Monday, August 07, 2006

Does Partisan Politics Get ANY Sleazier Than This?

The recent lawsuit filed against Senate Candidate Mike McGavick, stinks worse than Liberty Bay after one of its infamous sewer line breaks.

A Safeco Insurance shareholder, 27-year old Emma Schwartzman, a distant relative of Safeco's founders who inherited a small number of shares of the insurance company, has filed a lawsuit accusing McGavick of malfeasance and "looting" the company. Never mind the company was on the verge of bankruptcy when McGavick took over and turned it around. Makes you wonder what Schwartzman's stock would have been worth without McGavick.

Schwartzman and her attorney, Knoll Lowney, actually say with a straight face that the suit isn't politically motivated. We have a name for that kind of thing where I come from — it's what comes out of the northern end of a southbound bull.

McGavick received $28 million in a severance package approved by Safeco's board of directors. It's my understanding that $20+ million of that was in stock options — not cash. That board includes former Governor Gary Locke, as well as Kerry Killinger, head of Washington Mutual, Robert Cline, retired CEO of Airborne Freight, Joshua Green III, head of Bainbridge Island-based Sage Fly Rods, and Judith Runstad, of the law firm of Foster Pepper, among others. Runstad is also a director of Wells Fargo and Potlatch Corp, and most other members serve on other corporate boards — including those of Paccar, MBIA Insurance, Esterline Technologies, Delta Airlines, CNET Networks, Nike and Coke.

Like Locke, more than one of those board members are Democrats. This is a pretty high-powered, financially savvy group of folks who aren't about to let Safeco — which is doing quite well these days thanks to McGavick — do anything fiscally irresponsible.

Rather than belabor just how underhanded and squalid this is — other than to say it's about as low and sleazy as hardball partisan politics gets — and a true measure of exactly how desperate the Democrats and incumbent Senator Maria Cantwell must be, I'll just let KING 5's Robert Mak tell the story.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:37 PM

    Well here we go again. I do not know what angered me more, her wanting to be a leader of the "generation fed up with coruption" or the lawery that found her via the internet fishing, yes I know what did, that they can say it is not politics yet McGavick supporters were asked to leave the press conference. They were not asked to leave because the room was filled. Neither side is clean when it comes election smear, but this is just one more. I did noticed that she only went after the man who got the money, not the people that approved it. GIVE ME A BREAK!

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  2. Anonymous11:10 PM

    " Does Partisan Politics Get ANY Sleazier Than This?" Yeah have you ever heard of Ohio Sec of State Ken Blackwell and his pal Karl Rove?

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  3. Anonymous8:09 AM

    So I have gone to the web site set up by the lawyer for this misuse of time and they are quite full of themselves. Yes they do name dems, however they seem to have one thing in mind. As for my opinion, good on him for getting what he could and got the board to approve it, so how do you call it stealing?

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