Free Republic

Two men arrested Friday night during a bizarre shooting spree along Interstate 5 in North Seattle may have been planning to fire at vehicles driving up and down the freeway, police said Sunday. “One theory is that maybe they were going to snipe at people as they were driving by on I-5,” Seattle Police Department spokeswoman Renee Witt told KOMO News

President Barack Obama has settled on a train-wreck of a nominee for Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). On Tuesday, the Senate, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee approved Ronald Sims in a voice vote. They did so despite having credible information indicating financial mismanagement and ethical transgressions, including two egregious abuses of a state freedom of information law. Sims has been King County Executive in Washington state since 1996. Under his watch, local government was fined after it failed to produce documents concerning construction of the Qwest sports stadium. The Supreme Court of Washington, in a blistering ruling...

Note: The following text is a quote: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 10, 2009 GANG MEMBER PLEADS GUILTY TO BEING A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A FIREARM Defendant Appears in Internet Video Holding Gun and Making Threats Against Rival Gang Members ERIC CHARLES SANFORD, 21, of Seattle, Washington, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Seattle to being a felon in possession of a firearm. SANFORD was arrested on November 15, 2008, following a traffic stop in central Seattle. SANFORD was a passenger in a car that was stopped for traffic violations. SANFORD was ordered out of the car for...

Pete Nelson, who runs Treehouse Point in Fall City, Wash., built a treehouse without a permit. Nelson admits he built the treehouse without a permit from the county, saying, "It probably wasn't the right thing to do." The county has a file a couple of inches thick on Nelson...The county found out after Nelson cut down a tree and was caught doing it by a neighbor. That neighbor reported Nelson to the county — and the truth came out.

King County prosecutors are investigating apparent voter-registration fraud in the 2006 general election. Dan Satterberg, chief deputy to King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng, confirmed late Thursday that attorneys from his office will meet later this week to brief their federal counterparts regarding evidence that hundreds of voter-registration cards submitted in King County were forged. Satterberg said "there are significant irregularities" among a batch of more than 1,800 voter-registration cards submitted to the county by canvassers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national group that represents the interests of low- and moderate-income citizens. County prosecutors, aided...

King County GOP booth at Bumbershoot vandalized  08:55 AM PDT on Tuesday, September 2, 2008  By KING5.com Staff  KCGOP Vandals tore open the tent, flipped over the table holding candidates' literature and set parts of the display on fire.  SEATTLE - The King County Republican Party reports that their booth at Seattle's Bumbershoot festival was vandalized Sunday evening. The vandals tore open the closed tent, flipped over the table holding candidates' literature and set parts of the display on fire. A person at a neighboring booth saw the flames and extinguished them before more damage was done. The KCGOP says...

New 30-year high in tuberculosis cases March 24 is World TB Day Thursday, March 20, 2008 KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON - Tuberculosis (TB) takes two million lives worldwide every year, and World TB Day on March 24 is an opportunity to focus on solutions to the devastating global epidemic. Locally, 161 cases were reported in 2007, a new 30-year high, serving as a stark reminder that TB also remains a significant challenge in King County.Today’s cases are increasingly among the foreign born. Also disproportionately represented are African Americans, Asian /Pacific Islanders, American Indian/Alaskan Natives, Latinos, the homeless and those living...

Hours after his wife was found clinging to life in a wrecked car, Tom Rider struggled to restrain his rage at the King County Sheriff's Office, which on Friday defended its decision to wait five days to ask for the cell phone records that led to her rescue. For a week, 33-year-old Tanya Rider -- her left leg crushed in the Sept. 20 wreck -- hung upside down inside her mangled Honda SUV. Thousands of drivers passed by on state Route 169 only feet away, but did not see the car, which fell 12 feet down a brushy hillside....

  King County flubs 400 voter registration cards 06:49 AM PDT on Friday, August 24, 2007  By ROBERT MAK / KING 5 News   Luke Esser  BELLEVUE, Wash. – The King County Elections department made a mistake with the state Republican Party chair's voter registration card this year. Luke Esser was one of 400 poll voters who received voter notification cards that were incorrect. For many years, Esser voted at Cross of Christ Lutheran Church in Bellevue. But in July, he got a letter and a new registration card from King County Elections, notifying him that it had changed his precinct location...

Despite objections from restaurant owners and food-industry officials, the King County Board of Health on Thursday banned artificial trans fat and required nutrition labeling for menu items in chain restaurants. With the vote, King County joins a handful of jurisdictions in the country to ban artificial trans fats in restaurant meals and becomes only the second to require nutrition labeling on menus. While most restaurant owners and their supporters testified against the trans-fat ban -- most said they're already getting rid of trans fats but they simply hate mandates -- they saved their harshest words for the nutrition-labeling requirement. Chris...

Menu labeling, trans fat ban approved by the Board of Health Thursday, July 19, 2007 KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON - People will be able to make more informed food choices and have a safer food supply as the result of today’s action by the King County Board of Health to require menu labeling in King County chain restaurants and to eliminate artificial trans fat in all King County restaurants. Board of Health members expressed strong support for the decision that will improve the dining experience and the health of the community in the fight against obesity and chronic diseases such...

Dog taken off voter rolls -- after three elections12 Jul 2007, 0539 hrs IST,AP SEATTLE: A dog has been taken off voter rolls after receiving absentee ballots for three elections, said officials in King County, Washington. Elections Director Sherril Huff said she cancelled voter registration Tuesday for Duncan M McDonald, the Australian shepherd-terrier mix owned by Jane K Balogh. Balogh, 66, registered her pet to protest a change in the law that she said made it too easy for non-citizens to cast ballots. Balogh put her telephone in the dog's name, then used that as identification when she mailed...

Seattle Times Eastside bureau Neighbors in the Kirkland area had complained to public-health officials for years that one reclusive homeowner was living in a filthy home infested with rodents, which the man sometimes fed. On Monday, a King County deputy found the decomposing body of a man at the home on Finn Hill, an unincorporated area near Kirkland. The house was filled with rodents, feces and garbage. The medical examiner has not identified the man, but the health department and neighbors believe he is Thomas H. Stone, 67, who had lived in the home with his mother for some time...

A biography of late Alice In Chains frontman Layne Staley might be turned into a movie, reports Blabbermouth.net. A press release from Arts Publications indicated that Argentinean journalist Adriana Rubio has been contacted by Philadelphia-based filmmaker Eric Moyer about making a film version of her book, Layne Staley: Get Born Again. Moyer said in a statement, "I am determined to make this film about Layne Staley, not only to celebrate his life and talent, but to warn others through his compelling story that heroin will kill you...no matter who you are." Staley died in April of 2002 after struggling with...

Before DSHS and Gov. Chris Gregoire pop the champagne on word that the state auditor has revised the amount of “questioned” costs in the state’s most recent Medicaid audit from $950 million to $80 million, some audit definitions are in order. Each year the state auditor issues two Medicaid audits. One is state focused (the one reporting $950 million in “questioned” costs) and the other is federal focused (the one reporting $80 million in “questioned” costs). So did the state’s Medicaid audit really improve by $870 million? No. The federal government has a different definition of “questioned” costs than what...

Rodney Littlebear was a homeless drunk who for 15 years ran up the public tab with trips to jail, homeless shelters and emergency rooms. He now has a brand-new, government-financed apartment where he can drink as much as he wants. It is part of a first-in-the-nation experiment to ease the torment of drug and alcohol addiction while saving taxpayers' money. Last year, King County created a list of 200 "chronic public inebriates" in the Seattle region who had cost the most to round up and care for. Seventy-five were offered permanent homes in a new apartment building known by its...

A man who stabbed a Microsoft Corp. program manager more than 200 times while high on methamphetamine was found guilty of manslaughter Tuesday when a King County jury couldn't agree to call it murder. A few jurors believed Ronald Lakey was too intoxicated to actually intend to kill David Barzilai four years ago in Barzilai's Belltown apartment, one juror said later, so they settled on the less-serious charge. The juror, who did not want his name made public, said the decision was "extremely hard" and that jurors believed Lakey would take back that night if he could. Though disappointed, King...

OLYMPIA — A King County Superior Court judge Monday ruled that thousands of Washington felons should be able to vote even though they have yet to pay off court-ordered fines. "It is well recognized that there is simply no rational relationship between the ability to pay and the exercise of constitutional rights," Judge Michael Spearman wrote in a ruling backing the challenge of three indigent felons. Spearman said the state law requiring payment of all court-ordered fines and fees before a felon can vote again violates the equal-protection clause in the U.S. Constitution and the state constitution. He said "discrimination...

A rape suspect who was shot by Federal Way police last week while fleeing an apartment where he allegedly assaulted two teenage sisters has been released from Seattle's Harborview Medical Center and booked into jail. Though Anthony Casper Dias, 26, has been charged in King County with two counts of first-degree rape and three other felonies, he was booked into the Pierce County Jail on Saturday afternoon, said Maj. William Hayes, a spokesman for the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. The decision was made because at least one of Dias' alleged victims is related to a King...

In a nutshell, I quit as a poll judge because the inspector threatened me for doing my job of dissuading an ineligible individual from voting. The poll judge's statutory oath says: we will not give our consent to the receipt of any vote or ballot from any person, other than one whom we firmly believe to be entitled to vote at such election Silly me, I tried to convince someone who is not eligible to vote in this election to vote in the next election. The poll inspector, a Democrat named Nancy Shelton, threatened to remove me from my post...

Dino Rossi, the new book by Dino Rossi, is not primarily about the 2004 election or whether employees of King County can count. On its surface it is a self-help book, of the sort the academically minded will sniff at. A lot of others will like it. Rossi assured me he wrote it himself, and clearly it is written in his voice. Much of it consists of stories. There is, for example, the story of how he was cut from the junior-high basketball team, and how he practiced fervently and made the team in high school. Similarly, he lost his...

With the election just three weeks away, a new KING 5 poll shows that the race for King County Executive's is neck-and-neck. A full 46 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Republican David Irons now, compared to 43 percent for incumbent Ron Sims. That is within the poll's four-percent margin of error. Another factor in this race could be Green Party candidate Gentry Lange, who polled at 7 percent. Four percent of those surveyed told SurveyUSA that they're still undecided. Irons may be ahead, but strangely enough, many voters know very little about David Irons. The Republican...

King County sheriff's officials insist -- in the wake of public outrage -- that they had no choice but to give Deputy Dan Ring a near-full retirement pension.But Ring got more than the law required, even under a state system that once guaranteed a taxpayer-subsidized pension to another ex-cop who was a convicted murderer.

The report by the King County Task Force on Elections is a disappointment. The committee that prepared the report might have given us a clear description of what went wrong at the King County elections office in the last election, a diagnosis of the underlying problems, and a set of proposals for curing those problems. Members of the task force gave us no description at all. They did give us a vague diagnosis, but their diagnosis is inconsistent with the facts. And their proposed cures, though not all bad, would do more harm than good. The committee's diagnosis, such as...

SEATTLE -- Former King County Elections Superintendent Julie Ann Kempf has been arrested for investigation of forgery, theft, criminal impersonation and assault. Kempf, 40, who was fired in 2002 for what officials called a "pattern of dishonesty," was booked into the King County Jail just after 5 p.m. Tuesday and released less than an hour later, jail records show. The arrest was first reported in the Seattle Weekly on Wednesday. Sgt. John Urquhart, a King County sheriff's spokesman, did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press seeking comment Wednesday, and Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the county prosecutor's office,...

KING COUNTY - First, it was allegations of sexual abuse by guards inside the King County Jail. Now, we're hearing reports guards traded chocolate for sex. And, there are allegations of drugs and alcohol for sex as well. Three King County jailers are suspended; each under investigation for sexual misconduct inside the jail's walls. The suspensions come after a female inmate told police one jailer forced her to have oral sex in the recreation room. She also accused another jailer of inappropriately touching her and taking a photo of her naked breast. Investigators searched both guard's lockers, And according to...

Judge Allows New GOP Allegations of Fraud in Washington Governor's RaceBy Rebecca Cook Associated Press Writer Published: May 24, 2005 WENATCHEE, Wash. (AP) - A top King County elections official on Tuesday denied knowing about an absentee ballot report allegedly falsified by county workers while counting ballots in the 2004 governor's election. Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens, testifying in a challenge to Washington state's 2004 gubernatorial election, said the Democratic-leaning county that includes Seattle had absentee ballots but added: "I don't know that we have an exact number." He also acknowledged the report did not include 96 unopened, uncounted ballots that...

King County's absentee-ballot supervisor has testified that she collaborated with her boss when she filled out a report that falsely showed all ballots were accounted for in the November election. Nicole Way said in a deposition Friday that she and assistant elections superintendent Garth Fell agreed to the misleading report because officials didn't know how many absentee ballots were returned by voters. Way is the first employee to link an upper-level manager with a practice that failed to meet state ballot-auditing regulations. ~snip~ Way said she and Fell agreed that adding together the number of ballots accepted and rejected was...

Did you hear the one about the lady lawyer who had sex with the strapping male cop? She's suing the police force for performance issues. Really. The lawyer, Margita Dornay, is suing along with her cuckolded spouse who, it turns out, is a lawyer, too. The couple say the cop, Dave Hick, was violent, made threats against them and was a ticking time bomb. So, naturally, the suit, which was filed the other day, focuses on the party most responsible: the cop's bosses. Laughing yet? Hick's bosses at the King County Sheriff's Office should have known he was trouble. They...

This Monday, May 2, is the date for the next hearing in the election contest. This will be the last hearing in Chelan County Superior Court before the trial starts on May 23. In this hearing the judge will consider all pre-trial motions. ***Below are two recent news releases regarding what's been happening lately with the election contest. Highlights of Dean Logan deposition King County investigating more felon voters To subscribe to the Dino Rossi for Governor e-mail update, please send us an e-mail at update@dinorossi.com.

SEATTLE, April 21 - The Microsoft Corporation, at the forefront of corporate gay rights for decades, is coming under fire from gay rights groups, politicians and its own employees for withdrawing its support for a state bill that would have barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Many of the critics accused the company of bowing to pressure from a prominent evangelical church in Redmond, Wash., located a few blocks from Microsoft's sprawling headquarters. The bill, or similar versions of it, has been introduced repeatedly over three decades; it failed by one vote Thursday in the State Senate. Gay...

SEATTLE - King County is now officially named in honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. Governor Christine Gregoire signed a bill Tuesday renaming King County in honor of the civil rights leader who visited Seattle in 1961. ~snip~ King County was established in 1852 when Washington was still part of the Oregon Territory. The county was named after William Rufus Devane King, who was a long-tenured senator from Alabama and vice president of the United States under Franklin Pierce. King died shortly after becoming vice president on April 18, 1853.

SEATTLE - There's a new flap over vote counting in King County. Three county election workers were suspended Tuesday evening after another mail ballot snafu -- this one involving the upcoming April 26 hospital levy election. Last week, the three workers were transferred from the mail processing headquarters to the elections office downtown after they failed to completely process 93 absentee votes in the Nov. 2 election. The 93 ballots had been signature-checked, but the ballots were left inside secrecy envelopes and never processed. King County Executive Ron Sims called that incident "extremely upsetting" and two Republican members of the...

SEATTLE -- More grieving families stepped forward on Friday with accusations that the King County Medical Examiner's Office sold brains for profit without getting consent. Thursday night, KIRO Team 7 Investigators first exposed how King County shipped about 180 brains to a private research facility out of state. In return, it got more than $1 million. Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne has discovered information about missing consent forms and at least one brain that should never have been harvested. For privacy reasons, we'll call this case 98-1218. That's the label King County slapped on the file of a dead man before...

I found this yesterday on The Seattle Times website. In typical Seattle newspaper fashion, the posting of the story and the 03/24 meeting announcement were a day late. Something to consider, especially since one of the proposed maps dividing King Co. into King and Cascade counties involved reducing King Co. to only Seattle and the north end.

`Visionary' plan would put `a roof over every bed in King County' by 2014 2005-03-12 by Jeff Switzer Journal Reporter  A first-ever plan to end homelessness in King County -- not just manage it -- was issued Friday with a target date of 2014.But the pricetag to meet the vision of ``a roof over every bed in King County'' could be from $680 million to $1 billion.``If we set our sights high, that everybody in King County would have a house, it sets for us a standard we'll be always chasing,'' said Jeff Natter, newly named program director of...

Today's update on King County's magical binder of precinct-by-precinct reconciliation worksheets, which the lunatic-fringe blogs tell us are "sitting down there at KC Elections for anybody to inspect". The punchline is: the lunatic-fringe bloggers are living in a sick fantasy world (but you knew that). The binder is not now, nor has it ever been, available for public inspection. King County is perpetrating a cover-up. Two things happened today: First, County Councilmember David Irons confirmed to me that he's been asking for these documents for the last six weeks but that the Elections office has still not made them available...

I've revised my analysis of the King County vote discrepancy, based on some slightly improved source data files. The differences from my earlier analysis are minor, but this does represent the best analysis based on the data that King County has released. I've also added some new illustrative statistics. My conclusion: Former Attorney General Gregoire "won" with the help of hundreds of unexplained ballots (along with all those felons, dead people, double voters, non-citizen voters, etc). The election was genuinely stolen. If King County and its cult-like apologists on the lunatic-fringe dispute these findings, then the ball is in King...

Here's my trip report from this morning's hearing to challenge the King County voter registration of Atlanta physician Daniel M. Sosin. The punchline: there is no punchline yet. Dean Logan promised a written ruling within a few days. The following is a brief run down of the proceedings, a recapitulation of the evidence that I presented, and a discussion why voting eligibility by residence is an important non-partisan issue that is largely unrelated to the governor's race and that merits a serious discussion. Dean Logan presided over the hearing as a kind of judge. He was accompanied by Janine Joly...

Bellevue, WA – An internal e-mail adds to the evidence that the King County elections department knew about No Signature On File (NSOF) ballots well before it claimed to have discovered its “mistake.” King County rejected more than 700 ballots because it didn’t have signatures on file to match the signatures on the ballots. On Nov. 3, 2004, an e-mail sent to King County Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens included a list of NSOF voters. A copy of the e-mail is attached. But in December, when news of the NSOF ballots became public, King County Elections Director Dean Logan, Huennekens’ boss,...

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- An effort to recall Secretary of State Sam Reed will not move forward, after a Thurston County Superior Court judge ruled Monday that allegations Reed mishandled the contested governor's race did not meet the legal threshold to put a recall before state voters. Martin Ringhofer, a Boeing Co. employee, and Seattle resident Linda Jordan argued that mistakes made by Reed led to Democrat Christine Gregoire ultimately winning a third count and the election by 129 votes. But Judge Chris Wickham ruled that each of the nine charges brought by Ringhofer and Jordan were either legally or factually...

I attended this morning's press conference with King County Executive Ron Sims and Elections Director Dean Logan. It was an attempt at whitewash and it backfired. Big time. Another nail in the coffin not only of this disastrous election but also for King Sims career. The purpose of the conference was to release Logan's "2004 Election Report to Ron Sims". Hard copies were handed out. I don't see a copy on the web yet, although it should be posted soon. The prepared text of Sims' remarks haven't been posted yet either, but they should be. Here are some highlights. It...

Live discussion of the hearings in Chelan County on Dems motions to dismiss the Rossi con test of the governors election. King5.com is streaming live!

I've received new information to confirm that King County's large discrepancy between ballots counted and voters counted is an outsized anomaly. As I reported earlier, King County's discrepancy of miscounted ballots, (considering both voterless ballots and ballotless voters) -- is on the order of at least 3,700 ballots. Dean Logan did not dispute my numbers at last week's town hall meeting. At best, he might have explained some of the miscounted ballots with his claim that 250 of the unverified provisional ballots were paired with empty provisional envelopes from eligible voters. Even so, 3,400 miscounted ballots is still an outsized...

Republicans said yesterday they have found 249 more felons who voted in the November election. That's nearly double the number state party officials had reported just two days earlier. And Republicans expect the list to grow as they continue their investigation and build a case to have the gubernatorial election overturned and Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire removed from office. Republicans backing their candidate, Dino Rossi, say they are confident ballots were cast by at least 489 felons whose rights to votes had not been restored by a court. Of those, Party Chairman Chris Vance said yesterday, 424 are in King...

Oregon's successful Measure 37 property rights salvo is boosting support just across the Columbia River in Washington state's Clark County for a similar statewide rural property owners revolt, as The Oregonian reports (quick, 3-step reg. req.). And - closer to Seattle - in eastern King County. Now, in addition, Washington State Rep. Toby Nixon (R-45) is seeking a committee hearing in the Democrat-controlled House on HB 1500. It has to do with how a new county can be established, and that's no academic question. King County, even apart from it's egregious bungling of votes in the 2004 gubernatorial election, continues...

EFF launches two new projects to ensure free and fair elections in Washington state Foundation releases recommendations to legislators; prepares detailed report on 2004 election OLYMPIA—The Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) has launched two new projects: The Voter Integrity Project (VIP) and Grassroots Washington (GW). The purpose of both projects is to help restore the free and fair elections that are indispensable to political freedom, secure the sanctity of the ballot, and restore public confidence in our voting system. EFF estimates both projects will span two years. This announcement coincides with EFF’s release of election reform recommendations to the legislature. The...

Yesterday we had a rousing rally at our state capitol. Over 200,000 people have signed a petition for a re-vote in the governor's race in Washington State. In addition approximately 2,500 people came to support the re-vote. Gregoire had at best 200 supporters. There was a good number of the media there, but of course, particularly in the early reports they diminished our numbers. We videotaped the entire event. If interested please go to the following link to view. Washington State ReVote Video

The King County Elections staff are starting to break "omerta" and talk about some of the monkey business that's going on in their deparment. In the extended entry is an anonymous e-mail from someone claiming to be a King County elections worker that was sent to the Rossi campaign on the morning of Nov. 17 [it was later that day when the first count was completed]. Some of the hints in here have been confirmed by later events. Notice in particular the questions about the sending of military ballots and the tie-in to today's Seattle Times article and the mysterious...

Washington state Republicans yesterday filed a lawsuit calling for a revote in the tight 2004 gubernatorial contest that saw Democrat Christine Gregoire top Republican Dino Rossi after two recounts by 129 votes.     "Most Washingtonians don't believe this has been a valid election," said Mr. Rossi, who filed the Election Contest Petition along with the state Republican Party in Chelan County Superior Court. [snip]Republicans pointed to what they described as widespread voting irregularities in King County, a Democratic stronghold, that included votes cast by dead people and convicted felons, illegal provisional ballots, and thousands more votes than registered voters.     "We've...