If you couldn’t make heads or tails of many of Washington State’s record number of ballot initiatives while attempting to vote in the election concluded yesterday, you’re not alone. What began as a process for citizens to circumvent the legislature as a last resort has pathetically morphed into a process where moneyed special interest groups effectively railroad a legislature that doesn’t do shit. But at least nobody around here tries to do shit like the shit Jeff Peckman attempted in Denver this election cycle.People propose plenty of daffy initiatives in Washington, like the one to put a tapeworm on the state seal. But the signature threshold is set sufficiently high to where sanity generally prevails when it comes to which measures actually make it on the ballot. Not so in Denver, where an initiative to establish “the world’s first government-sanctioned extraterrestrial-affairs commission” actually made it onto the ballot. Initiative 300, the brainchild of Peckman, would have established a commission “to collect credible evidence that extraterrestrial intelligent beings and their ‘UFO’ vehicles have been visiting Earth. The evidence will then be displayed on the Denver City government web site. The seven regular members of the commission will also try to determine both risks and benefits of interacting with extraterrestrial visitors.”The effort was trounced at the ballot box by a five-to-one margin. “Denver told E.T. not to go home, but to go the hell home,” wrote Technorati.Kind of makes Tim Eyman seem like Thomas Jefferson by comparison, doesn’t it?