case. Because even as 400 plus people braved a frigid, slushy night to turn out and give the FCC another earful, I came away this time with a slightly sour taste.

Despite the turnout, and the overwhelming opposition to media deregulation by the crowd, progressives reading themselves into the public record did themselves few favors last night. The two most compelling speakers on the night, IMO, were John Carlson (KVI talk show host and the night’s sole self-identified Republican), who made the conservative case for regulating media ownership, and UW President Mark Emmert, who made an educator’s pitch for media diversity as necessary for fostering critical thinking skills in a democracy. In a sea of progressives, the standout critics were a conservative talk show host and (essentially) the CEO of one of the region’s biggest employers.

Granted, Carlson and Emmert are both polished public speakers, and both are familiar with how to couch arguments that make sense to lawmakers and regulators. But that’s just the point: with few exceptions, the several dozen mostly left-leaning public speakers that followed in testimony weren’t. Many were lost in a sea of abstract theory; a number made the repetitive case that concentrated media ownership is bad – completely true, but also tangential and in important ways irrelevant to the proceeding, since that question was settled (for the FCC’s purposes) by Congress with the abysmal Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Remarkably few progressives specifically addressed the actual issue at hand: whether having different big corporations owning your newspapers and your radio/TV outlets is better than having the same corporate monolith owning both. Only one speaker addressed that issue head-on in those terms, and several compelling progressive arguments against cross-ownership went entirely unmentioned. (For example, addressing the pro-business argument that Internet diversity makes distinctions between regulated broadcast stations and unregulated newspapers irrelevant — an argument Carlson skewered — by noting either that many Americans still don’t have home Internet access, let alone broadband, or that while diverse information is widely available on the Internet, citizens must seek it out — through search engines, links, or URLs — whereas turning a dial, flipping through a remote, or dropping quarters in a box gets you radio, TV, and newspapers, a far more general mass audience.) While these arguments and others went asking, two speakers somehow felt that it would be helpful to do satirical presentations in a federal hearing, as though it were yet another Seattle School Board hearing. Another plugged her socialist newspaper (sigh…) as running the sorts of stories corporate media ought to but won’t.

At least nobody sang.

In other words, it was a few former professional journalists and current media management types (a working journalist would never testify at such a hearing), plus a fairly representative cross-section of our region’s progressive Left, flakes included. The two FCC Commissioners who came to Seattle and who are holding these hearings around the country must have the patience of saints.

The flakes worry me less than the relative absence of compelling and on-point testimony from progressives – and I say this as someone who founded a broadcast trade company whose bread and butter was covering FCC rulemaking proposals. (The company is now owned by Clear Channel. Big sigh.) Few speakers were polished. Few dressed nicely — a detail that doesn’t matter much in a Seattle public hearing, but very much does in D.C.

Few seemed to understand what sorts of testimony might move the FCC, particularly (as Carlson grasped) how to frame issues in a way that would speak to at least one of the three Republican commissioners not present. (After all, the point is to win, not just to ratify the views of the two Democratic commissioners on hand.) Failing debate tactics, few even spoke from the heart as to what media diversity meant to them. And on a related note, excepting Jan Strout of NOW, the only speakers who addressed how lack of diverse ownership affects minority ownership were non-whites.

The FCC hearing was a microcosm of a larger problem. Progressives have been out of power so routinely that when we do have power, far too often we have no idea how to use it. The media democracy movement now has power; anyone doubting it should consider that despite a $200 million lobbying campaign by big telecommunications firms, that movement stopped Congress this session from ending net neutrality. That’s power. But in this case, when local grass roots progressives had the opportunity to publicly put their views on federal record, by and large they whiffed.

Something to ponder now that, at both the state legislative and congressional levels, progressives now have unprecedented power.

From a KIRO TV report this evening:

According to booking records, Larry Corrigan, the former director of operations and budget for the King County Prosecutors office, was arrested Wednesday in an online sting.

Corrigan, accused of attempted child rape and communication with a minor for sex, was released Thursday on his own recognizance, KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reported.
Corrigan was allegedly using an Internet messenger service to contact what he thought was a 13-year-old girl to meet for sex.

Police arrested Corrigan Wednesday afternoon at a Capitol Hill video store where he had arranged to meet the teenage girl.

Corrigan had worked as the director of operations and budget for 25 years before leaving nearly two years ago to pursue business interests, KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reported.

Oh, man, a 25 year employee of King County…and in operations and budget. No doubt the Wingnuts will be up our liberal asses claiming Corrigan—a long term King County bureaucrat—is a typical Democrat. They’ll accuse the King County Dems of harboring and nurturing child predators. No doubt the righties will use this as an example of why Ron Sims is corrupt, and use it to claim King County steals both children and elections.

No doubt this will ultimately be blamed on…Dean Logan!

Oh wait a minute…It looks like Larry Corrigan is a big cheerleader for Republicans. I mean, he endorsed Sam Reed, and he is one of Bret Olsen’s distinguished supporters. The PDC shows him contributing mostly to Wingnuts like Luke Esser and Bret Olsen.

So, suck it Wingnuts. He’s one of yours.

(Man…what is it with these King County Republicans, anyway?)

Right-wing news aggregator The Orb reports from the GOP State Convention in Yakima, and has some constructive criticism for Rep. Dave Reichert:

Dave Reichert, U.S. House Rep – He’s a good guy and my congressman, and I am going to vote for him. But I have hard time following him when he speaks. It’s not that he has a bad voice or comes off nervous or unsure of himself – it’s just that sometimes I can’t figure out what his point is. He mix and mingled 3 stories of WTO rioting, riding with Ron Sims in the towncar, and chasing down crooks that got filmed on TV… all to make the point that it’s import “to try”, and how that related to Reagan fighting the cold war. I don’t want too sound mean or picky because he’s a good man and has done a good job for the 8th district and is head and shoulders more qualified than ex-Microsoft executive product manager Darcy Burner, but in my opinion he needs to focus better when speaking to a crowd.

Of course, part of the problem could just be that Reichert simply isn’t all that bright. (At least, that’s what a number of people who know him tell me, Republicans included.) These rambling speeches, they’re not a result of lack of focus Orb – Reichert’s about as focused as he can get. No, they’re a result of a lack of intellect.

For example, did you know that Reichert once had the inside track on the Republican nomination for governor in 2004? The man with the shiny medals and shinier hair had the support of the party big-wigs all lined up. That is, until he appeared before a gathering of these very same mucky-mucks and delivered one of his trademark, higgledy-piggledy soliloquies, displaying an utter lack of knowledge of the duties of office, let alone the issues of the day. A stunned audience immediately started recruiting Dino Rossi.

Why do you think that when he ran for the nomination for the 8th CD, the usually disciplined state GOP atypically tolerated such a crowded and competitive primary, despite Reichert’s huge name ID advantage? Because party stalwarts like Luke Esser and Diane Tebelius had seen him speak before, and they couldn’t stomach nominating such an idiot.

And why do you think that Reichert staged his dramatic walkout from the candidate debates? Because the other guys hurt “The Sheriff’s” feelers? No… because his handlers knew that he would be overwhelmed even by the likes of Tebelius. (I’ve seen her work a courtroom, and I’m telling you, that’s a pretty low bar.)

You want Reichert to “focus better”…? If by that you mean stay carefully on script, well sure, that would help his campaign. But don’t kid yourself about who Reichert really is. That rambling, periphrastic mess you saw on stage in Yakima, well… that’s the real Dave Reichert. Support him if you want, but don’t pretend it has anything to do with competence or intellect.

David Irons Jr.’s mother has mixed emotions about her son. On the upside, she says he’s “very good with his hands.” On the downside, she claims he’s used them to beat her.

I’m almost embarrassed to start with such a flippant lede… for my hour-long conversation with Janet Irons was both sad and disturbing, and the genuine pain she expressed surely deserves more respect. But this is a story that apparently demands the most shocking prose possible in order to be heard, for it is also one of those stories that everybody in the media seems to know, yet nobody wants to talk about.

In an era when pundits and reporters can soberly chronicle the impeachment of a president for lying about a blowjob, it seems inconceivable that our local media could ignore the character testimony of a candidate’s own parents. But that is exactly what the MSM has done for years, most recently with Joni Balter’s timid, almost-apologia of a column in the September 29 edition of the Seattle Times. [”Irons’ Burden? It’s all relative“]

Balter starts by asking the obvious and pertinent question — “Who is David Irons Jr. and why is much of his family unwilling to vote for him…?” — yet she amazingly leads readers to believe that the family feud is merely rooted in politics.

That is not the story the Irons family told me, nor the one they claim they told Balter. Irons’ mother, father and younger sister won’t vote for him because they believe him to be “dishonest”, “devious”, prone to violent outbursts, and “totally unqualified” to serve as King County Executive. The family cites a number of incidents, many dating from long before Irons’ 1999 run for county council, that call into question his fitness for office and paints the picture of a troubled, unstable man with a vastly inflated resume, a penchant for dirty tricks, and dubious ethics.

“Wouldn’t I like to be the proud mother and say yes,” Janet told me when I opened the interview by asking whether she supports her son’s candidacy, “but that just isn’t the case.” She then went on to recount the sad tale of David Jr.’s gradual estrangement from the family, whichculminated in his council run, rather than started from it as Balter implies.

Of course, the fact that Irons’ family refuses to vote for him is old news. During his 1999 campaign against Councilman Brian Derdowski, he not only smeared the reputation of his family’s longtime friend, but his victory also put his sister Di Irons, a Derdowski staffer, out of a job. Di’s write-in campaign against her older brother during the general election became amusing fodder for political writers nationwide, but the MSM has remained curiously uncurious about the private circumstances that led to this very public family split. Take for example Balter’s description of Janet’s refusal to endorse her own son, an oddly expurgated bit of reporting:

Irons’ mother is an independent who votes for — or in this case against — individual candidates. Angry about a different family matter years ago, she won’t support her son.

A “family matter”. How concise.

As tearfully recounted to me by Janet, the “family matter” involved an incident that occurred back during the early 1990’s at her office in the family cable company, when David Jr., during one of his frequent fits of rage, hit his mother, knocking her to the floor… and then ripped the phone off the wall when she attempted to dial 911. Frightened, shocked and in pain, Janet fled in her car, hiding several blocks away, “afraid he was coming again.”

Janet has never again allowed herself to be alone with David Jr. since the day the “family matter” occurred. More than a decade later she remains frightened of her own son, even fretting to me that “something might happen” should he read her account in the papers.

As for David Jr., he never denied to his family that something happened that day… he never straightened the office to hide signs of the struggle, nor picked up the typewriter, papers and other objects he angrily swept off his mother’s desk. However, he did deny to his father and sister that he actually hit his mother, incredibly claiming that she ran into his arm… an account that reads like those laughable accident reports where stunned drivers insist that the tree hit their car.

If this were but a single, isolated incident it still would be inexcusable, and in my opinion disqualify him from higher office. But the Irons’ family has many tales of David Jr.’s “violent temper” and his abusive, cuss-filled rages in which he would push his father and poke him in the chest, and occasionally fling objects in blind anger. In one such fit he threw a wrench at his nephew, Di’s son Chris, who afterwards went to his grandfather and refused to ever work with his uncle again. Even the hard-nosed crews who laid cable for the family business complained of working with David Jr., finding it unsettling to have the boss’s son indiscriminately toss obscenities and tools in their direction.

“David billows up easily,” his mother told me in her understated fashion, “and people ought to know.”

Well… many who have worked with him apparently do know. At Brigadoon.com, a former officer tells me that Irons had a reputation as a “bully” who many colleagues avoided entirely. According to council scuttlebutt, Irons has a similar reputation for bullying staffers — particularly women — several of whom reportedly played for colleagues recordings of abusive voicemail messages left for them by the choleric councilman. Derdowski says an unnamed council staffer complained to him that Irons was “abusive and rude”, while another former staffer recalled to me a copy machine mishap that ended in a door-slamming screaming fit.

None of this shocks David Jr.’s mother, who describes her son as “very difficult to get along with.” If anything, she seemed most surprised that he hasn’t shown more of his temper in public. “He sometimes goes bonkers,” she said.

But if Janet is at times understated in describing her son’s explosive temper, it is nothing compared to Balter’s muffled reporting of the family’s assessment of David Jr.’s character:

The candidate’s dad is a Republican likely to vote for Sims because of the vague term, veracity, or in his view, his son’s lack of it.

There is nothing vague about the term “veracity”, and what the family has bluntly told both Balter and me — and anybody else who will listen — is that David Jr. is a liar.

“David lies about all of us,” his mother lamented. According to family members, acquaintances and co-workers, David Jr. has lied to reporters, he’s lied to voters, he’s lied to his family, and he’s lied to the police. Derdowski, who has plenty to be bitter about, is particularly disturbed by what he sees as easily refuted “outlandish lies” from which Irons’ had little or nothing to gain.

“I don’t have the professional experience to diagnose him as a ‘pathological liar’,” Derdowski told me, “but there is a pattern of making false statements where David apparently doesn’t seem to know the difference. I find it chilling.”

Of course, the easiest lies to document are those on Irons’ resume, and at the very start of our conversation Janet immediately made a point of refuting some of her son’s educational claims. In a 1999 candidate survey, Irons — who has no undergraduate degree — described his college education as “Economics/Math, Bellevue Community College, 1971-1973; Economics/Math, Oakland University, 1973-1975.” Unprompted, Janet pulled out her son’s Oakland University transcript, which shows “Intro to Math for Social Studies” I and II, plus a math lab. “Those were the only math courses he ever took,” his mother told me. “David was never very good at math.”

But exaggerating his math education is nothing compared to some of the other doozies on his resume. While Irons’ campaign website biography now describes his involvement in the family business as simply “VP & co-owner All Points Cable TV — 1982 to 1995″, a 1997 resume was considerably more creative.

Both Janet and Di actually laughed at the suggestion that David Jr. was involved in the day-to-day operations and management of the company. “David…?” Di chuckled, “He maintained the trucks.” She says her brother also occasionally liked to operate the equipment out on cable laying jobs, “but mostly he worked alone in the garage.”

Janet echoed her daughter’s account, describing her son’s resume as an exaggeration: “99 percent of what he wrote, there’s not one bit of truth to it.” According to Janet, her son had no office, had absolutely no role in the management of the family business, and while he once accompanied his father on a business trip, he had no involvement in any negotiations. Still, both Di and Janet agree that David Jr. was good at what he did. “He’s an excellent mechanic…” his mother kvelled, “… good with machinery… very good with his hands.”

While his years at the family business may have prepared Irons for a job in the maintenance facility at the county motor pool, it most certainly did not provide the vaunted business experience he touts in his quest to be county executive. Even the one-line reference on his current bio, “VP & co-owner”, is intentionally misleading.

“At a small company like ours, everybody gets a big title,” explained his mother. And if Irons was a co-owner of All Points Cable TV, then I am a co-owner of Apple Computer… and any other corporation in which I might own stock. According to his family, Irons never invested money in the family business, never had a say in its operations, and only came to work for his parents years after the company’s founding. Because David Sr. wanted his children to have a financial stake in the company, he gave David Jr. a raise a couple years into his tenure, but paid the difference in stock instead of cash. When the family sold out in 1995, David Jr.’s take was a couple hundred thousand dollars… not a bad windfall for the company mechanic, but only a small fraction of the multimillion dollar deal.

But lying on your resume is nothing compared to lying to the police. In what his family considers to be but one of his many dirty campaign tricks, they claim David Jr. filed a false police report about a week before the 1999 election, accusing his nephew Chris, the son of his opponent/sister, of vandalizing his car. The family adamantly swears that Chris was at home at the time of the alleged incident… a fact of which they insist David Jr. was well aware. Chris even used his own money to pay for a polygraph test, but when he tried to clear his name by presenting the results to the Sammamish police a few weeks after the election, he was told that his uncle had quietly dropped the charges, claiming Chris had admitted to the crime and agreed to pay restitution… both of which were out and out lies.

To file a false police report about your own nephew was a fitting conclusion to a campaign that had been built on lies and dirty tricks. This was a campaign engineered by the Master Builder’s Association, but one in which Irons ironically campaigned against the eminently green Derdowski for not doing more to control sprawl. It was a campaign where Derdowski signs mysteriously disappeared, and when a local resident, Sara Ulrich, saw Irons himself removing a Derdowski sign she had planted, and asked him what he had done with her sign, he unapologetically replied he had “lost over 14,000 signs.”

This is the David Irons Jr… the tool throwing, obscenity spewing, resume faking, police report falsifying, mother beating, lying, cheating campaign trickster for whom his father, mother and sister refuse to vote.

By all accounts the Irons family had once been very close… bizarrely close… dysfunctionallyclose… all living together on the same Sammamish cul de sac… her parents to one side of Di’s house, her brother to the other. The family used to live together, work together, rent houses by the ocean together, but over time their relationship with David Jr. slowly deteriorated. The brooding David Jr. moved away from the family enclave, and eventually stopped attending family dinners and other events, feigning illness or using some other excuse.

To claim as Balter does, that “a private family squabble spilled into the public realm’’ only after Di ran against her brother as a write-in candidate, is a bizarre misreading of the sequence of events, for it was David Jr., after years of gradually distancing himself from the family, who chose to bring the “squabble” to a head and take it public by running against a close family friend, and putting his little sister out of work. It was David Jr. who estranged himself from his parents and sister, and who has repeatedly gone public with attacks against the family.

A former council staffer describes Irons as nearly appearing sympathetic, almost teary-eyed around the holiday season as he lamented the fact that his children could not enjoy Christmas with their grandparents and cousins. But according to his family, David Jr.’s exile is self-imposed. In 1999 he told his parents that if they did not support him politically, they would never see their grandchildren again… and much to their surprise he actually followed through on the threat. He even forbade his parents to send his children birthday and holiday cards, leaving a voicemail message saying that his girls had shredded their gift checks. (A year later, two of the checks cleared.)

Irons of course, blames his estrangement on his family, once complaining to the Issaquah Press that they never let him know that his 97-year-old grandfather was sick and dying. But according to Di, he hadn’t called or visited the man for over five years, and so they assumed he had as little interest in seeing his grandfather as he did in seeing his own parents.

In telling this story — a story Irons’ mother, father and sister want to be told — I know full well that I am going to piss people off. There are those of you who will say that I have sunk too low… that I have inappropriately brought a man’s private life into the public realm. But to you I ask… since when has a man’s character not been the subject of political campaigns? Just last year John Manning was virtually dismissed as a serious candidate for Seattle City Council because of a prior domestic violence conviction… a conviction Irons might share if he had not had the foresight to tear the phone off the wall before his mother could dial 911.

And to my friends in the media, who have thus far failed to cover this story, I ask you this: how is it possibly responsible journalism to tell the amusing tale of a candidate whose own mother won’t vote for him… yet refuse to attempt to explain to voters the reasons why?

If you reject this story as just another case of he said/she said, then why not reject the entire story, instead of just the part that requires a little elbow grease? How hard is it to research a candidate’s resume to determine if his claims are based in fact? How hard is it to interview former co-workers, employees and neighbors to see if they corroborate the family’s charges? How hard is it to look up a damn police report? Isn’t that your job?

Irons’ own family — the people who know him best — have made devastating charges against his character and qualifications… doesn’t the public have a right to know?

And finally, to those cynical amongst you who question the timing of this post, appearing just as the absentee ballots are dropped in the mail, and thus positioned to have maximum impact… I want to personally assure you that this is absolutely intentional. This is not merely a strategic move on my part, but one which appeals to my unique sense of irony.

You see, back in 1999, when Irons first entered the council race, Derdowski went to the Irons family, who were longtime friends and backers, and said he would not want or expect them to support him in opposition to their son. And so Irons’ mother and father stayed quietly on the sidelines, despite their misgivings about David Jr.’s qualifications.

The night before the absentee ballots dropped for the primary election, Derdowski and Irons’ attended a candidate forum sponsored by the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, at which the Irons’ family was in attendance. Much to his surprise, the first written question posed to Derdowski was “Are you under investigation by the FBI?”

As it turned out, Derdowski had been under investigation by the FBI during much of the campaign (he’s not sure for what), but the investigation had recently come to a close without indictment or comment. And so Derdowski truthfully answered “No.”

It was a setup. At this point, as Irons’ mother Janet describes it, notorious Eastside developer Skip Rowley exclaimed “We got him! We got him!” while gleefully wringing his hands. Irons immediately stood up and charged that Derdowski was indeed under investigation. An unusually heavy media presence in the audience (apparently tipped off that something would happen) hit the story strong the next day, and by the time the truth played its way through the press a week or so later, the damage had already been done. Derdowski lost the early absentee ballots big, and went on to lose the election.

For months, David Jr. had been bragging to his family that he had a “secret weapon” in his race against Derdowski, and that night they realized what it was. Shocked and offended by what they perceived to be a dirty trick, it was only then, a few weeks before the primary, that Irons’ parents finally came out in public support of Derdowski and in opposition to their own son.

“I’m not proud of my son,” Janet sadly lamented about his political success, “because he didn’t do it the right way. I’m disappointed that he approaches the level he does, and that I didn’t do a better job raising him.”

What started years before with Irons’ violent outbursts, and continued through his brooding, gradual disengagement from his parents and sister, culminated that night in the family split that continues to this day. It was not their son’s politics that prompted his parents to go public, but rather his tactics — specifically, the unfair, public maligning of an old family friend — a dirty trick that to those who knew David Jr. best, must have seemed tragically, unfortunately, and entirely in character.

And so tonight, as I prepare to air Irons’ dirty laundry on the eve of the absentee ballots being mailed, I do so without remorse, and without regret. What goes around comes around.

UPDATE:
N in Seattle of Peace Tree Farm, has a diary up on Daily Kos, and Darryl, usually of Hominid Views, has a very funny letter to David Irons posted over on Jesus’ General.

Oh… and I’ll be talking to Kirby Wilbur tomorrow morning at 7AM, 570-KVI.