My first thought upon getting word Wednesday that Judge Michael Hecht had been convicted was: recall.

We were even talking about turning our oped page into a recall petition, if Hecht didn’t step down from the bench in short order.

As it turns out, recalling a judge is not so easy. In fact, it seems to be impossible in this state. Below is an exchange (read it from bottom up) I had today with the Secretary of State’s office. “Dave” is David Ammons, the office’s media guy. Katie Blinn is the state’s assistant director of elections (knows her stuff).

The constitution exempts judges from the recall procedure, and they have a separate removal-disciplinary process. I imagine that’s to shield judges from getting jacked around by harassing recall petitions because somebody didn’t like an unpopular decision.
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This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

Politicians may play the eternal optimists, but even they couldn’t feign surprise at Wednesday’s announcement that Boeing will begin assembling commercial jets omewhere other than Washington state.

Boeing hardly could have been more clear about its intentions to locate the second 787 Dreamliner production line elsewhere. By the time the workers at its newly acquired assembly plant in South Carolina voted to decertify their union last month, the decision was probably a fait accompli.

The chance to build planes without the threat of work stoppages that have plagued the company’s Puget Sound operation apparently proved too enticing to pass up. The tax breaks and low-interest loans approved by South Carolina lawmakers this week may have just been the sweeteners.

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This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

“We do have a vaccine that works.”
– Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

Federal health officials said this week that the swine flu vaccine boosts patients’ immunity faster than expected – which came as good news to all 12 Americans who have been able to secure a dose.

The vaccine – especially the injectable type sought after by some of the most at-risk populations – is proving more elusive this fall than Michael Jackson and Kate Gosselin costumes.

The federal government assured the country last summer that vaccine companies could produce 80 million to 120 million doses by mid-October. Only 22 million are available so far.

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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

No union likes having its back against the wall, but that seems to be where the Machinists union stands right now on the question of keeping 787 Dreamliner production in Washington.

Boeing has been ostentatiously talking to South Carolina about building a second 787 factory line in Charleston – in a nonunion plant – instead of Everett, where the plane is now being assembled. South Carolina lawmakers are offering the aerospace company a sweet package of incentives. Boeing’s Chicago-based corporate leaders are within days of deciding between Everett and Charleston.

Meanwhile, company and union leaders have been quietly discussing Boeing’s central condition for sticking with Everett: a no-strike guarantee good for 10 years. The Seattle Times reported Tuesday that those talks aren’t making much progress.
Boeing is reportedly pushing for what in most cases would seem a reasonable alternative: binding arbitration.

Like any union, though, the Machinists are loath to give up their nuclear weapon. They’ve reportedly also thrown another – far bigger – issue into the mix, pushing for a promise that the successors to the 737 and 777 will also be built in this state.
The union appears to be putting more chips on the table than its cards warrant. Keeping 787 production here seems a large enough goal without throwing the 737 and 777 replacements into the deal.
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I’ve never quite figured out the sense of creating a price barrier to flu vaccines. People with the flu give it to others, incur medical expenses and make life harder for their employers and fellow workers. That has to be a bigger economic problem than the cost of the vaccine.

See below:

By Karen Kaplan
The Los Angeles Times

Here’s some advice for public health officials who want to maximize the number of people getting the H1N1 flu shot: Make it free.

A study being published in Wednesday’s edition of the British Medical Journal finds that the higher the price for the swine flu shot, the lower the odds that people will get it. For instance, three times as many people said they would get a free shot as would get one that cost more than $25.

The results are based on a survey conducted in Hong Kong, whose recent experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome and H5N1 bird flu arguably give the general public a heightened sensitivity to outbreaks of novel viruses. Even so, only 45 percent of those surveyed said they would be “highly likely” to get an H1N1 flu shot if it was available for free.

Interest in the vaccine fell steadily from there. A modest price of up to 100 Hong Kong dollars (about $12.90 in U.S. currency) was enough to knock interest in the shot down to 36 percent; a price between 100 and 200 Hong Kong dollars reduced it to 24 percent; and anything above 200 Hong Kong dollars dropped it to 15 percent, the study found.

Price wasn’t the only factor standing between people and the H1N1 vaccine. Twenty-seven percent of the people surveyed said the shot would be “inconvenient,” and 16 percent complained that it would cause too many side effects, including “very severe” ones. (In reality, the CDC says side effects are rare and likely to be mild.)
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This editorial will appear in Tuesday’s print edition.

Kerry Killinger said he wanted to create the Wal-Mart of banks. He attempted to do it in a curious way, by ruining the very customers he said he wanted to serve.

The spectacular train wreck that was Washington Mutual continues to be dissected a year after the 119-year-old institution became the nation’s biggest bank failure.

The latest study is The Seattle Times’ two-part report this week that offers a case study of how fast greed can turn a good company bad.

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This editorial will appear in Tuesday’s print edition.

In 2004, Washington Secretary of Sam Reed was at the center of the firestorm created by one of the closest gubernatorial races in U.S. history. Two recounts, multiple lawsuits and six months later, Reed – a Republican – declared that Democrat Chris Gregoire had beaten Republican Dino Rossi by 133 votes out of nearly 3 million cast.

For Reed, the chaos of uncertainty during that time was a personal challenge – to reform the system so that it would hold up to scrutiny in future close races.

His fairness during the tense months as vote counts teetered back and forth and his reform efforts afterward are reasons Reed is being honored as one of the nation’s eight top public officials in next month’s issue of Governing magazine. He and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley are the only two statewide elected officials being honored.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

That didn’t take long.

When a federal judge ruled last month that the First Amendment bars disclosure of the petitions that put Referendum 71 on the ballot, he opened the door to a potential gutting of Washington’s open records laws. The gutting is already being attempted.

Some opponents of the state’s new same-sex domestic-benefits law, which R-71’s passage would preserve, are now pressing to go far beyond keeping petition signatures secret. A lawsuit they filed in federal court Wednesday demands that many – probably most – campaign donations also be kept secret. In fact, it insists that the Bill of Rights mandates such secrecy.

The implications of this claim are shocking. If successful, it would crack the bedrock foundation of campaign disclosure laws in Washington and other states.
Both the petition and the donation-disclosure cases have the potential to hide elections in a black box.

If the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upholds petition secrecy on First Amendment grounds, every petition for every initiative and referendum – throughout the country – will have to be treated like a state secret. There will be no way for citizens to independently assess whether elections officials verified signatures properly and lawfully put measures on the ballot.
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