Archives for August 2008

Elway Research has released a new Washington state poll that includes some interesting races. The big one, of course, is the Washington state gubernatorial race.

The poll shows Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) leading challenger Dino Rossi (GOP-Party) 52% to 36%, with 12% “undecided”. This relatively small poll of 405 people was taken from July 27th to July 31st, and has a margin of error of 5%

This is the fifth July poll in this race. Rossi has led in none of them. In fact, Rossi has not led in a poll since the end of February—going back 14 polls.

As usual, I’ll analyze the results using a Monte Carlo approach (1,000,000 simulated elections with 405 voters, but this time the analysis is modified [upon prodding by scotto and Richard Pope] to include an additional uncertainty term. Technically, now I am drawing counts of votes from a beta-trinomial distribution and using uniform [uninformative] prior distributions on the preference probabilities).

Result 1: Gregoire won 992,024 of the elections and Rossi won 7,115 times. This suggests that, if an election were held now, Gregoire would have a 99.3% chance of winning and Rossi would have a 0.7% of winning.

Here is a plot showing the distribution of votes in the million elections (blue bars are wins for Gregoire and red bars are Rossi wins):

You may recall that there was a recent Strategic Vision poll of this race that gave Gregoire a slimmer 47% to 45% lead. That poll was taken from 25th July to 27th July. Given that the Elway and Strategic Vision polls were taken back-to-back, a combined analysis would seem in order.

Result 2: This time, Gregoire won 955,951 elections and Rossi won 41,842 of the elections. The analysis using both polls suggests that Gregoire would win with a 95.8% probability and Rossi would win with a 4.2% probability. A statistician would point out that, even using both polls, Gregoire’s win is slightly outside the margin of error.

Here is the plot showing the distribution of votes in the million elections for the combined polls:

Elway Research also polled for the presidential election in Washington state. Sen. Barack Obama (D) leads Sen. John McCain (R), 47% to 35%. This +12% margin is notable because, if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that Gregoire has polled better against Rossi than Obama has against McCain.

Other results of note in the Elway poll include the Commissioner of Public Lands race where Peter Goldmark (D) barely leads incumbent Doug Sutherland (R) 31% to 30% (well within the margin of error, obviously). In the Attorney General race, incumbent Rob McKenna (R) leads John Ladenburg (D) 41% to 30%.

(Cross posted at Hominid Views)

I particularly like the headline in the online edition, “Rich are feeling pinched too,” but the simple fact that this story makes the front page of the Seattle Times tells you all you need to know about the life experience and day to day perspective its publisher.

Oh no… the rich are “spending less on luxury goods and are being more thrifty with their credit cards!” In fact, I understand that things have gotten so tough for the ultra wealthy, that some are even being forced to sell off their extensive newspaper holdings in Maine! Can you feel their pain? (I suppose the Blethens might chafe at my description of them as “ultra wealthy,” but that just shows how out of touch they really are.)

And… that the Times editors thought this fabulously wealthy human interest story worthy of front page placement is even funnier in light of the tiny little teaser they squeezed into the bottom right hand corner:

Grow your food City dwellers across the country are planting gardens to save money

Yeah sure, the working and middle class are farming their backyards so that they can afford to feed their families… but at least they’re not being forced to suffer the humiliation of shopping around for the best deal on private jets.  I suppose that explains the relative placement of the two stories.

Over at EffU, I conducted a reality check on the Washington Policy Center.

Call me a curmudgeon, but this Southeast Seattle resident has grown to dread Seafair.

As a 16-year transplant I’ve never quite understood the local fascination with watching boats run around in circles, and even the thrill of the Blue Angels eventually wears out its welcome after years of having one’s house rattled by Navy jets. (If I had a nickel for every time the Blue Angels buzzed my backyard in full formation, I could buy myself a latte.)

Still, it’s not the annual festivities I begrudge, even if I usually choose not to participate. It’s the goddamn traffic.

My part of the city is normally blessed with multiple routes in, out and through the downtown, enough to cope with nearly any traffic situation, but for one weekend each year I might as well be living on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Up over the hill to the East of me is the lake, where absolutely everybody else in Seattle is now headed. To the North, the main thoroughfares and the surrounding side streets from Lake Washington Blvd. to Beacon Hill Ave. and everything in between, are blocked by an impassable glacier of traffic. And my usual western route to I-5 and the many options of the Duwamish Valley beyond is transformed from a five-minute sprint into a 45-minute slog through a swamp of equally pissed off drivers.

Cut off from even local amenities, my only escape lies to the South, where I intend to head off soon, before the annual Seafair sclerosis clogs those arteries too

I mention all this not just to complain (though I do like complaining), but rather to make a couple points. First, mine isn’t the only neighborhood subject to occasional or even regular invasions due to special events or local amenities. I live walking distance to a couple of pretty spectacular parks on a lake, a luxury that is well worth the occasional street closure or traffic nightmare. So I have no sympathy for folks who, say, choose to live near the Woodland Park Zoo, and then bitch about the parking, or who live near Gas Works Park and fight planned concerts there out of concern about the crowds. I have empathy, but no sympathy. Like me, complain all you want… but then suck it up and deal with it.

Second, this is likely the last Seafair in which the northern frontier is virtually walled off from me. This time next year light rail will be operating through the Rainier Valley, providing yet another route in and out for us luck Southenders… a route mercifully not subject to the whims of local traffic. A route, by the way, that will prove a fast and affordable alternative for Seafair celebrants from outside the neighborhood, who’d rather avoid traffic than help contribute to it.

Keep that in mind this November when you’re asked to tax yourselves to extend light rail through other neighborhoods.

(…and almost ninety other media clips from the past week in politics are posted over at Hominid Views.)

Some items of interest in the world of energy research…

There was a major breakthrough this week that could revolutionize solar power technology. Researchers at MIT came up with a way to cheaply and efficiently split water molecules using a catalyst consisting of cobalt and potassium phosphate. Paired with a second electrode that converts the resultant hydrogen ions into hydrogen gas, it opens the possibility for having solar panels that can store energy – in the form of hydrogen gas – for when the sun isn’t shining.

Also this week, my father-in-law (who maintains an alternative energy website) sent me this video of the prospect of using algae as a source of biofuel. One of the benefits of using algae is that it can be grown and harnessed in any type of structure, and in the video, the closed bio-reactor system there can produce significantly more biofuel than what can be produced through conventional farming methods and just needs sunlight and carbon dioxide. There are still some cost barriers to doing this on a large scale, but the improvements in the reactor technology and the price of oil is making that investment seem more and more worthwhile.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asks:

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Paris Hilton and Britney Spears aren’t just “sexually provocative.” These are women whose celebrity, to a great extent, was shaped by very public airing of their sexual exploits and parts. These women have become cultural icons of the infamy that arises from celebrity mixed with unrestrained sexuality.

At the same time, images of nubile, promiscuous women juxtaposed with Barack Obama churn up stereotypes and primal fears held, largely beneath the surface, by many Americans: Black men with their uncontrolled sexuality are out to steal and rape “our” women.

Don’t fool yourself. Hilton and Spears were not simply chosen because of their celebrity. The same ad makes no sense whatsoever with other scandalous celebs substituted in for the starlets.

Take Martha Stewart…a scandal-ridden white woman who is closer in age to Obama than is Spears. Umm…no, doesn’t work. The ad becomes incomprehensible. But why a woman? How about pairing up Keith Richards and Steven Tyler, celebrities who are both closer in age to Obama than are Hilton and Spears, and have well publicized substance abuse problems and public personas of hypersexual rockers. Obama has confessed to drug use as a youth, so isn’t the Richards/Tyler imagery a much better way to paint Obama as an empty celeb?

This doesn’t work at all. We expect our rock stars to engage in hedonistic self-destruction and take on a hyper-sexual persona. It’s in the job description. Obama, by comparison would come out as clean cut, self-restrained, and rigorously responsible. Besides, they look old. The ad would invoke universal puzzlement (if not ridicule).

Let’s try Michael Jackson, who matches the Hilton/Spears celeb-gone-wild bits, but has the advantage of demographic accuracy: Jackson is male, is close to Obama in age, and is black. Surely, this must make for a better ad than using much younger, white women to exemplify indiscretions of celebrity.

This still doesn’t make any sense. Nobody believes Obama is on the Wacko-Jacko track, which is obviously pathologically bizarre. But, when it comes right down to it, nobody really believes that Obama is on the Hilton or Spears pathologically slightly-less-bizarre tracks, either. The analogy is deeply flawed. Obama has become a celebrity as a result of his skills as a politician and orator, not because his sexual imagery was successfully marketed. An certainly not because he was born, like Hilton, fabulously rich.

The fact is, the Hilton/Spears imagery fails any kind of test as a sensible analogy. (This is one reason why the media is all abuzz about it.) Superficially, the ad was supposed to paint Obama as a shallow celeb. The real function of the ad is identical to that of the infamous NRSC hit advertisement on Harold Ford : frame Obama as the frightening “sexual savage.”

Why would the McCain campaign use hateful, racist messages in a political contest against a sitting U.S. Senator whose only scandalous vice is chewing Nicorette? Because the tactic still works, as was demonstrated by the Republican’s smear ads against Harold Ford in 2006.

One thing that emerges clearly from this episode: John McCain has become a shell of the man he was in 2000.

Not in the pages of Seattle’s two major dailies, anyway.

When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) decided this spring that Boeing’s appeal of the Air Force award of a tanker contract to a rival had merit, the P-I was so giddy that it published the GAO’s entire press release.

But last week, when the GAO released a report finding that Boeing and other military contractors, along with Pentagon officials, had illegally interfered with government auditors investigating performance and cost of weapons systems — and with the GAO’s investigation of those investigations — and again yesterday, when Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) took to the floor of the Senate calling the report “what could be the biggest auditing scandal in the history of this town,” and calling for “firings by nightfall,” there has not been a word of it in local media.

So you’ll have to read about it here:

Among the findings of the report:

* The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) resident auditor made an agreement with an unnamed aerospace contractor (determined to be Boeing based on the facts contained in the report), one of the five largest government defense contractors, that “limited the scope” of the audit and would allow the contractor to correct problems that were found before the final audit opinion was issued.

* The resident auditor replaced uncooperative auditors and intimidated others into making unsubstantiated assessments that benefited contractors at the expense of the government.

* Supervisors assigned complex auditing tasks to underqualified subordinates, resulting in incomplete audits.

* DCAA officials threatened staff members with retaliation for speaking with GAO investigators.

* The director of a cost-estimating system for a major defense contractor threatened the DCAA he would “escalate” the issue “to the highest level possible” in the government and within the company in question if the DCAA would not green-light the billing system it identified as problematic.

* The DCAA failed to revisit contracts that were negotiated by a corrupt (and later convicted) Air Force official.

* Mistakes, incompetence or intentional deception by the DCAA has essentially built in defective price-estimating systems that may artificially inflate contract estimates for years to come.

McCaskill, on the floor of the Senate yesterday:

I will guarantee you, as auditors around the country learn about this, they’re going to have disbelief and raw anger that this agency has impugned the integrity of government auditors everywhere by these kinds of irresponsible actions…all this time that we have been wasting hundreds of billions of dollars [in Iraq], the fox was in the chicken coop.”

So why is a story about a major government corruption scandal — one that involves our (former) hometown heroes — getting no local coverage? Or, put another way, how is it that when the news is unflattering for the Mariners, local media can be honest about it — but not when the issues are rather more substantive?

Earlier this week, Postman wrote again about Dino Rossi’s Forward Washington organization and the corresponding “Idea Bank.”

The foundation didn’t accomplish much. There was the Idea Bank that Rossi heralded as a bipartisan effort to solicit and vet ideas from citizens on how to improve state government. (The Democrat who made the project “bipartisan” thinks FDR was a Socialist and still complains “that traitorous scamp, Jane Fonda” caused America to lose the Vietnam War.)

That “Democrat” was Lou Guzzo. At EffU, I’ve posted up a challenge to see if you can distinguish between things recently written by Dino Rossi’s “Idea Man,” and things recently written by Stranger Public Editor and OSHA Board of Governors Member A. Birch Steen. Good luck.

I’ll be filling in for Dave Ross this morning from 9AM to Noon on News/Talk 710-KIRO. I’ll post details of today’s lineup, as we put it together.

9AM:  Spokane Gambling compact… man does the press have this story wrong.

10AM:  Does Obama have a problem with women voters?  For that matter, does Gregoire and Burner?  Democratic consultant Cathy Allen shares her take on the top elections.

11AM:  Abortion.  Recent polls show Dave Reichert getting 37% of pro-choice voters, Dino Rossi 32%.  Are voters simply unaware of the candidate’s positions, or do they just not care?