Archives for August 2009

Normally, a sound first place finish in a nonpartisan primary would pretty much assure a candidate frontrunner status, but since the race for King County Executive is nonpartisan in name only, not-so-secret Republican Susan Hutchison shouldn’t start measuring the drapes just quite yet.

On the one hand, 37% in an ostensibly five-way race is pretty darn good, especially when you consider that the runner up is trailing far behind at 22%. But that’s not really all that much better than Will Baker numbers, the bare minimum an uncloseted Republican can expect to draw around these parts, and with 57% of voters choosing avowed Democrats, the D to R ratio is actually pretty damn respectable.

So what percentage of these non-Constantine Dems can Hutchison expect to lure in the general? Some, sure, but I’d hazard not nearly enough. Constantine is by far the most qualified candidate remaining, and the only Democrat. And if voters understand that in November, that should be enough to put him well over the top.

Public Policy Polling (PDF:)

One poll question indicative of how difficult it is to gain public understanding on a complicated issue asked if respondents thought the government should ‘stay out of Medicare,’ something inherently impossible. 39% said yes.

Sometimes I really think we should just repeal Medicare, look over at the Republicans and go “there.” We won’t, of course, because it would be inhumane to millions of our fellow citizens, but still…

(Props to Think Progress.)

The Columbian: has a roundup of primary night down here.

Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard faces a heated battle to keep his job in November after waging a neck-and-neck struggle with Councilman Tim Leavitt in Tuesday’s primary.

Preliminary tallies released Tuesday night show Pollard with 43.1 percent of the vote, followed by Leavitt with 42 percent.

A third candidate, citizen activist Charlie Stemper, had 14.9 percent and will not advance to the Nov. 3 general election.

This should be a very interesting race to watch. As the article notes, Pollard is a 14 year incumbent, and the blunt former military officer has only once received less than 60% in a general election. Leavitt is campaigning on “change,” which is evident if you check out his web page. Remind you of anyone else’s?

There’s a generational component at play, with Pollard generally receiving backing from many long-time establishment figures. But Leavitt has secured some pretty impressive endorsements as well, including some union locals, various civic and community groups and of course, the Building Industry Association, the local BIAW affiliate.

Perhaps as importantly, Leavitt is endorsed by county commissioners Marc Boldt and Steve Stuart, whose party labels read “Republican” and “Democrat” respectively, but who in reality are both solidly in the BIAW camp.

There are long-standing frictions over growth between the county and the city, and one way to view Leavitt’s run is as an attempt by the pro-developer forces to take over the city government as well. The bubble may have burst, but the local bidness guys and gals are busy planning for the next one, and it would be great for them if the city doesn’t give them any trouble.

While there are the usual assortment of hyper-local issues, like redevelopment of Vancouver’s waterfront, the big regional issue at play is a new bridge over the Columbia River, ie the CRC project. This might wind up being a key factor in the race, with Pollard sticking to his vision of a completely revitalized downtown replete with waterfront, new bridge, capped freeway and light rail.

Leavitt has been pretty vocal about resisting tolls on any new bridge, which makes for good populist fodder, but doesn’t really match up with existing federal, state and local budget realities. Without tolls there won’t be a new bridge, as federal transportation funds aren’t what they used to be and there is strong political pressure in Oregon on the issue of cars coming in from the Washington side.

So to boil it down, the long-term incumbent and former military guy is the one with the vision for the future, including light rail and a more viable urban landscape, and the “change” guy endorsed by the BIAW is the one pecking around the edges, with the support of some Democrats, campaigning to stop a new bridge, even if he doesn’t say so explicitly.

It’s not that there aren’t real issues to address, and there are legitimate beefs with the city over where to put resources. The arts community is supposedly quite unhappy with Pollard over what they perceive as a lack of support, and many downtown merchants got their dander up early on about the possibility of light rail disrupting their businesses. Sprawl and traffic on the east side of town is as bad as ever, although over the last decade the city has made significant improvements in services delivered to that area.

The real issue, I suppose, may actually turn out to be the lack of funding for municipalities in general, and just how much less in basic services people want. There’s never any shortage of people to complain about taxes, and in this economy that would seem to work in Leavitt’s favor. This could wind up being the race of Pollard’s career.

I’m still on Other Coast Time, so I couldn’t help but drift off after writing up the 8:15 election results, but I think I dreamt last night that I awoke to find Greg Nickels with a comfortable lead in the Seattle mayor’s race, the later ballot drops having flipped the early numbers. I guess even my unconscious had trouble believing that Mayor Nickels might not survive the primary.

Of course, there wasn’t much in the way of late ballot drops as only the handful of ballots from the county’s three accessible voting centers were added in at 10 PM, and so the mayor really has found himself at the shortest end of a three-way statistical tie in a top-two primary. The mayor’s camp tells me they have some cause for optimism, as late polling showed Nickels doing better against Mallahan than the early vote, so with another 45% or so of ballots still outstanding there’s a good chance the mayor could catch him, but as I wrote last night, they’ve gotta be feeling kinda sad.

Winning a third term is awfully tough (a truism Gov. Gregoire should take to heart as she continues to raise money, presumably in preparation for 2012), even under the best conditions, and these weren’t the best conditions for Mayor Nickels, who despite managing our city into arguably one of the more stable financial situations of any major city, county or state government during this nearly unprecedented economic downturn, has faced brutal attacks on his management skills from a press that apparently believes that his response to a nearly unprecedented snow storm is a better measure of his managerial abilities.

Voters tire of you. And citizens have reason to be fatigued, considering the miserable city response to last December’s snowstorms.

[…] The anti-tunnel vote got a huge bump with support for McGinn, who wants to undo that decision. Welcome to Groundhog Day, as the city revisits the decision again and again. McGinn’s solution, surface transit, will jam our streets and overwhelm the freeway.

Yeah, well, I oppose the tunnel myself (at least, this tunnel, under this financing deal), but perhaps the Times might have thought about the potential consequences before nailing the mayor to the cross over a trumped up Frozen Watergate scandal. (I always find it a little irritating how the press plays such an active role in influencing elections, and then sits back and pretends to be a neutral observer after the fact. At least I’m honest about my activism.)

So as it stands now, we face the very real prospect of the man with the reputation for being one of the greenest mayors in America being unceremoniously shoved aside by an environmental activist. Really?

Don’t get me wrong, Mike McGinn and his supporters deserve a helluva lot of credit for running a grassroots campaign, and impressively so, whatever the final results. I’m eating a breakfast of not so tasty crow this morning for questioning the value of phone banking. And I certainly have my differences with the Nickels administration.

But it’s just hard to believe that a scandal-free mayor of a relatively well-managed city with few if any major problems compared to, say, the big city of my birth from where I’m typing my morning after observations, might potentially fail to make it through such an unimpressive, if crowded field of primary challengers.

How very Seattle of us.

So even while town halls are being held, contentious but not violent tonight in the case of Brian Baird, the political situation has bypassed the right wingers earnestly stamping their feet and holding their breath about “socialism” and “death panels” and such. From The New York Times:

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

So in their zeal to, well, be wienies, the righties have managed to convince even Rahm Emanuel that there’s no sense in playing ball with them. They just keep moving the goal posts.

My, oh my, isn’t this all so interesting?

I’m sure this will turn out to be good news for Republicans, somehow.

The quesadillas were shockingly good for an Irish place. What no boiled meat and cabbage? Oh, also he seems to have a ticket through the primary.

Hutchison…………37.40%
Constantine………22.38%
Jarrett…………….12.04%
Phillips…………….11.72%
Hunter…………….10.90%

I’m sure a new set of numbers will drop as soon as I hit publish, but there you go as of right now.

King County Elections dropped the first batch of ballots shortly after 8PM, and… well… blow me down:

Mike McGinn	16810	26.56%
Joe Mallahan	16334	25.81%
Greg Nickels	15859	25.05%

That’s a three-way statistical tie in the Seattle mayor’s race with 17.3% of registered voters counted. Can’t get much more dramatic than that… except for, you know, the excruciating wait over the next week or so as the other half of the ballots slowly trickle in to elections headquarters. (KC Elections still projects a 33% final turnout.)

No doubt the McGinn camp is feeling awfully damn pleased with themselves right now about their grassroots efforts, while the mayor’s folks… well… I suppose they’re feeling kinda sad. As for Mallahan’s folks, well, I’m still not sure there are any Mallahan folks who aren’t actually on payroll.

As for the rest of the King County primary results, there aren’t many surprises. In the executive race, Susan Hutchison leads Dow Constantine 37% to 22%, while Ross Hunter, Fred Jarrett and Larry Phillips are battling it out for a distant third. Meanwhile in the Seattle City Council races it looks like Sally Bagshaw will face off against David Bloom, Nick Licata will go up against Jesse Israel, and Mike O’Brien will take on Robert Rosencrantz.

And of course, the Bag Fee initiative is failing, 58% to 42%.

More later.

Today is election day, so make those final selections and turn in your ballot. And the join us tonight for some politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

Remember, folks, guns and alcohol don’t mix. So check your sidearm with the kids before you come on down.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWg9CqgwZN4[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 335 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to shoot for.

Portland Fox Noise affiliate KPTV is going to stream Brian Baird’s first town hall, being held tonight at the Amphitheater at Clark County, capacity approximately 18,000.

The event is scheduled to be streamed starting at 7 pm.

The temperature in Vancouver just before 4 pm is 91 degrees.

Next up at the Amphitheater, in ten days, Nickelback, followed by Def Leppard in September.

[Typed on my Blackberry. Excuse the typos.]

At around 1:10pm, while getting ready to go to work, I stepped on the corner of a garbage bag. In that bag was the lid of a can of olives… My heel met that lid from the olive can, and well… The guy I’m housesitting for is probably going to need a new mat for his back door.

Sitting on this hospital bed at Overlake is giving me the chance to reflect, in real time, about healthcare in the USA.

This visit is going to cost me $125 bucks. Did I try to shop around, maybe to look for a better deal to avoid the ER? I did, but with a shoeful of blood, its tough to comparison shop.

Whats good about the situation is that I’m going to recieve excellent medical care. In America, we don’t ration healthcare. I’m going to get the full boat: tiny stitches, local pain meds, and a flat tube TV on the wall.

In America, we don’t ration healthcare. We ration the access to that healthcare. We run a healthcare system that no serious conservative politician in any country would advocate for. In England, Tory leader David Cameron reaffirmed his support for the NHS after a member of his party made dispariging statements on American TV. Cameron wants to be Prime Minister one day, and he knows that for its flaws, each and every Briton would pick the NHS over America’s broken system any day.

After I’ve been patched up and sent on my way, the hospital will ring up my charges and bill my insurance. They will bill at the highest rate possible to recoup for uncompensated care. You see, the simple fact that some don’t have insurance makes the insurance I do have more expensive. Whats more, my health insurance company will spend %12 of every dollar on paperwork, processing, and other overhead. Medicare, The Great Healthcare Satan, spends far less.

For all the monkeytalk coming out of DC these days, its easy to lose track of the reality of a broken healthcare system, and how regular Americans must navigate it every day, Americans of all stripes.

The doctor is on his way in, so I’ll close by saying this:

Universal health insurance is no more a socialist plot that universal car insurance.

[Typed on my Blackberry. Excuse the typos.]

From Pacific County blogger/writer Arthur Ruger, who makes a lot of good points. Worth checking out, here’s a taste:

After the last two election cycles, I backed away from lots of writing. At 63, I want to retire as soon as possible from my full-time job at the local welfare office in South Bend.

That’s right, the welfare office – where a day doesn’t go by without older American residents of our county coming in seeking any kind of relief from medical expenses that take larger and larger bites out of their fixed income.

It’s also the office where younger Americans come in – not asking for a welfare check – but to find out if there’s any kind of help with medical expenses. They don’t want a government hand out. They seek a way to keep their families safe. And they are not seeing or hearing any constructive ideas from reform opponents, especially the current minority party, it’s willfully propagandistic leadership and its public broadcast shills who are all talk and no solution.

I may not be the county expert on health care reform, but I’m willing to bet that short of medical professionals, I see the problem more closely and with more clarity than most citizens nationwide who have gone to town meetings scared, worried and nervous. They seem to feel that way because they are driven by outrage and fear inspired by the disinformation and outright lying that has come out of desperate Republican political organizing, coaching and talking point tactics.

After all the shouting, real people still need real solutions. That’s why this fight is worth it, and good on Ruger for reminding us.

When I get back to Seattle the first thing I’m gonna do is get me a handgun, and a license to carry it, and then I plan to start showing up at health care reform town halls.  Armed. You know, just in case.

After all, it is my constitutional right to protect myself, my family and my property, even if it means taking another person’s life in the process. So I invite all of you to show up armed at your next neighborhood town hall meeting and join me in teaching those pussies on the right what it’s like to be a real American.

I’m just sayin’….

No public option, no passage. And the votes are there, apparently.

You’d never know about this from most media accounts, probably because progressives aren’t screaming, yelling and waving guns around. Yes, it’s a battle of wills, and no, I can’t predict the final outcome.

But I’d wager that progressives around the country are now in little mood to compromise on anything, and we’re certainly not going to cotton to some giant industry turd with “health care reform” written on it.

While the diversionary clown shows continue, the administration faces the basic decision Molly Ivins used to describe as “dancing with them what brung you,” to paraphrase the late and great Texas columnist. It’s pretty clear that’s what Max Baucus and Kent Conrad are doing.

The conservative clown shows are already wearing thin, in addition to getting creepier, and their political utility will continue to decrease as we get more into the fall. At some point clowns grow tiresome.

So it seems like the short term strategy is to move the debate back to actual policy, rather than the incomprehensible nonsense we’ve been witnessing. You can add “death panels” to the long list of recent American political idioms like “Schiavo,” “Katrina” and “”weapons of mass destruction” that are shorthand for conservative craziness, incompetence and lies.

No rational person can do much but shake their head in sorry amazement at how the right always doubles down on being nuts, never seeming to realize that the short term media attention eventually gives way to the broader, non-cable watching public recoiling in horror.

If progressives in the House can hold firm, everyone is going to have to deal with them. If that upsets some Blue Dogs, well, cry me a river. The ongoing political re-alignment needs to be helped along sometimes, and if we wind up with fewer Blue Dogs, so much the better in the long run.

As another Texan, Jim Hightower, used to say, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Today’s release of R-71 data has the process nearly half-complete. Now 65,531, (47.6%) signatures have been examined in completed volumes. There have been 7,201 invalid signatures found, for an uncorrected rejection rate of 10.99%.

The invalid signatures include 6,165 that were not found in the voting rolls, 470 duplicates, and 566 that did not match the signature on file. There are also 24 pending signatures that I’ve not counted either way.

The 470 duplicates suggest that the overall rate of duplicate signatures for the petition will be about 1.84%. This is slightly higher than what we saw last week, from Tuesday through Friday, 1.62%, 1.74%, 1.73%, and 1.69% respectively.

Using the V₂ estimator, the number of valid signatures is expected to be 121,475 exceeding by 898 the 120,577 needed to qualify for the ballot. The overall (i.e. duplicate-corrected) rejection rate is about 11.78%. (Last week we saw 11.61%, 11.53%, 11.54%, 11,65%.)

A Monte Carlo analysis of 100,000 simulated petitions gives this distribution of projected valid signatures for the petition:

In only 34 of the 100,000 simulations did the measure fail to qualify for the ballot (those red bars on the left). The median number of signatures was 121,478 with a 95% confidence interval between 120,951 and 122,003.

As we saw last week…the measure has almost no chance of being rejected.

After the fold, I provide a rather dry analysis by small batches of signature pages for the R-71 obsessives and stats wonks….

[Read more…]

With reports that the Obama Administration is considering backing down on the public option – a health care proposal that is supported by roughly 3/4 of the country – due to the way the debate is being portrayed in the media, I get the sense that we’ve witnessed what might be an even larger media failure than what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War. At least then, the public was in far more of a position to buy into the lies being put out by the special interest groups leading us into that mess. But what has happened over the past few weeks in the health care debate has transcended that. A narrow set of interests who profit very handsomely from our incredibly overpriced health care system have managed to derail a popular initiative put forth by a popular president. It’s another loud warning that the ability of Americans (and media personalities) to figure out when moneyed interests are lying to us is not keeping up with the myriad ways we’re all being lied to.

A big part of this distorted debate has focused on end-of-life issues. An innocuous provision in one of the health care bills was incorrectly characterized by former Alaska Governor and losing Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin as “death panels“. The issue itself was nothing more than a provision to allow for voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions to be covered. As I’ve pointed out previously, these end-of-life sessions have a well-known positive effect when people take advantage of them. In fact, those who discuss these issues openly and honestly with their doctors tend to outlive those who don’t. The idea that there’s anything to fear from something like this is so absurd that even Sarah Palin herself didn’t buy it back in 2008 when she endorsed end-of-life counseling as Governor of Alaska.

Instead, much of what happened after Palin dropped that turd into the health care debate punch bowl reminded me a lot of what happened last year during the I-1000 campaign, where opponents of the death with dignity initiative piled lies on top of bullshit on top of more lies in order to convince people that a law that was working very well just across the border in Oregon would somehow be a disaster here in Washington. One can easily see the parallel to the current health care debate, where we can look to countries like France – which has a world-class health care system that relies heavily on government involvement alongside private insurance – to see that moving towards more “socialized” medicine is not a slippery slope. And we rarely saw the media (either last year or right now) take a forceful approach to separating fact from fiction this way.

Fortunately, the I-1000 debate was only about a single contentious issue, and in the end, it didn’t really matter that Martin Sheen was telling whoppers in a commercial that aired every 10 seconds in October, or that the Seattle Times was giving editorial space to a crackpot conspiracy theorist who actually believes that Washington’s death with dignity law was specifically worded to allow people to kill their rich parents. It still passed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. I think that’s one thing to be optimistic about. I remember having a conversation with Will around this time last year (he was working on the I-1000 campaign) as he was freaking out about all the bullshit being shouted through media outlets who arguably should have had much better baloney detectors. I told him there’s no way it wasn’t going to pass, and I ended up being vindicated on that front.

The national health care debate right now is a complete buffet of every contentious issue that borders on health care. End-of-life care is just a small tibdit. Abortion, government regulation, illegal immigrants, and taxes are each separate elephants crammed trunk to tail into this room. And while the people whose paranoia far outweighs their ability to grasp complex issues continue to show up at town halls and scream their heads off, I still hold out some hope that enough Americans are taking the same thing away from the spectacle that I am, that we’re really not doing a good enough job in this country of treating the mentally ill – and that’s just another reason we need to improve our health care system. Sadly, we’ll still likely have to improve how we keep ourselves well-informed first.