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You don’t get the Seattle Weekly to name you “Best Activist/Hell-Raiser” just by sitting on your ass. No sirree… last year I earned my award by rolling up my sleeves, getting my hands dirty, then washing my hands, scrubbing under my nails, and typing up an email to 700 people asking them to vote for me for “Best Activist/Hell-Raiser.” Yes it was a petty, self-centered, egotistical thing to do… but if it kept Tim Eyman from grabbing the honor two years running, then it was well worth the sacrifice.

Well it’s “Best of” season again, and this year I’ve got some real competitors who are at least as petty and egotistical as I am, but have an even bigger list. The children over at (un)Sound Politics have already posted, asking their 7000 readers a day to cast ballots for their preferred ticket, and well… I just don’t want those lying SOBs to enjoy the tiniest bit of pleasure from this bogus accolade… do you? And so I ask you, my loyal readers, to fill out the Weekly’s online ballot, and mindlessly vote the following slate:

3. Best local talk radio host: David Goldstein
9. Best local blog: HorsesAss.org
11. Best activist/hell raiser: David Goldstein

Um, no… I’m not actually a local talk radio host, but I’d like to be. So this award would look pretty damn good on my resume. The other two should be pretty self-explanatory.

The folks at (u)SP have also posted nominations in other categories, so we need to crush their hopes there too. Feel free to vote your conscience, but if you all vote mine instead, we’re much more likely to come out winners:

8. Best local website: Pacific Northwest Portal
14. Best scandal: Dino Rossi’s meritless election contest
15. Best local cause: ending homelessness
16. Best reform we need: a state income tax

And finally, for old time’s sake, I strongly encourage you all to vote in the following category:

42. Best fish market: Tim Eyman

That’s only eight categories; vote in two more and you’ll be entered in the Weekly’s prize drawing.

Anyway, you have until July 11, so please, please join me in my childish efforts to deny gratification to others while shamelessly pandering to my own inflated sense of self-importance. Vote early, vote often… vote for me.

[NWPT48]I concluded my post-ruling analysis by demanding that Dino Rossi apologize for taking his meritless election contest to trial. But of course, I’m just a partisan blogger, so it’s nice to see a respected political commentator like The Seattle Weekly’s George Howland Jr. open his post-ruling coverage with the same demand (“A Fraudulent Finish.”)

Republican Dino Rossi should have apologized to Washington state. On Monday, June 6, after seven months of irresponsible rhetoric and fruitless litigation by his lawyers and spinmeisters, Rossi finally ended his bid for the governorship. He did not, however, take personal responsibility for his headline-grabbing, whiny, and expensive litigation. Instead, Rossi took a page out of the playbook of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, making an ad hominem attack on the integrity of the state’s highest court. It was as baseless as the rest of his legal arguments and should serve as a reminder that Rossi is deeply wedded to the radical right-wing agenda emanating from D.C.

It has been suggested to me that I should go easy on Rossi for his comments immediately following Judge Bridges’ decision, as he must have been speaking from a deep state of personal disappointment.

Bullshit.

For Rossi to have been deeply disappointed would have required a reasonable expectation that he might have prevailed Monday morning, an expectation that could only have been born out of ignorance, idiocy or ideology. It’s not that I have ever considered Rossi to be the most informed, intelligent or open-minded of candidates, but he isn’t stupid, and if his high-priced attorneys had left him with the impression that he should be measuring for curtains in the Governor’s Mansion, then he should sue them for malpractice. Perhaps the only thing legally surprising about Judge Bridges’ decision was its severity. As Howland reports:

The complete legal rout delivered by the judge came as no surprise to Seattle University law professor John Strait. “It’s pretty much what I would have expected,” says Strait. “I’m not sure that the Republicans ever thought they would reverse the results of the election. This was an organizing tool for them.”

An organizing tool for the state GOP, but I’m not so sure it will turn out to be such a great boost to Rossi’s political career. Had he bowed out gracefully in early January — at a time when the GOP’s most inflammatory allegations were at a fever pitch — he could have assumed the mantle of a martyr who sacrificed his own personal ambitions for the good of the state. Disenfranchised military voters, shady “enhanced” ballots, mishandled provisionals, and felon, dead, and double voters would have forever clouded the results of this election. But now with the charges “dismissed with prejudice” by a cherry-picked judge in conservative Chelan County, voters will be rightly suspicious of any attempt by Rossi to brand himself as a victim of corrupt Democrats. To the swing voters — mostly Democrats — who made this race closer than it ever should have been, the allegations are no longer merely unproved… they are disproved.

As to the party faithful, for whom no amount of evidence or common sense could ever refute the cult of the stolen election, it will be a long four years until Rossi’s inevitable rematch with Gov. Christine Gregoire. A reliable source assures me that it is “100%” certain that Rossi will not challenge Ron Sims for King County Executive. And other sources and circumstances assure me that a US Senate bid is nearly as unlikely. Indeed, the very fact that his campaign staff is finally disbanding, is as strong an indication as any that Rossi’s next race sits well beyond the 2005 or 2006 campaign seasons.

Rossi and his surrogates have made a lot of shrewd PR moves in their efforts to position him for his next campaign, but his Monday evening “concession speech” was not one of them. Rather than issuing an apologia for ending the contest, he should have issued an apology for bringing it.

A quick link to George Howland Jr.’s election contest coverage in The Seattle Weekly. I think he pretty much sums up my take on the election… though in a much more dispassioned voice.

After months of effort by top legal teams, the Republicans, who sued the state and most of the state’s 39 counties, have come up with around 1,000 illegal votes

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I have voted in three cities — Philadelphia, New York, and Seattle — and to tell the truth, I miss those clunky, lever machines back East. Those big old booths with their dozens of levers made casting your vote feel physical and real; pulling that big lever at the end, hearing all those gears click into place and that curtain grind open, was the electoral equivalent of cracking your knuckles, or sinking your teeth into a thick, crusty sandwich… it delivered an odd, satisfying finality that you just don’t get from silently feeding your ballot into a scanner.

Ah well, the days of the voting machine are passing by. They are hulking and cumbersome, prone to breakdowns, and expensive to maintain, transport and warehouse. And while my personal experience as a poll worker assures me that they are exceedingly difficult to tamper with, recent events have left me more than a little uncomfortable with their inherent lack of an audit trail.

New York State is preparing legislation that would phase out mechanical voting machines, and replace them with newer technologies. Legislators will rightly require touch-screen voting machines to produce voter-verifiable paper trails, but as a recent New York Times editorial laments, they appear to be caving to lobbyists by ignoring a more reliable, cost-effect voting technology: good old, optical scan.

The big voting machine companies, which are well connected politically, are aggressively pushing touch-screen voting. These A.T.M.-style machines make a lot of sense for the manufacturers because they are expensive and need to be replaced frequently. But touch-screen machines are highly vulnerable to being hacked or maliciously programmed to change votes.

Security concerns should give Washingtonians pause as we rush towards voting reform in the wake of a disputed election whose main problem was its extraordinary closeness. Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org has made a sport of demonstrating to election officials how quickly their systems can be hacked. And Paul Lehto and Jeffrey Hoffman have produced a 29-page study documenting touch-screen irregularities in Snohomish County, that they say may have cost Christine Gregoire thousands of votes.

Given security concerns and high costs, the NY Times suggests that touch-screen machines should not be used at all.

The best voting technology now available uses optical scanning. These machines work like a standardized test. Voters mark their choices on a paper form, which is then counted by a computer. The paper ballots are kept, becoming the official record of the election. They can be recounted, and if there is a discrepancy between them and the machine count, the paper ballots are the final word.

Optical-scan machines produce a better paper record than touch-screen machines because it is one the voter has actually filled out, not a receipt that the voter must check for accuracy. Optical-scan machines are also far cheaper than touch-screens. Their relatively low cost will be welcomed by taxpayers, of course, but it also has a direct impact on elections. Because touch-screen machines are so expensive, localities are likely to buy too few, leading to long lines at the polls.

Of course, all this may end up being a moot point in Washington state, where two-thirds of the electorate chose to vote absentee during the last election; as this trend continues, the rationale for maintaining two distinct voting systems becomes less and less tenable. It seems likely that we will inevitably follow Oregon to an all vote-by-mail system, thus making Snohomish and Yakima counties’ spanking new touch-screen machines prematurely obsolete.

I’ll miss going to the polling place at least as much as I miss cranking the lever on those hulking, old machines. But at least I’ll be assured that my ballot will be counted using the most accurate and auditable voting technology available today: optical scan.

I plan to devote a lot of pixels to the so-called “property-rights” debate, and the inevitable, BIAW-backed takings initiative. So I was interested to see Knute Berger’s latest Mossback column include the following comments on the issue from Robert Kennedy Jr.:

During our interview, I asked him mostly about the property-rights movement. It is making new headway in Oregon and resurging here in Washington as Tim Eyman and the development lobby consider a new ballot initiative, similar to Oregon’s recently passed Measure 37, which would compensate property owners if the value of their land goes down as the result of zoning and land-use laws.

“It’s a propaganda campaign to deceive the public,” says Bobby Jr. flatly. “There has never been a right to use your property in a way that injures your neighbor’s property.” The property-rights movement, he says, wants to exploit public assets for private gain. “The property-rights advocates have turned property rights on its head. . . . If government had to pay you not to put toxics in the air, not to dump sewage in water, the government couldn’t print enough money to do that. They’re about destroying the whole notion of community.” They are asserting a constitutional right to pollute, he says. “Look around at the communities that are the wealthiest, and they have the most controls. . . . If we all agree as a community to obey these laws and guidelines, we’ll all get richer.”

Some politicians have a gift for distilling an issue into a powerful, simple, and easy-to-digest message… and RFK Jr. is clearly one of them.

Others have a gift for sarcasm, so while we’re on the subject I thought I’d point you to Carl Ballard’s amusing “Dear Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights“.

Anybody who thinks I’m uncritical of the Democratic Party, hasn’t heard me ranting on the phone or in email about the pathetic response they have mounted to the Rossi/BIAW/GOP all out PR assault. We’ve been getting our asses kicked for over two months now, and quite frankly, I’m getting rather tired of removing steel-tipped neo-con boots from between my butt cheeks.

Christine Gregoire disbanded her campaign staff the minute Sam Reed certified the election, but Dino Rossi’s campaign continues to go strong. Aided dominated by the considerable resources of the BIAW, Rossi is now the nominal leader of a calculated and dishonest campaign to discredit the entire Democratic party. As George Howland writes in The Seattle Weekly, the Democrats failure to effectively defend Gregoire’s legitimacy could make her win a Pyrrhic victory:

The Republicans recognize they have an opportunity, whether or not they win in court. That’s why their revote campaign is so smart. By whipping up a frenzy, the GOP has left most of Washington feeling like 2004 was a botched election.

I do my best to refute the vicious lies and irresponsible rumor-mongering coming from conservative talk radio and the right-wing blogs, but some days I feel like I’m just pissing into the wind. It’s time for the state Democratic Party to fight fire with fire and money with money… they need to wake up and realize that they are in the middle of a political campaign — rallies, paid media, yard signs and all — however weak Rossi’s legal case might be.

Personally, I could give a shit about public opinion when public opinion is wrong, but I’m not running for office! The Republicans are boldly, loudly and unashamedly lying to voters… because it works. At the rally in Olympia yesterday, GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance said:

“Hundreds of felons voted, hundreds of dead people voted and hundreds of people voted twice.”

These are LIES, damn it, and Vance knows it! But apparently the public does not, else he wouldn’t keep repeating them.

I am a proud Democrat, and I am sick and tired of being called a cheater and a thief by BIAW thugs and their political puppets in the GOP. I have stood up for the Democratic Party again and again, and it’s time for the Party to stand up for me and the hundreds of thousands of other proud Democrats whose support has never wavered.

Dino Rossi will soon get his day in court. And it’s time us Democrats get our day in the court of public opinion.

I’m quoted in a couple of AP newswire stories today, including a nicely written piece by Olympia correspondent Rebecca Cook, that has gone national: “Bloggers obsessively track votes in governor’s race.” Also mentioned is local righty blog SoundPolitics.org, who really has been tracking the ballot count obsessively. (I guess I should also mention equally obsessive righty Timothy Goddard, since he was kind enough to mention me.)

You’ll also find me getting my digs into our friend Timmy, in Dave Ammons’ weekly column: “Analysis: Current rough patch won’t stop Eyman.”

One of the lessons reinforced by last year’s “Horse’s Ass” campaign, was that people are willing to put at least as much effort into a good joke as a good cause. And if you can combine the two, all the better.

Well, I want to thank all of you who answered my rather sophomoric call to participate in the Weekly’s Best of Seattle 2004 ballot, and name me the Reader’s Pick for “Best Activist/Hell-Raiser.”

Best Activist/Hell-Raiser

David Goldstein lives up to this title. He’s extremely active (at least when it comes to hating antitax advocate Tim Eyman), and he definitely likes to raise hell (exemplified by Initiative 831, his attempt to officially declare Eyman “a horse’s ass”). Goldstein’s passion even led him on an Internet campaign to win this category as a statement against Eyman, and it worked. www.horsesass.org.

I am extremely honored — well, at the very least, rather amused — by your efforts on my behalf. Sure, “best of” polls like this are rather bogus (as evidenced by my selection,) but any opportunity to make last year’s winner, Tim Eyman, gag on his morning latte is well worth it. Plus, it made my mother’s day.

On a more serious note, it once again shows how a little bit of effort by a modest number of people can help shape the political debate. When I asked supporters to write and phone their legislators, we got a hearing on the Property Tax Homestead Exemption. When we emailed the Public Disclosure Commission, we got an investigation. And when we decided to use the Weekly’s best of poll to stick it to Timmy… we stuck it to Timmy.

Politicians and journalists seem to be under the mistaken impression that Eyman commands some kind of army of loyal, dedicated activists.

He doesn’t.

Sure, his email list may still be bigger than ours, but when it comes to dicks like Tim, size doesn’t matter. Indeed, a few weeks ago, when he repeatedly emailed his list, asking them to join him in Olympia for his I-864 failure photo-op, not a single supporter showed up.

His claims not withstanding, Tim Eyman does not represent the majority of Washington voters. The majority of voters do not want to dramatically cut state and local government, eliminate essential services, privatize schools, sell off parks and close libraries. The majority of voters do not want slot machines on every corner of every Main Street in the state.

Do the majority of voters want lower taxes? Sure. Hell, I want lower taxes! I’d also like to be able fly above Seattle traffic in my own personal helli-car.

Voters understand that you don’t get something for nothing, and if we all do our best to educate our fellow citizens that that’s exactly what Eyman is peddling, his initiatives won’t stand a chance.

Sometimes it’s enough to participate in a stupid little joke. But sometimes we all need to do a little bit more. So today we can sit back and enjoy this tiny, symbolic victory… and then redouble our efforts to defeat I-892 in November.

Last week I kicked the crap of The Seattle Weekly’s Knute Berger [But Knute, there’s so much crap to kick…] for whining about the public’s tendency to “kick the crap out of the news media.” [E Pluribus Stupid]

While I still stand by my original crap kicking, Knute did make the very important point that the public has a responsibility to educate itself. My experience at Folklife last weekend drives home the fact that many voters are failing to live up to this obligation, while others are finding it impossible to do so.

Why the average citizen would be willing to put his signature on a petition he hasn’t read is beyond me… but this sociological curiosity has become the basis for a very lucrative industry.

Most of the people signing initiatives had no idea what they were penning their name to. A paid signature gatherer might be carrying as many as seven different petitions, and once he cajoled a voter to sign one, it was very easy for him to flip through the others.

Unless… somebody like me was there to explain the true impact of the initiatives. Indeed, on more than one occasion, a small crowd gathered around as I conducted an informal Q&A session on one initiative or another. These were engaged citizens who asked good questions — questions that apparently have not been sufficiently answered in the news media.

My argument with Knute’s thesis (apart from the self-indulgent whining,) is its total lack of subtlety. Yes, citizens have the responsibility to educate themselves. But the news media has the responsibility to give them the tools to do so.

Following that line of reasoning I suppose I should applaud Knute for helping to educate citizens about their responsibility to educate themselves. Or deride him for failing to effectively do so.

I feel a tautology coming on. Or a paradox. (Which is, of course, a tautology.)

Whatever. I think I better just stick to crap kicking.