Spin Control: Protesters should own up to actions

Debate over the July Fourth Riverfront Park arrests is likely to continue this week with one of the defendants scheduled for a court hearing and police investigating who spray painted downtown buildings with the suggestion he’s being railroaded.

Immediate suspicion for the graffiti turned to Alternative Solutions and Possibilities, and one of the group’s members quickly denied its involvement. Whether the graffiti was simple vandalism or solidarity with a fellow traveler remains to be seen, but it would have been uncharacteristically stupid for the self-styled anarchists to go on such a spree just as public sentiment may have been shifting toward the protesters and defense attorneys were having preliminary talks about dropping some of the charges.

And ASAP members may be accused of many things, but stupidity isn’t one of them.

That said, protesters are going to have to be more careful about the claims they make regarding that fateful day in the park. For days after the incident, demonstrators – some who were arrested and some who weren’t – emphatically denied that they had carried signs that said “Kill a Cop” or used the F-word in a similar construction.

Turns out they most certainly did.

Police doing the mop-up from the arrests collected an array of banners, pamphlets and picket signs, as well as fistfuls of handmade signs, about the size of bumper stickers, apparently made by spray painting stencils on contact paper and cutting to size with scissors. Those stickers, now locked away in the police Property Room, come in a variety of color motifs and slogans, including “Hogtie the SPD” and “Kill a Cop” – the latter with an inexplicable heart at the end. And, yes, there is an “F-word the Police” sticker as well.

In a similar vein, at least one of the protesters insisted in the days after the arrests that they were not sitting on an American flag, but a blanket that merely looked like a flag.

Nope. It was a flag, a really big one that is currently folded in the ceremonial triangle made familiar by military funerals, wrapped in paper and stored in the Property Room.

This is an effort to set the record straight – some news accounts carried those denials – not a judgment of whether protesters were properly exercising their free speech rights.

The First Amendment protects a person for saying many unpopular and controversial things. But it probably assumes the people who carry that unpopular message will own up to it.

Talking food trash

Spokane police and fire departments are on friendly terms, but that doesn’t keep them from talking a little good-natured smack from time to time.

Like when the respective chiefs appeared together at the City Council’s Public Safety Committee last week. Both departments were graduating cadets Friday, and Fire Chief Bobby Williams and Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick offered invitations to the assembled council members to the respective ceremonies, happening one after the other.

Council President Joe Shogan thanked them for the invite but wondered why the two departments couldn’t make it a little easier on the schedulers and have just one ceremony.

“We do not eat as well as the Fire Department,” explained Assistant Police Chief Jim Nicks.

“We will not be serving doughnuts,” countered Williams.

Numbers games

Looking ahead to 2008, Washington state Republicans find great satisfaction in a poll by a Portland firm that shows Dino Rossi “neck and neck” with Gov. Chris Gregoire.

When Moore Information asked 500 people this month whom they would pick for governor next year, 47 percent said Gregoire and 43 percent said Rossi. Even though Gregoire is up by 4 percentage points, that’s the poll’s margin of error, so statistically, they could be tied. (Of course, statistically, she could be ahead by 8, but that’s not the way you crunch numbers when you are behind.)

Further, this is good news, the GOP believes, because the numbers are essentially unchanged from February. In the meantime, as Moore Information notes, Gregoire wrapped up a successful legislative session and the economy improved; Rossi got hammered a bit over the foundation he heads that some people think is just a campaign wolf in a think-tank sheep’s clothing.

What the GOP seems to have forgotten, however, are some of the polls it was trumpeting in the early years of Gregoire’s term. You know, the ones that showed her as low as 35 percent, and Rossi as high as 53 percent, as recently as 2006.

As Republicans note, however, this is all “hypothetical,” because Rossi isn’t really a candidate for governor yet.

Yeah. Right.

Catch the candidates

Wednesday: Mayoral candidates in a “living room style” debate sponsored by Vorpahl Wing Securities. 5:30 p.m. at CenterStage, 1017 W. First Ave. Admission is free but tickets are required; call (509) 747-1749.

Note: A League of Women Voters forum for mayoral and council president candidates scheduled for Aug. 7 at the downtown library has been canceled.