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Posts published in “Day: July 30, 2007”

Inslee on point

Jay Inslee

Jay Inslee

Washington Representative Jay Inslee has abruptly become the lead congressional figure on the prospective impeachment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

There's no reference to it yet on his congressional website, but it's all over news media: He's taking the initial step toward an impeachment, formally asking the House Judiciary Committee to look into it. His resolutions says:

Directing the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The ruse organization

So often this kind of thing happens, and so often they get away with it. Might have in this case, but for the side effects of a lawsuit.

In his column, Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News Tribune writes about a group called Associated Casino Employees for Survival (ACES, of course). The city of Tacoma has been trying to ban or at least cut down on its proliferation of casinos, and a 2006 initiative (which failed) sought to overturn it. ACES was the public face of the attempt to overturn the ban.

ACES presented itself as a group of casino employees - notably, as Callaghan writes, single moms trying to earn a living and keep their jobs. That presentation wasn't enough to pass the initiative. But just now has it come completely undone, thanks to the firing of Mike Purdy, who ran the campaign, and his followup lawsuit for wrongful termination. In it, he described how the corporations which ran the casinos were the real backers of the initiative.

So you see an initiative - or something similar - on the horizon backed by jes' plain folks? Look carefully before you take them at face value.