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The Democrats' 1st District Chair, Nicholas Carlson, is acting extremely bizarrely.

As the GOP 39th District Chair, I never would have told a candidate they needed to bow to me. A district chair is no one special, and candidates have no need to genuflect. Sure, it's wise to talk to them, but it's not a "snub" to not do so, except in the overinflated ego that perceives it.

And neither would I claim that a candidate needed to "earn" the right to run as a Republican to my satisfaction. Instead, I would merely expect that Republicans wouldn't vote for someone who hadn't done anything to help the party they were trying to represent, respecting the right of the candidate to run as he wishes, and the wisdom of the voters who will likely find that candidate wanting. I'd advise the candidate he would have little chance without name recognition or support of the party, especially against an incumbent, but I wouldn't tell him whether to run. That's his choice.

I especially love that Carlson says you can't support charter schools and be a Democrat. Tell that to President Obama, maybe?

But the best part is when he makes a "demand" that the fellow stop using the party label. He has no authority to make such a demand. The party does have that right to a limited extent, but Carlson isn't the party, and worse -- in this particular context -- the law is quite clear that the candidate has a right to say what his "party preference" is, which the courts have ruled does not amount to a de facto claim of affiliation with the party. Feel free to tell the world that the guy isn't a Democrat (we've told the world that certain candidates are not Republicans), but you have literally no right to make the demand that they can't say what their party preference is.

Your gripe, Carlson, is not with a candidate you dislike that calls himself a Democrat, but with Senator McAuliffe and other politicians in both our parties that have cheerleaded our downward slide toward the confusion that is now represented by the "Top Two" primary, leading to the various federal lawsuits both our parties have engaged in.

I use a Community Transit bus from Snohomish County to downtown Seattle most weekdays. I live about 4.5 miles from the bus stop, and as the weather's been improving and my bicycle's been recently tuned, I've thought about how I could manage riding my bike.

At the park-and-ride I use there's six bike lockers. They are a few feet tall and a couple wide and they fully enclose the bikes, with the doors secured by padlock. I thought this would be a nice place to put my bike, but with limited resources, I didn't think one would be available. I looked into it more, and my chances were decreased further: to get one, there's only a one-time deposit of $50, and you keep it as long as you like. I emailed Community Transit and got my name on a waiting list.

So a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking that I'd never seen anyone use the lockers that I could remember, and there's probably people who get the lockers but rarely use them, because there's no disincentive to holding onto it without using it. I thought that maybe they should charge a quarterly fee for use, just to encourage people to give up a locker they aren't using.

So last week, I got email that a locker opened up, and oh, by the way, they might start charging $5 a month just to make people more likely to not hold on to lockers they aren't using. The letter noted that if I wanted to not participate because of the extra fee, that would be fine; my response is that -- while of course I want that money -- it's the right thing to do, and I'm glad they are doing it.

It reminds me a little bit of an Obama anti-Romney ad I saw this morning bashing Mitt Romney because he tried to maximize profits, and fired workers. But ... maybe it was the right thing to do. Maximizing profits is good. Firing workers is often a good and necessary part of that. I was fired a couple of years ago, with a bunch of other guys who had been around more than 10 years, because the company thought I cost it too much money. Maybe they were right. I was never once angry at the company or the people who made the decision, though I was disappointed in it, because I understand that they thought it was in the company's best interests: not just the shareholders, but the other employees and customers, too.

I don't want to be fired (erm, "laid off") or pay extra fees, but I do want organizations to do economically right things, and I won't selfishly hold it against them when they do.

I read a brief summary of the account of Romney's "disturbing" bullying incident. It didn't sound like anything worth mentioning to me. So I heard people talking about how terrible it was, so I went back and read the more complete account, thinking I must've missed something.

Apparently, I didn't.

Look, Mitt Romney apparently did something pretty nasty. But he was a young man at a prep school in the 60s. That's not to say everyone would do what he did: I was bullied, and stood up to people who bullied me and others. I hated bullying and I still do. But I also recognize the truth that young men will act this way, and there's nothing we can do about it. It's the responsibility of the bullied to stand up to it and deal with it, and it's the responsibiity of the bullies to grow out of it, and it's the responsibility of the adults to help both of them.

When I was in sixth or seventh grade, I made a conscious choice to no longer give a damn about people who disliked me, for whatever reason. It was as if a massive weight was lifted off my shoulders. I no longer allowed my emotions and view of self to be controlled by what others thought. Granted, not everyone can do this, and it was doubly easier for me: not only do I have a personality that allows me to easily do this, but I was physically larger than most of the bullies, which meant that while maybe I was teased or even occasionally attacked, it was far less for me than it was with smaller kids who were bullied. But the principle still holds: you have bootstraps; use them.

I've occasionally thought about kids who have bullied me and my friends in the past, and with one exception -- one kid who bullied everyone all the time, pretty much, and I stood up to him and got a sucker-punch bloody nose for it -- I can't see how I could possibly hold it against them today in any way, even thinking that it says anything negative about them as grown men. They were boys. That's what boys do. It doesn't mean anything now. Even for the one exception, I like to think he grew out of it, but he was on a pretty bad trajectory for a long time.

At the end of the day, with the kid Romney apparently attacked, it's just hair. If I found out my son did this, I probably would have given him a really terrible haircut with patches missing and made him go to school every day for a week with it, along with apologizing to the other kid, and loss of certain privileges for awhile. And if I found out my son was attacked like this, I'd simultaneously help him deal with it gracefully, while encouraging the school and other parents to take action. These are all learning experiences that happen with boys, and they're pretty well universal.

The only story this story tells me is that Mitt Romney was a young man, which I had already guessed.

In a much more realistic accounting of the quality of business opportunities in Washington State than the 7th best spot Forbes offers, ChiefExecutive.net named Washington the 37th best state for business.

In part, the discrepancy is likely due to Forbes not considering Washington's unique taxation system for business, and at least some underestimation of the negative impacts of regulation in the state, but that's not the whole story. There's a very clear difference in bias between the organizations where Forbes favors generally liberal, Democratic states much more highly than it does more conservative, Republican states (and ChiefExecutive.net, vice versa).

Whether this is an intentional bias on the part of one or both organizations, or bias in how the various criteria are chosen, or some other reason, the results are striking: Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, and Minnesota are all more than 20 spots higher in Forbes than in CEO. And Indiana, Nevada, Florida, and South Carolina are more than 20 sports higher in CEO than in Forbes.

Mapping these results to E.C results or party control is left to the reader.

Governor Gregoire told candidates for governor that "we cannot live up to our responsibilities [in education] without new revenue."

This is based largely on the idea that our state's constitution says, "It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders." So they think to uphold that responsibility, we need a billion more dollars.

The problem is that it is not just a duty of the state, but the paramount duty of the state. So if you need a billion dollars for education to uphold that responsibility, and you are spending a billion dollars on other things, then you take the money from those other things. That's what our constitution says.

It's always a lie for our state politicians to say we need more money for education. They are simply using education as a way to fund other projects, because they know the public is going to be in favor of education more than any other project. So if they lie and say education needs money, they are more likely to get that money.

Don't fall for it. Demand that education is funded first, as our constitution requires. If they want more revenue for other things, let them ask for it, honestly.

Vice President Joe Biden said yesterday, quoting Mitt Romney, "If we want someone who has a lot of experience in foreign policy, we can simply go to the State Department. ... that’s not how we choose a President. A President is not a foreign policy expert." Biden then went on to criticize this, saying that -- apparently, since it's all that Romney said -- a President should have a lot of experience in foreign policy, and should be a foreign policy expert.

Therefore, Biden said Obama should never have been President, since he had even less foreign policy experience than Romney's got.

(In fairness, to Biden, he wasn't actually saying that, because he wasn't actually responding to what Romney actually said, but instead lying about what Romney said, inventing this idea that Romney was implying other people should make the foreign policy decisions for the President. But no, what Romney actually said was exactly what Bush and Obama said when running for office, and what they did as President: that you listen to the actual experts, and you as President make the choices.)

The Seattle Times reports that someone donated too much money to John Koster's campaign. This sort of thing literally happens all the time, and when they find out about it -- as they do when they reconcile the books -- they fix it, either by returning it, or (as is the case here) attributing the money to someone else (in this case, the donor's wife).

Koster's campaign literally did nothing wrong. In fact, they did everything right. So this literally isn't even a story. It's just a way to tie Koster to anti-abortion activists, Citizens United (ooo! hate!), and people who have "poured more than million dollars" [sic] into Tim Eyman initiatives. The article, purportedly about a campaign finance violation, is just an ideological wink-and-a-nod toward liberal voters.

The left counters, "but these are just facts." Sure, but they are very selectively chosen facts: they only mention three donors, each of them designed to inflame liberals, all in the context of a "story" about someone donating too much money, without choosing to note the fact that this happens in all large campaigns (Obama had thousands of donors who exceeded contribution limits in 2008; presumably, all or most of that was refunded or reallocated).

People keep saying Obama said it was "judicial activism" for "an unelected group of people" to "overturn a ... law." He did not. He said it was judicial activism for an "uninelected" group of people to overturn a law.

"[Obama is] a brilliant constitutional lawyer deeply devoted to the rule of law ..." So says Laurence Tribe. I am unconvinced.

I don't see any evidence Obama is a brilliant constitutional lawyer. He sure is a lawyer, but being a professor doesn't make you brilliant, or any sort of expert. And I see plenty of evidence that his understanding of the Constitution is extremely weak.

Worse, though, I am thoroughly convinced that Obama not only is not devoted to the rule of law, but that he actively *hates* the rule of law. The rule of law is what says the government is extremely limited. Obama clearly believes in ignoring that rule of law, and he does it all the time, whether it is banning handguns in DC, illegally wiretapping, ordering companies to comply with nonlegal memoranda, or forcing all Americans to buy health insurance.

Indeed, in his inaugural address -- and many times since -- he came right out and said he puts practicality above legality, and chided us who believe otherwise as "cynics" with "stale political arguments." Sure, he didn't say "practicality above legality": but that's what he clearly meant when he said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works," because -- as a brilliant constitutional lawyer -- Obama knows the argument about governmnent being too big is largely based on the Tenth Amendment.

Ignoring Tribe's laughable claim that it is a "fact" that "precedent and historical practice alike would lead a suitably cautious court to uphold rather than overturn" the Affordable Care Act, when in actual fact the Court has in recent years forced the government to back up its claims that the law or precedent justifies particular questionable exercises of power, and almost everyone seems to agree that the Solicitor General failed in that task ... it's nevertheless transparently dishonest when Tribe shrugs off Obama's repeated criticisms of the Supreme Court while attacking Judge Smith's criticism of Obama.

I agree that Smith was wrong, as I mentioned recently: he has no authority to order the DOJ to even write that letter, let alone get involved in what is clearly a purely political exercise by the President. Yes, Obama should shut his trap about the Court while they are deliberating instead of trying to rally the public against them. But our judges should stay above Obama's lowball tactics.

There will be two different WA-1 elections on the same primary and general election ballots in August and November, for some people at least. Voters in the current WA-1 vote for someone to finish out Jay Inslee's term (basically, December) and then the voters in the new WA-1 (because of redistricting) vote for someone who will start the new term in January.

Of course, some of the same candidates will be running for both positions, but since the primary is "top two" for both, we might not have the same people on the general for both, especially since the old WA-1 is very different from the new one. The new one is much more rural than the old one, and -- as a new resident of WA-1 myself -- I look to a change in party control when John Koster -- way ahead in a recent poll -- wins the seat for the new term. But he very well may not be able to win the remainder of Inslee's term, because those will be largely different voters.

The worst thing is that Inslee could have avoided this if he had resigned a week earlier, and he knew that at the time. Some think Inslee should be required to pay the cost. That's silly, of course, but with Governor Gregoire saying, "It is important that the people of the 1st District have representation, especially in December when key votes on matters that affect our state may need to be cast," you'd think she could have had a few words for their lack of representation from most of March through November.

I have a bad back. I threw it out in December and am currently in physical therapy.

My therapist tells me my back is pretty bad in certain ways, and that it might benefit from certain chiropractic treatment. Of course, chiropractic treatment varies widely between practitioners and so on, so they were hesitant about just telling me to seek such treatment, because it might not help, and might even make matters worse.

But here's the bizarre thing: they tell me that they know how to do this treatment. They were trained. They could help me right now, saving me significant time, money, and risk to my health. But they tell me they can't because Washington State won't let them, adding that it is part of a "turf war" between chiropractors and physical therapists.

I thought that the liberal Democrats who run this state had a problem with government getting between a medical professional and their patients.

One more illusion shattered.

I don't really mean this as a partisan attack. But this policy of government making my health care decisions is directly harming me, and I just wish that when they said something, they meant it.

My resolution to restore the secret ballot in Washington State was adopted by our pooled caucus, which had more than 200 people in attendance, across 34 precincts.

The biggest confusion is in what a secret ballot is, and why it's needed. A secret ballot is one that is -- as the state constitution requires -- prepared and desposited in secret. The reason why we have it is to prevent bribery and coercion. If someone is pressuring or paying you to vote a certain way, and they cannot actually see your ballot, they cannot know how you filled it out; therefore, the ballot is protected from such influence.

We could argue about whether this is important. I think it is. But the facts and history are inescapable: we do not have a secret ballot in Washington State, and the Washington State Constitution requires that we do.

The other big problem some people had with the resolution was the effect on those who need absentee voting, because they are for some legitimate reason incapable of going to the polls. I had mentioned that this would be up to the legislature to address as they saw fit through introduction of a constitutional amendment, but we directly addressed the concern by adding "and that the Legislature introduce a constitutional amendment providing for absentee voting for electors unable to go to the polls" to the end of the resolution.

If you consider yourself a Republican, or something close to it, and you want to help select the next Republican nominee for President, your only option here in the state of Washington is to go to the precinct caucuses tomorrow.

(Well, technically, that's not true. You could skip the caucuses, and then get a delegate from the precinct caucuses to the next level to nominate you, and then get elected as a delegate there. But that's harder. Don't do that.)

Now, as I've mentioned before, there's no actual voting at the precinct caucuses. You simply state your preference when you sign in (or state no preference, or cross out the box, or something). Then the parties count up the preferences of all attendees, and report those results to the media. It's just a straw poll.

Personally, I'm writing Mitt Romney as my preference. I am, however, in the -- I suspect -- fairly unique position of wanting Santorum to "win." Now, some of you may think it's because I agree with Santorum more, but I think Romney has the best chance of winning, or somesuch. But that's not the case.

Now, I do think Romney has the best chance of winning, and that he would be a significantly better leader than Santorum (or Gingrich, or Paul). But I like and agree with Romney about the same as I do with Santorum (which, unfortunately, is not as much as I'd prefer, but I think either one will do a reasonably good job as President).

So it's not out of any internal conflict that I want Romney to be the candidate, but want Santorum to win the precinct caucuses. It's actually because I like to see a good race; I like both candidates; and I like it when the media loses its head over how terrible Santorum is.

This is an interesting story about the security of online voting. The technologists are, of course, right that these systems are (almost?) all completely insufficient in protecting security. And the bureaucrats are right that it doesn't need to be perfect ... though it does need to be much better.

But both, and the journalist (Miles O'Brien), miss the point that voting secrecy is not solved by online voting, it's exacerbated.

O'Brien says, "Commander Wells ended up faxing in his marked ballot, relinquishing his constitutional right to secrecy."

Like most people in this debate, he don't understand what voting secrecy is. The principle of secrecy in voting is not that you are allowed to keep your vote a secret, but that you are NOT allowed to NOT keep your vote a secret. You can tell someone how you voted, but they'll never know for certain because they didn't actually see you vote.

This means that any time you are voting outside of a private polling booth, you are surrendering your right to secrecy. This includes all forms of voting at home, whether via absentee ballot or online.

The reason this principle exists is primarily so that no one can coerce you. Wells could have his commanding officer looking over his shoulder as he votes. Employers influencing employees. Unions influencing workers. Husbands influencing wives, or vice versa, or influencing their adult kids.

It's also to help prevent selling your vote. Online voting exacerbates this problem: people could sell their authentication information, and then someone else could literally vote for them.

That's not to say we can't have absentee voting. But when we do, we literally give up our right to voting secrecy.

In the state of Washington, where I live, we have no more right to secrecy, because the state is (except for one county) all vote-at-home. You can mail in your ballot, or you can drop it off in a (somewhat) secured box. If you're like me, and you recognize the importance of secrecy, and you have the time, you travel to your county auditor's office on election day and vote on the Disabled Access Voting machines, which are the only way you can still have a secret ballot in most of the state.

The Roman Catholic Church says that contraception is a sin, and that therefore providing contraception is a sin. The same church also believes it is their duty to provide health care through hospitals, and education through schools and universities. Those institutions are, if anything is, establishments of religion.

So it seems obvious to me to say that government forcing those institutions to commit a sin violates the First Amendment's prohibition of laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. But that's precisely what President Obama is threatening to do, should he win another term: force an establishment of religion to commit a sin.

I don't even believe contraception is a sin, personally; but I respect the right of people to refuse to engage in an act they believe is wrong. If they want to cause direct harm to others, I'll stand against it; but if they simply want to say, "we believe this is wrong, so we won't do it" ... that, to me, defines freedom, including religious freedom.

If you have a different opinion on the law here, I'm all ears. But if you want to talk about women's health issues, please, don't bother. The First Amendment rights of people being forced to buy things for other people is more important than the "right" of those people to have those things bought for them, and I refuse to entertain discussion about that subordinate issue unless someone can first demonstrate that the First Amendment is not being violated.

If you want to have a say in who the Republican nominee for President will be, and you are a registered voter citizen in the state of Washington, and you are not participating in the process to select the Democratic nominee, you are eligible to go to the precinct caucuses on March 3, 2012, and vote for a delegate to the county convention.

For a couple of decades or so, the Washington State Republican Party has used a mixture of convention delegate votes, and the statewide "presidential preference primary" vote, to determine delegate allocation to the national convention. But this year, to save money, the state has canceled the primary, so there will only be the caucus/convention process. If you want a say, you have to be involved.

Now, realize, the caucuses do not select who the state party's choice for candidate is. The news will report who "won," but it's a fiction. The winner will not actually be determined until the state convention. The caucuses pick delegates to the county conventions, the county conventions pick delegates to the state convention, the state convention picks delegates to the national convention.

You do not vote at the caucus for a presidential candidate, you vote for a delegate to the convention. It's like how you don't vote for Speaker of the House, you vote for a Representative who votes for Speaker of the House. But how you make your decision of which delegate to vote for can be based on any reasons you choose, just like some people vote for Congress based on whether the candidate will support Pelosi or Boehner for Speaker.

If you want to vote for someone because he is a good businessman, or tireless activist, or smart engineer, or local politician, or simply because they agree with you on the issues, you can do so. You can even vote for a delegate based on which presidential candidate they support, but that rarely happens, in my experience. Caucus-goers seem to care more about the delegates they select than the candidates those delegates support. That's not always the case, though, and this year may be different.

And here's the thing: the same thing happens at the county level. In theory, you could have 40 percent of the delegates elected at the precinct caucuses be for Mitt Romney, and 20 percent each for Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. But then that combined 60 percent goes to the county convention, and congeals around electing delegates who support Santorum, in order to prevent Romney from winning. So maybe 80 percent of the delegates to the state convention are for Santorum, and only 20 percent for Romney, even though Romney "won" the caucuses by a large plurality.

And then at state, maybe Santorum will drop out, and those delegates will end up switching to vote for pro-Gingrich delegates to national. We could have three different "winners," one at each level of the process.

All this to say a few things: if you want to participate in the process of selecting the GOP nominee, this is how you do it; you vote for delegates any way you want to, not necessarily by the candidate they support; the "winner" of the caucuses may not reflect who actually wins Washington's delegates.

Now, where is your caucus? I don't know. If you live in Snohomish County, go to the Sno Co GOP Caucus page and enter your legislative district and precinct. If you're from another county, check with your county party for more information.

And if you're a Democrat, go play ball that day, or something. It's not like you don't know who your candidate is going to be. But if you really want to participate, ask your county party. The procedures are not the same, so ignore most of what I said, except the part about this being your only way to participate. (And with the Democrats, that's not unique to this primary-less year: the Democrats have never used the presidential preference primary to determine delegate allocation. Literally, the primary vote for Democratic presidential candidates in Washington has always been meaningless. You have to go to the caucuses to have a say.)

It's bizarre to me that so many people link Citizens United with the rise of "Super PACs." In fact, what makes a "Super PAC" legally possible is almost completely unrelated to Citizens United.

It's actually legal through a case called Speechnow v. FEC, which says quite simply that an independent group making independent expenditures for political speech cannot be limited in contributions to, or expenditures from, that group. This is obviously protected Free Speech: government cannot, for the purposes of limiting your speech, limit your money, because that is a de facto restriction on speech itself. Citizens United was cited in the case, but the case would've stood without it.

It's bizarre to me that anyone would have a problem with this. Ross Perot and George Soros can spend millions, even billions, of their own money to influence elections, but less-affluent citizens can't pool their resources to do the same thing? That's just nuts. So Speechnow was essentially inevitable.

What Citizens United did is say that a corporation -- not a PAC -- can spend unlimited dollars on a campaign. This includes contributing to a "Super PAC": that is where the two cases overlap, but the decisions are independent.

The one criticism I have sympathy for, regarding these rulings -- Speechnow in particular -- is that Super PACs are not subject to the same strict reporting requirements, such that we don't really know where all of the money is coming from. I think this is a good and necessary thing: anonymous political speech, including anonymous publishing of the speech in question (which is essentially what the anonymous contributions facilitate) is a hallmark of our republic. But I also understand that because of the problems of money in politics, disclosure can be an important tool for the electorate.

Frankly, I've been thinking lately we should work to encourage disclosure, rather than mandating it. We could even have laws about how disclosure is done, if it is done, to discourage dishonest disclosures. But if a committee wants to remain anonymous, so be it. Regarding such committees that don't do disclosure, TV stations could choose to not broadcast ads from them; news outlets could choose to refuse to reference their ads; donors could take a pledge to not contribute to them; and so on. We can solve this without laws, and thereby protect our right to anonymity while greatly discouraging it.

Disclosure issues aside, however, it still seems obvious to me that you cannot, while respecting the First Amendment, limit someone's expenditures for the purpose of limiting their speech. The First Amendment says No, and it also says that -- given that we have rights to assembly and petition -- that when we come together in groups, we still have our right to speech as a group.

I'm certain by now most of you have heard or read Elizabeth Warren's remarks about how because society gave you what you have, society can take what you've got:

I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own: nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory -- and hire someone to protect against this -- because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

There's so much wrong about this it is hard to know where to begin. I could talk the fact that the things she talks about that make it possible for people to conduct business -- other than the military -- represent a tiny fraction of the actual spending of the government. I could talk about how her argument -- even though she says we should be allowed to "keep a big hunk" of our own money -- has no real limits. I could talk about how the rich already pay their fair share, paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the rest of us.

But I want to be clear: the biggest fundamental flaw here is that rich people actually are the ones who gave all of that to us moreso than the other way around. Most revenue comes from rich people. They gave us roads, they gave us public education, they gave us police and fire and military. Rich people paid for -- far more than the rest of us put together -- everything the federal government does. The top 5 percent pays over 60 percent of all federal income tax. The top 1 percent pays 40 percent of all federal income tax.

And instead of thanking Mitt Romney, and other people in the top 1 percent, who pay about $800 billion in income taxes every year (not including the income taxes paid by their employees), and create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Warren and others on the left attack them as though they've done something wrong.

Granted, some a very small number of rich people don't pay their fair share. They dodge taxes and take subsidies and don't pay a higher effective rate than you and I do. But overwhelmingly, most of them do pay more than us, in both dollars and percentages. A lot more. They are the reason we have the government services we've got, and Warren pretends that these people, who are objecively the greatest contributors to the services she mentions, are somehow merely beneficiaries who are stealing from the rest of us.

I know, I call people liars a lot. But it's not my fault that there's lots of liars out there, and they aren't being called out for it. So I do it.

Senator Lisa Brown said the other day, "to reach the ultimate goal of amply funding basic education as we've now defined it is going to require a new dedicated revenue source."

She's a liar. She knows this isn't true. She knows the state can cut existing programs to pay for whatever they think they need for basic education, and she knows that it's not education that would require additional revenue, but all those other programs that the state's constitution says are not the "paramount duty" of the state.

We do not need to increase any taxes, let alone come up with new revenue streams, to cover basic education. This is a fact. It's other programs that would "need" additional revenue, and instead of lying and saying she wants that money for education, she should be honest and say precisely what other programs she wants that money for. The constitution says it's not for education.

Hold on to your pocketbooks. Governor Gregoire and the Democrats continue to cut education instead of arts funding, environmental causes, and many other budget items, in the hopes that citizens will want to raise taxes to pay for education.

See, no sane person would want to raise taxes to pay for art at a halfway house for child molesters, so the Democrats have conducted a strategy of cutting the most popular programs first, in the hopes that popular support will swing toward increasing taxes. So far, it hasn't worked, but now that the Supreme Court of Washington has ruled that public education is underfunded, that may change.

Resist. Demand cuts in other programs. Demand that education be cut last. And if your local politicians tell you we need to raise taxes for education, call them out on their lies.

Now, granted, I think any decision that says schools are underfunded is completely wrong. It's a given that better education can always be provided without an increase in funds. I am completely unconvinced that education is actually underfunded, though I would agree that the students aren't getting a sufficient education. But this is beside the point, which is that if more money is needed, we already have that money, in all of the other places where it is being spent that are not the state's paramount constitutional duty.

And while you're at it, demand that our state return to priorities-based budgeting. Every item gets a priority, and we spend revenues on the top priorities first, and when we run out of money, we stop. We don't cut top priorities. We don't fight over what to cut during a recession. We only fight over what the state's priorities are, and then they are laid out for all the voters to see. This is how families budget, this is how businesses budget, and this is how our state should budget.

According to Bill Wade, chairman of an organization of Park Service retirees, a law that allows guns in national parks is directly responsible for the death of Park Service ranger Margaret Anderson.

Of course, this makes no sense: from everything we know, Benjamin Colton Barnes was a fugitive, heading to the mountains to evade capture from another shooting crime. There's no reason of any kind to think he would have obeyed a law that said he couldn't bring his guns into the park, any more than he obeyed the laws that said he couldn't murder Anderson with his guns. It's insanity. It's not even within one of the possible realms of reality. There is not a criminal like him on Earth, ever, who would have been stopped from entering the national parks with his weapons before the new law that was passed in 2010. Indeed, there's a strong chance he didn't even know what the law was, because -- simply -- he has no reason to care what the law was, since he would have no intention of following it regardless.

Maybe I am being too hard on Wade. Maybe he's senile or somesuch. But my experience with anti-gun folks tells me that they will use lies and extreme language to exploit gun tragedies to suit their agenda, so I won't assume he is disabled, and call him what he appears to be: a scum-sucking liar.

Washington's new congressional districts, as expected, are designed to protect incumbents. (Caveat: while many, including myself, are treating these as though they are final, the commission hasn't voted on them yet, but they are set to do so within days, and I expect them to be approved.)

Rick Larsen, who beat John Koster by only two percent in 2010, was given the 2nd District by removing almost all of its rural areas. Similarly, Dave Reichert's 8th District was made more rural, solidfying his chances of reelection. So the 1st District -- which has no incumbent, as Jay Inslee is running for governor instead -- picks up the rural areas of the 2nd, and some of the more urban areas of the 8th, and kept some of its existing urban areas. And the new 1st happens to be where Koster, 2010's toughest challenger, lives.

Interestingly, although Koster (a Republican) has an Arlington address, he lives outside the city, in the unincorporated area northeast. Larsen also is originally from Arlington, though currently "lives" in Everett. Yet commissioners saw fit to put Arlington -- where Koster beat Larsen by double digits -- into the 2nd. It seems to me like it's a bit of a poke in the eye to Koster by Democratic redistricting commissioner Tim Ceis.

The most offensive part of the redistricting to me, however, is the new map for the ninth, which was carved out deliberately to give "ethnic minorities" a majority. I can't stand this sort of institutional racism.

Yes, I called it racism. This district is designed to get an "ethnic minority" candidate elected. Oh, they don't say it outright, but it's obviously true. They say they want to "[encourage] people of color" to participate, make them "feel their votes matter -- that they have the ability to swing future elections," and that the new representative will "be a champion for their interests." I happen to think that voting for someone -- even in small part -- based on ethnicity is racism. And the Redistricting Committee is making it a part of our electoral institution. So it is, indeed, institutional racism.

Granted, the extremely pale incumbent, Adam Smith, is going to be on the ballot in 2012, but the proponents of this district believe it will become more "ethnically diverse" (read: "nonwhite") in coming years, so when Smith is gone, they hope to replace him with an "ethnically diverse" (I mean, "nonwhite") candidate.

Y'all don't think the proponents of this new district will be satisfied if they continue to be represented by Adam Smith or some other paleface, do you? If they would be, then why bother with an "ethnic minority" district in the first place? It's obvious that Smith can be a champion for their stated interests: comprehensive immigration reform, and disparities in education and health care. So why is this change so important, since they already have someone who is working for their interests? Obviously their interests are not merely in the issues, but in actually having a nonwhite representative.

So if they think that voting based on ethnicity is important, then if no white candidates runs in the new 9th District (in the future, since Adam Smith is running in 2012), I am considering doing so myself (even though I am not certain I am actually white, I appear that way to most people), just to give white resident-citizens of the 9th a choice that the designers of this district map seem to think is so important.

I do not believe that there is any value whatsoever in grouping voters together by race. Some race-lovers may disagree, but I know plenty of conservative "ethnic minorities" who would rather live in a conservative district than a left-leaning one, regardless of its ethnic makeup. Playing to race just further instills in us that "people of color" are different than people of ... white? Non-nonwhiteness? No color?

Honestly, I don't even know what the hell these race-lovers are talking about half the time. But as for me and my house, we will ignore whatever color you think you are and I am.

Some years ago, Senator John Kerry voted for the Iraq war funding before he voted against it. He got in a lot of trouble because, in the end, his proposal would have funded the war, but in a different way than the bill that was passed, but people took that as him being against the funding. It's hard to keep up with that sort of story line. It's the sort of story that gets caught in the current and carried downstream no matter how hard you paddle upstream.

The Republicans are in the same, swift, boat now. They too are in favor of the policy (extending the payroll tax holiday), for even longer than the Democratic proposal. But because they want it to work differently, they are getting accused of being against the policy altogether. Now, some of them are against it, but there's a majority of both parties sufficient to pass it, if they could work out how to pay for it.

The only difference with Kerry is that there was a majority of both parties who got it passed without him, so the policy moved forward without jeopardizing the timeline. But the timeline is upon us now, and the House Republicans had no more time to get a better bill now.

Of course, this bill lasts only two months. I wonder if this wasn't planned by Boehner, frankly: he waits for the conservatives of his party to go home, he strikes a deal to pass it without them, they return next year angry and ready to fight, and they get a better deal for the remainder of the year. People are saying Boehner and the Republicans lost big here, but I'm not so sure. Yes, they take a small and temporary hit from people who are lied to into believing that they were against the payroll tax extension, but if they can pull off a better bill in two months, that will be quickly forgotten.

It's funny to me that so many people are accusing Boehner of being short-sighted, but they themselves can't see that just two months down the road, Boehner has an opportunity to turn it all around.

Many people say that uncertainty in public policy -- taxes, regulation, and so on -- is holding back the private sector. Other people say, that's dumb: if something makes sense for a business, the business should do it, regardless of the public policy.

Now, on its face, the latter argument seems silly. If I can get some equipment for $10 million, but it will only provide me $10 million in revenue over its lifetime, then that obviously makes no sense. But if government will give me a $5 million tax credit for it, well, now it might make sense for me, depending on what other costs are associated with it.

But it also makes no sense based on the other behaviors of government, in particular the tax code: most of the tax code is designed to manipulate private behavior, whether it's through encouraging home ownership, or charitable contributions, or changing the windows in your home. So on the one hand the politicians use public policy every day to manipulate behavior, and then when it gets to the point that those policies become uncertain, they tell us that their policies don't affect behavior.

Actions speak louder than words: if they ever get rid of all of these manipulative features of the tax code, I'll believe them when they say that they don't believe policy affects behavior.

All of you students and parents and teachers who are upset about K-12 education being cut: if you think that these cuts constitute having less than an "ample provision" for education, then please tell Governor Gregoire that her proposed cuts violate the Constitution.

She would likely tell you that we need more revenues to continue to make that ample provision the Constitution requires. In fact, what the Constitution requires is, essentially, to make ample provision for education first, and pay for everything else afterward. So if anything else is being funded, then they have literally no excuse for not making ample provision for education. No extra revenues are required, as long as other expenditures exist.

The Democrats are trying to get kids and parents and teachers to hate on the Republicans and others who don't want to raise taxes, and to convince them that supporting tax increases is the only way to fully fund education. They are counting on you to be ignorant of their constitutional obligations. Don't let them get away with it!

I think Newt Gingrich would be a terrible nominee for President, and a pretty bad President. I think he doesn't lead effectively, I think he's essentially an American statist (not that government is the answer for everything, but that it is a big part of the answer for many, if not most, things), and I think he is erratic and prone to errors that can hurt the country.

But for the life of me I don't understand the hubbub over this Freddie Mac thing. Yes, it paid him a lot of money for his insights, whatever they may be, but there's no evidence he ever tried to convince legislators of anything on its behalf. And there's no evidence that their money influenced his own views or criticisms of the institution. It seems to me if anything that people should be upset with Freddie Mac for wasting its money on Gingrich.

And while I have some admiration for Michele Bachmann's tenacity and values and intelligence, my view of her character has taken a recent hit when she tried to convince debate viewers that the proof that he was "influence-peddling" was that he "took the money." So if you take money for A, that means you did B? Heck, taking money for A doesn't even mean you did A, let alone B. It's utter nonsense, and she knows it.

[Edited to change "Fannie Mae" to "Freddie Mac."]

I think Rick Larsen owes the Detroit Tigers an apology. I've seen his staff's offensive tweets next to the Detroit Tigers logo -- which at least one of his staff chose for their Twitter picture -- for a couple of days now. I'm not even a Tigers a fan, but I feel bad for them having to be associated with Rick Larsen's staff.

Maybe Michele Bachmann was right when she calls our federal government a "gangster government."

The Obama administration apparently didn't even mean it when -- almost two years after the plant was announced -- they said Boeing broke the law in opening a plant in South Carolina. They dropped the lawsuit today, even though nothing changed about that plant since the lawsuit was announced. But Boeing did agree to open its next plant in a union state, and suddenly the South Carolina plant doesn't violate the law?

All along, Obama was just using the threat of a frivolous, but expensive, lawsuit by the federal government to force Boeing to go to a union state with its next facility.

This is part of why the health insurance lawsuit is so important: Obama and the Democrats literally believe they have the right to force anyone to do anything, as long as it has to do in some way with "commerce." Fire your CEO, cut these benefits, increase those benefits, set your prices, build your plant here, provide this service and these products.

It's total insanity. They literally have no right to do any of it.

Obama and many others on the left are attacking the Republicans for on the one hand taking a pledge to not raise taxes, and on the other opposing continuing the payroll tax holiday.

Obama said just yesterday, "I know many Republicans have sworn an oath never to raise taxes as long as they live. How could it be that the only time there's a catch is when it comes to raising taxes on middle-class families?"

But, unfortunately, Obama is lying. They took no such pledge, and there is no "catch." The oath Obama refers to for members of Congress very explicitly does not cover the payroll tax. It reads:

ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and

TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.

It only refers to the federal income tax, and deductions and credits on that tax. The payroll tax is separate and not addressed, in any way, by implication or otherwise, in the pledge. This is intentional. If you read the state versions of the pledge, they refer to all taxes, but the federal version is only about the income tax.

Obama and his people are smart. They know this. They are just lying.

A few other points on this payroll tax thing are worth noting:

First, the Democrats have tremendous gall to say that the Republicans should oppose a tax increase on fundamental principle now, while at the same time saying they are just going to increase that tax in the following year anyway.

Second, the Democrats have for years attacked anyone who called preserving an expiring cut a "tax increase." Now they are using that phrase for that purpose every other minute. Of course, some Republicans have switched their language too, but I've not seen one say that it is wrong to call it a tax increase, as the Democrats have done for years. I've actually been called a liar by leftists, several times, for saying that allowing a tax cut to expire is a tax increase. I've not seen any of these same leftists call the Democrats, like Obama, liars for the same language. Funny that.

Third, this is not paid for. Anything that takes ten years to pay for, won't be paid for.

Fourth, it's just bad policy, even if it were paid for. We should be reducing income tax, not payroll tax. Payroll taxes are what pay for Social Security and Medicare, the two most serious financial liabilities our country faces in the future, both of which are in serious trouble. We need to address those entitlements as wholes, and not monkey with it for short-term political gain.

Fifth, and most importantly, the Republicans should address all this by proposing income tax reform that will lower tax rates, or provide deductions/credits, at about the same level as the payroll tax holiday, but will be permanent. That will effectively demolish the dishonest Democratic argument that the Republicans are against helping the middle class, while highlighting that Republicans really believe that the payroll tax holiday is just bad policy. Given the lateness of the hour, maybe concede to a six-month payroll tax extension while the income tax reform is worked on.

President Obama's people are out attacking Mitt Romney, saying that because he changes on the issues, he has no "moral core." So I guess that means if you say you will pull out of Iraq within a year and three years later we're still there; if you say we will close Gitmo and there's no plans to do so; if you say a health insurance mandate is wrong and then you make it the keystone of your plan; if you say you will end warrantless wiretapping, but then keep using it; if you say you believe the Second Amendment provides for an individual right, then support a ban on individuals owning guns in DC; if you say you will have more open processes and less lobbyists in government, but nothing changes; if you say you are against gay marriage, but then say you are in favor of it ...

Sorry, what was Obama saying about Romney?

I am not attacking Obama's positions and changes on positions here. I just don't understand how people can look at Romney and Obama and say, "yeah, Romney has no moral core because he keeps changing his views, unlike this Obama guy."

Of course, I am begging the question a bit here: Obama's strategy, as I've said for more than a year, is not to make himself look good, but to make his opponent look bad. He doesn't care if he looks even worse than Romney on the things he criticizes Romney for. All that matters is that people who might vote for Romney, don't. Obama knows he has at least as many significant changes in positions -- just in the last four years -- as Romney has had in his career. But it doesn't matter.

Make no mistake: not only is almost all of Obama's foreign policy, and significant parts of his domestic policy, just like Bush's, but his second-term campaign strategy is, too. Bush did something novel in 2004: he didn't really defend his own record much, but instead attacked Kerry. Not only did this dilute Kerry's support among independents, but it scared the voters on the right about the prospects of a Kerry presidency so much, it got them out to the polls in droves. How many people did you know who were voting for Kerry, instead of against Bush? Similarly and more remarkable, many people on the right voted against Kerry rather than for Bush.

(This is why the exit polls were so far off: the left was enthusiastic about opposing Bush, but the right was not enthusiastic about supporting Bush. And because he was not already in power, they were not enthusiastic about opposing Kerry, either. They were just scared Kerry might win, while the left was excited about the chance to remove Bush from power. As a result, the left was more interested in talking to pollsters, thus, the exit polls skewed heavily for Kerry.)

If you want to know what Obama will do next year, just look at what Bush did in 2004. So much for "hope and change." So much for a "moral core." But you all on the left will vote for him anyway, just like we all on the right voted for Bush.

So the left is hammering Gingrich over his "hypocrisy." But I can't figure out what they are talking about. Keep in mind that I do not really like Gingrich as a politician, and while I would vote for him over Obama, I would never nominate him for pretty much any federal elective office, and maybe not a state office either. So it's not like I am defending My Guy here.

But what did Gingrich do that was so wrong? After he was no longer in office, he was paid by Freddie Mac for a service, presumably performed it. There's no evidence of any kind that he lobbied, or that he made any decisions. So he criticizes the people who made the decisions, and people who took money from them while in office. So ... where's the hypocrisy? He criticized A and B, but he did neither A nor B.

Carl Bernstein, Boy Reporter, actually brought up the Clinton impeachment today as "another" Gingrich hypocrisy. You see, Gingrich went after Clinton for having an affair, and Gingrich had an affair, too! Small problem, though: Gingrich went after Clinton for perjury, not having an affair.

Now, I generally despise cries of "hypocrisy" substituting for actual criticisms. But in this case, if Gingrich were trying to make a campaign off attacking people for doing thing he himself did, that would certainly be worthy of comment. But so far, there is no evidence of any kind that he has done that. It's like if I criticized Tim Tebow for not having a good arm, and then someone said, "well, you're a hypocrite because YOU don't have a good arm either!" Yes, I don't have a good arm ... but that's completely beside the point, and it doesn't make me a hypocrite. Gingrich didn't criticize people for consulting for, or being employed by, Freddie Mac, and as best we can tell, all he did was offer them advice.

And this "hypocrisy" thing has become such an article of faith, despite evidence of actual hypocrisy, that anything Gingrich says is by definition hypocritical, apparently. On Morning Joe, they noted that Gingrich worked with an organization for health reform, that didn't fully agree with conservative views on health reform. But Gingrich has always worked with people and organizations -- from Nancy Pelosi to Ted Kennedy -- that he doesn't fully agree with, if he thinks they can help push an issue in the right direction. But to the leftists, this is just more "evidence" that he is a hypocrite.

And this is, by the way, at the same time that they complain that the right doesn't work enough with people "across the aisle." Yet when Gingrich does precisely that, he is a "hypocrite," or in the words of one of the panelists, "a terrible human being."

The saddest thing to me is that these people pretend to be rational, stating quite clearly that logic and reason are on their side, but then they abandon it to go after someone they decide to dislike.

If I am missing something here, by all means, let me know. I did leave out the amount of money Gingrich was paid -- somewhere around $1.5 million to his company, much of that going to himself, certainly -- but unless you can explain rationally why the size of money reflects poorly on him, instead of positively, I won't really care. I wish I could get paid that much money to give my opinions, and I see no reason to demonize anyone for it.

Most of the anti-1183 campaign has been based on lies, but the most recent ad about health professionals is just insanely false. It says that "public health experts speak out against 1183, and then it shows those "public health experts" lying through their teeth.

For example, Douglas Myers, MD -- President of the Washington State Medical Association -- lies that 1183 "will increase risk to public health and safety."

Sofia Aragon, JD, RN -- representing the Washington State Nurses Association -- lies that 1183 "will expand the use of hard liquor."

And Jim Cooper -- President of the Washington Association for Substance Abuse and Violence Prevention -- lies that 1183 will "lead to more senseless deaths."

Every single one of these claims is false. They are not backed up by anything more than biased conjecture. They are lies.

Douglas Myers, Sofia Aragon, and Jim Cooper are liars.

In a bombshell just days before the election, the Washington State Patrol says they have opened a criminal investigation of Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon for misappropriation of funds, due to a Snohomish County Prosecutor's office request. This is likely related to a taxpayer-funded Reardon staffer digging up dirt on challenger Mike Hope, although it could also be related to Reardon's taxpayer-funded trips abroad, to Europe and Australia.

So yes, I get it that Halloween has more children die than any other night. According to this study, most evenings one kid dies in a pedestrian accident, while on Halloween, it's 2.2 kids.

But there's gotta be a lot more than 2.2 times the number of kids out on Halloween, which means that as a percentage, the number of deaths in pedestrian accidents decreases significantly on Halloween. That's pretty awesome: it means either that pedestrian deaths don't scale linearly with the number of people, or that everyone is a lot more careful on Halloween in particular. It's probably a combination of both (probably, the more kids are out, the more careful everyone is).

That's not to say we shouldn't try to reduce that number; that is certainly a worthwhile goal. And that's why several years ago, Congress changed the switch from daylight savings time to regular time to after Halloween.

The problem is, though, that when the darkness shifted by an hour, my family, as with many others, started the evening's festivities an hour later. So there was nothing gained for us, except that it messed up the kids' sleep scheduled even more.

So, Congress, as usual: thanks for nothing.

Our entire nation depends, for our economic future, on an industry that gets hundreds of billions of dollars in direct subsidies from the federal government each year. This year, President Obama's administration is increasing it by tens of billions more.

Yet each year, the industry charges more and more money to consumers for the same product. Obama would have us think that the solution is to continue to give more subsidies to the industry, when the prices increase as subsidies do.

No, I am not talking about oil or gasoline, I am talking about higher education. Giving subsidies for education -- in the form of grants and loans for the students -- makes far less economic sense than a subsidy for oil (which is saying something). The amount a prospective student can afford to pay doesn't really change from year to year. Sure, they can get a job and so on, but other than that, it doesn't change much. So when government pays for a bigger and bigger chunk of the price, the colleges are free to simply increase the price. There's no real competition in pricing, because consumers will pay whatever they can pay and government will pick up the rest of the tab. The competition is all in what services are provided, so the colleges use the extra money from the higher tuition to provide more and more services, justifying the price increases ... but it doesn't give consumers a proportionally better education, it just keeps the college in the competition for more students.

So make no mistake: more money for grants and loans is not money for the students, it's a subsidy for the colleges, and students end up no better off. And, actually, they are far worse off, because this is all just being added on to their liabilities as a taxpayer, ensuring higher deficits and more debt.

Obama's plans to increase college grants and loans are nothing other than direct subsidies for colleges, and just make college more expensive.

Along similar lines of yesterday's post about inequality: does anyone actually care about what these protestors think, besides themselves? We've already established I don't care about anyone else's feelings, and I mean that in a very specific way: you are entitled to feel however you like, and it doesn't -- nor do I think it should -- affect me one way or the other. So yeah, some lady on the front page of CNN is "87 and mad as hell," but so what? Why should that have anything to do with me?

I am looking for substance, people. If you just want to not feel bad, move to Haiti where everyone else is worse than you are, but people are more equal.

But there is no substance. They are mad that other people have bigger houses, and so they want to take them away. That's all this appears to be, to me, as I roll through Westlake Plaza.

Vice President Biden said the reason for the protests is that a "bargain has been breached with the American people." What bargain is that? I know of none, and, as usual, he doesn't say. He just wants us to tap into the emotions, like he does. It's the 21st century version of "I feel your pain."

Well, I don't feel their pain, because I see no substance to their complaints. Biden compares them to the Tea Party, but they are inverted: the Tea Party wants government to leave them alone, and the leftist protestors want a more activist government that will take more from everyone else and give it to themselves.

One of their most often-made complaints is something that I hestitate to even mention because almost everyone on the right agrees with it, and it's not really their point: they want to end "crony capitalism." Well a strong majority of the people on the right that I know think that we should end government subidies for businesses, including ethanol and other farming, health insurance for employees, and so on. These protestors don't care about ending "crony capitalism" any more than most of the rest of the country.

No, what they really want is to simply use government force against things they think are "unfair" to make them more "fair." That's at the root of this. When banks charge 44 cents per transaction, and the actual swipe cost is only four cents, why, that's unfair! So Senator Durbin and President Obama swoop in and cap the fees at half the average. The problem is that, aside from the fact that banks have more invested in the cost than the actual cost of the transaction (such as printing cards, providing customer service, development of the systems, and so on), it's not the job -- or even the right -- of the federal government to decide what is and isn't "fair" in the free marketplace.

(Of course, a more practical problem is that the banks always win anyway, and Durbin and Obama knew absolutely that the banks would pass on the lost revenue to the consumers through increased fees. Frankly, I wonder if the Democrats set a cap on swipe fees just so they could demonize the banks when the banks inevitably raised fees on consumers to compensate. Why have merchants upset with banks when you can have the consumers upset by banks?)

Look, people, if you don't like the banks, then avoid them. Same goes for any other business. You can do it. It just means you can't be lazy and you have to do more for youself. I know the thought of being independent scares you, but the thought of a government capable of forcing any person or business to do whatever the people want at the moment is far scarier. And leftists, of all people, should understand that.

I would like someone who decries "inequality" to tell me one way in which someone else having more than you hurts you.

Please realize I am not talking about someone else having more power than you and thus being able to violate your rights without recourse. That is a separate problem. No one should be allowed to do that, regardless of how much wealth they have. What someone does to harm you with their wealth is not a problem of wealth inequality, but of insufficient protections of your rights.

I also don't care about your feelings. If you feel bad because someone else has a Bugatti Veyron and you can't afford a Ford Pinto, that's your problem. Your feelings are your responsibility alone.

And here's a hint: the fact that someone can do something you can't doesn't actually hurt you.

Your standard of how well off you are has -- or should have -- nothing to do with how much Bill Gates has. It is about how happy you are, whether you can provide education and food and shelter and clothing for your family ... the standard "standard of living" stuff. And while Americans have paltry wealth compared to the top 1% in America, they are fabulously wealthy compared to most other countries.

It is about you and your family, not about everyone else. Inequality is nonsense.

Can someone please explain to me why the Tacoma School District doesn't just fire people who don't show up to work?

I am not saying teachers don't have an unalienable right to strike. Of course they do. We all do. But none of us have any right to keep our jobs if we don't show up for work. They won't work; the district needs them to work; so, why not just fire them and hire new teachers?

What am I missing?

President Obama hates jobs.

Well, OK: President Obama hates private sector jobs.

Well, OK: President Obama hates not having a maximum of government power over businesses and jobs, and would gladly sacrifice private-sector, non-union, non-government-controlled, jobs for the mere opportunity to try to create far fewer jobs under the thumb of government, whether under the NLRB or direct government subsidies.

How else to explain taking $1.5 trillion out of an economy that needs capital to grow jobs? He certainly can't believe that it is better for job creation to funnel that money out of the private sector and into government only to come back to the private sector in ways he thinks is more appropriate, with strings attached every step of the way. That's just stupid. No, it makes much more sense that he simply wants government control over those jobs.

And similarly, how else to explain the Boeing situation? Here we have a company actually creating jobs, and lots of them. They decide, for many reasons, to open a new plant in South Carolina. Probably, one of those reasons is the lower costs of labor: not just in not having to pay union wages, but also in not having to spend time/money dealing with the union. So they open the new plant, and hire thousands of workers. Not a single union job is lost due to the new plant; on the contrary, more union workers have been hired by Boeing. The fact is that not a single person was harmed in any way by opening the new plant.

So: thousands of new employees hired, no jobs lost at other locations, making a product that's been creating, and will continue to create and maintain, even more jobs across the sector.

And what does Obama do with this success story? He tries to kill it. Literally. He is trying to shut down the S.C. plant, for no reason other than that the unions don't control the jobs there. Boeing did nothing wrong whatsoever, broke no laws, and violated no code, other than than the (in some states) unwritten rule, "thou shalt not hire nonunion workers." They are jobs, yes, but not the right kind of jobs.

When Obama says his main goal is to create jobs, we know he's lying. If that were his main goal, he would not be seeking to destroy thousands of jobs in South Carolina just because they are not the kind of jobs he approves of. He would not be taking $1.5 trillion out of the economy. Those are things you just don't do when you're trying to create jobs.

President Obama attacks Mitt Romney for flip-flopping on his health care plan, even though Obama was vehemently against a health insuance mandate during his campaign, and now is vehemently for it.

Obama attacks Republicans for not passing free trade agreements, even though Obama hasn't given the agreements to the Congress to pass. They literally cannot pass those agreements because Obama won't let them. It's the presidential version of "stop hitting yourself!"

Obama attacks Rick Perry for threatening Ben Bernanke -- which never happened -- when Perry said Texas would "treat [Bernanke] pretty ugly" for his "almost treasonous" devaluation of the dollar, while at the same time Obama says nothing about the many Democrats calling Republicans terrorists. He calls Perry's claim "irresponsible," without saying why, and I can't tell what he means: sure, Perry was flatly wrong that the devlauation is "almost treasonous," but he is making a perfectly responsible and rational point about how terrible for the country Bernanke's policies have been.

Obama is, these days, constantly arguing that we should put country before politics, while at the same time constantly putting politics before country, every single chance he gets. He literally hasn't spoken to the public in more than a month without making partisan attacks against the Republicans. That's fine, but to do that as President while saying we should put the country before politics? That makes you look like an utter fool, eclipsed only by the fools who believe you.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone can still take this man seriously as President. It'd be one thing if Obama had significant substance and was being dishonest in his rhetoric, but he really isn't doing anything of substance: just like in his campaign, he's all talk and no action, all style and no substance.

Millions of people voted for Obama because of some bizarrely nebulous vision of "hope and change," with barely any detail on what that meant in practice; and most of the few details Obama did offer -- no increased taxes on incomes under $250,000, pulling out of Iraq, closing Gitmo, lowering unemployment, fixing the economy, no health insurance mandate -- he's reneged on. We shouldn't be surprised: he was elected without much substance, and he's governing without much substance.

I don't say people shouldn't have voted for Obama in the general election, because at that point it could have been a lesser of two evils thing, if you love Democrats or hate Republicans or something: but how did it make any sense to pick the no-exerience, no-substance Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton? How could you possibly have been so easily suckered by this shyster's facade, actually believing that he could do all the magical things you thought he represented? Say what you like about Clinton, at least she's a serious person who knows how to get things done.

If this were 2010, I'd "hope" that Obama would "change" and actually try to lead this country instead of continuing to blame everyone for his problems and offer literally no solutions to the problems we're facing. I've given up on such hope. How about you?

Would it be inappropriate for me to note that we wouldn't be seeing riots like those in London, here in the U.S.?

Try to imagine what would happen here, even in Seattle. On the first night, people would perhaps be taken by surprise, we'd have a public outcry. Maybe we would think it was over, and not prepare for the second night. But by the third night, most every business would be under armed guard, and it wouldn't take many dead rioters before the whole affair would come to an abrupt end.

It likely wouldn't even reach a third night. Business owners would arm themselves and stand watch and people would die. And rioters, most of them, would understand this, and fewer of them would even bother coming out. We don't tend to have multi-night riots in the U.S.

There are exceptions, such as the "Rodney King riots." I was in L.A. at the time, so I don't forget it. But that was a much larger group of rioters, and while the shopowners abandoned by the police did arm themselves, many of the rioters were armed too. So I guess my point is that if it happens in the U.S., it will only be if the rioters outnumber the shopowners and cops ... which means, stay out of L.A. and you'll be fine. Even then, the federal government stepped in to stop the rioting and widespread rioting was finished by the fourth night.

For now, I leave comparisons of London and Wisconsin to the reader.

So, let me get this straight: every problem we've faced in the economy since Obama took office is Bush's fault, because it started before Obama took office. But the "Tea Party" has been a small minority in the House for less than seven months, and, according to the same Obama (via his advisor, David Axelrod), the downgrade is all the Tea Party's fault?

The hypocrisy on this is jarring. Even if the criticism made sense, the case being made here requires an amount of cognitive dissonance, between don't-blame-me-I'm-new and blame-them-they're-newer, greater than the American psyche can muster.

Of course, the criticism doesn't make sense. Yes, of course, the "Tea Party conservatives" -- I tend to just think of them as "conservatives" -- in the House did hamper Boehner's ability to get an all-Republican bill through the House. But this obviously raises the question: what was stopping him from getting a bipartisan bill through the House? He needed to get a bill the Democratic Senate would agree to anyway, because "Tea Party" support wouldn't pass a bill through the Senate. And oddly, the Senate never passed a single attempt at compromise until the final hours before the "deadline," and the Democrats in the House didn't support any bill until a few hours before that.

What the Democrats are really saying is that the "Tea Party" is to blame for not going along with a bill that the Democrats also wouldn't go along with. What makes this criticism even worse is that if the Democrats went along with it, it would've passed weeks or months earlier in both houses, whereas if only the "Tea Party" went along with it, it still wouldn't have passed the Senate.

Any objective view of the events shows that it was the Democrats that prevented passage of a compromise bill earlier on: they opposed all attempts to pass any legislation, never offered any of their own until the end, and opposed the exact same bills they villify the "Tea Party" for opposing.

But it's even worse than this hypocritical nonsense: on substance, the "Tea Party" proposal was the only one that, guaranteed, actually would've prevented a downgrade. Say whatever you like about the S&P statement, but the main concern was ever-increasing debt, and cut/cap/balance (along with similar proposals) would've fixed that problem, even if you don't like other results of it. No other proposals, including the one that passed, seriously deals with the debt. Obama's guaranteed continuing debt increases, and Boehner's merely holds out hope for some cuts in the near future.

It's a sad world to live in where a group of citizens can be ticked off, elect people to represent them, who then back the only plan that will actually solve the problem they were elected to solve, and (as a small minority) voice their opposition to a plan that the entire opposing party also opposes (because it won't solve the problem they were elected to solve), and somehow ... they end up with all the blame.

Someone please explain to me what is "broken" about our political system ... especially as opposed to any other time period since George Washington was President. I keep hearing it, but I am not seeing it. People apparently expect me to believe that it's a problem to have representatives who fairly reflect the views of the people who elected them, but I'm not buying it.

John Boehner's bill cuts discretionary spending by $917B over 10 years. That's $91.7B a year (I can do maths!) which I think isn't even inflation adjusted, and certainly is cumulative. So it means cutting our deficit from about $1.1T to $1T, which will then promptly begin growing again.

Yes, there's a promise of more cuts, but no one here can believe in any such promise. Future action is always negotiated. Raising the debt limit is real and can't be rolled back any time soon; spending cuts are at best very temporary, and if promised in the future, don't exist at all.

The biggest win for the right in this bill is that they got the Democrats to concede to spending cuts without revenue increases, even if the spending cuts pretty much only exist on paper. As Bill O'Reilly said last night, combined with the massive outcry from the "far left" about how terrible this deal is, and the cries from the "far right" about how this isn't enough cutting, this basically sets up the 2012 elections thusly: if you want government to spend less, you'll vote for Republicans; if you want it to spend more, you'll vote for Democrats.

It's still amazing to me that pundits and politicians on the left are continuing to push this line that the GOP is the "Party of No." The Republicans passed multiple bills out of the House -- none with Democratic support -- and the Senate Democrats killed each one. Finally when they got to the final bill in the House, the Republicans supported it in far greater numbers and percentages than the Democrats. Can someone please explain the rational basis for this "Party of No" stuff?

Not that I care if my party has such a label: I believe the job of an elected representative in government is primarily to tell constituents No. No, I won't protect your business with regulation and higher taxes on competitors; no, I won't give you a tax credit; no, I won't build you a sports stadium; no, I won't extend your unemployment indefinitely. Saying no is hard, but it's part of the job of any good representative, and attacking someone for saying "no" is, to me, akin to attacking someone else for having courage. If you want to say that a specific use of the word "no" is wrong, fine; but that, of course, isn't what they are doing.

What isn't amazing to me is that the left is continuing to trot out the claim that Republicans are "terrorists." The idea they are trying to get across is that Republicans will only agree to a plan on their own terms, or else they will "blow up" the country's economy. But the facts show clearly, as demonstrated above, that, from the beginning, it's the Democrats that have opposed every Republican offer; meanwhile, the Democrats refused to put any offer on the table at all. And in the final bill, the Republicans still backed it far more than the Democrats did.

Just who do they think they are fooling when they make such an obvious lie by saying the Republicans are the ones trying to "blow up" anything?

This level of self-deception is always amazing to me, though perhaps it shouldn't be.

Can someone please explain to me how the few Republicans who oppose Boehner's debt ceiling plan are "crazy," but the couple hundred Democrats who oppose it are ... not?

No, I didn't think so.

I mean, you could adopt the view of that idiot savant from the New York Times, Paul Krugman, who consistently pushes a textbook question-begging fallacy as though it were a rational point of view, and say that the Republicans are worse because they are wrong, and the Democrats are right, regardless of your ability to actually demonstrate that without resorting to mere opinion.

But other than by question-begging, you can't seriously back up the claim that the Republicans who oppose the plan are the problem, not when the Democrats are unanimously opposing the plan, and there's far more of them who could push the bill over the top.

So why do we keep hearing that the Republicans who oppose it are crazy and evil and stupid, but we don't hear the same about the Democrats? There's one primary reason: the Tea Party is the most influential grassroots political organization in a lifetime in this nation, and the left fears it and wants to discredit it.

I could go on about how the "cut, cap, and balance" approach that the Tea Party folks support is the only rational plan moving forward: the Boehner, McConnell, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama proposals would all result in increased spending and almost certainly decreased credit rating. Even if you don't believe that, however, it is certainly rational to believe that, as it is in line with what S&P has recently said; and further, it is rational to believe that if we don't being to actually cut spending now (again, something the other proposals do not do), that we have a greater risk of long-term financial problems than if we default now.

The Washington DC mentality -- mostly because of fear of losing their own jobs -- is to always put off what can hurt until tomorrow. There's no doubt that default now would hurt. But I think bankruptcy -- which is the likely result of continuing to increase spending and debt -- will hurt more, so without actual spending decreases (not merely cuts in projected spending, but cuts in year-over-year spending), I would not support a debt increase, myself.

I could also point out how people who say not raising the debt limit would mean default are lying, but I've proven that several times over already (as have others, yet the myth persists). Again, it would be painful -- cutting massively across government so that we do not default -- but, again, that's better than bankruptcy.

So I could go on and on about these things, and show that the "Tea Party" position is more rational. But if your position is just, as the Democrats keep (dishonestly) saying, that we just need to increase the debt limit, and that this is the most important thing so we can get back to the problem of jobs ... then why are all the Democrats opposing all of Boehner's very modest proposals?

It's not a handful of "Tea Party Republicans" taking us to the brink here. The math is very plain, even for math-challenged people like Krugman: it's the Democrats who are preventing the debt limit increase. They refuse to back a (laughably) modest proposal by Boehner, and refuse to come up with any alternative.

It is utterly irrational and malicious to claim that Republicans are "taking America hostage" because a handful oppose the bill, while Democrats are "justified" because ... well, they just are; or that the Democrats are standing up to Boehner's bill because they are "trying to ... save the world from the Republican budget. We're trying to save life on this planet as we know it today."

Think about that: Nancy Pelosi is literally saying that $80 billion in cuts per year over 10 years is going to destroy life on this planet ... after she ballooned per-year spending about 15 times that in her short time as speaker, and the yearly increases moving forward are going to far exceed the amount Boehner proposes to cut.

Then again, no one today should be naive enough to look to Krugman or Pelosi for rational thought. Apparently, though, they do.

Obama and most Democrats say we should do what they've always said we should do: have a "balanced" approach that has a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Now, in fact, they actually propose increasing spending, but somehow this equates, in the media, to the Democrats "compromising" without regard to what their "base" wants.

But when the Republicans say we should do what they've always said we should do -- cut spending and don't raise taxes -- somehow they are afraid to offend their "base" so they refuse to "compromise."

It's pretty stupid stuff. What really gets me is how the media loves to say this is evidence that Washington is "broken," as if the fact of massive debt increases under Bush, and then far worse under Obama, are not evidence enough. If the Republicans completely capitulated and gave Obama what he is asking for -- tax increases and debt increases without any spending cuts -- the media would surely talk about how this was a "success" for democracy, an example of how Washington "can still work," even though it has set us on an accelerated course toward bankruptcy. Boehner and other Republicans would be lauded for their sensible compromise.

But if the Democrats gave in and we got "cut, cap, and balance," it would be, in the media, a massive failure, a complete and total surrender by Democrats, the end of the party as we know it, because how can it even exist if it won't stand up for its basic principles?

We see this passive-aggressive mentality in the recent flareup between Reps. Wasserman Schultz and West: the former -- the chair of the DNC -- gave a campaign speech on the floor of the House designed to hurt West with his constituents. She didn't use his name, and she didn't come out and say "he wants to kill old people," but she wanted to present people with the dishonest implication that West was sacrificing the health of the elderly for handouts to corporations. West responded, in a privare e-mail, with some nasty invective directly toward her.

The media, of course, thinks what West did was far worse. But I can't see it. What he said was more direct, but in substance, wasn't any worse than what she said. And at least he said it privately, instead of on the floor of the House (which violated House rules). And completely ignored is that while what Wasserman Schultz said about West was almost entirely untrue, what he said about her was almost entirely true.

We have this irrational style-over-substance, passive-aggressive, mentality, where if I call someone a liar, that's somehow worse than the lie I am referring to. So a process if "broken" if we cannot "compromise," but if we have a "compromise" that leads to bankruptcy, we have a process that is "working."

This sort of nonthink is no more evident than in the media's treatment of "fairness." On Meet the Press this morning, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin eloquently made the case for how great politicians of the past had a wonderful sense of fairness, which she essentially defined as being a moderate. But I defy her, or anyone else, to objectively explain to me how "cut, cap, and balance" is unfair to anyone. It's the beginning of the ultimate in fairness. We'd also need to have a flat-rate income or consumption tax, and continued cuts in the federal government, before we could be fair, but to me the entire federal policy of the moderates -- which is mostly leftwing-lite, including massive taxes on the middle class and wealthy, and massive expenditures to give things to people who "need" them -- is grossly unfair (not to mention unconstitutional).

Fairness means treating people equally, by the same standards. Fairness is the rule of law, where we don't let men change the rules to be whatever they wish after the fact. Fairness is, essentially, libertarianism/conservatism, where the government doesn't tell people how to live or what to do, let alone take what people have in order to bring about some desired social outcome.

You might think that it's a good thing to take from the rich to give to the poor, but it's not fair: it is, essentially, stealing, which is the opposite of fairness. When I give to charity, I don't do it because it's "fair," it's because I want to help people who need the help. I don't have this irrational self-loathing causing me to think that what I have isn't fair to other people. Of course it's fair: I didn't violate any laws or anyone's rights or do anything unreasonable to get what I have. So how is it not fair that I have it, that justifies anyone saying it is "fair" to take it to give it to someone else?

What bothers me isn't that someone has a different (and completely illogical) view of "fairness," or "compromise," or "broken": it's that the media almost entirely accepts these views as objective truth, when, if anything, there's a serious dearth of rational arguments backing up those views in the first place.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) accused Republicans of opposing the debt increase because they are racists.

Now, obviously, she is not stupid enough to believe such a thing. She has been in Congress for 16 years, and she knows quite well that what she's saying makes no sense. She also knows that no one else in Congress believes it, or will be swayed by her words.

So why say it?

There's only one reason: to perpetuate the lie that Republicans are racist so that black voters will be more likely to vote for Democrats. She hates black people so much, has so little respect for them, that she cannot honestly lay out the issues and trust them with making their own decisions about how to vote for based on the facts. She wants to keep them down and beholden to her, by lying to them about some group of "others" that's out to get them.

And frankly, President Obama -- whom I, along with many others, see as someone who can help heal our racial divides in this country -- should call Jackson Lee out for her overt lies to black voters, if he really cares about race relations in this country more than he cares about partisan politics.

(And on a side note, it's hard for me to care much about Roger Clemens allegedly lying to Congress, when Jackson Lee and many other elected representatives tell lies on the floor of Congress almost every day it's in session. Now, I know that what they say on the floor is protected, so I am not trying to draw legal equivalency to Clemens' hearing, but the fact remains that I just couldn't care less about liars accusing liars of lying.)

(On another side note, Jackson Lee also lies when she says raising the debt limit is required by the 14th Amendment. I agree fulfilling our debt obligations is required by the 14th Amendment, but it's indisputable that we can do that without raising the debt limit.)

Look, I just want to be clear here: when Obama and the Democrats talk about two or three or four trillion dollars in spending cuts over ten years, they are lying.

They propose to increase spending, not decrease it.

The total budget is currently less than four trillion dollars. If they proposed four trillion dollars in actual cuts, then we would have no spending less. So they aren't proposing that, obviously.

What they propose is to reduce the total deficits by that much over the next ten years. And that's not even very impressive, because it's compounded annually. If you cut a $100 billion program, that's $1 trillion over ten years. So you just need to cut $400 billion in the first year, and you're done cutting.

Considering we're well over a trillion dollars in the hole this year, cutting $400 billion from the budget seems completely lame.

Now, since Obama hasn't released any specifics, we don't know how this would actually play out. My guess is that it would be significantly cutting the rate of growth almost entirely across the board, so in year one you'd see maybe a hundred billion less than what you would've had ... but still a big net increase in spending over 10 years, and probably over every individual year.

The bottom line is that Obama is proposing tax increases, debt increases, and spending increases. And we are supposed to think that he's compromising? I want spending to be less in ten years than it is now. Heck, if we just spent the same amount every year, over the next ten years, in actual dollars -- not adjusted for inflation -- that would be a cut, and I'd be happy with it. We'd catch up with spending, and start to pay down the debt. I'd be willing to compromise on both the debt and taxes, if it meant that our spending would be actually cut.

But under Obama's proposal, our spending will continue to increase, as will our taxes and debt. Let's not pretend otherwise.

It's always seemed, from the beginning of this debate, nearly self-evident that it is not true that a failure to increase the debt limit equates to default. We obviously have enough revenue to pay our debt service, despite the lies from the Democrats. Almost every Democrat has repeated this absurd lie, and yet many people still haven't caught on.

I say it is nearly self-evident because all you need to know is that our revenues (over $2 trillion) are more than half our expenses (over $3 trillion), and that debt service is not nearly half our expenses ($164 billion in FY 2010; as we have no budget for FY 2011, because the Democrats didn't want to pass it an election year, I am unsure of the actual FY 2011 figure, but it's probably still well under 10 percent of revenues).

Therefore, we have more than enough money coming in to pay for our debt service, and we are in no danger of being forced into default come August 2. It's very clear, and very obvious.

It's bizarre that seasoned newspeople like Bob Schieffer don't even understand it. He was completely outclassed by Michele Bachmann a couple of weeks ago in this exchange:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Congress will soon decide whether to raise the debt ceiling, which has to be done in order for the government to borrow the money to pay the bills that are coming due. ... would you really vote against raising the debt ceiling and allow the government or force the government to begin defaulting on its debts?

REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN: Well, first of all it isn’t true that the government would default on its debt because very simply the Treasury secretary can pay the interest on the debt first and then from there we have to just prioritize our spending. ...

SCHIEFFER: Congresswoman, I have to take issue with what you say that ... the government would be able to pay its financial obligations. Experts inside and outside the government say that if we don't raise the debt ceiling, we face the United States having to default on its financial obligations. ... Are you saying these are scare tactics or are you saying that's not true ... how can you say that?

BACHMANN: It is scare tactics because, Bob, the interest on the debt isn't any more than ten percent of what we're taking in. In fact, it's less than that. And so, the Treasury secretary can very simply pay the interest on the debt first then we're not in default.

Of course, Bachmann was absolutely right, and the math is so completely clear, and Schieffer embarrassed himself and his network.

Default, I've been telling people, is a choice. If we do not raise the debt limit, and we default, it is only because President Obama chose to default. It is because he put other priorities ahead of paying the debt service. You can blame the Republicans for blocking an increase in the debt limit, sure, but Obama still has a choice ... and I'd turn right around and blame the Democrats for increasing spending -- and therefore, the debt -- more than any time since the second World War.

And that's really the point: we've tried many ways to get the government to reverse its spending habits. We've tried electing a fiscally conservative President with a Democratic Congress; we went with all Democrats, then put Republicans under a Democratic President; we tried electing all Republicans; then all Democrats again. All we learned is that at best, the deficit decreases during good times, sometimes even to the point of a surplus, but that spending continues to rise, and given our economic policies, we cannot count on the good times to continue.

So I'm fine with forcing massive federal spending cuts, if that's what it takes (and yes, I realize the cuts would be massive: almost all discretionary spending would be cut, we'd have to bring home almost all our troops, cut all spending on education and HUD and health and transportation, yadda yadda yadda ... sounds great to me). Call it draconian or evil or heartless or unwise; I don't care. Children often say the same thing when their parents take away their credit cards. Obama recently talked about managing the government's financial affairs like families do, but he wasn't talking about any families I know: they do not go out and get more credit cards or increased limits every time their credit cards run out. They prioritize spending. They, for the most part, pay the bills first (or do tithes or charity first, and then the bills, depending on their convictions), and then they divy up what is left over.

Obama and the Democrats, and, yes, many Republicans too, act like spoiled, entitled, children who believe any limits on their spending are unfair and unjustified and just who do we think we are, anyway?

Well, even the worst parents often wise up and take action, even if it's a bit late, and they cut those cards and make their kids get jobs to pay off the balance. Yes, Mr. President, let's act like responsible families: I urge Congress to refuse to up your limit, and to take away your credit cards, and to force the government to live within its means for once.

Frankly, I might even be OK with raising taxes if it corresponded with scheduled reductions in the debt ceiling; that is, if the government were forced to use that money to pay down the debt. As that's unlikely, I won't be supporting any tax increases, let alone debt ceiling increases.

If the Republicans held the line on this, I might actually be proud of my party's congressional delegation in DC, for the first time in quite awhile.

I've had many problems with Sam Reed's execution of his duties as Secretary of State. But I also think about the good things he's done and how bad it could have been otherwise.

Consider if Jay Inslee, for example, were Secretary of State. Would he have worked as hard to clean up the voter rolls, or required identification at polling places?

If Bill Gates Sr. came up to Inslee with an initiative titled, "Initiative Measure No. 1070 concerns taxation," would Inslee have forced them to change the title to something like, "Initiative Measure No. 1098 concerns establishing an income tax and reducing other taxes"?

I doubt it.

Now, granted, for every positive I could name, I'm sure many of you could name multiple negatives. We could have a debate on whether the law really did require him to certify Gregoire as the winner, or even if not, whether he exercised his discretion properly. I could rant for long hours about the idiocy of a blanket primary, and of a "top two" primary, or any other primary that doesn't fit the purpose of nominating candidates. I could go off on how terrible it is that Reed has helped spearhead the destruction of the secret ballot in Washington with the now-near-universal vote-at-home system.

But for all his faults, and for all our disagreements, Sam's been a conscientious and fair-minded public servant who has done a lot of good, and has done far more good than many on the left would have done in his place.