Political Desk: What, Me Primary?

It is not yet August, and I've just received my primary ballot. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me, either.

Here's what passes for the thinking on this: The candidates and parties felt that a primary in the more temperate regions of September doesn't leave enough time to spend gobs of money on swaying your vote. Nor would it be enough to make you sick of campaigning, mailers, and robo-calls. So as a result they shuffled the primary forward into the realm of summer vacations and picnics. Yeah, that's going to work out real well.

The good news, such as it is, is that the ballot is pretty light for the primary. No initiatives. No judges. No state offices. A lot of contests are one or two candidates to start with (this is a top-two primary, which means for a lot of urban contests you see two democrats punching it out in November, and in more rural precincts two republicans). Still, this is the hand we've been dealt, and is a chance to get in on the early decision making, such as it is.

I will be dispensing my traditional blather in this space. I shan't be going into the big local event, the Seattle City Council, since I don't vote on it. So there. King County has the full listing of candidates and their statements here. The Seattle Times editorial board has cut its three-martini lunch short and put its blather here (it hasn't aggregated it yet). The Stranger got off its pot-fogged butts and has their blather here. The Municipal League ratings (which don't include Kent or Renton - thanks guys) are here. And as an added bonus, here's a slate presented by a group of CEOs in hopes of motivating their tech minions into voting for candidates that won't punish large corporations by making them take out the garbage or at least clean out the cat litters every once and a while, for Pete's sake.

So stay tuned and we'll try to make this as painless as possible. Well, for me at least.

Sadly, more later.