Keep your gun, leave your knife

OLYMPIA – Half a dozen Democratic state lawmakers – all of them from rural districts – want the state’s attorney general to weigh in on whether cities can ban otherwise-legal firearms on city property. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels recently issued an executive order doing so.

“I’d like to know whether cities like Seattle can set aside the Bill of Rights when you walk onto city property,” Rep. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim, said last week.

Washington lawmakers ran into a similar issue firsthand several years ago, when they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars installing and staffing metal detectors and X-ray machines at the entrances to the state capitol.

But because lawmakers have long been reluctant to go the logical extra step and actually ban firearms in the building, the screenings led to a bizarre result: security staff was confiscating things like hammers, screwdrivers and pepper spray, but anyone with a concealed weapons permit was free to pass through, pistol, bullets and all.

The leased machines were soon removed.

A green thumbs-up

State Sen. Chris Marr and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, both D-Spokane, have drawn kudos from one of the state’s top environmental groups for their work in Olympia.

Washington Conservation Voters named Marr its legislator of the year, saying that while it is unusual for a first-term lawmaker to have so much horsepower, Marr is not one “to sit back and watch how the process works.”

Among other things, the group cites Marr’s controversial efforts to combat global warming, which predate his election in 2006. In 2005, he was virtually alone among car dealers in publicly supporting Washington’s adoption of California-style auto emissions standards. He followed that up as a lawmaker with another bill – also controversial – targeting greenhouse gases this year.

The group pronounced Brown an “environmental champion,” saying she has a long track record of backing environmental legislation.

Like trade groups, unions and other interest groups, Washington Conservation Voters issues an annual report card detailing how each lawmaker voted on the group’s priorities. I link to the full report on my blog, but here is the short form: Local Democrats, notably state Rep. Don Barlow, D-Spokane, got high marks. Local Republicans didn’t.

Today Thimphu, tomorrow Olympia

The national assembly of Bhutan has banned lawmakers from toting their laptops into the capitol, Reuters reported this week, apparently out of concern that they’d spend their time playing computer games.

Lawmakers in the Himalayan kingdom, which until recently was a monarchy, overruled objections by colleagues who argued the laptops are more convenient than paper.

Such a reform would be extremely difficult in Olympia, where lawmakers in just a few years have become accustomed to routinely pecking away on e-mail (and sometimes solitaire) on their state-issued laptops as they listen – sort of – to hearing testimony and floor speeches.

IdahObama, of course

Bumperactive, an online bumper-sticker maker, is trying to design pro-Barack Obama bumperstickers customized for every state. There’s ” ‘bama for Obama” (Alabama, yes), “GumbObama” (Louisiana) and, for Arizona, “Re-elect Senator John McCain 2008.” (Emphasis on “senator.”)

In this field of competitors, alas, Washington’s offering comes off as pretty feeble. It has a lot of evergreen trees, the stubby whiteness of Mt. Rainier and “O B A M A” written across both. It’s no Nebraska (Obama spelled out in corn kernels on a cob), Nevada (his smiling face on slot-machine wheels) or New Hampshire (“Live Free, Vote Barack” on a field of gray granite.)

But Idahoans, here’s your chance. Idaho is one of the nearly three dozen states with no bumper sticker. Got ideas? The company – see the link on my blog – is accepting e-mailed ideas. And it’s still taking proposals for the states that are already done.

First the pieman, now the lawnmower man

Initiative pitchman Tim Eyman, who’s been booted from meetings and once got pied in the face by political opponents, recently faced a new challenge: the lawnmower man.

Eyman last week filed his latest initiative petitions, likely enough to put I-985 on the ballot. A relentless publicity seeker, he called a press conference to announce the victory on the steps of a state building next to the state capitol. But as a TV crew and a couple of newspaper reporters arrived, a state groundskeeper on a riding lawnmower appeared. The big green machine roared away as Eyman struggled to be heard.

“Mow the lawn some other day!” he shouted. The man paid no attention, piloting his rig around stone steps and shrubs and sidewalks.

“We’re the Rodney Dangerfield of politics,” Eyman said. “No respect.”

Public record? Only after you get out of jail

The state Supreme Court ruled last week that prison officials who had to disclose a government document to a prison inmate could nonetheless seize it when it arrived in the prison mailroom and refuse to deliver it to him.

While incarcerated at the state’s Olympic Corrections Center, Michael Livingston filed what would otherwise be a routine public-records request. He asked for the training records of a particular prison guard.

The Department of Correction copied the file and mailed it to Livingston, who by then had been transferred to the state’s Cedar Creek prison.

At Cedar Creek, the packet was opened, read and confiscated as part of the prison’s security screening. Livingston simply got a note saying the prison superintendent did not permit DOC employee records to be released to inmates. The agency offered to mail it to someone else – outside prison – if Livingston wished.

Writing for the high court’s 5-4 majority, Justice Barbara Madsen said it’s one thing to release records to the public, but another to allow them inside a prison.

Dissenting Justice Jim Johnson said the law is clear: an open public record is available to anyone. It’s not enough, he said, for the prison system to have “mailed the record to itself” and claim that it complied with public disclosure.

GOP: “Get Out and Party”?

That’s what the latest Elway Poll asked hundreds of registered voters in Washington recently.

The upshot: 75 percent correctly said Republican.

But the poll found that “One in seven did not know and one in 14 thought GOP referred to the Democratic Party.”

Among them: more than a quarter of people describing themselves as independents or Democrats.

The question is particularly relevant for the Republicans running with the words “prefers GOP Party” on the ballot, such as gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. Rossi’s campaign – citing his longtime use of the acronym – has denied that using “GOP” is a move to obscure the fact that in a blue-leaning state, Rossi’s a Republican. But those independents and Democrats are exactly the ones Rossi’s going to have to try to win over.

Reach Richard Roesler at (360) 664-2598 or