Local News

Good Morning. Happy Friday.

Former Seattle City Councilmember
Peter Steinbrueck

Who’s running for Seattle mayor in 2013? Lots of people. And some are just toying with the idea before, well, likely running. Former Seattle City Council member — or should I say, friends of Steinbrueck — have launched a beg-Peter-to-run Facebook page. Publicola has more details.  Scroll down a bit. The other candidate who may not be able to resist the mayoral temptation is former King County Executive Ron Sims.  Don’t miss the inside-baseball fight over where and how City Councilmember Tim Burgess made his announcement for mayor this week.

Running Olympia: As Olympia watchers have probably heard, state Sen. Ed Murray was elected by fellow Dems to be Senate majority leader. That sounds so simple, until you consider two other events, the squeaky close, gotta-do-a-recount race  in the 17th Legislative District in Vancouver.  State Sen. Don Benton, a Republican, is currently ahead of Democrat Tim Probst, by 78 votes. The recount is next week. So, I know, who is staying awake at night wondering if Benton wins or loses? Murray, probably. A couple of moderate Dems are threatening  to join Republicans in the Senate and install one of the Dems, Sen. Rodney Tom of Medina, as the majority leader of some sort of coalition group in the Senate.

Sen. Murray is obviously trying to work around that while keeping himself as majority leader. So he offers committee assignments to folks he wants to keep, win over, whatever.

Anti-tax-increase
crusader Grover Norquist

The world according to Grover Norquist: A bunch of Republican members of Congress are having second thoughts about their never-raise-taxes pledge with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Seattle Weekly has an interesting piece tying that development to an alleged weariness of anti-tax crusaders in general, i.e., Washington’s own Tim Eyman. But, but, but. Didn’t voters just say yes in big numbers to Eyman’s latest offering, Initiative 1185, the measure that re-instates the two-thirds requirement to raise taxes in our Legislature? Yes, they did.

Politico has a piece arguing that Grover’s not over.