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In this post on TNT’s Political Buzz, Oregonian editorial tells Washington: Don’t go there on assisted suicide, death with dignity ballot measure, the blogger, Joe Turner, says this:

I’m posting this just to add to mix of debate. Oregon has had an assisted suicide law for a decade.

This was forwarded by a consultant from the opposition camp to Initiative 1000, which is on Washington’s Nov. 4 ballot:

Then he posts the text of an editorial in the Oregonian.

The claim is that the author of the editorial is against the measure in WA, and was against the measure in OR, but then states that they defended the OR measure from [the arch nemesis of all liberals,] the Bush Administration. But the editorial itself is either a complete fabrication or one of the worst opinion pieces ever written.
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Tuesday at the West End Neighborhood Council meeting we were blindside by the executive committee with a variance issue. We heard from one side, but the other side wasn’t told that there would be a vote. That one pushed me over the top in my tolerance for manipulative politics. More on that later.

After finding out about the public meeting regarding variances for a synagogue in a residential neighborhood on Mildred, I decided to attend and get the other side of the story.

It was like most such public meetings. One side was calm while the other was emotional. Each time the emotional group’s concerns were answered, the answer was ignored and the same thing was brought up again. The priceless moment of the meeting was when on of the more emotional neighbors stood up and proclaimed that his side was being rational and sticking to the issues and the other side was making emotional pleas. Made me wish I had it on video.
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It’s hard to tell what’s happening in King County but the elections office says it may break records for new voter registrations. Apparently this isn’t just the people who want to vote for Sarah Palin since this trend was going on before the announcement was made naming her as McCain’s running mate. There might be some of that involved, but not all of it is.

According to the AP story in the TNT:

King County is just 41,000 voters away from its all-time record and new voters are signing up at a rate of more than 10,000 a month. So far more than 16,000 new voters have signed up in September and last month, 19,000 enrolled.

That’s 16,000 for the first half of September. Maybe that’s the Palin effect, but the 19,000 last month probably aren’t. A Rasmussen poll does put McCain/Palin within 2 points of Obama/Biden in Washington state and these two facts could be connected.
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I’m getting sick and tired of the Tacoma News Tribune and what passes for journalism in that rag.

I’ve been relatively quiet about the garbage they print, but I’m to the point where I can’t keep quiet about it.

What pushed me to reconsider giving them a pass was their puff-piece reporting in their blogs, such as the one that failed to expose the group behind the ‘tribute’ on the waterfront as a left-wing anti-war group. It also ended up in a prominent position in the Labor Day print edition. Then there was the puff-piece about a member of the same group (with some cronies) trying to start an anti-war coffee shop near the entrance to Fort Lewis.

So I thought I’d start with this diatribe in their Political Buzz blog, which I think I’ll be referring to as the ‘Political Bias’ blog. It introduces a new spokesman for the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP).

Earlier today, Patrick Bell, current communications director and chief propagandist for the Washington State Republican Party, brought his replacement on a tour of the press houses in Olympia.

Matt Lundh is the new guy. His job is to issue periodic diatribes against anything Democratic and, of course, to make state GOP party chairman Luke Esser sound articulate. (OK! OK! Luke the Truth is a former journalist, of sorts, but let me have a little fun here at their expense.) [emphasis theirs]

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First there were claims that Tall Ships Tacoma was a success, although turnout was lower than expected. Then it came out that the event lost money. Now a report has come out that shows some successes for the event. I think there’s something to learn here for our city, if they’ll pay attention.

Since I don’t have the actual report I’m going to have to go by a TNT blog entry, which generally slant in a particular political direction with regard to local issues. But there are some things that can be gleaned.

And of the roughly 300,000 people attended this year’s event about 48,000 visitors came from more than 50 miles away. On average, they stayed 2.6 days and spent $88.09 per person per day.

That’s good news, right? Well maybe not. That means that 16% of the people who attended presumably were drawn to the event from outside the area. But later in the article information was given about another Tall Ships event, just North of here.
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There’s no doubt that Sarah Palin has changed this election. Other than the occasional October surprise that grows legs I don’t think I’ve seen this big of a shift in my life. It’s taken a little time to settle out, but we can finally start measuring the actual effect she’s had.

McCain had lost the base of his party, conservative Republicans. He did this by repeatedly leaning left on issues that were important to them while doing nothing to try to win them back. I’m not sure if his advisers had actually calculated the effect Sarah Palin would have or if they just got lucky. But they struck gold, not just with the base of the party, but with others as well.

Political wonks on the left have been complaining that ‘white, middle-class women’ have been deserting the Democrat party in droves. Many of these were leaning toward Hillarity (oops… I mean Senator Clinton) and when Barry took the nomination away from her they lost interest in the party. Then along came someone who is just like them. So they changed their opinion. They’re not endorsing McCain. They’re endorsing Sarah Palin.

When she entered the picture I started thinking about Washington state and whether she could put the state in play. If the information I received in an email today is correct, then she has done just that. Here’s what it said:

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The Tacoma Club was once more than just ‘An Unparalleled Business & Social Club’. For years it was the place to be if you wanted to do business in Tacoma, especially if your company was business-to-business play.

Tacoma’s business community has a lot of unwritten rules. But if you want to do business here you have to know the rules and live by them. Mostly, these rules tell you which organizations to join and which ones to contribute to. The Tacoma Club was one of those ‘must have’ memberships. But all of that changed.

I wish I could say that the rules have gone away, but they’ve just been ‘rewritten’. It used to be that you had to schmooze the local elite and rub elbows with the good ol’ boys. Now you have to show your green credentials and rub elbows with artists. Same game, different names.
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Amazing. Oprah created the empty suit’s popularity but now doesn’t want her show to be political. She created the liberal obsession over Barry, but when the first woman GOP candidate for VP comes along she wants nothing to do with her. I guess her political bias trumps her support for women.

I’m not an Oprah fan. I think she’s bad for this country. She might do some good for some people but she also has done a lot of harm to a lot of people by making them feel ‘empowered’ about being a victim. As a Christian minister I’m all for people rising to their full potential, but not on the backs others who don’t deserve to be trampled.

I used to view Oprah as an equal opportunity exploiter. She will exploit anyone who makes themselves available to her. She has been behind some of the worst garbage to hit the airwaves in daytime TV.
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It seems as though the Obama campaign’s response to the Palin nomination and acceptance speech might be to be nice to her, even defending her against the media. Is that it? Will it work?

Biden was on TV this morning and even when pressed to attack Sarah Palin he refused and defended her against the media attacks saying some were outrageous. Based on this and other comments it appears that is the campaign strategy.

Don’t be fooled, though, by a pretentious campaign strategy. From the moment she was announced as McCain’s running mate they were scrambling to find a way to attack her. Their initial responses were so bad they needed to pull back from it.

I wonder how far the campaign will go to stop the media from attacking their opponent. Will they go so far as to write a letter to the FEC (Federal Elections Commission) demanding that they stop? That’s what Obama did in an attempt to stop information about his ties to an unrepentant domestic terrorist named Bill Ayers. So, I’ll just sit quietly and wait for the letter to come out in the media. Hmm… so that’s what crickets sound like during a campaign.
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Did you notice that little puff of smoke rising in the distance? It was Barry’s last hope of winning this election going up in flames.

I listened to some of the RNC speeches tonight. Rudy skewered Barry and had a lot of fun doing it. But the highlight was Sarah Palin.

At one point during the speech I actually felt sorry for Barry, losing the election this badly. Sarah Palin successfully skewered what was left after Rudy had finished with him.

I have to admit, I was holding off on blasting McCain (ok, I held back on the one barrel) until after the VP pick was announced. If it was a conservative, I would vote for him. If not, he’d get the other barrel in hopes that we would be able to pick someone else in four years.
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