Kimberly Christensen—who described herself to me as a freelance writer, mom, and former midwife from Wallingford—yesterday filed a complaint with the King County Obmbudsman's office, alleging that Rob McKenna, while on the King County Council, demonstrated a "complete disregard" for rules prohibiting campaign activities inside government offices.

“When I read the Stranger and AP articles, it seemed like it was begging for someone to file a complaint," Christensen told me this morning. "All the information was there, but I know that in order for it to be investigated somebody actually has to file.”

The county ombudsman's office confirmed that it has received not one but two complaints—the other, apparently, is from lawyer Kyle Olive—regarding McKenna.

"We will make determinations about these complaints as soon as we can," said Jon Stier, senior deputy ombudsman. He noted that the King County ethics code provides for civil penalties—meaning fines—for a person found to have committed ethics violations, but he could not tell me whether a person no longer working for King County (McKenna now works for the state as attorney general) can be the subject of a King County ethics investigation.

Christensen told me she's "hoping there will be some sort of formal censure" of McKenna, whose King County archives feature hundreds of campaign-related documents that shouldn't be there. She continued:

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This is based something that Romney is not familiar with: hard facts.

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

...In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

The big surge in federal spending happened in fiscal 2009, before Obama took office. Since then, spending growth has been relatively flat.

....Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%.

Here's a video explaining the premise for the Paul Festival, a music and activism festival celebrating Ron Paul's birthday just in time for the Republican National Convention in Tampa:

There is nothing I can say, except this: I want to go there. Maybe in a Ronvoy:

All right. This definitely isn't going away anytime soon, now:

A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker’s first run for Mayor — back in 2002 — suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers.

Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000) — all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage.

Near as I can tell, nobody has checked to see if Bain contributed to the other side of that race, too. I think it'd be hard to find any successful politician in a major northeastern city who hasn't taken money from Bain or some Bain-alike private equity firm, but whatever. Let's keep going with this witch hunt! It's a great idea to drag down a rising star in the Democratic party while simultaneously chasing after Wall Street investors who donate to Democratic causes. We'll have the purest party in the whole country once we've driven all the money out of it! Booker will be on The Rachel Maddow Show tonight at 9 Eastern Time.

The good news for Democrats:

President Obama and his allies continue to hold a sizable fundraising advantage over Mitt Romney and his allies, including a 2-to-1 edge in available cash, according to the latest totals filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The numbers show that Team Obama (the campaign, the DNC, and the major pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA Action) had a combined $144 million cash on hand as of April 30, and it raised $41.7 million last month.

That's compared with the $77.5 million in the bank that Team Romney (the campaign, the RNC, the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future, and the anti-Obama Super PAC American Crossroads) has reported, and it raised a total of $29.5 million in April.

The bad news for Democrats:

"It is entirely possible that Romney and the RNC could outraise the president and the DNC,” acknowledged Steve Rosenthal, a veteran labor strategist.

(That's not even including super PAC cash.) As we begin the slow descent into the general election, people have started asking me who I believe will win in November. I think President Obama holds an edge, but I believe the attention span of the American people can be temporarily bought, and I think that means that Romney has a very good shot at the office, if he's smart about spending his money.

(This post will catch you up on the whole messy affair.) At a press conference just now, President Obama answered questions about Cory Booker's statement that Bain Capital should be off the table during the general election. Talking Points Memo explains:

Obama declined to criticize Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a supporter who on Sunday called attacks on Bain “nauseating.” Booker is an “outstanding mayor,” Obama said. But the president made clear that he thought Bain was not only fair game, but essential to the process of determining the next president.

“It is important to recognize this issue is not a distraction,” he said. “This is part of the debate we will be adding in this campaign about how do we create an economy where everybody from top to bottom, folks on Wall Street and Main Street, have a shot at success.”

“If your main argument for how to grow in the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors’, then you are missing what this job is about,” he said.

While Obama said he felt private equity was a “healthy part of the free market,” he said that firms’ first priority was not job creation, but “to maximize profit,” a goal that can be damaging when applied to public service.

That's just about a perfect response, I think: Booker was wrong in this case, but he's not a bad person; Bain is a real issue in this election; private equity is part of the economy and should not be vilified outright. This should be the end of it, but there's no way Republicans are going to let go of their first opportunity to go on the offensive since that ridiculous War on Moms a month ago. RNC chairman Reince Priebus just sent out an e-mail urging Republicans to sign a petition letting President Obama know that they "stand with Cory" in agreeing that Bain should not be an issue in the election. This kind of stuff is what we're looking at for the week in political commentary, all laid out ahead of us like a bad dream.

I didn't post about this earlier, because it's too depressing to think about. Here's Newark Mayor Cory Booker, launching a billion Democratic tweets on Meet the Press yesterday:

If you don't have video where you are, Booker is saying that Democratic attacks on Bain Capital should be off-limits, and he's defending private equity firms in general. This soundbite is part of a greater argument Booker is making about the political discourse getting out-of-hand. (He says that Reverend Wright attacks from the right are unacceptable, too.) I personally disagree with Booker; I think Romney is running away from his record as governor of Massachusetts and centering Bain Capital as the most relevant part of his resumé—sorry, but organizing a Winter Olympics should not automatically qualify you for Commander-in-Chief—and so Bain attacks are totally acceptable. But Democrats proceeded to tear Booker to bits all day Sunday, and it was a nasty affair. Irrelevant blowhard Keith Olbermann hilariously accused Booker of " believ[ing] in nothing but Cory Booker." Many others accused him of being a stooge for the Republican Party, and others stopped just short of calling for the death of private equity firms everywhere. By yesterday evening, Booker had produced an apologetic video walking back his comments. I've always admired Democrats' refusal to fall, creepily, in line on every single issue the way Republicans do. It's a weakness for the party within the 24-hour-media-cycle, but it's also a strength because it doesn't force us into stupid purity-test-style political traps.

Now, the Republicans are featuring Booker in ads and John McCain is publicly thanking him. This is a shrewd political move, because it increases resentment against a man who many—including myself—have said should be a serious Democratic presidential candidate within the next three election cycles. Republicans are playing chess here by trying to take down a major star of the party. And as a bonus, it plays Democrats against each other in a shrill, teabagger-style purity argument that the news networks will love rehashing for the next week or so.

There's a local angle to all this: On Friday, June 1st, Booker is scheduled to deliver a big speech at the Washington State Democratic Convention. When the speech was scheduled, Booker was a hero who saved people from burning buildings; now he's a controversial figure. I hope he goes through with this speech, and I hope that he's treated well, here. If Democrats persist in knocking around one of their stars for expressing an unpopular opinion, we'll be no better than the teabaggers who swallow their own moderates. Arguing that Booker is for the 1% and accusing him of being a sellout (or worse) is just ridiculous.

Here's the first Mitt Romney presidential ad:

Here's an ad for (shudder) Congressional candidate Joe the Plumber:

According to the Boston Globe, Mitt Romney is the guy the big banks are backing for president:

The top five donor groups in Romney’s campaign are individuals and political action committees associated with large financial institutions, led by Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to information compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign donations.

A number of Democrats—myself included—are mad that Wall Street reform wasn't as strong as it needed to be. But anyone who says that there's no difference between these two presidential candidates is crazy.

It seems that it's time for birtherism to pop back up again. First, in Arizona, as Dan told you this morning, birthers are trying to get President Obama knocked off the ballot.

Second, the late Andrew Breitbart's site has "discovered" that Barack Obama's literary agent in 1991 accidentally claimed in promotional materials that Obama was "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii." PROOF!

Third, now that we've read some of the love letters that President Obama wrote as a young man, it's time for the same people who claimed that Obama couldn't have written his own memoir to claim that he didn't write his love letters, either. Dave Weigel at Slate found a doozy of an "expert."

[W]riting longhand, presumably from memory, Obama has the wherewithal to put an umlaut over the “u” in Münzer. In college, I was an Honors English student and a Classics minor, not a political science major like Obama. I had not even heard of Münzer before reading this letter.

That Obama could embark upon a sophisticated, spontaneous discussion of T.S. Eliot – he claimed not to have read “The Waste Land” for a year and never bothered “to check all the footnotes” – should have alerted Maraniss.

Nowhere in “Dreams [from My Father]" is there any mention of T.S. Eliot, Münzer or Yeats.

Those are some compelling arguments: He can't possibly be smarter than me, and it's doubtful that anyone has more than three literary references to throw around. Birtherism is back, baby, and better than ever!

So there was this:

The Obama campaign is looking to expand the battleground states map to include Arizona, opening campaign offices and registering voters across the state despite its Republican governor, two Republican senators, and a history of voting Republican in presidential elections broken, in the past 50 years, only by Bill Clinton.... “It is going to be a swing state,” said Jim Messina, the president’s campaign manager. “The question is, whether we can get enough people registered to put it in play this year.”

Which is why there's this:

The man in charge of running Arizona’s elections has gone to the birthers. Secretary of State Ken Bennett now says he’s not convinced Barack Obama was really born in the United States and so he is threatening to keep the president off the ballot in November.... Bennett [is] the state’s No. 2 elected official just below Gov. Jan Brewer (R).... “I’m not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii—or at least I hope he was,” Bennett said on the show. “But my responsibility as secretary of state is to make sure the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballot have met the qualifications for the office they are seeking.”

• Revel Smith / Andrew Hughes Campaign
• The Stranger (left) defeated Andrew Hughes (right) in the biking portion of his trek. Hughes then easily defeated The Stranger in the kayak segment. Next up for defeat, Hughes hopes: Congressman Jim McDermott.

I met Democratic Congressional candidate Andrew Hughes at 7:45 a.m. yesterday on the dock of the Fauntleroy Ferry terminal in West Seattle. We were both trying to fight off shivers from the morning cold, and welcomed the distraction of a man in a bright orange-and-yellow vest who came by collecting signatures.

It turned out they were signatures for Referendum 74, the effort to repeal Washington's new gay marriage law. Hughes, 30, supports gay marriage. So, as he's been doing all over the 7th Congressional district lately, he struck up a conversation with this potential voter. If he could convince this signature gatherer to change his mind on gay marriage, great. And if he couldn't, maybe there was a Hughes vote to be earned anyway.

No dice. The signature gatherer went on about the "dictionary definition" of marriage and called Jim McDermott, the 7th District's Congressman for the last 23 years, an "old friend." By this, it didn't seem that the man meant he and McDermott (who supports gay marriage) hang out a lot. Just that he knew McDermott's name well, and thought of him fondly. As a lot of people in this district do.

Hughes, whose fledgeling campaign has knocked on 6,000 doors since April—with 2,000 of those doors knocked on by Hughes himself—admitted: "Mt. McDermott's a big mountain to climb."

Which points directly to the question: Is Hughes up for that kind of challenge?

• E.S.
• Andrew Hughes says: "There's a need for a new voice, and especially for a new generation of leadership."

By kicking off his campaign with a three-day trek around the district—involving biking, kayaking, swimming, and walking—Hughes is trying to show that he's certainly up for a physical challenge. And if he can bait a reporter (or several) with the trek's visuals, he'll tell that reporter (or several) how, as a tax attorney, he's up for the rest of the challenge of being a Congressman, too.

I was the only reporter who showed for the first leg of Hughes's journey. And McDermott, 75, shrugged the whole thing off yesterday, calling Hughes's trek a stunt. As we headed to Vashon Island, Hughes responded:

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Yesterday, WoW Report introduced the world to a series of butt plugs that a NYU grad student made out of Republican presidential candidate approval ratings. The Santorum butt plug looks like it could produce a whole lot of santorum.

UPDATE: Apparently, I don't read my own blog. I am a terrible person and Dan Savage gets to take one free punch while commenters hold my arms back.