The knee-jerk, government-shouldn't-be-in-the-booze-business crowd will have plenty to drink to when Costco's $22 million Initiative 1183 wins tonight—and it will win, by a comfortable margin—but you booze-hounds are missing the bigger picture: Washington's initiative process is now officially open to the highest corporate bidder.

Yeah, I know, it's been heading in that direction since Tim Eyman first made a lucrative profession of it back in the late 1990s, but I-1183 and last year's Coke & Pepsi sponsored I-1107 mark a turning point in our history when large corporations finally started spending tens of millions of dollars in pursuit of hundreds of millions of dollars in returns. It's great for stockholders, but will ultimately prove to be a disaster for the citizens of Washington state, when corporate interests with unlimited resources dive into the business of directly marketing to voters self-serving policies that could never survive a deliberative legislative process.

But, you know, I'm rational enough to admit defeat. And since we have neither the political will nor skill to reform the initiative process, from here on out it will only get worse. Yet another way in which Washington, politically, is totally fucked.

So enjoy the hundreds of millions of extra dollars Costco will ultimately earn from selling jugs of Kirkland brand vodka in Washington state, Mr. Sinegal, but don't you ever again pretend that you are some sort of responsible corporate citizen, because you're not. And you'll never get another dime of my business again.