The Seattle Times nails it: Bring elections back to the people

In this matter, I can't speak for the dems... but I can for the Republicans.

Chris Vance has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated disaster as party chair. The reasons are obvious and legion, many of which have been discussed elsewhere on this blog.

But not the least of which has been his rabid shortsightedness in going around and alienating the mainstream voters on both sides of the aisle from our cherished, blanket primary, tradition.

And now, to compound the errors of his ways, the blindered leadership of the Party, including the executive board, will be suing the voters of this state so they can finally, and irrevocably, achieve their goal.

And, ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: ALL of this is about “The List.” All of this has been a smoke screen for getting “The List,” and anything else has only to do with the Party agenda.

The LAST thing these hacks want is to concern themselves with the will of the people. In the end, it’s about control and power… but it usually is. Here, they fail to understand that their arguments are legally invalid (there is a reason they call it the “Louisiana Primary,” and that is mainly because it’s legal and in place in another state, tending to lend that system’s imprimatur to the legality of OUR system) and all their idiotic actions will do is further alienate the voters, drive up voter empathy and provide ammunition for the Libertarians… who most people don’t understand support these moves as well.

Congratulations to the Times, who have masterfully stated the case, not only that the leadership of BOTH major parties are acting like idiots, but in reality, that both leaders should be replaced.



Monday, May 9, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.



Editorial
Bring elections back to the people

There they go again. Chris Vance and Paul Berendt, chairmen respectively of the state Republican and Democratic parties, can't stop trying to wrest control of the state's primary election from the people. Now they're trying to tinker with Washington's new primary, approved overwhelmingly by voters in November.

They should just leave the elections to the people.

The whole mess started when the parties sued the state because they wanted Washington's blanket primary declared unconstitutional. Voters used to choose among all candidates and all parties, and the top Republican and top Democratic vote-getter advanced.

The party bosses didn't like Democrats picking Republicans, and vice versa. They won their lawsuit, and last September, for the first time in 70 years, Washington primary voters were confined to candidates from only their chosen party.

People hated it so much that, two months later, voters adopted by initiative a primary that is all but blind to party. Next September, voters will go back to choosing among all candidates for a political office. The top two highest vote-getters advance, regardless of their party.

More...

Dr. Dean The Disaster.

I’ve written a few words about the democrat’s abortive choice of Dr. Dean/Mr. Hyde to run their badly listing ship, and the early returns are in where it counts: Dollars.

Dean has been a disaster. As long as they let him run their party, he will BE a disaster.

Dean has a runaway mouth. He’s thoughtless, apparently incapable of a strategic thought, and while attempting a democrat reality check on one hand, on the other, he shoots off his mouth like an AK 47, with remarks that have the effect of an Iraqi car bomb, killing everyone in sight.

Mainstream democrats tried to warn the rest of the Party. But their Party is infested with radical socialists who are doing everything they can to drag the Party farther and farther Left… and now it shows where it’s most important: money.



Robert Novak

DEAN'S DEBACLE

Democratic National Committee (DNC) fund raising under the chairmanship of Howard Dean shows a disappointing $16.7 million raised in the first quarter of 2005, compared with $34 million reported by the Republicans.

That tends to confirm dire predictions by old-line Democratic fund-raisers of a fall-off in money if Dean became chairman. He had promised to bring in heavy individual contributions, as he did in his 2004 campaign for president. But the DNC in the first quarter received only $13 million from individuals, compared to $31 million for the Republican National Committee (RNC).

A footnote: A recent DNC fund-raising appeal promised to send field workers to North Carolina, which does not have a major statewide election until 2008.

A brief moment of common sense by Clark County democrats: get rid of the HOV lane.

Has I live and breathe.

Remove the HOV lane

The Columbian weighs in with a good quote from County Commissioner Steve Stuart:

HOV lanes work elsewhere, but in Vancouver, a one-way car-pool lane that leads to a narrow bridge, then to a bottleneck, has not proved to be a solution. Clark County Commissioner Steve Stuart was quoted in a Columbian story by Jeffrey Mize: "I fully support a functional HOV lane across the river into Portland. My problem is this is not a functional HOV lane."

He's right. The experiment was a good try, but it's time to face facts, erase the HOV lanes and let the entire public use the entire freeway on that stretch of I-5.

We'll eventually need an HOV lane, but the lane will need to extend into Oregon. That will require that the two-lane bottleneck in Delta Park be fixed. In this era of declining federal revenues, these kinds of transportation problems will be hard to get done. Another example of the federal government shifting the burden back to states, for what is a federal interstate highway system.

admin – Thu, 05/05/2005 – 10:12am
admin's blog – login or register to post comments

I'm thrilled to see them FINALLY come around on this issue... but where've they been for the past four years of this nonsense? The silence has been deafening.

Paul Berendt: Republican's Most Valuable Player in the Rossi drama.

The state democrat party has lost its mind.

Now, most observers of state level politics know that Paul Berendt, state democrat budda, is something of a nut job. Did you, for example, notice how he cries? A lot?

Anyway, with a reasonably straight face, Berendt and his crew have helped the Republican cause (did I mention he’s something of a nut job?) by identifying an ADDITIONAL 743 votes that HE claims are illegal.

Is this where I say something acerbic, like, “Hello… Hello… anyone home in there?”

First of all, that Berendt could even remotely believe that the illegal voting population of this state, REGARDLESS of their race or gender would vote anything but democrat is truly bizarre.

The democrat party is, after all, the party of victimhood. What better draw to the woe-is-me, illegal felon vote then the party that would allow them to ignore personal responsibility so they can blame everyone and everything but themselves for committing their crimes? It’s the party of the poor (well, unless you’re poor and powerless in this state, in which case, the democrats happened to balance the budget on your backs, according to democrat State Senator Craig Pridemore, mere seconds before he, to, voted to balance the state budget on your backs) … the party of the “expanding program.” What convict would vote against that?

Berendt and the rest of the democrat machine actually expect us to BELIEVE that Rossi picked up the redneck felon illegal vote?

We’re already aware of the bogus efforts of “Every vote must count” Berendt, who’s vote runners screened Republican votes out when they were getting signatures on absentee ballots in King County. We already know that democrats have made the strategic decision to oppose any effort to stop illegal voting, because they’ve determined that they benefit from such a vote.

Now this clown expects us to think that they also don’t get any vote that is illegal if the source of that vote is a “nonunion blue-collar, male Caucasian” convicted felon?

Please. I don’t buy it and my guess is the judge won’t buy it either. And, with the exception of the racial component, which I believe to be trumped by the convict component, Berendt offers absolutely no proof to back up his assertion.

The irony of all this, of course, is that the more irregularities Berendt can provide, the greater the case that the results should be thrown out and we should have a revote.

Clearly, the strategists in the state democrat party have hit the bong a few too many times.

Keep up the good work, Paul. I appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to get Rossi elected and between Christine’s efforts in the last Legislative session and your efforts to strengthen Republican claims that the final tally was bogus… we just might get there.



Saturday, May 7, 2005
Democrats flag 743 votes they say felons cast
By David Postman
Seattle Times chief political reporter

Democrats said in court papers yesterday that they've identified 743 felons who voted illegally in the November election.

And in a separate filing in Chelan County Superior Court, Democrats said they've added two academic experts to their legal team to help show that those felons, as well as 946 submitted earlier by Republicans, are more likely to have voted for Republican Dino Rossi than Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire.

"We know for a fact that nonunion, blue-collar, Caucasian men vote very disproportionately Republican, and when you look at the felon population in the state of Washington, they are overwhelmingly nonunion, blue-collar, male Caucasians," said state Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt.

"This could be under any other circumstance the prime demographic Republicans target in their" get-out-the-vote effort, he said. Republicans said they already found errors in the Democrats' earlier list of alleged felons and will carefully review the latest filing.

More...

More of the diversity of the Left: Kill Republican T-Shirts

Here's a few examples:


These example pics, from the website in question, were changed. Pressure from the people resulted in changing the line from merely "Kill Republicans" to the advice to "Fuck A Republican."

Just a little more of that diversity of thought thing the far Left loves to illustrate.

On the page of the local loyal opposition, stilwell's whining about Pastor Hutcherson using a phrase or two he doesn't happen to like (Which, come to think of it, is even MORE of that diversity of thought thing the democrats are genetically incapable of showing)

"Can you imagine the mighty trembling, shaking outrage that would have erupted in the noise machine if a liberal had said such a thing?" stillwell sniveled.

Well, let's see how long it takes for his bogus sense of outage to condemn THIS effort... like THAT would ever happen.