Michael Hanscom

This mess just keeps getting worse and worse. A local judge declared yesterday that the Republican suit to overturn the election will proceed, and might end up voiding the election — but he wouldn’t order a new election. Would that leave Washington without a Governor?

Bridges said in Chelan County Superior Court that allegations in the lawsuit filed by Republican candidate Dino Rossi and Republican voters, if proved at trial, would be sufficient to overturn the election. And he denied a Democratic motion to limit any challenge to issues of fraud and illegal votes, saying misconduct or neglect by election officials would also be sufficient grounds for setting aside the election.

“This case should go forward, at least at this point,”; Bridges said.

But the judge said even if Republicans prove their case, he won’t give Rossi what he has said he wants from the court: a new election.

Democrats argued he didn’t have that power, and Bridges agreed.

But Bridges dismissed the remedy requested by Rossi. Still remaining in the lawsuit is Rossi’s call to have the judge nullify the November election. That, Republicans say, would create a vacancy in the office that could be filled by a special election ordered by the Legislature.

Honestly, the whole thing is pretty confusing.

Who knows, though. If things continue in this vein, I might get to fire up my write-in campaign after all!

Update: More on this from the Seattle PI:

The only way to attain a legitimate election, Republicans have consistently argued, would be a revote — a new election between the two candidates. They specifically called for a revote in their lawsuit filed in court last month.

But with the judge’s ruling yesterday, that’s not going to happen — at least not one ordered by Bridges.

He cited state law and constitutional provisions saying that even if the election was tossed out and Gregoire removed from office, such a vacancy for governor could only be filled during the next general election in which voters are allowed to vote for the state’s executive office.

Because of special constitutional rules requiring the governor to be elected during the same election year as legislators, that could mean 2006.

“From Detroit to J.A. (full mix)” by Kleptones, The from the album From Detroit to J.A. (full mix) (2005, 1:00:02).

‘Liveblogging’ (though I won’t actually post this until afterwards) the State of the Union. I’m not sure why, all it’s going to do is annoy me. But still…

He’s introduced, standing ovation. Why the standing ovation? He hasn’t even fallen over yet.

He’s been placed in office by half the people he serves…details, details. And I have to wonder just how free and sovereign Iraq really is, we seem to have our fingers in a lot of pies over there.

“Our generation has been blessed…” Unfortunately, my generation is being quite nicely screwed, thankyouverymuch.

We’ve overcome the recession? Good to know, I’ll have to look into that. We’ve added 2.3 million new jobs…which is where compared to where his predictions said we would be?

“We will keep America the economic leader of the world.” As the dollar continues to fall.

He’s going to cut the deficit — which he created — in half by 2009. Okies. First thing, eliminate government programs that aren’t performing up to standard — what standards, and which programs?

From Prairie re: No Child Left Behind, because as a teacher she knows more about that than I do:

standards are lower, minorities aren’t being tested, high school diplomas don’t mean crap
and he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about
sure, you can increase the size of Pell grants if you don’t give them to as many people

(How many times did he have to practice saying “fruitless asbestos” without stumbling? He sure slurred that…)

Why can’t people give speeches without having to pause for applause breaks after every two sentences? Whatever happened to actually listening to what someone has to say, rather than just blindly applauding every talking point? (Of course, it does give me a few more moments to type my random comments here…)

He’s re-vamping the entire tax code? Apparently there weren’t enough loopholes in the current system for his big business friends.

So he’s advocating looser immigration standards for people who will take jobs that Americans “will not take”. Oh, give me a break. In other words, cheap labor for shit jobs. There shouldn’t be jobs that Americans “will not take”. Our sense of ego and pride — “I’m too good for that job” — is a serious modern problem that drives me up the wall.

Social Security has problems that “will grow worse with time.” A long, long, long time. There is no crisis. On a long enough timeline, we’re all dead, too.

Ooh — he’s getting booed on the Social Security bankruptcy claims!

Lots of namedropping — we’re looking at all these guys ideas because we can’t come up with any good ones. Or something like that.

So these Voluntary Personal Retirement Accounts are tied to the stock market. Gee, that’s encouraging.

And now we’re getting into “honor and values”, “;responsible and moral children”, etc. Marriage, of course. He’s still pushing for a constitutional amendment on marriage?

We’re also “building a culture of life”. Ugh. I can hardly listen to this. Anti-abortion (though he doesn’t come out and say it directly), embryos are sacred.

The emphasis on young men in this three-year program to keep kids out of gangs and such feels incredibly patriarchal and sexist to me. Young women aren’t worth saving? Or will saving the young men automatically bring their girlfriends/wives/sisters along with them?

No person should have to face prosecution for crimes they didn’t commit (unless they’re in Gitmo or have dark skin), so we’re focusing on DNA based defenses (and oh, by the way, don’t worry about the national database of everyone’s DNA that we’ll be building in the meantime). Not that DNA based defenses are a bad thing, but I worry about just what kind of privacy issues might be raised, and how they’re going to approach this.

At least now he’s admitting that Al-Quaida still exists.

Most of this section of the speech could be summed up with “DANGER! DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!” Yes, we’re still in danger, everyone still wants to kill us, and we should be sure to stay under our beds wrapped in tinfoil, we understand.

We know we should be giving the military the tools they need. That’s much of what we keep telling you. That $40M of inauguration money could have bought a lot of armor, weapons, and vehicles for our troops in Iraq.

Oh, crud, my ‘net connection just went down.

Just called Speakeasy and apparently Seattle’s network is having issues — it was described to me as being “up and down like a basketball”. I’ve still got access to my own server so I can post this, but who knows when it will actually be visible to the rest of the world.

At 6:55 pm PST our main Seattle network router went offline briefly. There are still problems with connectivity and routing for all circuits connecting through Seattle. We are working on the issue and hope to have full connectivity restored shortly.

Grrr.

“Flower of Sweet Strabane” by (unknown) from the album Songs of Ireland (1994, 2:20).