1. Former Washington State Wire reporter Erik Smith, who, after leaving the conservative blog was briefly on the editorial board of The Seattle Times, has joined the Republican-dominated Majority Coalition Caucus communications team. 

Here's the email that went out over the weekend announcing the hire. 

From: Troyer, James 
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2014 9:27 P
To: @Senate MCC Caucus
Subject: New Staff announcement: Erik Smith

 I am very excited to announce a new addition to our staff:  Erik Smith will be joining our Communications team.

 Erik Smith is a familiar name around the Capitol, after a long career spent working as a statehouse reporter. He has covered Olympia for a total of 15 sessions starting in 1987. His journalism career includes the Aberdeen Daily World and 10 years for the Tri-City Herald where he was the lead statehouse reporter and wrote an award-winning weekly political column. After time with The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., Erik returned to Olympia in 2009 to launch Washington State Wire, an independent online publication that put an emphasis on coverage of business-community issues. For the last six months he has worked as an editorial writer at the Seattle Times.

A graduate of the University of Washington, he reminisces that he entered college at a time when tuition was only $229 a quarter. As tuition rose year after year, he began to develop a critical understanding of the reasons for those increases. Where many talk of the trends of the last 30 years, Erik watched them unfold. 

He has deep Eastern Washington roots. He was born in Richland and grew up in Spokane, where he graduated from Mead High School. He returned to his home town 10 years ago to launch and manage a pair of family-owned small businesses, two Curves for Women franchises. The experience left him no richer, he says, but it gave him a firm understanding of the role small business plays in the economy, as well as the unemployment-insurance and workers’-comp issues all business owners face. 

Here’s one fact about Erik that he seldom divulged during his time working as a reporter at the Capitol. A relative of his served in Congress – Henry P. Smith, who represented a district in upstate New York from 1965 to 1975. Rep. Smith was an R.

Erik begins this Monday.  Please welcome him to our staff.

2. A footnote on former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's $285,000 contribution to Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, the group campaigning for I-594, the gun control measure on this year's ballot: Bloomberg's last-minute cash infusion (the October 23 contribution came less than two weeks before Election Day) might make liberals and gun control advocates happy, but the donation wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for a 2009 lawsuit brought by the social conservative group the Family PAC (which had run an initiative against the state's domestic partnership laws) and their attorney James Bopp, the conservative anti–campaign finance regs mastermind who served as the legal adviser on the now famous Citizens' United case, a decision that's anathema to liberals.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled on the Family PAC case in 2011siding with attorney Bopp's argument that Washington State's prohibition on contributions over $5,000 to initiative campaigns within the last 21 days of the campaign was an unconstitutional restraint on free speech.

Washington State conservative AG Rob McKenna's office argued against Bopp and for the state (another irony) that major last-minute contributions would escape the attention of voters who'd already cast their ballots.

(Speaking of I-594 and casting ballots with the new info that Bloomberg is pouring in last-minute money thanks to campaign finance bogeyman Bopp: Pro-I-594 voters can head to Neumos tonight for a fill-out-your-ballot party and concert hosted by the youth GOTV group the Washington Bus and the I-594 group Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility.)

The secretive mailers appear to be a double cross by a Democratic group trying to suppress Sheldon's vote among Republicans. 

3. Speaking of campaign finance controversy: Washington State Republicans are complaining to the state's Public Disclosure Commission about a group called American Values First which is sending mailers to Republican voters ostensibly supporting wayward Democratic state Sen. Tim Sheldon (D-35, Potlatch), the conservative Democrat who's a key Republican vote in the state senate's Republican-dominated Majority Coalition Caucus. The mailers praise Sheldon for supporting immigration reform, Medicare expansion, and family planning services. 

The mailers appear to be a double cross by a Democratic group trying to suppress Sheldon's vote among Republicans. 

The GOP, according to the Olympian, says in its PDC complaint that "the group failed to file as a political committee, that it failed to report its funding source or top five donors, it didn’t file an electronic report of electioneering expenditures within 24 hours, and it lacked 10 in-state donors."

Campaign finance records at the PDC show that Sheldon independent groups have spent $293,922 supporting Sheldon and $1,323 opposing Sheldon. 

Washington, DC–based American Values First shows up—as of a PDC report filed yesterday—in the support column for $20,013. 

 However, there is no report at the PDC of who's contributing to American Values First. 

4. Fizz is hearing from sources on both the Democratic and Republican side of the aisle that U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA, 8) is getting ready to run for governor in 2016. 

That would certainly explain why he's currently airing TV ads in parts of King County that he doesn't represent—like this one about bipartisanship that's up in Redmond, which is in the First Congressional District not Reichert's Eighth.