A local homeless activist has filed a specious anti-harassment order against City Council Member Bruce Harrell after, the man claims, Harrell threatened him.

In an anti-harassment order petition filed in King County Superior Court late last month, Michael Fuller—who repeatedly refers to himself as the Honorable Michael B. Fuller in his filing—claims that Harrell threatened him outside of Coleman Elementary School on April 28th.

In his filing, Fuller says he ran into Harrell outside the school and told him he "if you won [a city council seat] that you would handle the problem of racism in the CD." Then, Fuller says, Harrell "made movements as he was getting out of his car to assault a disable[d] man." Luckily, the petition says, local activist Omari Tahir Garrett, who famously whacked Mayor Paul Schell with a bullhorn in 2001, was there to break up the alleged melee.

Fuller writes in his petition that he's afraid of Bruce Harrell because "Karate Bruce Harrell knows and this put my life in great danger."

Fuller, who lists himself as a Private Attorney General in his filing, apparently fears for his life so much that he drafted a letter to President Barack Obama, which is included with his anti-harassment petition.

"Now these slant-eyed immigrants in the black community, with hatred against Black American disable and saying we have invaded their country and have killed their families. Now, looking as I read Jones V. Meyer CD 1968, this case law does not apply to the ones with or without a Green Card to violatie 45.11 Coercion threat and intimidate the Black American disable in the Black Community. I notice that they only socialize with Caucasoid. This has also invaded the Black Community. They did not want to be around us in the early 60s, and now they are saying this is their neighborhood. Bruce Harrell is a racist and he said we the people but not African American disable or African American veterans"

Bruce Harrell was not in his office this afternoon (sources at City Hall say Harrell was at a Karate class) and could not be reached for comment.

It appears City Hall staff are familiar with the Honorable Michael Fuller. "We’ve all been warned about “the honorable,”' one staffer says. "He’s somebody they warn you about when you start here."

Fuller could also not be reached for comment, but his voicemail message warns "time is winding up and God has your address. All of you elected officials that are fabricating to the constituents will have to answer to my God. Thank you."

Fuller's anti-harassment order against Harrell was tossed out by the court the same day it was filed.

In other news, just about anyone can file for—and get—a temporary restraining order. I'm thinking about filing one against Dan just for shits and giggles. That, and he's been threatening to kill people around here.

In my column this week, I talk to King County Executive candidates Fred Jarrett and Ross Hunter, two Eastside Democrats who serve in the state Senate and House, respectively. (Longer Q&As with each candidate, as well as a report from last night's executive forum in Renton, will be posted on the Stranger's web site shortly). In our conversations, both candidates told me that the one percent cap on property taxes (passed by voters as Tim Eyman's Initiative 747, overturned by the state supreme court, and subsequently reinstated, at Gov. Christine Gregoire's request, by a special session of the state legislature) was one of the biggest problems facing the county: Because the county relies primarily on property taxes, and because one percent is lower than the rate of inflation, the cap means county government has to make deeper cuts every year.

Hunter: [The county has] a structural revenue problem. They get 60 percent of their revenue from property tax and that only grows one percent a year, and inflation is just bigger than that. Over time, they have to keep doing less and less as a county. And if the county’s doing things that you think are really important to quality of life, like public health or putting miscreants in jail, then that’s bad news.

Jarrett: There are some structural problems around their revenue sources, but there are solutions to those that the county council and executive have decided not to take. While they are limited to 1 percent property tax growth [each year], they’re able to go out and ask the voters if the voters will want those services. They haven’t done that because they know they’ll lose. They haven’t made the case to the voters that those services are important.

However, both men voted to reinstate the one percent cap on property taxes in their roles as state legislators in 2007.

I called Hunter and Jarrett to see why they voted to put the cap back in place, whether they stood by their votes, and whether, in light of massive recent budget cuts at the county, they thought voters were prepared to raise their taxes to protect county services.

Hunter paused for a long time, then he said:

Why'd I vote that way in the first place? I voted that way because that's what the [House Democratic] caucus decided to do on that issue. ... I'm finance chair and to some degree I follow the lead of my caucus. ... I don't think it works, but I think it's what the people want. One of the things I tried to do this year was make corrections to the county's tax structure. And what I found is that there is immense resistance to doing that within the caucus. I was surprised by that, because we're looking at some pretty devastating cuts at the county... The members are concerned, but they also have concern that the county has a spending problem. ... I don't thing King County is going to be able to get its voters or the legislature to vote for more revenue authority until they convince both the voters and the legislators that they're spending what they have in a reasonable way. ... I think you've got to come back and convince the voters that you have a real issue and they actually want the services you provide. ... Until people can understand what the county spends its money on, I don't think they do they aren't going to vote to raise their taxes. ... Is one percent the right number? No, it's not. We should probably use a number that's closer to some measure of inflation. Every year they do less. Maybe that's what you want, but it's not what I want.

Jarrett , similarly, said the county hasn't made the case that it deserves more tax revenue:

One of the county's big problems is that it hasn't built the public support for the programs, and that's why you have things like the one percent cap. My view is generally, I don't want to overturn decisions that the public made. I dislike the way that Tim approaches politics and the way that he tries to make public policy without understanding what the consequences of it are, but by the same token, one of the things that I have learned over the years is that when people don't get to have the consequences of a vote they don't learn that they have to be a little bit more careful when they're doing their analysis of a vote. ... Notice that what i said last night is not that you do away with the property tax cap. I said, you work with the law as it is. You can go above one percent—you just have to have a vote of the people. The county has not been able to demonstrate the need to the people to do that. ... If you look at the rhetoric that comes out of Eyman and his ilk, what they talk about is how much property taxes are rising. Well, the reason they're going up is voter-approved levies. ... When it's a specific thing and people see value in it, they're willing to vote for taxes.

Slog tipper Justin writes:

One year ago today, Obama effectively buried Clinton and the primary was over. We knew it was true because Tim Russert said it was true.

Was that really only one year ago? It seems like so much longer. But Justin's tip made me wonder where I was a year ago. Turns out it was almost one year ago today that I was out among the white people of southern Oregon, trying to figure out why Hillary Clinton was still in the presidential race (and still hoping to win the Oregon primary) even though Tim Russert and everyone else said it was over for her. At the Jackson County Fairgrounds, down near the border with California, I found something of an answer:

As that Clinton event at the Jackson County Fairgrounds was finishing up, a familiar face walked by the press area—a friend from college who now travels with the senator. He looked great for having been in three states in one day, and after a few minutes of catching up he told me to grab my stuff and come with him.

We walked to the back of the arena, songs like "American Girl" and "Don't Stop Believing" playing on the loudspeakers. My friend nodded at a Secret Service agent and then the two of us were walking under the risers that had formed Clinton's backdrop, into a "greenroom" draped in blue cloth and filled with local law-enforcement officers in their dress uniforms, probably waiting for a picture.

Through a curtain, across a short stretch of concrete, and then, with my friend as my escort, I was suddenly inside the bubble of Secret Service protection that was surrounding Clinton as she worked the rope line. Because of the late hour, Clinton had promised the crowd she would answer their questions one on one rather than doing a Q&A, and my friend wanted me to hear what people say to Clinton as she presses the flesh. This is something people don't see and don't understand, he was telling me: the intensity of Clinton's connection with her supporters, the absolute firmness of their conviction that she should go on.

It was true.