Norm Dicks

Burner's house burned, Rossi's billboards revealed and Dicks' district disses. Here are the Winners & Losers for July 11, 2008. | CLICK HERE

Washington's Congressional delegation spoke out in favor of today's decision by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' decision to re-open the bidding process for the Air Force KC-767 tankers. Airbus had won the initial contract, which would have cost the state's economy a significant amount of money, but the process was discovered to be flawed by the Government Accountability Office.

Representatives Brian Baird (D-03), Doc Hastings (D-04) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (D-05) have yet to speak on the matter. Links to and excerpts from the rest of the state's elected officials statements are below.

Rep. Norm DicksThe Grays Harbor County Democrats met last week as usual, but when the meeting ended something stood out quite glaringly. The Aberdeen Daily World is reporting that the group decided not to endorse their sitting Democratic U.S. Representative, Belfair's Norm Dicks.

Dicks has consistently won elections by wide margins in his thirty-one year electoral career. Many Democrats at the meeting cited Dicks' support for funding the war in Iraq as a reason not to officially endorse him. Dicks voted for authorization of the war, but has since voiced the need to bring it to an end. Still, as with most Democrats, he votes to fund it.

Washington's full delegation, with the exception of Rep. Brian Baird (D-Vancouver) spoke out on the Government Accountability Office's decision today to uphold the protest against the decision making process that led to a US Air Force tanker contract to go to Airbus over Boeing earlier this year.

The group unanimously celebrated the GAO's decision because of initial unfairness in the decision making process, and used their statements as an I-told-you-so to those who supported and helped usher the deal through.

"It has been clear all along that the process was flawed, as evidenced by the clear recommendations made by the GAO," said Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Auburn). "This is a great victory for Boeing, Washington state and every American who values our nation's economic and homeland security."

Read all available statements below the jump.

Fox News reported early this morning that Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Belfair) was one of three House Democrats, along with New York's Rep. Charles Rangel and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), to convince Hillary Clinton to suspend her campaign for president later this week.

At the time of the conversation Wednesday, Dicks was still a supporter of Clinton's candidacy. Then this morning, he announced that he was backing Barack Obama in the spirit of party unification.

"It's time to move on," Dicks told McClatchy's Les Blumenthal. "We need to unify the party," Dicks said. "Whatever differences we have among ourselves, they pale in comparison to those we have with John McCain."

Washington's superdelegate count stands at five for Obama, five for Clinton and seven undecided. State Republican deciders may know something the Democrats don't know, since they've been campaigning against Obama, without a single mention on Clinton in recent letters. The Republican decidee is coming to town, and you can meet him for dinner for only $33,100.

Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dave Reichert have gone kosher and sworn off the pork. Which sounds admirable but also correlates to their effectiveness rating, and will likely get them less goodwill than a couple of good projects for their districts would have. On the other side, Rep. Norm Dicks won Citizens Against Government Waste’s “April Porker of the Month” for trying to get the Air Force to buy from Boeing. What nerve!

TACOMA -- Gov. Chris Gregoire's campaign kickoff bus tour hit Tacoma's Stadium District today moments after noon in a meeting room dotted with campaign signs that read, "Making our communities safer." Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Belfair) began the festivities by calling her a fighter for, among other things, taking on the tobacco industry, and highlighted the construction of the second Narrows Bridge under her leadership before handing the microphone over to a series of political leaders.

Paul Richmond, Democratic candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in the 6th District that covers much of Tacoma and the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas, calls himself the "story telling lawyer" in his private law practice. With his candidacy for Congress, Richmond hopes to tell the story of a nation turning its back on a history of civil liberties, experiencing economic trouble and a shrinking middle class, and how the current representatives in Washington, D.C. are not doing enough to change that.