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Category: Washington Politics (Page 11 of 27)

TVW and their video voter guide

July 8, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The first big test for the embed tool over at TVW will hopefully be the video voters guide.

By the way, have you notice since right before the new tool went online, Mark has been really quiet?

Via email:

For immediate release – July 7, 2008

For more info: TVW President Greg Lane, 360-725-3999

Video Voters’ Guide begins today on TVW

Olympia – TVW and the Washington Secretary of State are offering the public a chance to watch direct, unedited statements from candidates for statewide office via the 2008 Video Voters’ Guide.

Beginning today and continuing through the Nov. 4 election – with separate primary and general election editions – TVW will televise the Video Voters’ Guide regularly on statewide cable television.

“The Video Voters’ Guide is a valuable public service and is one more way for the electorate to stay informed in this important election year,” said Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed. “We hope voters will follow their state and local races with the same interest and excitement they’re showing for this year’s presidential race.”

TVW and the Secretary of State have teamed up to offer the Video Voters’ Guide every two years since 1996. The guide features candidates for statewide offices: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, State Auditor, Attorney General, Commissioner of Public Lands, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Insurance Commissioner, and Supreme Court Justice.

“Voters will hear many sound bites this election year, but it’s also important they get the whole picture,” said TVW President Greg Lane. “Beginning with the Video Voters’ Guide, our election coverage will give people the chance to watch the candidates talk to them directly, straight and unedited.”

The guide also will be available on the Web at tvw.org. Link to the Video Voters’ Guide Web page here: http://www.tvw.org/Elections/VideoVotersGuide.cfm?bhcp=1

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Note to media: TV, print, radio and news blog Web sites are encouraged to embed the 2008 Video Voters’ Guide on their sites using TVW’s new embedding tool, detailed below.

TVW, often called the Washington state version of C-SPAN, provides unedited gavel-to-gavel television coverage of the State Legislature, Supreme Court, executive branch, state boards and commissions, elections, and public policy events of statewide significance. TVW’s 2008 election coverage includes party conventions, candidate debates and forums, newspaper editorial board interviews, and a LIVE election night program. For the first time this fall TVW’s “Election Tuesdays” will highlight the network’s top weekly election coverage starting at 7 p.m., along with civics education programs featuring high school students and teachers.

Cable TV carries TVW for free, reaching 99% of the cable households in Washington, representing about 55% of the state population. Viewers can watch TVW programs on demand at tvw.org, which includes the largest archive of legislative streaming media in the world.

We’re pleased to announce TVW has added a new embedding tool to all programming found on its Web site tvw.org.

This new tool allows any event from TVW’s archives to be embedded into Web sites and blogs, and includes the ability to highlight a portion of the footage, but in a way that honors the balanced, unedited, gavel-to-gavel nature of TVW programming.

The new embedding tool is readily accessible just below the player window of every TVW video and audio event available at tvw.org.

Our goal is to be the most effective resource as possible for citizens to view the Legislature, state government and state public policy debate. We look forward to your comments, questions and suggestions, as well as working with you to improve our services.

Sincerely, Greg Lane, President

What is “embedding”?
Embedding is the ability to place a video or other object in HTML code in order to display it on a Web page. TVW will now allow you to “embed” a TVW video or audio event on another Web site or blog while TVW’s servers securely stream that content to your Web visitors.

Embedding instructions
Embedding TVW video on your Web site is simple and very similar to YouTube’s embed function. With a little knowledge of HTML you can quickly get TVW’s video playing on your Web Site or blog.
To embed an event from tvw.org:

* Click in the text field under the video player area or click “Embed”. This will select all of the code needed to copy into your site or blog’s HTML editor.
* Use the “Right mouse click” and chose “Copy.” This will copy the text to your computer’s clipboard.
* “Paste” this code into your Web site’s HTML code or your blog’s HTML editor.

(For specific hosted blog spheres and how to embed video code, please consult the appropriate help section of your blog site or contact your Webmaster.)

Advanced embedding options

TVW’s advanced virtual-clip feature is unique to the Web. This feature allows you to choose a “Start” and “Stop” time, essentially creating a virtual clip of a TVW event. This, however, does not edit the actual event – it allows a user to continue playing from the point the clip ends and review the event in its entirety right from your Web page or blog.

To use the advanced features, click the “Use Advanced Embed” button and set the start and stop times. These times must be in a HH:MM:SS format. You can also set the width dimensions of the video. The dimensions feature can only be set in conjunction with using the virtual-clip feature. To simply embed the video without a virtual-clip, click the “reset” or “Use Standard Embed” buttons. This will clear any advanced embed features. For further questions about TVW’s embedding feature, contact support@tvw.org.

Republicans made a mistake nominating Christine Webb to face Brian Baird

July 1, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Ok, I’ll be honest, I don’t know all that much about Christine Webb. My knowledge begins and ends with that she came into the race against Brian Baird very late, and seemingly to attempt to beat out a less than establishment Republican that had been making waves in the Ron Paul sense.

My argument is that only a Ron Paul type Republican could beat Brian Baird this time around. Well, a financed Paul Republican, but that would require some support from the local Republican establishment and maybe they’re not ready for that yet.

Ok, here’s my argument: Baird is a great in-district guy. No one on his staff is allowed to run for local office (no link for this fact, I just know its a fact). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it emphasizes that Baird doesn’t like to face off against local Republican leaders in the field.

So, the typical “he’s forgotten about us” argument won’t work against Baird. Therefore it would also be hard to gain traction against him with the local chamber of commerce, Lion Clubs folks.

Cheryl Crist is making a run at Baird from the left, but with Olympia only being a very small portion of the district, and Baird being an incumbent from her own party, she’ll have a harder go at it.

So, where does that leave us? People not taken to insurrection (chamber types) are out. The progressive community can’t make a run at Baird from the left, so the best candidate would be from the right who could attract protest votes from the left and mobilize disaffected conservatives.

If someone is to knock off Baird, it will only be an anti-war righty, Michael Delavar.

By the way, over at Politics is a blood sport blog, they seem to be pointing to a inter-party fight down in Clark County between the Delavar folks and Webb folks. Maybe Delavar can pull it off.

Filing week notes in Thurston County

June 7, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Full results here.

There’s a handful of Democratic candidates that are describing themselves at preferring the “Democrat Party,” Which no self-respecting Democrat.”ic candidate would actually do. I think the blame falls on the online form.

But, that doesn’t explain why the two non-Democratic candidates for the open house seat in the 35th LD (just north of here) couldn’t say Republican. Heck, they couldn’t even say G.O.P., which seems to be the popular alternative.

Once, Herb Baze, just said R Party. Yeah, OK.

The other one, Randy Neatherlin, described his preference as “Prefers No Gas Taxes (R) Party.” I guess, “Prefers sunshine and lollypops and everyone being happy and stay off my lawn (R) Party” wouldn’t fit.

Back in Thurston County, there are four candidates for an open PUD seat. The Thurston PUD has a very limited scope, providing utilities to an urbanized, but not incorporated area of Thurston County called Tanglewild. The PUD has had a grander vision, becoming the water supplier of Thurston County, but the cities haven’t liked that idea at all. They also run a handful of other water systems across the South Sound.

Anyway, two guys from Rochester, Lowell Deguise and John R. Blacklaw, and two guys from Olympia, Chris Stearns and Terence Artz, are running. I’m assuming the PUD also runs a water system down in Rochester, so those folks see an interest in having a say.

Larry Seaquist endorses both Democratic candidates in the 35th LD?

June 4, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Well, it seems to make sense when I typed out the headline, but it seemed weird last night when a fellow from Tumwater emailed me the apparent weirdness.

Both Daryl Daugs and Fred Finn, who are running against each other for the same state house seat in the 35th LD, are claiming an endorsement from sitting legislator Larry Seaquist from the neighboring 26th LD.

Did someone fudge an endorsement or is Larry just not picking sides by saying both fellows are good by him?

UPDATE: See comments.

Andrew on: His thoughts on the Top Two

June 4, 2008 / / 0 Comments

If there was any question at all about how Andrew from Redmond feels about the Top Two primary, that’s all cleared up. The guy hates it.

And how.

Ok, so he writes a very long post about how the Top Two is very bad, so I’m just going to wade into this and see where I end up. It looks like we’ll just go rant for rant.

One of the problems with how the Top Two is rolling out is that the parties are asking local organizations to hold nominating conventions. I’ve said, and others as well, that these conventions are a tool to be used later when the parties move to have the Supreme Court reconsider their decision.

Andrew is much kinder to the state Dems intentions, saying rather they are “gamely fighting to ensure that there will be somebody carrying the party’s banner.” Oh, I’d say they’re creating an official record for the court that the Top Two hurts their freedom of association.

Later on, Andrew writes this:

Meanwhile, the 36th Legislative District has refused to even hold a nominating convention. The two Democrats running there are John Burbank and Reuven Carlyle. Its leaders, who aren’t giving their district’s precinct committee officers much credit, argue that having only PCOs pick the nominee isn’t democratic.

I enjoyed reading that local party leaders thought giving a decision over to PCOs would be undemocratic. Which, it really would be. If the 36th LD holds to the average of King County, their PCOs really weren’t elected in a Democratic fashion. Last time I checked, less than a third of the possible PCOs positions across the county were elected and less than 2 percent of all the positions available were contested. The rest of the PCOs now serving in the 36th and across King County are appointed.

I wish it weren’t this way, but handing a decision over to PCOs to decide is necessarily undemocratic because of the lack of participation in PCO elections.

There is a central question that I run into when I talk about this issue with folks who aren’t involved in party politics. They wonder why the state of Washington should pay for what party activists argue is a private party function.

Andrew:

The choice belongs to the people of our party. It’s too expensive to hold special caucuses in every jurisdiction every year. And they don’t attract the numbers that a presidential caucus does. That is why we really need the open primary.

The choice belongs to the people of the party, but we can’t pay for it. We need the state to pay for our private party function.

Well, I’ll agree, we don’t have enough money to pay for precinct caucuses every time we want to nominate someone. We also don’t have the volunteers. We do have enough money (collectively) to run campaigns, put televisions ads up and pay consultants.

What we don’t have the structure, resources or people to actually get people involved in our organization. We may sound grassroots, but we’re not. Very few people actually participated in our caucuses as compared to voter turnout in other elections, and we barely had the capacity for that.

I can see why people don’t like the open primary, or any system that gives too much control to parties in Washington. They don’t trust us because they aren’t part of us.

Washington Dems do good job on reminding PCOs to file

June 4, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Giving credit where its due. Last Friday I hyperventilated, pointing out that the Washington Democrats seemingly weren’t doing anything to encourage people to run for PCO. Of all the two faced…

Anyway, I got a letter tonight not only reminding me to file (since I’m already a PCO), but providing me with the right form. Well, good on you.

But, before I give them too much credit, it would have been better to send letters to everyone who attended a caucus, to ask them to run as well. Its one thing to remind folks who are already PCOs (even though they might have been appointed in the past couple of years), but its another thing to get new folks into the fold.

Andrew on: Freedom of association and Top Two primary

May 31, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Andrew from Redmond writes:

Listen, Sam, you and your best pals at the Grange created this big mess. You’ve opened the floodgates to confusion, mischief, and trickery by turning the primary into the first act of a general election where people can use the descriptor to say almost anything they like about themselves.

You have destroyed the integrity of our primary, which is supposed to enable grassroots participation – allowing a greater number of Washingtonians to join in the selection of the party nominees.


(he did the bolding)

So, if we want to allow “a great number of Washingtonians to join in the selection of party nominees,” why did we hold a caucus for the presidential nominee?

re: Holy Crap! Don’t forget to file for PCO (June 5 deadline)

May 30, 2008 / / 0 Comments

A little rant related to the informational post below.

How long am I supposed to believe the grass-roots b.s. that we Democrats spew every so often to defend the archaic structure of our party?

Last year when I was arguing to allow for membership in our local party organization, more than one PCO argued that the position of Prescinct Committee Officer was sacrosanct because it was an “elected” position.

Well, bull-shit. PCOs elections may be in fact democratic, but in practice their little advertised and hardly anyone ever contests them.

There is absolutely no mention of the pending PCO deadline on the Washington Dems website. There’s a button to become a “neighborhood leader,” but nothing to do with actually becoming a legal boardmember in the state Democrats.

Why is this? I would assume because while PCOs and people elected by the PCOs would love to believe that the state party and our local organizations are the expressed will of the Democratic voter.

But because so few people actually participate in these elections, and so people encourage others to run for PCO, that there is very little turnover in PCOs.

It also probably doesn’t help that PCO elections are held right in the middle of the partisan election season, when the really active people feel like they have better things to do.

And, yes, I’m plunking down by $1 next week at the county auditor’s office to run again. I’m running because PCOs have legal powers not given to common party members. And, if I want to change this thing, I think I can best do it from the inside.

Plus, I hope someone runs against me. I’m in Oly 48, so if you live in that precinct, file and we can doorbell together and argue who would make the best PCO.

Holy Crap! Don’t forget to file for PCO (June 5 deadline)

May 30, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The deadline for Precinct Committee Officer election filing is just around the corner. Don’t forget to file! The filing fee is only $1.

Each county has a different form, so here’s all the ones I could find (I’ll update as I find more):

Clallam County
Island County
King County
Kitsap County
Mason County
Pierce County
Thurston County

Oh, forget it. Here’s the statewide declaration, which I hope works.

Here’s a form at Washington Dems Chairs that WILL work, no matter where you are in the state.

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