Archives for November 2009

The “free-market” means that a massive American corporation, propped up and majority owned by US taxpayers, can now do whatever the hell it wants.

Thousands of the 25,000 workers from Opel’s four factories are gathered in Ruesselsheim to protest at GM’s refusal to sell its European operations.

GM’s U-turn came just days before the agreed sale of a majority stake in Opel and Vauxhall to car parts maker Magna and Russian bank Sberbank.

Under that agreement, Opel workers were promised no factories would be closed.

Sure, this is “good news” for workers in the United Kingdom, just as workers in South Carolina had some pleasant news recently, when Boeing announced it would move a 787 production line to the non-union state. We’ll see how it works out in the long run.

What’s not good news is that nothing changed in terms of fixing the fundamentally unsound financial sector, because it’s still out there operating as if nothing had happened. Workers are being screwed! Wall Street approves! The mammoth banks are screwing consumers and creating “innovative” financial products! Yeah! This is the system that led us to the brink of worldwide financial calamity, and the very same people are back at it again, because they’re still in charge. The real power doesn’t lie in the White House anyhow, I think we all know that.

Decisions like the ones made by Boeing and GM are rational in terms of the zombie neo-liberal system, which rewards chasing the lowest common denominator, but in the process many regular people are stripped not only of autonomy, but in many cases the ability to earn a living. Not every western democracy has abandoned the basic rights of workers, either in law or culturally, and neither has every western democracy been subjected to the idiocy of Fox Noise and the associated conservative movement hate speech on a daily basis. It’s possible that one or more of these western countries may decide to fight back.

It will be interesting to see how German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been played for an asbolute fool, reacts as the days go by. Sure, there will be strikes and such, but the biggest threat to the zombie economic order might be the regular people who don’t believe in it that much any more.

There have already been spontaneous rumblings such as the “credit card revolt.” Why risk getting bashed and gassed when there’s YouTube? BTW, there’s a plan afoot that would care of the troublesome tubes under the guise of “copyright reform,” but I digress.

But what if they threw an economy and nobody bought stuff? Seems to me we’re already half way or more to that point, with consumers de-leveraging in a nearly unprecedented fashion.

There’ve been two news items this week that have shown us one of the uglier aspects of the drug war – attempts to censor science and expert opinion in order to maintain the status quo.

In the UK, a chief drugs advisor named David Nutt was fired by Home Secretary Alan Johnson after Nutt publicly stated something that’s rather obvious: marijuana and ecstasy are safer drugs than alcohol. Nutt was a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and two other members of the council quit after the firing.

Here in the US, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is going even farther than that. In response to a bill introduced by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia to establish a blue-ribbon commission to study how to fix our criminal justice system, Grassley tacked on an amendment that would prohibit the commission members from considering drug decriminalization as an option. This is like having a commission to study how to deal with global warming but not allowing the commission to suggest reducing carbon emissions.

Is there any other political subject where we so willingly accept the idea that science and reason are a threat that we have to legislate against? When Nutt made his proclamation, he was able to point to a recent study in The Lancet on the relative harms of various substances. As is mostly common knowledge now, you can’t overdose from marijuana and it’s less addictive than nearly all other recreational drugs. Ecstasy is also non-addictive and kills far, far fewer people than alcohol does every year, while also having potential medical uses. But simply pointing this out is apparently grounds for termination within the British Government.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has previously ignored the advice of the ACMD when his government stiffened penalties on marijuana, had this to say in defense of the move:

On climate change, or health, for example, we take the best scientific advise possible, but in an area like drugs we have to look at it in the round. We have got to look not just at what medics and scientists are saying to us – and we take that very seriously – but also what impact differ­ent decisions can have on young, vul­nerable people.

For some reason, this passes as an acceptable excuse. Drug policy is somehow a grand exception to the general rule that if you employ science and make rational decisions, you’ll end up with better outcomes. Brown seems convinced that if adults don’t act like paranoid simpletons, their kids will all become drug addicts. This is moronic. Of course, any time a drug warrior is backed into a corner of their own irrationality, they always end up claiming that what they’re doing will be better off for children – and never with any evidence to back them up. The UK continues to have much higher drug use rates among teens than nearly every other country in Europe, despite having some of the strictest drug laws too.

Back here in the United States, a reporter asked Senator Grassley about his amendment. Here was his response:

Well, my intent on that amendment isn’t any different than any other amendments that are coming up. The Congress is setting up a commission to study certain things. And the commission is a — is an arm of Congress, because Congress doesn’t have time to review some of these laws.

And — and — and the point is, for them to do what we tell them to do. And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to — to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.

So Grassley is proudly admitting – out loud, to a reporter – that he thinks it’s a good idea to set up a commission to study a complex issue, but then also tell the commission what they can and can’t recommend. That’s surreal. It’s not like he and the rest of the dinosaurs in the Senate can’t do what they do in the UK and just ignore the experts and then fire them when they speak louder. Grassley posted this amendment because he’s too scared to even hear people suggest it. God forbid drug policy experts suggest that Iowa shouldn’t continue to arrest startlingly high percentages of its relatively few black residents for drug crimes. In the end, the reluctance to confront the broken status quo of our criminal justice system is not so much about the worry of children grappling with an adult issue so much as it is the worry that adults will have to stop dealing with this issue like children.

Susan Hutchison has called Dow Constantine to concede the King County executive race. I guess she was neither professionally nor spiritually ready for the job.

King County Elections just dropped the results from about 54,000 newly tallied ballots, about half the number we were expecting to be reported today. No word yet on what’s taking so long.

In the King County Executive race, Dow Constantine now leads Susan Hutchison, 57.53% to 42.26%, a full one point increase in his margin of victory from last night’s results.

In the Seattle mayoral race, Mike McGinn’s lead over Joe Mallahan has narrowed to 461 votes, or a 49.77% to 49.33% margin. McGinn led by 910 votes last night, 50.03% to 48.96%. 20,742 new Seattle ballots were added to the mix, of which Mallahan received about 51% of the vote.

So what does this mean?

Not all that much. Like I’ve previously said, my understanding is that these ballots were from the same larger batch from which yesterday’s ballots were drawn: those that were received by 5PM Friday. If voters trended McGinn over the weekend, that trend won’t show up until later ballot drops.  And there’s certainly no conservative trend in today’s new numbers in the county executive race.

Still, if I were Mallahan, I’d be feeling a tad buoyed. Whereas if I were Hutchison, I would do the gracious thing and finally concede.

UPDATE:
Drawing on my earlier post about the miracle it would take for Hutchison to pull out victory, assuming turnout projections are fairly on target, Hutchison would need to win the remaining ballots by a better than 15-point margin in order to pull into the lead; she currently trails by a better than 15-point margin.

She better start praying.

So how does Susan Hutchison explain her electoral ass-kicking at the steel-tipped boots of Dow Constantine? Apparently, the voters were confused…

She several times blamed “attack ads” taken out in the last weeks of the campaign, and “huge dumps of money coming in, for these false, misleading ads…The partisan issues that have nothing to do with this race were confusing to people.”

Well, I guess for a candidate who has so little respect for voters that she would predicate her entire campaign on a lie, it’s not surprising to see her blame her loss on the inadequacy of the voters themselves. If only she lived in Bruce Ramsey’s world, where “lazy people” like that aren’t allowed to vote, I’m sure Hutchison would have celebrated a huge victory last night.

Of course, Susan Hutchison lost big last night, as did Tim Eyman. And I suppose every candidate who didn’t come out on top probably feels that they lost big too. But I’d say the biggest loser last night was the Seattle Times editorial board, considering the woeful track record of its endorsed candidates within the city whose name the paper misappropriates.

In fact, you gotta wonder if a lot of Seattle voters don’t take a look at the Times’ top of the ticket endorsements, and just vote the opposite.

In contested countywide races, the Times bizarrely endorses Susan Hutchison, only to see Dow Constantine cruise to a double-digit victory. Meanwhile, Graham Albertini, the Times’ preferred candidate in the Assessor’s race, comes in a distant third. Ouch. And in Seattle races, the Times may actually soon challenge the folks at (u)SP for the title of Endorsement Kiss of Death.

Yeah, sure, the Times endorsed city council winners in Richard Conlin and Sally Bagshaw, but he ran unopposed, and nobody expected the Bagshaw vs. Bloom race to be close. The same cannot be said of the Rosencrantz/O’Brien race, where the former turned the Times prominent endorsement into a surprising 16-point deficit. And then there’s poor Jesse Israel, for whom a number of people told me they seriously considered voting, only to be turned off by her Times endorsement and her perceived run to the right. What some expected to be the upset of the evening turned into your run-of-the-mill 16-point win for incumbent Nick Licata.

And of course there’s the mayor’s race, where Joe Mallahan’s Times endorsed coronation appears to have been waylaid by Mike McGinn’s grassroots activism.

Compare that track record to, say, The Stranger’s candidate endorsements, which saw a clean sweep in the races above with the possible exception of King County Assessor, where Lloyd Hara currently leads their preferred Bob Rosenberger by a small but significant margin.

Considering which paper appears more in touch with the values of Seattle voters, perhaps the two publications should just swap mastheads?

A few days ago Joe Mallahan was that business guy who was about to become mayor after spending gobs of his own cash. Kinda Seattle’s version of Michael Bloomberg, but without all that Bloomberg money.

But this morning Mallahan is just that business guy who spent gobs of his own cash. Or as our friend Will pointed out last night, kinda Seattle’s version of Michael Huffington, but without the blowing guys part. (So far as we know.)

And if this seems like I’m predicting a Mike McGinn victory based on a slim one-percent lead with about 60-percent of the ballots still outstanding, well, I guess I am. Not nearly as confidently as I’m predicting an R-71 victory, and certainly not for the same reasons. But if I were Mallahan I’d be preparing to reacquaint myself with obscurity.

My reasoning? First, if the polls can be believed, the undecideds appeared to break in McGinn’s favor during the final week of the campaign, suggesting that late votes will favor McGinn by an even stronger margin than those reported last night, all of which had been received as of 5PM Friday. Second, and perhaps even more important, McGinn appears to have engineered the most impressive, grassroots get out the vote campaign this city has seen in some time.

On the other hand, I’ve heard from the Constantine campaign that they had the sense the late vote was trending a bit more conservative, and that they wouldn’t be surprised to see Hutchison slightly narrow the gap as the votes are tallied, but I’m not sure the same dynamics apply to the mayor’s race, which was widely understood to pit a Democrat against a Democrat. Hutchison may have successfully tagged Constantine a bit with her ridiculous claim that he was responsible for Boeing setting up shop in South Carolina, but that issue simply didn’t play in the McGinn vs. Mallahan contest.

We won’t really know if a trend toward McGinn holds true until after tomorrow’s ballot drop (this afternoon’s drop will largely be from the same batch as yesterday’s), but for the moment at least, I’m sticking with my thesis that McGinn wins.

Yeah, I know, only a fool or a liar would claim to know the outcome of a race this close, but there’s no glory in making a prediction after most of the results are in.

Of all the “too close to call” races this election, the easiest to call is R-71, which reaffirms the “Everything But Marriage” bill that passed the legislature last session.

Election night results have the measure passing by a mere 2 percent of the vote, a margin well within the swing that routinely occurs during Washington’s weeks long ballot counting process. But I have damn good reason to believe that R-71’s margin will significantly expand, not shrink as the ballots are tallied.

I base this assumption on the disproportionate number of ballots left to be counted in populous King County, which so far has voted 61 percent in favor of the measure, versus the ballots remaining in the 29 counties that voted against it. As of 8:15 pm last night, King had counted only 23.55% of registered voters, but projects a final turnout of 56%. The other 38 counties have thus far tallied 30.66% of voters, with a statewide turnout projected to top out at around 51%.

Punch the current numbers through a spreadsheet, play around with turnout rates, and any way you run it, R-71’s margin of victory expands. That is, assuming late voters didn’t dramatically trend toward the No side of the ballot… a trend for which there is absolutely no evidence.

My educated guess? R-71 passes by a comfortable 4 to 6 point margin.

UPDATE:
The folks at the Washington Poll run pretty much the same spreadsheet, and come up with pretty much the same numbers.

Susan Hutchison refused to concede the King County executive race last night, despite trailing Dow Constantine by a better than 14-point margin, because apparently the only poll that really counts was the one conducted by KING-5/SurveyUSA… on October 12.

Told in an earlier interview that Dow Constantine had already declared victory, she looked startled and asked, “Is that right?” … She said she was confident waiting is the best course. “Things have changed historically in the last five days. It is just too early to tell.”

Uh-huh. Perhaps where Suzie went to school they were too busy studying Intelligent Design to learn any math, so let me run the numbers for her.

King County Elections issued 1,079,842 ballots for yesterday’s election, and ultimately projects about 600,000 ballots returned for a 56% turnout. Yesterday a total of 254,261 ballots were tallied, giving Constantine a 34,879 vote edge.

Subtract the ballots counted from the turnout expected, and that leaves about 350,000 ballots remaining. Divide Constantine’s current cushion by the ballots outstanding, and you find that Hutchison would need to win about 55% of the remaining vote to slip into the lead. Even that Oct. 12 KING-5 poll that seemed to convince her she was going to win, only had Hutchison up five points.

Think about that. Hutchison is down 14 points after the first 250K ballots, but is hoping to be up 10 points in the remaining 350K… a miraculous 24-point swing. But in her own words, “It is just too early to tell.”

If this is the type of rational, mathematical skill Hutchison would have brought to the budgeting process — you know, hoping for miracles — then it looks like 57% of voters made the right choice.

Dear Mikes,

Yeah, sure, I was kinda hard on the two of you during the primary (particularly Mike), but it’s the general election that counts, so no hard feelings, right? After all, I ultimately voted for both of you, and wrote about it (Mike and Mike), and really, what more can you ask from a blogger?

So… um… I assume I can expect the two of you to maintain that secret, city hall slush fund Mayor Nickels established a few years ago to help fund my smear campaigns while shielding him from scrutiny? $2000 cash, slipped to me once a month at Drinking Liberally, and we’ll be cool.

Best of luck running the city. I look forward to destroying your enemies.

Goldy

Real quick, it looks like America’s Vancouver may wind up with a new mayor.

City Councilman Tim Leavitt held a 1,750 lead over incumbent Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard after initial ballots were counted Tuesday evening.

With perhaps 7,000 ballots left to be tallied in the coming days, it may be some time before we know the winner.

Yeah, I don’t know. That would be a lot to make up. Might be time for everyone to begin resigning themselves to the existing I-5 spans over the Columbia. We’ll see if there’s any movement in the election numbers as the days go by.

Tim Eyman's government limiting I-1033, Nov. 2009

Tim Eyman's government limiting I-960, Nov. 2007

I’m going to spend a lot of time over the next few days talking about trends, and what that predicts for the handful of close races in today’s election, but the maps above clearly illustrate what I believe to be one of the most gratifying trends demonstrated by voters today.

The maps above show the county-by-county vote for initiatives 1033 and 960 respectively, the green representing counties that voted yes, and the yellow counties that voted no. I-960 passed in 34 of 39 counties back in November of 2007, by a statewide margin of 51.2% to 48.8%. I-1033 is on its way to losing in 21 counties by a statewide margin of 55.5% to 45.5%.

Both initiatives professed to limit government spending. Both initiatives ran during off-year elections. Both initiatives were sponsored by Tim Eyman.

As I wrote earlier today:

One would think this same libertarian streak would bode well for Tim Eyman’s government drowning I-1033, but this is where personal self-interest comes into play. For as much as rural Washingtonians bask in their self-image of rugged independence, their limited tax base leaves them more dependent on state tax dollars than more populous regions of the state, and thus their communities would be disproportionately impacted by the inevitable cuts in state spending I-1033 would necessitate over time.

Already struggling to meet basic needs, I-1033 has received little support from local elected officials, even Republicans. And local voters are swayed by their local leaders.

Democrats in general and progressives in particular need to take advantage of the awareness that Eyman helped create in traditionally government-hostile areas of the state, about the central role that government plays in improving our quality of life.

Early results are coming in on the statewide ballot measures, and it doesn’t look good for Tim Eyman.  In Spokane, Lewis, Franklin and Island counties, I-1033 is performing dramatically worse than Eyman’s I-960 did in 2007. Based on even these early results, I’m ready to call it.  I-1033 loses.

UPDATE (8:15):
King County reports. With 23.5% reporting (I’m guessing, about 60% of the eventual total), Dow Constantine leads Susan Hutchison by a commanding 57-43 margin. That’s toast.

UPDATE (8:26):
Just to put turnout in perspective, King County has reported about 254,000 ballots counted thus far. Unofficially, I’m told that there were 350,000 ballots in hand as of Friday at 5PM, and that elections projects about 650,000 ballots to be counted over all. So there are a lot more ballots left to count in King. Keep that in mind when considering close races, and particularly R-71.

UPDATE (8:36):
Given my previous comments about King County, knowing that the ballots reported thus far are solely from batches received by Friday, and seeing as the polls appear to have trended toward McGinn, I tend to believe that his slim 50-49 percent lead over Joe Mallahan will not only hold up, but expand.

UPDATE (8:50):
I-1033 is getting its ass kicked. In Eastern Washington. Lincoln, Spokane, Garfield, Columbia, Asotin, Whitman, Adams, Walla Walla and Kittitas counties have all gone No on I-1033, some of them by pretty impressive margins. I’m looking pretty prescient right about now, huh?

UPDATE (9:33):
With all the counties reporting something, R-71 is up 51.1 to 48.9. But looking at the turnout figures on the SOS’s website, I’m pretty confident it will expand its lead by a couple points.

With Republican Bob McDonnell winning big in Virginia, and incumbent Democratic Gov. John Corzine apparently headed to defeat in New Jersey, Republicans are loudly pitching the election as a referendum on President Barack Obama.

Well, uh, not so much…

Chuck Todd reports that Barack Obama’s approval rating among Virginia voters stands at 51 percent (just under the 52.6 percent of the vote he received in the state last November) and 57 percent in New Jersey (almost exactly the same as the 57.1 percent of the vote he earned in that state last November). In other words, exit polling indicates President Obama has not really lost supporters over the past year.

Apparently, exit polls in both Virginia and New Jersey both have voters denying that their vote had anything to do with Obama. But, you know, if that’s what it takes for goopers to get themselves through the day, more power to ’em.