Wednesday and Thursday I will be in Pasadena at the Ninth Circuit Media Conference. I am on a panel Thursday morning titled: Bloggers: The New Journalism. It'll be a humbling experience for me as I appear with some of the country's smartest writers about law. The panel includes Dahlia Lithwick, a Slate senior editor, Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who blogs at The Volokh Conspiracy and Pam MacLean, a writer for the National Law Journal. Our moderator is Circuit Judge Richard Clifton of Hawaii, named to the court in 2002.

I plan to blog from the conference as well, and particularly look forward to sessions about secrecy and the courts and judicial ethics and misconduct procedures.

King County Executive Ron Sims endorsed Hillary Clinton for president today only after talks with her, John Edwards and Barack Obama, who Sims is convinced will be America's first African-American president. "I wanted to feel comfortable with people on domestic policy issues," he said. But he says there aren't many differences between the three leading Democratic candidates on domestic issues. Sims called that "an embarrassment of riches."

Clinton won him over on foreign policy, the very issue that makes it hard for many liberal Democrats to support the New York senator. Sims says Clinton has a "foreign policy toughness, a foreign policy experience that gives her an advantage."

"I opposed the Iraq war before it was declared and I want us to get out. We need an orderly process to get out. Of all the presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, I thought she would get us out of Iraq in the most orderly fashion, but at the same time in a fashion that would keep the region as stable as we can make it. ... She's going to get us out of that place."

Sims supported Edwards in the 2004 presidential campaign. And he remains a fan. He said he also hit it off very well with Obama.

"I walked away going, 'He's going to be president one day.' He had all the energy and charisma and he's a policy wonk, which I like. We had a wonderful time talking about health care and global warming and how you end poverty."

Sims also felt the tug of having the chance to elect the first African-American president. But in the end he didn't think Obama had "seasoning" yet for the job.

"I don't mean seasoning in a denigrating way. He and I talked about having everybody say, 'You're not ready, you're not ready.' I believe that when you're competing against another candidate who is bringing that skill set to the presidency, then I think it is legitimate to say, 'When you acquire that same skill set you will be the president.' I think Senator Clinton has it now."

The Clinton campaign also put on the hard sell. Sims was asked to invite former President Bill Clinton when he made a June appearance in Seattle at a fundraiser for his wife. He did that, but still refrained from making an endorsement. He had a long talk with Bill Clinton that day. And the former president asked him "to give my wife some consideration."

Sims also got a call from former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater. Sims had always been close to the Clinton administration but he said Slater was the one cabinet member he was closest to. Slater invited Sims to come see him in D.C. at his office with the powerful lobbying firm of Patton Boggs. Said Sims:

"He put his arm around me and said, 'Well, what would it take.' I said, 'Probably a phone call.'"

It turned out that Hillary Clinton had been trying to call him for some time. The phone call happened recently. He and Clinton talked about global warming, a big topic for Sims, and health care. He was impressed that Clinton knew about the Puget Sound Health Care Alliance, the group he put together of representatives of government, industry and labor. Clinton knew details of his work on global warming and was able to cite awards Sims has gotten for those efforts.

She invited him to serve on her Environment and Energy Task Force, and then surprised him by asking him to also serve as state co-chairman with Rep. Jay Inslee.

Rep. Jim McIntire, D-Seattle, says he'll run for state treasurer next year instead of a sixth-term in the Legislature. McIntire teaches economics at the University of Washington and has focused on those issues in the Legislature. But his support for considering a state income tax cost him his chairmanship of the House Finance Committee last year when Democrats decided they didn't like such talk.

State Treasurer Mike Murphy, a Democrat, has announced he's retiring next year. Murphy is backing his deputy, Republican Allan Martin, for the job.

Sen. Erik Poulsen, a Democrat who has represented West Seattle in the Legislature for nearly 11 years, is resigning his seat to take a job with the Washington Public Utilities Districts Association. Poulsen will be government relations director for the PUD group.

Poulsen had been considering a run for state lands commissioner. But an offer from the PUD association convinced him to leave the world of electoral politics. Poulsen told me:

"It will allow me to keep working on environmental and public power issues that are near and dear to my heart, and enable me to get my two sons through college. I always wanted to go out on top and I feel like I've set the environmental agenda in Olympia for the past several years and put a lot of things in motion."

He said he has grown tired of the "nuts and bolts of campaigning."

Poulsen's pending resignation means an appointment will be made to fill his seat until November 2008. The two Democrats representing the 34th District in the House are Eileen Cody and Joe McDermott. Cody has more seniority. (ADD: The appointment is made by the King County Council from a list of three candidates submitted by the district party organization.)

Poulsen established himself as a voice in utility debates early in his legislative career. His first year in office he worked to stop an effort to deregulate the state's electric utilities. He worked with Republicans in 1997 to prevent what he says now would have been an Enron-style deregulation of Washington's power market. He said:

"That gave me great insight into the value of public power and it something I've been passionate about ever since."

SENATE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS

I'd say Poulsen's biggest accomplishment, though, was the Legislature's bipartisan deal in 2006 to rework how water disputes are handled on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers. The Legislature had been unable to deal with water legislation for more than a decade — with Democrats and Republicans lining up behind environmentalists and farmers in a long-standing stalemate. As Craig Welch reported last year:

In the face of that stalemate, Sen. Erik Poulsen, D-West Seattle, who chairs the Senate committee that deals with water, went to Eastern Washington to fish last summer with Sen. Bob Morton, R-Orient, Ferry County, and work out a solution.

"We were trying to change the culture of how we work on water in Olympia," Poulsen said.

After months of miscues, Poulsen and Morton this year told environmentalists and farmers to lock themselves away and reach a compromise both sides could live with.

Poulsen is widely credited with guiding that compromise through the Legislature. He said he leaves with one major disappointment. This year he was unable to pass legislation to stop an expansion of gravel mining on Maury Island.

Poulsen has been among the more quotable members of the Legislature. He's also irreverent at times, even using that trait as a political tool. In 2003 he and then-Sen. Aaron Reardon slipped off in Poulsen's SUV to slow down Senate action on a bill so that House Speaker Frank Chopp would have time to work a compromise more to their liking.

Poulsen hopes to raise the profile of the PUDs in Olympia. His hiring does some of that off the bat. He will also hire two contract lobbyists and he said, "I hope to make a big statement with the lobbyists I hire as well."

One of the big issues facing the PUDs is their involvement with high speed Internet service in rural parts of the state. Poulsen says that commercial carriers are not interested in serving small communities, but that the PUDs need legislation to allow them into that business.

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign just announced that King County Executive Ron Sims will co-chair her Washington campaign with Congressman Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island. Sims will also serve on Clinton's Environment and Energy Task Force.

Sims said in a release from the campaign:

"At this critical time in our history, Hillary Clinton is the experienced leader this country needs to deliver the change it demands. ... She will provide the national leadership essential to meeting the challenges of climate change that threaten our economy, environment and public health."

At Crosscut, Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett says:

If you're bored with snooping through Match.com for photos of your coworkers and fully caught up on the neighbors' property values thanks to Zillow.com, just be patient. A new source of cyber-dishing is on the way in Oregon, and other states might not be far behind.

The new search tool is a database of people who sign petitions in Oregon to repeal the state's gay rights and domestic partnership laws. It's called KnowThyNeighborOregon.com and it is the latest branch of a national effort to track people who oppose gay rights. The group says:

KnowThyNeighborOregon.com strongly believes that if you sign one or both of these petitions to take away the basic rights of Oregon families and individuals, then again, these people should have the courage of their convictions, and take responsibility for what they've done. Being that it is public information, your name and address will appear on this Web site after the petitions have been turned in.

The group says it "discourages with its fullest conviction the actions by anyone to harm a person or their property in retribution for exercising their democratic right to sign the petition."

Marlowe Hartnett says the database will go live only if there are enough signatures to qualify the measures for the ballot. She hopes that doesn't happen.

But what if there's a mistake and the wrong people are outed? Suppose one of those buck-for-a-name petition scams happens again, or simple human error means your name and address are mistakenly put up on KnowThyNeighborOregon's site? You're supposed to then report it to KnowThyNeighbor's volunteers, who will remove it and contact the Secretary of State about the error. No one knows how many errors are likely or if the correction mechanism will work. Even if the fixes do work and contribute to a more accurate record, that may be small comfort once your name and address are hung out there erroneously in cyberspace, where info has a shelf-life roughly equivalent to canned vegetables.

Marlowe Hartnett may not need to worry. The Oregonian reports groups behind the petition drives "are disconnected, frustrated and uncertain whether they can muster enough voter names to qualify for the statewide ballot."

They have less than seven weeks to collect the 55,179 valid signatures needed to refer each of two laws passed by the Legislature to the November 2008 ballot. Chief petitioner Janice Bentson estimates that only 5,000 to 10,000 signatures have arrived at her Salem home.