"Sherman Gets Nod" says Seattle Times

Bill Sherman has picked up the endorsement of the Seattle Times in the August 21, 2007 Democratic Primary. Sherman is running for King County Prosecutor and has one opponent.

The primary this year is a month earlier than in the past because the Washington State Legislature this year passed legislation to move the date to August. While this helps candidates who win the primary have more time to transition to a general election ballot, particularly if there is a close primary vote, the voting date in August falls on the lazy summer days of August when many folks take vacations before school starts.

Sherman ran last year in a crowded field as a Democrat for a vacant seat in the 43rd Legislative seat. He did not win then but he gained valuable experience and connections and support that is giving him a leg up on his current primary challenger, Keith Sculley. Sculley appears to be a good candidate but this is his first run for public office.

Both Sherman and Sculley were campaigning Saturday at the King County Democratic Picnic at Woodland Park in Seattle. Sherman is a Deputy Prosecutor with the King County Prosecutor's office and is currently on leave. Scully worked in the Prosecutor's Office previously.

The Republican candidate is Interim Prosecutor Dan Satterberg who was appointed temporarily to fill the seat when long time Republican Prosecutor Norm Maleng unexpectedly died.

Bill Sherman has also picked up endorsements from all the Democratic Legislative District Organizations in the county as well as the King County Democrats. The King County Labor Council and Machinists Local 751 are also supporting him.

The Times, in their endorsement of Bill Sherman notes that

"Sherman has worked in the prosecutor's office since 2003. He was a deputy prosecuting attorney in its Domestic Violence Unit before going on leave to conduct his campaign. He has prosecuted sexual-assault cases, gun crimes and juvenile crimes, and says he will focus attention on repeat offenders involved in drugs or domestic violence, will overhaul the fraud division and expand the offerings under victims' services. ... Sherman is smart and well-spoken, ..."

Bill Sherman is a personable candidate that seems at ease campaigning. It is refreshing to see new Democratic candidates emerge on the political scene that are well versed on the issues. Sherman would bring new life and energy to a Prosecutor's Office that already has a strong reputation. He is working hard to win the vote both in August and November.

Phony Voter Registration by ACORN Workers

It's an embarrassment and its a felony. Seven workers hired by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) last fall to register voters in Washington State instead went to the Seattle Public Library and made up names and addresses.

You can read the Seattle Times story here "Seven charged in vote-fraud scheme" and the Seattle PI story here: "Voter-registration workers charged with submitting bogus registrations"

Of course the right wing will be endlessly using this to say "I told you". The fact is that while some 1760 made up registrations were submitted to King County it turns out that there were no votes cast by these fraudulent registrations. It was not an attempt to steal an election or change the outcome of the vote.

It was really just an amateurish attempt by seven $8.00/hour workers to defraud ACORN out of contracted services. As stated in the Seattle PI article by Grergory Roberts:

"...the scheme had nothing to do with an attempt to manipulate elections and everything to do with the workers' efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs, prosecutors said.
In fact, no votes were cast based on the more than 1,760 fraudulent registrations submitted by workers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, interim Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said.
"The defendants ... cheated their employers to get paid for work they did not actually perform," Satterberg said. "The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets."

Lazy is more like it - the canvassers only had a quota of getting 18 -20 new registrations every day. That's like only 2-3 registrations an hour. ACORN has accepted responsibility also as they should. Where was the supervision and oversight? A quick look at the registration cards should have made it obvious that something was wrong - like the writing looked the same or "Wow you really registered former heavyweight boxer Leon Spinks and former Sonics basketball player Vin Baker as well as Denis Hastert? He was a former Republican Speaker of the House.

Election officials caught it and the system worked. As the Seattle PI noted:

In accordance with elections procedure, the registrations ACORN submitted were entered in the statewide electronic database of voters, but flagged to require proof of identification should anyone signed up by them attempt to vote. Officials then compared the names and other information with driver's license and Social Security records and attempted to contact those voters when information did not match. Those attempts were fruitless, and officials Thursday removed 1,762 of the names from the rolls."

Fraudulent signatures have also been a problem in initiative campaigns in the past. Without adequate pre-hiring screening or adequate supervision phony names can be signed onto petitions. Usually petition firms that pay by the signature will check signatures against voter registration rolls.

Maybe people running voter registration drives need to institute some type of random verification by supervisor's that actual people signed the forms. Even laying cards out on a table and visually inspecting them would have prevented this embarrassment and negative publicity for an organization that has long worked the grassroots for social causes.

Governor Gregoire Tilting at Windmills?

There's a lot of wind in Kittitas County, Washington. Kittitas County is east of the Cascade Mountains. East of Ellensburg, 110 windmills already are operating as part of the Wind Horse Wind Farm. More are on the way.

Just like with building any large facility for energy, be it nuclear, coal, natural gas, or hydropower, there are changes and impacts to local communities. Weighting these local impacts against statewide significance is not always easy. But windmills aren't nuclear power plants.

Still its not necessarily surprising that local Kittitas County Commissioners last year rejected another wind project near Ellensburg called the Kittitas Valley Wind Power Project.
However the local commissioners did not have the final say. Energy projects of statewide significance are approved on the state level by EFSEC - the Energy Facilities Site Evaluation Council. EFSEC on a 6 to 1 vote subsequently approved the project to build 65 windmills, overruling the local land use decision. In a nod to local concerns they only gave approval to about half the number originally proposed.

However now Governor Gregoire has asked EFSEC to re-evaluate whether a setback of 1600 feet from residences could be increased while still keeping the projects viable. Kate Riley, an editorial columnist for the Seattle Times, wrote a column entitled "Wind-farm storm shouldn't blow governor off course" She's right.

The Governor may be trying to cater to local concerns but we're not talking about putting a coal plant or a nuclear plant in someone's back yard. The Governor should go along with the EFSEC decision - the wind plants will create 125 new jobs in Kittitas County while not adding more CO2 to the atmosphere or producing nuclear waste that will be around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Last year Washington state votes passed the Clean Energy Initiative, Initiative 937, to promote renewable energy like wind power. The voters want to move forward and if Governor Gregoire wants to micromanage where every individual wind mill goes she is moving backward not forward.

As noted in an article in the Seattle PI by Helen Wise of Ellensburg and Sara Patton of the Northwest Energy Coalition

many were shocked when the governor failed to confirm state regulators' endorsement of a well-sited wind energy project near Ellensburg. The state's Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council had voted 6-1 for Horizon Wind Energy's proposed Kittitas Valley Wind Power Project. The project had passed every environmental test and Horizon had halved the number of turbines to address some local residents' concerns.
The governor wants EFSEC to investigate an issue already addressed during the five-year process -- the economic feasibility of greatly increasing the distance between clean energy-generating turbines and outside properties. Horizon officials testified during the EFSEC and earlier county proceedings that doing so would kill the project.
The governor's remand jeopardizes the many benefits the project would bring to Kittitas County residents, which only begin with direct payments to project landowners. A Kittitas Economic Development Group report says the wind farm would increase county property tax revenues more than $1 million annually -- a 5 percent rise -- and create 125 full- and part-time jobs.
The move is also a threat to state and regionwide interests. The Kittitas Valley project is the first proposed renewable-energy development to come before the governor since voters approved the state's clean-energy Initiative 937."

One has to wonder what's up? Other wind projects are also in the pipeline to be considered. Governor Gregoire needs to be clear about the value of these projects in producing clean energy and not increasing global warming. She is sending the wrong message questioning a 6 to 1 decision by EFSEC that already reduced significantly the approved number of viable wind turbines.

The Price Relation Between Beer, Barley, Corn, Ethanol and Tortillas

The Denver Post reports that beer prices are rising faster than inflation. Expect it to increase even more by next year. Farmers in Washington State along with those in Idaho, Montana, Minnesota and North Dakota are partly to blame - they have planted 22 percent less barley than last year.

Barley is a key ingredient in making beer and the price of barley has gone up 48% since last year. The impact on beer prices is just starting to show up now since barley contacts usually are bought a year in advance.

Farmers are planting less barley because the expanding market for biofuels like E85 composed of 85% ethanol are driving up corn prices. The Denver Post reports the price of corn futures up 49% since December 2005.

But its not just beer prices that are affected by America's gluttony for driving. The lack of foresight and action by Bush to raise fuel efficiency standards on cars and trucks to reduce America's need for more fuel, combined with a push for biofuels, has resulted in increased competition for corn. The push by Bush to switch from gasoline to biofuels is not the answer to America being hostage to foreign oil.

Producing ethanol from corn comes at a price. And its more than just beer. Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist in London writing in the Toledo Blade on July 10, 2007 notes that the increased use of corn for biofuels is raising food prices worldwide and will mean starvation for more of the world's poor.

Dyer notes that "the mania for

"bio-fuels" is shifting huge amounts of land out of food production. One-sixth of all the grain grown in the United States this year will be "industrial corn" destined to be converted into ethanol and burned in cars, and Europe, Brazil and China are all heading in the same direction.
The attraction of bio-fuels for politicians is obvious: they can claim that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and global warming (though the claims are deeply suspect), without actually demanding any sacrifices from business or the voters. The amount
of US farmland devoted to bio-fuels grew by 48 percent in the last year alone, and hardly any new land was brought under the plough to replace the lost food production. In other big bio-fuel producers like China and Brazil it's the same straight switch from food to fuel. In fact, the food market and the energy market are becoming closely linked, which is very bad news for the poor."

Dyer is not the first to question the rush to biofuels. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute is an early critic of what he calls the "ethanol euphoria." In testimony before Congress last month he stressed that

"The escalating share of the U.S. grain harvest going to ethanol distilleries is driving up food prices worldwide. Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since gasoline prices jumped at the end of 2005. Once completed, distilleries now under construction could double U.S. ethanol output, turning nearly 30 percent of next year's U.S. grain harvest into fuel for automobiles. This unprecedented diversion of the world's leading grain crop to the production of fuel will affect food prices everywhere, risking political instability. "

Brown very succinctly sums up the impending problem with biofuel from corn:

As more and more fuel ethanol distilleries are built, world grain prices are starting to move up toward their oil-equivalent value in what appears to be the beginning of a long-term rise.
The food and energy economies, historically separate, are now merging. In this new economy, if the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will move it into the energy economy. As the price of oil climbs so will the price of food. If oil jumps from $60 to $80 a barrel, you can bet that your supermarket bills will also go up. If oil climbs to $100, how much will you pay for a dozen eggs?
From an agricultural vantage point, the automotive demand for fuel is insatiable. The grain it takes to fill a 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year. Converting the entire U.S. grain harvest to ethanol would satisfy only 16 percent of U.S. auto fuel needs.

Which gets us back to fuel efficiency standards for cars - Brown notes that there is a simple answer:

"A rise in auto fuel efficiency standards of 20 percent, phased in over the next decade would save as much oil as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol."

I suggest you tell your Senators and Representative what you think we should do. They are currently considering and debating new fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks.

Global Warming and Poison Ivy

Poison ivy is no joke. If you dare, check out some actual pictures of poison ivy rashes here.

Then check out this recent editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Even the Washington Post was impressed enough to reprint it in their editorial roundup. Here are a couple of excerpts:

"Recent studies suggest that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are promoting leafier, more prolific, faster-growing - and itchier - poison ivy than ever before. And that could be killing off more trees in the forest, and causing more itches for more of us, than ever before.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's crop systems and global change laboratory in Maryland found that today's CO2 levels are doubling poison ivy growth - and making it itchier than 50 years ago."

The editorial goes on to say that studies done by Duke University found that carbon dioxide levels projected for the middle of this century due to continuing global warming resulted in a 149% faster growing crop of three leaved poison ivy and one that was much more potent.

I saw this editorial after visiting my own family home in Ohio. I noticed poison ivy seemed to be growing a lot more places. When I was a kid I got a bad case of poison ivy when I pulled some out near my favorite hiding place under the lilac bush. Now it seemed to be popping up in many other places on the two acres we owned.

My aunt asked me if I would help her by trimming up a ground cover area in front of her house and I noticed a lot of poison ivy spouting up in it. She commented that it seemed to be getting worse over time and she had already pulled a lot of it out. She attributed the spread to the local gardening company that last had worked on her lawn. More likely it was really global warming in action.My aunt's friend also commented on the increased growth of poison ivy on her property when I mentioned it.

Poison Ivy climbs trees just like the English ivy that has spread in Seattle, threatening to choke and kill trees in mass. The editorial notes that "scientists think the woody vine could alter the forest composition around the globe by choking off trees." Poison ivy also grows in Seattle. It hard enough to try to stop the spread of English ivy - adding more prolific growth of poison ivy to the mix will make things much more difficult.