The Nose: What’s a presidential caucus? And why is it so hard to get a ticket?

Civics exam: If you can figure out how the state’s political parties select a preferred presidential nominee, go ahead and send the Sniff an explainer. From this end, it looks like a closed door with a sign saying NO VOTERS ALLOWED.

State Republicans start the frolic Saturday with precinct caucuses, otherwise known as Meetings No One With a Life Would Dream of Attending. Participants can sign in with a presidential preference, but they don’t have to.

Supposedly, fascinating discussions of issues and platforms follow, instead of the get-in-get-out process the rest of us know as voting. That part comes later, on May 24.

Meanwhile, the Democrats start their episode of Presidential Survivor on March 26. It’s a series of caucuses, and admission requires a club membership and golden ticket – oops, actually anyone can attend, assuming enough free time and the willingness to read a 14-page set of arcane instructions.

The best part? If would-be Democrats don’t go to the caucuses and instead cast a primary vote on May 24, it won’t count for beans, because the party’s caucus results rule. Ah, partisans. Makes you long for the woolly scent of the state’s old blanket primary, where everybody voted the way they wanted.

Guv grammar: The big dog, Gov. Jay Inslee, dumped a gigantic preposition pile on our inbox today, announcing “transformative changes” to state children’s services.

First take — are there any kinds of changes that aren’t transformative? Meaningless changes? Yuuuge changes? Bowie ch-ch-changes?

Second take — the Guv signed his executive order in the midst of a photo op, with cute kids hanging on his tweedy elbows. Sweet — but the rest of his accompanying news release was way harder to understand.

Presumably, “children’s services” refers to stuff like food, shelter, foster parenting and medical care, among other good things. It was tough to tease that out of his strangely worded news release, though.

The executive order creates a “Blue Ribbon Commission (you’d think this guv would want green) on the Delivery of Services (capitalized for some reason) to Children and Families (this is a formal title?) tasked with sending the Legislature recommendations for the organizational structure, cost estimates for IT and capital, and measurable benchmarks for assessing the effectiveness of the new department.”

Whew. Might take an opera singer with good lungs to get that mouthful out in one breath.

Methanol saboteur alert: No one supports sneaky PR tricks online. Heavens, no. Such sleazy tactics have no place in public discourse. So no one interested in the Methanol Plant That Ate the Tacoma Tideflats should read past this sentence. You’ve been warned.

What’s more, no one still reading should dream of name-jacking an online domain address. For non-geeks, that’s the gobbledygook in the top of your browser window that says stuff like YOURNAMEHERE.COM. Some of those addresses are for sale, as many would-be billionaires know, though most of them favor sweats, slippers and Cinnabon.

Buying up obvious domain names that look and sound like your enemies while redirecting to your own wonderfulness is a standard political ruse. Our Prosecutor, Mark Lindquist, knows about such things. So do Donald Trump supporters, who recently snagged the JebBush.com address and sent it to The Donald’s campaign site.

All high-road advocates should deplore those tactics. They shouldn’t care that the domain name NorthwestInnovationWorks.com is on sale for a mere $11.99.

It shouldn’t matter that the real Northwest Innovation Works, parent company of the proposed methanol refinery, has its own website at nwinnovationworks.com, with all sorts of information. It’s a testament to noble participants in the debate that no one has thought to sow any confusion. That would be terrible. So don’t get any ideas.

 

Old-school reportage: Nothing beats that old-book smell. It oughtta be packaged and sprayed on car fresheners for librarians.

It wafts from an old tome from the mouldering past, recently acquired and shared by a colleague with a penchant for purple prose.

Title: “The Career of a Journalist.” Copyright date: 1908. Author: William Salisbury, a veteran ink-stained wretch, who promises in his foreword to tell, “the most comprehensive story of newspaper life ever written,” based on his nine years (!) of work on papers “in five American cities.”

Already, you can tell this was a guy with staying power, a veritable institution at each rag where he cast his hairy eyeball over the fruited journalistic plain. Salisbury spent some time in Chicago, working for Charles Foster Kane — oops, William Randolph Hearst, that paragon of our industry.

Upon what meat did our Salisbury feed? Turns out he had one thing in common with today’s scribblers: a taste for grumbling. Here’s the closing sentence of his fusty chronicle:

“I tried to be a great American journalist,” he wrote. “And I find that I have been but a dreamer of foolish dreams, a seeker after the impossible, a worshipper of false gods, a pursuer of phantoms.”

We feel you, William. Now hand that thing off to an editor, and we’ll stick it inside someplace.

This story was originally published February 18, 2016 at 5:53 PM with the headline "The Nose: What’s a presidential caucus? And why is it so hard to get a ticket?."