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Archives for October 2008

Election Scorecard

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Obama McCain
100.0% probability of winning 0.0% probability of winning
Mean of 369 electoral votes Mean of 169 electoral votes


Yesterday’s analysis showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by 362 to 176 electoral votes.

Today there were 32 new polls in 20 states released. Obama get the better of it.

After 100,000 simulated elections, Obama wins all 100,000 times. Obama receives (on average) 369 to McCain’s 169 electoral votes—that gives Obama 100 electoral votes in excess of what he needs to win. If an election had been held today, Obama would have won with near certainty.

Detailed results for this analysis are available at Hominid Views.

Methods are described in the FAQ. The most recent version of this analysis can be found on this page.

Open thread

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UPDATE [Lee]: If there’s anything I take issue with in this post by Josh Marshall, it’s that “Disgrace” may not be a strong enough term for what the McCain campaign is pulling with respect to Rashid Khalidi.

Palin bounced

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Remember a couple months back, in the midst of an apparent “Palin bounce,” when liberal bloggers like me were warned that our personal attacks against Sarah Palin were backfiring?  Well, guess what…

A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said that Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up 9 percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said that the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favored Senator Barack Obama.

In a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said that they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people to serve in his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

What we did was soften her up… sowed the seeds of doubt.  And when Palin got out on the campaign trail and proved herself to be a one trick pitbull, totally incapable of fielding even a few simple questions from Katie Couric, Palin’s approval numbers collapsed faster than the stock market.

Palin is not qualified to be vice president, and it would have been absolutely stupid and self-destructive to refrain from relentlessly pointing that out, simply because she’s a woman.  Perhaps McCain gambled that in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat, the Dems would be too timidly PC to go there.  Well, we weren’t, and we did.  And now McCain is paying the price for the most irresponsible VP pick since Spiro Agnew.

Borrowed Time: Running Out of Time

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Last week, I reported that local media firm Media Plus was lining up TV ad time on credit for its stable of Republican clients—Rep. Dave Reichert, Dino Rossi, Rob McKenna, and Douglas Sutherland. 

The arrangement, in which Media Plus secured hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of TV time for its GOP clients before the candidates cut any checks (or even had the money in their accounts to pay for the ads), ticked off the Democrats who cried, “illegal loan!”

Both the Washington state Democrats and Darcy Burner’s campaign against Rep. Reichert filed complaints— the Democrats with the state’s Public Disclosure Commission; Burner with the Federal Elections Commission. The complaints accused Media Plus of lending money to its clients, which translates into a contribution.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, the dollar figure for such expensive TV buys exceeds contribution limits.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, however, it isn’t likely that either the FEC or the PDC will get to either complaint before election.

This means illegal fundraising may affect the outcome of this year’s elections.

The Media Plus deal is particularly disturbing in Reichert’s case where the $1.7 million ad buy exceeded Reichert’s budget by nearly $600,000.

On the morning he was drafting the complaint,  Burner’s attorney complained : “Media Plus probably doesn’t extend credit to any of their [other] clients in an amount greater than the amount the client earned all of the previous quarter.” (Reichert raised $524,000 in the most recent quarter.)

Incompetent and paranoid to boot

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Worst. Campaign. Ever.

From Iowa State Daily:

Elborno said after seeing the people who were asked to leave, she was concerned that McCain’s staffers were profiling people on appearance to determine who might be a potential protester.

“When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.”

Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.

“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

So you think that girl is going to continue to vote for Republicans?

McPalin is alienating an entire generation with their abusive, paranoid style. Four years ago at Shrub rallies you at least had to possess something terrorist-related like a Democratic tee shirt. Now you just have to look like you might want to vote for Obama.

Truly unbelievable. Let’s hope we can put a permanent end to this iteration of the institution known as the Republican Party. They have not one redeeming feature as a major political party. If they get their clocks cleaned as we all hope, when the inevitable “what went wrong” discussions start in earnest, honest grass roots Republicans are going to need to point out that the first step is to stop being lying, paranoid, vicious morons who throw their own supporters out of rallies.

Or, you know, honest Republicans can come on over to the big Democratic tent. Friendly discussions about the appropriate marginal tax rate can be held among fellow citizens of good will. If one truly believes a certain rate is too high, we can investigate it, listen to economists argue, and legislate it and so on. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s called governing.

(Props to Atrios.)

Podcasting Liberally

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The podcast begins in the WA-08 congressional district, where some journalists and a lot of Republicans don’t seem to understand academic degrees and terminology. A Harvard graduate clears matters up. From degrees to convictions…the panel scrutinizes Rep. Dave Reichert’s illegal campaign loan. Next they examine “G.O.P. Party” candidate Dino Rossi’s deposition over campaign finance law violations. (Oh…that sound you hear? It’s the gnashing of Republican teeth across the state). After a brief sojourn into presidential politics, the panel revisits the strange case of Alaska’s Uncle Ted Stevens seven traffic tickets felony convictions. The podcast closes with panelist’s predictions for the WA-08 and the gubernatorial races.

Goldy was joined by Matt Stoller of OpenLeft, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, Publisher of the Group News Blog, Jesse Wendel, and initiative specialist Laura McClintock of McClintock Consulting.

The show is 51:36, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_oct_28_2008.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting podcasting liberally.]

McCain robocalling WA state?

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TPM reports that the McCain campaign is now sliming WA state of all places with it’s latest, ridiculous robocall:

[audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Tpmtv-AntiObamaMcCainCampaignRobocallRunningInArizonaOctober29555.mp3]

Yup, according to McCain, we Democrats are dangerous, because we want to “give civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators.”  What an asshole.

And, what an idiot to waste even a fraction of a cent per call in a state he has no chance of winning.  Good thing McCain is about to get his ass kicked, because if he ran this country in any way near as disastrously as he’s run his campaign, he’d make George Bush look like George Washington.

It’s because you’re Nazi communists

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The reason the BIAW campaign Dino Rossi campaign for governor didn’t let Goldy and Josh in to cover their press conference yesterday is because Goldy and Josh are probably Nazi communists. Who can forget this gem from the March issue of the BIAW newsletter, which Goldy had a great deal of fun with?

What environmentalists offer today, instead of the racist German National Socialism that defined the Nazi party, is an international environmental socialism, an amalgam of Nazism and communism—an international environmental socialism with a centralized planning scheme. But this amalgam is increasingly at odds with itself, causing a rift within the environmental lobby, with builders caught in the middle.

The issue really isn’t about name-calling, it’s about the constant inaccuracy of the right wing. Nobody with an ounce of common sense would try to shoehorn mainstream environmentalism into a made-up box called “an amalgam of Nazism and communism.” But they do it anyway, with any idea that strikes them as even faintly liberal, from tax policy to social policy to foreign policy, from the BIAW to the RNC to Sam the Non-Plumber.

I can never decide if it’s entirely deliberate, or if these people are just so profoundly ignorant of history they simply cannot express themselves clearly. At any rate, a vote for Dino Rossi is an endorsement of the inaccurate and inflammatory baloney being peddled at all levels of the Republican Party right now. It’s all they have left, you Swedish Islamo-Nazi-Liberal-Fascist Meatballs.

Fair and balanced

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I rode up the elevator with Seattle Times editorial board member Bruce Ramsey, as we both headed to wait with the press for Dino Rossi’s news conference.  The difference was, he was escorted into the press room while I was escorted out.

Why?  I’m a “partisan blogger” I was told, while he is a legitimate member of the press.  You can read the Times’ totally, nonpartisan, impartial, objective, fair and balanced editorial here.

I don’t know if there are some in the old press who applaud these efforts to exclude new media journalists like me, but they certainly don’t seem to be standing up for us.  Josh Feit, when he was credentialed by The Stranger, had the same kind of access as Ramsey, but yesterday, a working reporter in the employ of HA and its readers, was also escorted from the building because, I suppose, he wasn’t paid by the right kind of people.

Over time, more and more journalists will be employed by nontraditional outlets like HA, and if the subjects of our reporting get to pick and choose who is a journalist and who is not, it really isn’t honest to call it “journalism” anymore, is it?

Election Scorecard

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Obama McCain
100.0% probability of winning 0.0% probability of winning
Mean of 362 electoral votes Mean of 176 electoral votes


Yesterday’s analysis showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by 363 to 175 electoral votes. Obama had a 100% chance of winning an election held yesterday.

Today, there were 35 new polls representing 22 states released. The net result is a one-vote decline for Obama.

An analysis of 100,000 simulated elections shows Obama winning every one. Obama receives (on average) 362 to McCain’s 176 electoral votes. Obama still has a 100.0% probability of winning an election held now.

Detailed results for this analysis are available at Hominid Views.

Methods are described in the FAQ. The most recent version of this analysis can be found on this page.

Look out kids

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It’s something you did. At times it actually was about peace and love, although it may seem strange now.

Then some people did bad things before you were born, and therefore you are all Marxists. Sins of the father you know.

If NRO, the Doughy Pantload and Eric Earling should last for a thousand years, people on the right will still babble: you are all dirty fucking hippies.

Luckily our finest hour is very nearly upon us. Never before have so many contributed to the defeat of so few.

The Rossi Deposition

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Dino Rossi was deposed this afternoon as a witness in a lawsuit filed by Faith Ireland and Robert Utter, two former Washington State Supreme Court justices, and Chris Gregoire supporters.

The lawsuit alleges that the Business Industry Association of Washington broke campaign finance rules by coordinating its fundraising efforts with Rossi. Independent groups like the  BIAW, that raise money for candidates, are not allowed to coordinate those efforts with the candidates they are supporting because groups like the BIAW are not limited in how much money they can raise from donors. Candidates are. The BIAW has raised $7.2 million for Rossi. 

Attorney Knoll Lowney, who questioned Rossi, says today’s deposition was successful because Rossi’s testimony showed that Rossi’s involvement in the BIAW’s fundraising was “much deeper” than they originally believed. The testimony shows that Rossi made phone calls and held a lunch meeting with members of the Master Builders Association—an affiliate of the BIAW. The MBA minutes identify these phone calls and the lunch as fund raising meetings for BIAW-friendly candidates.

The lunch meeting, while noted in the original complaint, may constitute today’s “smoking gun.” Ireland and Utter’s original complaint simply speculated about the lunch. Today, Rossi confirmed that he took MBA members out to lunch in Bellevue in June, shortly after the apparent fundraising phone calls. And while Rossi refuses to acknowledge that the lunch was a fundraising lunch, his answer contradicts MBA meeting notes about the lunch which do link it to fundraising. (The lunch is discussed beginning on page 155 of the deposition.) 

Rossi says what he did was proper because he was not an official candidate at the time of the calls and the lunch, May and June 2007. Rossi did not declare until October 2007.

Lowney’s colleague, attorney Mike Withey, belittled that defense during a press conference with reporters after the deposition, saying Rossi’s logic made a “mockery” of Washington state’s campaign finance laws. His point: If someone can line up hundreds and thousands of dollars from a group (that’s going to spend it on that someone’s behalf) by simply doing it before  officially becoming a candidate, then the law is meaningless.

Withey also said there are several additional litmus tests for when someone becomes a candidate in the eyes of the state, including—knowledge and consent that someone is raising money on  your behalf. (You’ll find the definitions of a candidate here.)  

Withey identified Rossi’s performance as “the most obstructive” he’d ever seen in over 30 years. Lowney and Withey say they are filing a complaint with the judge about Rossi’s performance. 

I’d like to report Rossi’s side of the story, but I was escorted out of his press conference.

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