Democrats With Spines!!

Spotted in Washington State!

"It's time for Democrats somewhere to draw a line in the sand and say we are not going to let bully Republican tactics determine who our governor is or how an election is going to be determined," he (Paul Berendt, chairman of the state Democratic Party) said.

Mr. Berendt said Washington Democrats had decided from the start that what he described as Al Gore's "nice guy" approach was not to be the tactic here.

"I don't think there's any doubt that people are empowered by this whole thing," said Representative Jim McDermott, one of the state's most prominent Democrats. "The feeling of many of us is they quit too soon in Ohio. We don't know what happened there, but we said, 'By God, they're not going to do that in Washington.' "

The Democrats repeatedly went to court to challenge the Republicans. The party's communications director, Kirstin Brost, fired off a daily stream of news releases with biting words for Mr. Rossi, calling him a thief and the "accidental governor-elect" and deriding him for his "HypocRossi."

Also, judges who get it:

The State Supreme Court, hearing an appeal of a case decided last week by a lower court, on Wednesday ruled that ballots that had been disqualified in King County because election workers initially found no matching signatures on voter registration cards in their files were not "fully examined." Republicans argued that King County was trying to "expand the universe of ballots" after the election and that it was too late to go back and correct errors. But the justices, who ruled for the Republicans in another case last week, this time threw tough questions at them.

"You're looking at it from the point of view of the winner or the loser," Justice Susan Owens said. "Shouldn't we be looking at it from the point of view of the voter?"