Goldy

Because, this:

THE most expensive race in state history for a seat in the state House might be tilting a politically divided Legislature even more toward the middle.

In the race to represent Federal Way’s 30th Legislative District, Republican Teri Hickel held an eight-point lead over Democratic Rep. Carol Gregory in Tuesday voting returns. If that lead holds in future vote counts, a win by Hickel would skinny the once-mighty Democratic majority in the House down to a 50-48 margin.

The consequences of this shift should be welcome to Washington voters seeking moderation in Olympia.

Right. Because it’s the Democrats who are immoderate and obstructionist, rather than the Republicans who have pledged not to ever raise taxes ever, for any reason, under any circumstance, no matter what. You know, the Republicans who also oppose marriage equality, reproductive rights, gun responsibility, reducing carbon emissions, teaching evolution, and just about everything else the editors claim to endorse. A Republican Party that is so bereft of ideas or intellect (or, let’s be honest, morality) that it has elevated trickle-down-regurgitating student-harassing child-bride-marrying Matt Manweller to the status of rising fucking star.

That is the party to which the wise editorial board members of our state’s paper of record look to bring “moderation” to Olympia.

Sigh. I try not to wish for the day the Seattle Times shuts down its presses. But honestly—fuck you.

Okay, first off, let me just say upfront that I was wrong. Yesterday I predicted that a bunch of local races would likely be “too close to call,” when in fact, really, none of them are. Some will likely tighten up, but I will be awfully surprised if any of last night’s top-line winners end up losing.

The tightest race right now is in District 3, where Kshama Sawant leads challenger Pamela Banks by 5.4 points, but the late ballots will surely trend in Sawant’s favor. I guess District 1’s race between Shannon Braddock and Lisa Herbold (52.9% to 46.5%) is technically in the too-close-to-call range, but it’s hard to imagine a sufficient late ballot swing.

So then, what did we learn from last night’s election? Absolutely nothing. Every incumbent won reelection, and in all but one race (District 5, where fundraising was almost even), every winner outspent the loser. As usual. Also, we easily passed another property tax levy. Imagine that.

So much for the disruptive impact of district elections.

Speaking of which, for all the excitement allegedly generated by putting nine council seats up for election at once (four of them open!), voter turnout is likely to hit a historic low. Citywide, Seattle is only on track for about 39 percent turnout, compared to over 52 percent just two years ago.

So yeah, nothing to see here. Incumbents win, money rules, and turnout sucks.

Thanks to the shift to district elections, all nine Seattle City Council seats are up for election this year, including an astounding four open seats! So you’d think voter turnout would be sky high, right? Well, not so much.

Turnout is low. Abysmally low. The most recent ballot return statistics suggests that countywide turnout could fall under 40 percent, the lowest general election turnout as far back as I’ve bothered to look.

That’s just awful. And Seattle proper isn’t faring much, tracking toward below 45 percent turnout compared to 52 percent in 2013. So much for district elections generating renewed interest in city council races.

So what does that mean for tonight’s results? I’m not exactly sure. It could mean that voters are just voting really late, and we’ll see a surge of ballots pour in today and tomorrow. Or, since the most reliable voters tend to also be the most conservative, it could be bad news for lefty candidates across the board. (Well, every lefty but Kshama Sawant: D3 is a turnout outlier tracking toward 50 percent thanks to her impressive GOTV efforts.)

One thing I do know is that with “too close to call” stretching toward the 8-point range after Sawant’s 2013 late-ballot comeback, several races will be left officially undecided after tonight’s ballot drop—probably D1, D4, and both Honest Elections and Let’s Move Seattle. Maybe even D8 and D2.

So stay tuned for a week or so of wonky election results analysis.

Deuteronomy 28:49-51
Foreigners who speak a strange language will be sent to attack you without warning, just like an eagle swooping down. They won’t show any mercy, and they will have no respect for old people or pity for children. They will take your cattle, sheep, goats, grain, wine, and olive oil, then leave you to starve.

Discuss.

Revelation 1:9
We suffer because Jesus is our king.

Discuss.

Luke 19:23-27
Why didn’t you put my money in the bank? On my return, I could have had the money together with interest.”

Then he said to some other servants standing there, “Take the money away from him and give it to the servant who earned ten times as much.”

But they said, “Sir, he already has ten times as much!”

The king replied, “Those who have something will be given more. But everything will be taken away from those who don’t have anything. Now bring me the enemies who didn’t want me to be their king. Kill them while I watch!”

Discuss.

When two independent expenditure campaigns were announced last week, one explicitly pro Seattle City Council president Tim Burgess (“United for Tim”) and one explicitly against Burgess’s challenger, former Tenant’s Union leader Jon Grant (“Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders”), I wasn’t the only one to read this as a sign that Seattle’s business establishment was very nervous about Burgess’s reelection prospects. Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders was on the record promising to spend about $200,000, while the insider buzz had United for Tim budgeting at least the same. That’s an awful lot of money to spend on an incumbent who is already outspending his challenger by six to one.

But now in the wake of the Triad shakedown scandal it appears we all may have been half-fooled: that “Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders” was never more than an unethical ruse.

Of course, the PAC’s threatened $200,000 war chest never appeared—and it never will appear—and while some might attribute this collapse to fallout from the shakedown scandal, it is reasonable to suspect if the committee’s sole purpose was to facilitate a shakedown in the first place. Think about it. The committee has its spokesperson go public with a $200,000 budget, while whispering that it would be accusing Grant of some sort of personal ethical lapse. Was the money ever real? Or was it just an elaborate political bluff created by those hoping to profit from a potentially lucrative real estate deal?

(Or even more conspiratorially, perhaps it was an effort to entrap Grant in an ethical lapse? Hmm. That might explain the otherwise inexplicable creation of a text message trail.)

To be clear, Burgess’s backers are clearly nervous. United for Tim has already raised $218,000, most of it from a Chamber of Commerce funded PAC. But that other $200,000? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was always a fiction. Which means this shakedown scandal could be a lot more scandalous than it first appears.

So, first there was this. And now, this:

Seattle City Council candidate Jon Grant claims the developer of a project across from City Hall tried to shake him down, and a text message sent to former Mayor Mike McGinn reveals some of what went on.

Grant says Brett Allen, a senior vice president at Triad Capital Partners, approached him at a Saturday campaign event and asked for help settling a lawsuit brought by Grant’s former employer.

Grant says he was told the payoff could be that a new political committee gearing up to spend heavily against him would go away.

On the one hand, I appreciate the way Seattle’s political establishment is attempting to make me—an expatriate of Philadelphia and New York’s corrupt political machines—feel right at home. But on the other hand, what the fuck?

It’s one thing to use the threat of a big independent expenditure campaign to intimidate a council candidate, but it’s another thing to preserve the details of that threat in a goddamn text message. That’s just incompetent. I mean, if Seattle’s cabal of downtown developers can’t even shake down a politician correctly, how can we trust them to properly develop downtown Seattle?

Isaiah 34:7
And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.

Discuss.

Seattlish has the scoop on some very shady goings on in my own political backyard:

Bruce Harrell’s campaign may be in some hot water following allegations that they essentially bought the 37th District Dems endorsements for both him and Pamela Banks.

An SEEC complaint alleges that, before the deadline to become a voting member of the organization in time for endorsements, 15 new memberships were paid for in one batch, with sequential money orders purchased at the same location.

It gets sketchier: These new memberships came on the heels of the Harrell campaign calling and asking if it would be OK for them to pay for new memberships (they were told it was not). … Just after the vote, it was determined that at least five of the new members shouldn’t have been permitted to vote at all, because, per the 37th Dems themselves, they didn’t even live in the 37th LD.

This is the sort of sneaky, manipulative Democratic machine politics that might earn Harrell fear and/or respect in Chicago or New Jersey or my native Philadelphia, but here in squeaky-clean Seattle, not so much. In fact, it pretty much confirms the worst suspicions of the disaffected, young, left-leaning voters Democrats so desperately need to bring to the polls.

It is to say the least ironic for establishment Democrats who take such offense at Kshama Sawant’s insinuations of corruption to respond to her campaign with, you know, actual corruption. (And yes, legal issues aside, I consider this sort of flagrant violation of both the spirit and letter of the LD’s rules to be a form of political corruption.)

To be clear, I’m taking this personally, and not just because I’m a passionate Sawant supporter. This is my LD. And I hate the way this is tearing my LD apart—especially the mean-spirited behind-the-scenes attacks on LD members who dare to question the obviously compromised integrity of the endorsement process.

I’ve always tried not to cover internal Democratic Party politics, and I don’t want to start now. But man, the stories I could tell. Just sayin’.

No nits to pick with the policy direction of the Seattle Times’ surprisingly forceful editorial in favor of stronger inclusionary zoning rules. I agree: “The policy makes sense in a city like Seattle, where population and job growth are boosting housing costs and most new developments cater to high-end renters.”

That said, if the editorial board really means what it says when it concludes…

The City Council should consider a more aggressive target that caters less to developers’ interests.

… it might want to endorse City Council candidates who cater less to developers.

Just sayin’.

Revelation 19:17-18
I then saw an angel standing on the sun, and he shouted to all the birds flying in the sky, “Come and join in God’s great feast! You can eat the flesh of kings, rulers, leaders, horses, riders, free people, slaves, important people, and everyone else.”!

Discuss.

So last week, after the Public Disclosure Commission alleged that Tim Eyman received $308,000 worth of kickbacks from signature gathering firm Citizen Solutions on 2012’s Initiative 1185 alone, I congratulated myself for first suggesting this kickback arrangement back in 2006. Well, it turns out I was wrong. In fact, I first suggested that Tim might be receiving kickbacks way back in June 2004,  a little more than a month into my blogging career:

For intrepid reporters looking to add their own angle to this story, I suggest you delve into Tim’s business relationship with Roy Ruffino, who claims to have the “exclusive contract” on both Eyman initiatives. Since Roy has been subcontracting signatures to other firms, (surely keeping a healthy cut for himself,) and certainly doesn’t have the track record of the more established firms, I have long wondered what was in this apparently lopsided business deal for Tim?

Is this a convenient means of mixing funds between the two campaigns, outside the purview of the Public Disclosure Commission? Is he merely trying to hide the fact that his Canadian dollars are primarily being spent on Californian signature gatherers? Or, perhaps… is Tim getting some kind of kickback in return for his business?

Eleven years later we now that Tim was both mixing funds between two campaigns and routinely getting some kind of kickback from Ruffino in return for his signature business.

Man… I really knew my shit. Too bad nobody took me seriously.*

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* And in case you’re wondering why I didn’t follow up myself, well, I wasn’t a reporter, and didn’t have the time, resources, or experience to do that sort of investigative work. HA originally billed itself as “an almost daily blog on Washington politics and the press,” and as such was devoted to political commentary and media criticism. Still, I knew my shit, huh?

 

Deuteronomy 14:18
You must not eat bats.

Discuss.

The Washington State Public Disclosure Commission unanimously voted this morning to refer to the Attorney General the ongoing investigation of for-profit initiative sponsor Tim Eyman’s alleged misuse of campaign funds, including potential criminal charges. And in a move that could signal additional legal trouble for Eyman, the commissioners also asked the AG to expand the investigation beyond initiatives 1185 and 517, and into other current and past initiative campaigns.

Personally, I don’t really care if Tim actually serves any prison time. But given the seriousness of the allegations and the apparent strength of the evidence, anything short of a felony plea and seven-figure fine would be a disappointment.