UPDATE: The Discovery Institute's Bruce Chapman confirms that the group just took Hutchison's name off its list of board members today, after a Seattle Times reporter called to ask whether she was on the board. According to Chapman, Hutchison left the board at the end of 2007. "Somebody made a mistake," he said.Hutchison's biography at the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, of which she is executive director, still lists her Discovery affiliation.

Hutchison also donated $500 to anti-choice, right-wing nut case Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign last year, and another $500 to George W. Bush in 2004.

Neither the Seattle Times nor SeattlePI.com mentioned Hutchison's Republican affiliations—a product either of press-release journalism (both news outlets essentially rewrote the release Hutchison's campaign sent out this morning), or of the fact that county candidates no longer have to declare a party affiliation.

Original post follows.

Former KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison announced this morning that she's running for King County Executive—a possibility I first mentioned back in February. Hutchison, a Republican in all but name who sits on the board of the right-wing Discovery Institute, which advocates for the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools, was one of the loudest champions of last year's Initiative 26 making all King County offices officially "nonpartisan." And indeed, in her press release, Hutchison boasts about her lack of partisanship, name-dropping both Sims and Democrat Booth Gardner (as well as moderate Republican Dan Evans). However, as we noted in our endorsement against I-26, "The only hope local Republicans have of gaining ground in blue King County is to make sure voters don't know they're Republicans." With Hutchison's candidacy, that hope could be fulfilled.