Posted on 12/06/2005 8:29:45 PM PST by OnRightOnLeftCoast
SPOKANE -- It was a day of reckoning for Spokane Mayor Jim West. The preliminary results of the historic mayor recall election as posted by the Spokane County Elections Office show "Yes" votes as 38,718 or 65% to 20,681 "No" votes. The "No" votes equaled 35% of the vote total.
It has been a long road for all involved in the recall election. The scandal broke seven months ago when the Spokesman-Review published their investigative report on the mayor....
(Excerpt) Read more at king5.com ...
Spokane Mayor Recalled in Sex Scandal 11 minutes ago
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051207/ap_on_re_us/spokane_mayor
SPOKANE, Wash. - Mayor James E. West was recalled from office Tuesday in a special election over allegations he offered jobs and perks to young men he met in a gay Internet chat room.
West, 54, became the city's first elected chief executive to be ousted before his term expired.
With just over half of the 110,000 mail-in ballots counted, 38,718, or 65 percent, voted to recall West, while 20,681, or 35 percent, voted to retain him.
*ping*
Spokane Mayor gets boot. Not much of a surprise here, either.
Good freaking riddance.
If West had been a Democrat, do you think the newspaper would've gone to this much trouble to entrap him?
Repub or no, I'm glad West was nailed. But, somehow, I question whether the Spokesman-Review would've outed him had he been a Democrat.
The cosmopolitan vote is rather thin on the ground in Spokane. The guy would do better in the 48th perhaps. :)
I'm not touching that last sentence. :-P
In any event, it's truly a shame what happened to West. He had been a distinguished State Senate (Majority sometimes) leader. He succeeded another less-than-stellar Mayor and was potentially a future statewide officeholder, but just simply lost his mind. He really should've had the common courtesy to have resigned when it all "came out" (pun unintended) and spared the city the $$ it cost to run an election anyone with one brain cell could tell the outcome of.
And he still got 21,000 votes to retain him? What world are we living in?
Concur. Ask anybody involved in state politics, and West would have and did earn high praise in his career. But he really screwed the pooch on this one. Too bad.
And I didn't once have to hear him sthpeak.
Bye-Bye :)
You make it sound like he was some kind of victim.
Ohfercryinoutloud... not the pooch ~too~?!
Looks like the Catholic Church aren't the only ones giving homos the boot. Could the end (finally!) of the sodomy fad actually be in site?
[snort] Yes, the pooch too. :-P
I was thinking the same thing. About 21,000 voters wanted to retain him and how many thousands of people were indifferent and didn't bother to vote? Why would anyone that blatantly corrupt and incompetent get more than 1% of the vote? I know, I should just be glad that sanity prevailed and not worry about the percentages.
News to me.
No... that's not it at all. It's the state GOP faithful that believed in him that are the victims in this scenario. He was a good guy, and was fighting the good fight, and he blew it in a particularly spectacular fashion.
ROFLAO
Given that SCOTUS addressed the issue re military recruiting on campus revolves around the gay issue there might be hope.
"...truly a shame what happened to West." You've got to be kidding me! He did this to himself. We won't even go into his close personal relationship with members of a child molesting ring in Spokane during the 70's and 80's that included Catholic clergy, Boy Scout leaders and policemen. He lived with one of the offenders, but of course knew nothing of the vile horrors that the young boys(several who later committed suicide) had to endure. The guy is a POS who's got a special place waiting for him where the temp. is always over 750 degrees. The Spokesman-Review newspaper has done an outstanding job on investigating this pervert's history.
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