Jim Camden

Osama bin Laden took a prominent role in Washington's race for the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, as a commercial by challenger George Nethercutt accused incumbent Patty Murray of making excuses for the terrorist leader. "Winning the war on terrorism means fighting terrorists, not excusing them," Nethercutt says at the end of a television ad that features photographs of bin Laden and smoldering ruins from Sept. 11.

State troopers should get a raise and law enforcement agencies around Washington should get better communications equipment to deal with emergencies, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Christine Gregoire said Wednesday. Speaking at a convention of law enforcement officers in Spokane, Gregoire said the state needs to pay its troopers better to keep them longer. "They get the best training, but many of them stay two or three years, then get pulled away by other agencies," she said.

It's not just the economy, stupid. When voters are focusing on the presidential election, it's also the war in Iraq. Both issues are important to Laura Dowty, a Spokane attorney who was among some 400 Washington residents polled recently for The Spokesman-Review and three other newspapers.

Spokane voters won't have to take another run at a special levy for Emergency Medical Services. The final tally from the Elections Office shows the EMS Levy passed with a 392-vote cushion. The levy was one of several close races that were left hanging on election night because a majority of Spokane's voters are registered for ballots. It was just 83 votes above the required 60 percent majority, and city officials voted to put it on the November ballot if later counts dropped it below that mark.

Two current television commercials in Washington's U.S. Senate race. The ad: "Beginning," a 60-second TV commercial for Republican George Nethercutt, which pushes his support for a federal bill to reform medical malpractice and put a $250,000 limit on the amount a patient can receive for "pain and suffering" in a lawsuit against a doctor or hospital.

With medical and insurance costs rising and health care among the top issues voters want addressed, it's probably not surprising Washington state's candidates for the U.S. Senate each have a current commercial about that topic. Experts question whether the issues in those commercials – medical malpractice reform and new types of insurance plans – are the key to the nation's health care crisis.

Picture a lake of blue in a landscape of red. That's the partisan breakdown of Spokane County, based on the results of Tuesday's state primary, where voters for the first time in nearly 70 years were forced to vote for only the candidates of one party.

Anyone who claims to know exactly what Tuesday's primary means for the general election is either a genius or a liar. With voters restricted to a single party's candidates for the first time in nearly 70 years, there are no bench marks, no previous elections for persons with long memories to point to and say "It happened then, so it will probably happen again this year."

After years of being told their ballot counts, many Washington state voters will have to get used to something else in Tuesday's primary. Three out of four ballots they receive won't count, and instead will be thrown away.

In Washington state politics, the only thing more certain than death and taxes is a late campaign attack by groups trying to boost the chances of one candidate by smacking around another. This year, there are several conspicuous examples, as a shadowy committee tries to scuttle Deborah Senn's attorney general chances by questioning her work in the 1990s as insurance commissioner and the building industry tries to blame the state's new but already unpopular primary system on Christine Gregoire, a Democratic candidate for governor.

State campaign watchdogs told a political committee Tuesday it has 48 hours to reveal where it got the money it is using to blanket Washington with television commercials against attorney general candidate Deborah Senn. The commercials, which criticize Senn for her handling of a 1997 settlement with an insurance company, are political ads, the state Public Disclosure Commission said in a letter to the Voter Education Committee.

Eager to hear President Bush and other party luminaries without the filter of the news media, local delegates to the Republican National Convention scoff at the idea that such gatherings are a waste of time and money. Delegate Grant Peterson said he's heard journalists suggest that on television, but doesn't know anyone who actually believes it.

A trio of retired U.S. Coast Guard brass fired a shot across the bow of Rep. George Nethercutt's Senate campaign Thursday, calling on him to pull a radio ad attacking Sen. Patty Murray's record on Coast Guard funding. "Senator Murray has been a leader in improving our nation's security and providing support to the Coast Guard," the officers wrote Nethercutt. "The ad you are running is simply not true, and we request that you remove it from the airwaves."

The ad: "Port Security" a 30-second radio commercial by the Nethercutt campaign, accuses Patty Murray of underfunding agencies that provide protection for the nation's ports, including the Coast Guard. Main points include Nethercutt's contention that Murray is wrong to call ports the nation's first line of defense when they should really be the last line of defense, and that Murray "led the effort to cut the president's Coast Guard Budget after 9/11." Opponent's reaction: The Murray campaign says it's untrue that Murray cut the Coast Guard's budget in fiscal 2003 – the first budget year after the terrorist attacks. The Senate appropriations bill, S.2808, proposed spending $6.071 billion on the Coast Guard, which was more than Bush's proposed $6.057 billion or the House's proposed $6.06 billion.

Voters who are confused about the Sept. 14 primary can take heart. No one younger than 93 years old has ever done it quite this way in Washington before. Considering that voting has changed in the last seven decades – computer ballots have replaced curtained voting booths and levers – it would be fair to say all voters are equally inexperienced.