Archives for September 2008

I’m a little suspect of the polls right now in the wake of the national conventions, but as Lee just pointed out, the latest KING5/SurveyUSA poll on Prop. 1 is sure to dishearten the anti-rail crowd that maniacally trolls HA’s comment threads.

When asked about Sound Transit’s proposal to expand rail and bus service, 49% of respondents said that they were certain to vote yes, while only 16% said they were certain to vote no.  And when the uncertain respondents were asked whether they lean toward one side or the other, Prop. 1’s advantage expanded to a whopping 65% to 20% margin.

But perhaps more interesting…

Among those who describe themselves as conservatives, those voting or leaning “no” slightly outnumber those voting or leaning “yes.” Among those who identify themselves as Republicans, “yes” slightly outnumbers “no.” Among all other groups, the measure passes by no fewer than 31 points.

So Prop. 1 seems to have pretty damn broad support, even within the constituencies where you would expect the strongest opposition, a finding that is consistent with some internal polling numbers I heard whispered about a few weeks back.  Of course, unlike the actual ballot language, the SurveyUSA question didn’t include the $17.9 billion estimated cost, so I’d be surprised to see Prop. 1 pass by such a large margin… but I’d be even more surprised to see it fail.

There are several major differences between this year’s Prop. 1 and last year’s failed measure of the same nomenclature:  the proposal, the electorate and the economic reality.

This Prop. 1 is not tied to an unpopular and controversial road expansion package that split the environmental community and dramatically escalated the costs.  This Prop. 1 will benefit from the significantly larger and more progressive electorate that tends to turn out in this region during presidential election years.  And most of all, this election will occur with memories of $4.50/gallon gasoline still fresh in everybody’s minds… so fresh that bus and commuter rail ridership continues to grow even as gasoline prices have temporarily stepped back from their historic highs.

As I’ve repeatedly argued, the era of cheap gasoline is over, and that means that 2008 is most definitely not 2007:

I know conventional wisdom still suggests that now is the wrong time for Sound Transit to come back with a ballot measure, just one year after the defeat of Prop 1, but the conventional wise men are missing the point: 2008 isn’t 2007. The era of cheap gas is over, and Americans—even Seattle-Americans (and yes, I know, Seattle is different from every other city in the world)—are beginning to change their behavior in response. Voters get that, even if our politicians and editorialists don’t.

Traffic congestion has far from disappeared as a volatile political issue, but public demand for affordable transportation alternatives is rising at least as fast as the price of gas. And the thing is, whether it’s cheaper and more efficient or not, when current drivers envision their future mass transit commute, they much prefer to envision themselves riding on a train, than on a bus. People like trains; that’s a fact. And if I were an elected official, I’d probably want to focus on delivering the services that the people want.

Many of our region’s political and media old timers still seem mired in the auto-centric transportation vision of the 1950’s.  But I’m guessing we’ll find out on November 4 that the majority of voters are not.

SurveyUSA has done some polling on Sound Transit and it’s looking good for Prop 1.

On Proposition 1, concerning an expansion of mass transit, are you certain to vote yes? Certain to vote no? Or, are you not certain how you will vote on Proposition 1? {“Not Certain” voters were asked: At this hour, do you lean toward yes? lean toward no, or do you not lean?}

Lean Toward Yes – 65%
Lean Toward No – 20%
Don’t Lean – 14%

Is your opinion of Sound Transit favorable, unfavorable, neutral, or are you unfamiliar with Sound Transit?

Favorable – 52%
Unfavorable – 17%
Neutral – 27%
Unfamiliar – 4%

As someone who was skeptical that a transit-only package could pass so easily, I happily stand corrected on that point. The folks in our comment threads who are maniacally opposed to Sound Transit really are a fringe around here.

Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and now, AIG… so the question is:  what the hell did Lehman Brothers do to piss off Ben Bernanke?

From The New York Times:

Fearing a financial crisis worldwide, the Federal Reserve reversed course on Tuesday and agreed to an $85 billion bailout that would give the government control of the troubled insurance giant American International Group.

I’d like a line of credit too, please. I’ve developed a new type of pizza oven and I need money to stay in business. The oven tends not to work, either burning the pizza or not cooking it inside, plus it has a strange tendency to burn buildings down. Oh, and I sold a bunch of them to people with no money, so I’m broke.

Still, my pizza oven is as good as the investment products the insurance-financial complex have been offering.

More seriously, it’s obvious we’re all on the hook for this mess because the alternative is a worldwide depression. Things are still looking fairly serious, but the point is that sometimes we have to do what is practical and leave the vacuous right-wing ideology where it belongs, on the shelf. Most of us learned this lesson from reading basic American history about the Great Depression/New Deal era. But the righties were so busy trying to repeal the Enlightenment they couldn’t process little details like capitalism needs a referee or it will destroy itself.

This should be the end of conservative nonsense about “free markets” being, in and of themselves, the answer to nearly everything. It won’t be, but any conservative arguing today that regulation always needs to be reduced or eliminated is arguing in favor of worldwide depression. Nice platform.

Let’s see the Republicans put some lipstick on this pig. I’m sure they’ll start blaming Andrew Jackson or Woodrow Wilson or something.

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. Officially, we start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks show up early to enjoy the cuisine.

For tonight’s activity, we’ll brainstorm on ways to shuffle and funnel money to create multiple shadowy front groups that will bankroll Swift-Boat attack ads against Rossi. You know… they’ll smear him as a Republican in “G.O.P. Party” clothing:

Tonight’s theme song comes from Seattle’s Winlar (appearing at the Jewel Box Theater this Friday at 8pm):

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, McCranium shoud have the scoop on the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Greatest.  Free trader.  Ever.

“You are interviewing the greatest free trader you will ever interview, and the greatest deregulator you will ever interview…”
— Sen. John McCain, May 29, 2007

See, it’s easy for a president to know what to do in response to an economic meltdown if he fervently believes that the correct response is to do nothing at all.  And that’s what John McCain believes in.  Do you?

A new poll in the Washington state gubernatorial race between Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) and Dino Rossi (“G.O.P. Party) has been released by Elway Research. I mentioned the poll in yesterday’s poll round-up, but I had not seen the full report.

It turns out the polling was somewhat complex. The poll sampled 450 registered voters between 6-Sep and 8-Sep. The overall margin of error is 4.5%, although in the most interesting analyses, they split samples in half, giving a margin of error within a group of 6.5%.

Elway split the sample into two groups. Group one was asked to chose between “Republican Dino Rossi” and “Democrat Christine Gregoire.” Group two was asked to chose between labels as they appear on the Washington state ballot. That is, they were asked to chose between Rossi, “who prefers the GOP party” and Gregoire, “who prefers the Democratic party.”

Subgroup one gave Gregoire a 50% to 41% lead over Rossi. Group two gave Gregoire a 48% to 44% lead. With a 6.5% margin of error, the differences in these findings are nowhere near achieving statistical significance. In other words, the differences between the two subgroups could simply reflect sampling error.

Just for fun, let’s analyze these as separate polls and combine them later. As usual, I use a Monte Carlo analysis, consisting of one million simulated elections, drawing from the polled population.

The weakest results for Gregoire come when Rossi is introduced as preferring the “G.O.P. Party.” Following a million simulated elections, Gregoire wins 660435 times and Rossi wins 321369 times. This suggests that, if the election was held now, Gregoire would have a 67.3% probability of beating Rossi. Here is the distribution of vote outcomes from the simulations:

When Rossi is called a Republican, his chances go down a bit. Now, after a million simulated elections, Gregoire wins 834,999 times and Rossi wins 153,178 times. This subsample, treated as its own poll, gives Gregoire an 84.5% of defeating Rossi (if the election were held now).

I would argue for using both samples. First, because the difference is not significant. It may be that Washington voters react negatively to Rossi as a Republican. Or not. The sample size was not sufficient to statistically support the idea. Secondly, because I have a difficult time believing that come November the voters will not think of this as a race between the state’s top Democratic candidate and the state’s top Republican candidate.

In the pooled analysis Gregoire wins 838,346 times. Rossi wins 153,042 times. If the election were held now, based on this poll alone, Gregoire would have an 84.6% probability of defeating Rossi. Here is the distribution:

Let’s consider one more permutation. The new Elway poll actually falls between two other recent polls, so lets pool all the recent polls. The recent Rasmussen poll was conducted on 10-Sep. It gave Rossi a 52% to 46% lead over Gregoire. And the slightly older SurveyUSA poll was conduted from 5-Sep to 7-Sep. It gave Rossi a 48% to 47% lead over Gregoire.

When the Elway results are pooled with the Rasmussen and SurveyUSA results, Gregoire wins 451,469 times and Rossi wins 541,349 times. In other words, these recent polls suggest that, if the election were held now, Gregoire would have a 45.5% probability of winning and Rossi would have a 54.5% probability of winning.

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One final note. In my previous analysis of this race I pointed out that both the SurveyUSA and Rasmussen “polls show a surprising decline in Obama’s standing against McCain—a post-convention decline that is larger than anything I’ve seen in other blue states.” The suggestion was that, perhaps, both polls, by chance, drew samples that were favorable to both Rossi and McCain. There were some hints of this in the cross-tabs of both polls (like a surge in women chosing McCain in the Rasmussen poll).

The Elway poll lends a bit more support for the idea. In a McCain–Obama match-up, Obama came out ahead of McCain, 45% to 38%. The +7% advantage for Obama is more in line with other polling than is the +2% found in the Rasmussen poll and the +4% found in the SurveyUSA poll.

But without additional evidence, I’m forced to take the pooled results and giving Rossi a very narrow lead over Gregoire right now.

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

With all the hoo-hah over Sarah Palin’s documented desire to ban books from the Wasilla public library, and her vindictive effort to fire a popular city librarian who openly expressed her opposition to mayoral censorship, perhaps we should have been focusing less on the books Palin wanted to ban, and a bit more on the books she actually reads.

As New York Times columnist Frank Rich astutely pointed out on Sunday, Americans should find Palin’s apparent reading list downright scary:

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.”

[…] There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.

So… exactly how right-wing was Pegler?  As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out today on the Huffington Post, so right-wing as to have publicly called for his father’s assassination.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”

When a vice presidential candidate can admiringly quote a fascist, racist, anti-semitic hate-monger like Pegler—in her acceptance speech no less—and America barely bats an eye, it tells you a lot about where our nation is potentially going.

They lie about big things.  They lie about little things.  They forcefully repeat their lies to the faces of reporters even when confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.  In fact, it’s gotten so ridiculous that you’ve got to start wondering what the McCain campaign isn’t lying about?

Take for example today’s inexplicable fabulation, in which McCain’s top economics adviser bizarrely pointed to his BlackBerry as evidence of his candidate’s understanding of financial markets:

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

That’s right, John McCain invented the BlackBerry!

Only, of course, he didn’t.  It was invented by a Canadian company.  McCain doesn’t use BlackBerry.  Hell, he doesn’t even use email.

And if this seems like a petty thing to go after the McCain camp on, well A) McCain repeatedly mocked Al Gore during the 2000 campaign for the bogus “I invented the Internet” claim (which Gore never said, but for which there’s actually a kernel of truth); and B) This is just one in a series of shameless lies and distortions that have been emanating from McCain, Palin and their campaign for weeks.

Can we trust McCain or his advisers on anything?  For example, McCain surrogates have repeatedly reacted with outrage over accusations that he doesn’t use email, indignantly claiming that injuries incurred as a prisoner of war make it physically impossible for him to use a keyboard.

Really? He can’t even hunt and peck with a single stiff index finger like the majority Internet-savvy seniors his age? So how does his campaign explain the dozens of email exchanges between him and reporters that have been referenced in the New York Times and other publications?  Are staffers writing his emails for him? And how do they explain the nimble fingers displayed in this video of McCain handling his cell phone on the floor of the Senate?

I suppose if the 72-year-old McCain would release his complete medical records, like every other nominee in recent years, we might know for sure.  But they won’t.  Because the McCain/Palin administration promises to be the most opaque since… well… Bush/Cheney.

Honestly… if in the midst of what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan calls the greatest financial crisis in his lifetime, McCain’s top economics adviser has to reach so far into his bag of bullshit as to make the facially ridiculous assertion that John McCain had a role in inventing the BlackBerry, how can we trust anything from any member of the McCain campaign on any issue?

The truth is, we can’t.

UPDATE:
And as it turns out…

Blair Levin, who is currently Managing Director at Stifel Nicolaus and served as [former FCC chair Reed] Hundt’s chief of staff … pointed out that McCain actually voted against the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA ‘93) that “authorized the spectrum auctions that created the competitive wireless market that gave rise to companies like Research in Motion [the creator of Blackberry].”

Why am I not surprised?

Score a victory for astroturffing, as Seattle’s grocery bag fee has been put on hold after the so-called “Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax” managed to get enough signatures to put a city-wide referendum on the ballot.  The vote won’t occur until the August, 2009 primary.

Opponents of the fee say the referendum is evidence Seattle’s elected officials have sailed too far ahead of the electorate with their environmental goals.

My ass. A) Getting out in front on an issue is what is commonly referred to in other parts of the country as “leadership,” something voters in our state constantly complain they don’t get, yet hypocritically attack elected officials as arrogant for even daring to try; and B) The referendum’s successful signature drive—financed almost entirely by the much beloved local advocacy group, the American Chemistry Council—is evidence of nothing at all except a well-funded signature drive.

A typical statewide initiative campaign might budget about $500,000 for signature canvassing, and turn in around 300,000 signatures by the deadline; by comparison, the American Chemistry Council spent $180,625 to collect only 22,292 signatures.  That’s over $8 per signature, and about five times the typical cost.

All in all, a beautiful illustration of an inititiative and referendum process where money talks and true grassroots, populist advocacy walks around aimlessly at farmers markets and Hemp Fest.  The plastic bag industry stood to lose a pretty penny if other cities started following Seattle’s lead, and so they wisely spent 18 million of them to stop this trend before it started.

Given enough money one could get absolutely anything on the ballot.  Anything. I guess, if you have the money, that’s your right under the current rules, but it sure ain’t populism, and it’s high time our political and media elite pulled the bags off their heads and stopped revering as sacred an instrument of so-called “direct democracy” that isn’t partcularly direct, or democratic.

The John McCain campaign keeps running into trouble finding a theme song, since writing good music requires a soul. McCain has been repeatedly caught using music without the support of the songwriters, most recently when his campaign decided to use a song by the group Heart during the Republican convention in St. Paul.

Tonight HA sources tell us that the McCain campaign has decided to solve this problem by using music already in the public domain.

It doesn’t matter how high the capital gains tax is, if there are no capital gains.

I’m just sayin’….

I guess it’s not surprising that all those lying ads the BIAW has been running about Gov. Gregoire are paid for with illegal contributions.  At least that’s the conclusion of the state Public Disclosure Commission which found today that the Building Industry Association of Washington and the Master Builders Association of Snohomish and King Counties have committed multiple “egregious” campaign finance violations, including failure to report at least $1.2 million in political contributions.

In a press release issued after the ruling, attorney Knoll Lowney stated:

“It is now confirmed that the builders were operating a massive illegal fundraising campaign for Dino Rossi. We expect the Attorney General to file a lawsuit against the builders for these serious violations.”

Well… I wouldn’t bet on it.  Rob McKenna is a close ally of the BIAW and a major recipient of their ill-gotten largess, so it’s hard to imagine him forcefully going after his buddies in an election year… except maybe as a delaying tactic. I’m guessing the more likely outcome would be a civil suit brought by retired Supreme Court justices Faith Ireland and Robert Utter, who filed the complaint in the first place.  They’ve given the AG until September 19th to file a lawsuit, barring which they’ll file their own.

And this may just be the least of the BIAW’s troubles.  In a separate lawsuit in Thurston County, BIAW Trust beneficiaries are seeking an injunction to stop the BIAW’s diversion of trust funds for political purposes.  A hearing is scheduled for September 26th, and could end up putting a huge hole in the BIAW’s $3.5 million warchest.