Any Liberals On Board Will Walk The Plank
What a great idea after an exhausting election: Take a free Caribbean cruise with “like-minded friends” aboard the Love Boat.
That’s the invitation Rep. Val Stevens, R-Arlington, and U.S. Rep. Linda Smith, R-Vancouver, accepted in return for acting as guest speakers on the so-called Politically Incorrect Cruise last Nov. 11-19.
“We are inviting a select group of like-minded friends and associates to join us for the first annual Politically Incorrect Cruise Seminars at Sea Pleasure Cruises,” gushed a glossy brochure for the cruise aboard the Crown Princess ocean liner.
About 138 people took the cruise, which cost West Coast participants up to $1,385 per person, depending on the choice of stateroom.
Stevens, Smith and Smith’s husband, Vern, traveled for free, said David Brooks, a local talk show host and Seattle financial adviser who organized the cruise.
Their trips were awarded as free bonuses by the travel agency booking the cruise because of the number of paying customers signed up, Brooks said.
Stevens refused to answer questions about the cruise. Smith called it the “cruise from hell.” She got seasick and lost her luggage. She said she plans to declare the trip on her 1994 income taxes.
Stevens was invited to give a workshop on how to run for office. Smith talked about grass-roots organizing, based on her experience running successful initiative campaigns, including the tax and spending limitation measure approved by voters in 1993.
Eight speakers in all held forth on conservative themes, including advantages of off-shore investing and gold securities; the Whitewater investigation of President Clinton; and promotion of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that all powers not specifically given to the federal government by the Constitution belong to the states or to the people.
Also along as a paying guest was Paul Hall, managing editor of the Jubilee Newspaper, a California bi-monthly regarded by the AntiDefamation League as a racist, anti-Semitic publication.
The Jubilee lists “Yahweh” as “Supreme Editor and Chief” on the paper’s masthead.
“There were some pretty, uh, unusual folks there I wouldn’t have chosen to go with,” Smith said of her shipmates. “I guess if someone’s going to go somewhere with someone, they should find out more about them.”
Brooks said the cruise was not sponsored by any organization. “It wasn’t put together by Right Wing Nuts of America or something like that.”
A good hair day
Talk about power: A suburban hairdresser singlehandedly saved an endangered state board from the consuming flames of GOP scrutiny last week.
State lawmakers were bent on eliminating the State Cosmetology, Barbering and Manicuring Advisory Board along with a host of other obscure commissions when Rep. Kathy Lambert, R-Woodinville, got a call from her hairdresser at her desk on the House floor.
Sure, the board hadn’t done much in recent years, the hairdresser admitted. But had lawmakers considered the possible effects of deregulation?
Did Lambert want to risk a bad, perhaps even dangerous experience at the hairdresser? Lambert remembered a hot curling iron dropped on her head the day before last November’s election. “I had this huge burn across my head,” she lamented.
She warned her colleagues of the potential hazards lurking in salons.
Moments before the vote to terminate the board, Lambert offered an amendment to spare it. It passed.
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The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Lynda V. Mapes Staff writer Staff writer Jim Brunner contributed to this column.