Local News

OLYMPIA — Gun-control advocates in the state House conceded defeat Tuesday night on their top priority: a high-profile bill to require background checks for all gun sales.

While cautioning that nothing is ever truly dead in Olympia, bill sponsor Jamie Pedersen said “it does not appear that we’re going to make it there.”

“I always thought this was a stretch goal for us,” said Pedersen, D-Seattle. “It turns out it was too much of a stretch.”

Pedersen and others — including House Speaker Frank Chopp and Gov. Jay Inslee — have spent the past few days pushing for House Bill 1588, which would end a discrepancy in state law that allows sales from unlicensed, private dealers without background checks.

Earlier Tuesday, supporters announced they were adding a referendum clause to the bill in a last-minute bid to secure three needed votes.

Pedersen told reporters that the clause, which would put the issue on the November ballot, would be enough to get the votes. But after a day of politicking, he said the clause had indeed picked up some votes — but also turned off a half dozen original supporters of the bill.

Those supporters were concerned about risking a referendum in an off-year, low-turnout election, Pedersen said.

A spokesman for the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, which had been pushing the bill, said the group may consider running an initiative campaign in favor of expanded background checks.

In the Legislature, the prospects for the bill also appeared grim in the Republican-run state Senate, where leadership has indicated they will not bring up the bill for a vote.

Supporters in the Senate had said they had the votes to pass the bill — if they could get a vote on it.

Senate Minority Leader Ed Murray said Tuesday’s developments in the House made that harder.

“It’s not over until it’s over, but this makes it more difficult,” he said.

Non-budget bills have until Wednesday to make it out of their house of origin.

On Tuesday night, several House Democrats emerged from the caucus room with tears in their eyes.

“As a parent of four young kids –” said state Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle. “Just, incredibly disappointing.”

State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, is a major supporter of higher education and the architect of a bill that gave the state’s universities tuition-setting authority two years ago. So it’s worth hearing what he has to say about Monday’s offer by state university presidents to freeze tuition – just as long as the Legislature gives them an additional $225 million over the biennium.

His take: He’s sympathetic , “but there’s no way in the world anyone could responsibly do that when they’re not promising to move the needle on the accountability metrics, which they helped design.”

Carlyle is referring to the State Public Four-Year Dashboard, a recently released website that looks at things like graduation rates and the time it takes to complete a degree at the state’s six four-year schools.

He says some schools are slipping on degree completion time, meaning that more students are taking longer than four years to finish their degrees. “To me, that is absolutely unacceptable for a student to slip into a fifth year due to their inability to get access to a course,” he said.  An extra year of college means more students will go deeper into debt to pay for their educations.

“I just expect more from them,” Carlyle said of the universities. “We’ve got to make progress on access, affordability and quality metrics.”

Happy Friday:

Debate science: Former Vice President Al Gore  —he, a sighing menace to his own presidential debate performance years ago against George W. Bush  — had one of the more novel explanation for President Obama’s weak performance in Denver the other night — altitude. Gore who is very science-oriented offered up this doozy.

Tweet of the debate:

Big Bird, as you have heard, was unwittingly one of the stars of the presidential debate. Republican Mitt Romney said — and I paraphrase — he likes Jim Lehrer and Big Bird but wants to cut funding for public broadcasting.

Mentions of Big Bird promptly soared on social media.  It’s too soon to tell if donations are up or down at public TV stations around the country. Channel Nine Thursday received a phone call from a senior who railed against Romney for 25 minutes, because Romney says he is for education but won’t support PBS programming, which a lot of seniors adore.

The moment in the national spotlight, however, gave public TV a new chance to point out that some surveys show nearly 70 percent of Americans do not want to eliminate government funding of public broadcasting, said Moss Bresnahan, president and CEO of KCTS 9.

Carlyle v. Eyman, in the ring: State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, is hopping mad at initiative guru Tim Eyman for a blast email he sent Thursday that attacks the Everett Herald and its new editorial page editor, Peter Jackson, for changing course and opposing Initiative 1185, the measure that would continue to require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to raise taxes. Carlyle is pretty active in his opposition to Eyman measures. But the Eyman email hit a nerve because it attacked Peter directly. Peter Jackson is the son of the late Henry Scoop Jackson, whom Carlyle worked for in his younger days.

Here are some of the pyrotechnics:

From Eyman’s email:

 ”Today, Scoop Jackson’s son wrote:  “We were wrong.” — http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20121004/OPINION01/710049968/-1/opinion#

 Be careful taking at face value the word “we” in that sentence because the new “we” isn’t the old “we.”  I’m reasonably sure that Peter Jackson was against I-1053 also — he was simply one of the 36% who voted against it.  So it seems quite likely that no one at the Everett Herald changed their minds on this issue, even though it was presented that way today.

   Besides shifting their newspaper’s editorial position, they have also apparently shifted their endorsement procedures.  Allen Funk and Bob Bolerjack followed a common, respectful protocol of asking both sides to come in and discuss and debate I-1053 before their editorial board so they could listen to both sides before writing their editorial.  Since I-1185 qualified, I’ve repeatedly contacted Peter Jackson and asked when the editorial board would have us in to discuss I-1185 – he kept saying “we haven’t decided yet.”  There was no endorsement discussion; their shift in editorial position was taken without one.  Given their new position and how they handled it, it seems unlikely we could have swayed them, but we would have appreciated the chance to try.

   Of course it’s now their editorial board and they can have any opinion they want without listening to both sides — it’s still a free country.  But it’s quite doubtful that Scoop Jackson’s son previously supported I-1053 but now opposes I-1185.  It’s more likely that one of the no voters on I-1053 simply has a louder megaphone this time.”

Carlyle was not so happy with the above:

“There comes a time when public officials have a moral responsibility to stand up for civic dialogue.  Today is one of those days and this is one of those times. Tim Eyman’s unbelievable, nasty personal insult to Everett Herald Editorial page editor Peter Jackson, a treasured friend and son of one of our state’s legendary public officials in the late Scoop Jackson, went a step too far outside the dignity of Washington’s history of integrity in politics.  Merely because the Everett Herald objectively reconsidered its previous support for Mr. Eyman’s supermajority initiative, a patronizing personal attack on the paper, Mr. Jackson and the memory of Senator Jackson (whom I had the honor of serving as a page for in the United States Senate) was uncalled for.  We are better than this as a state and Mr. Eyman demeans us all in demeaning Sen. Jackson’s memory.”