Archives for September 2010

I couldn’t be bothered to fly to D.C. for Obama’s inauguration bash, but this… this march is awfully tempting.

Yes, you read that headline right. The Seattle Times editorial board has endorsed a state income tax. You know… back in 1969….

A single-rate income tax, adequate safeguards against rocketing property tax and appropriate reductions in other taxes must be devised if the state is to meet its budgetary needs and solve the school support dilemma.

And in 1970….

Property, sales, business and other excise-taxing sources are bearing too heavy a share of the public-expenditure load. Yet vast amounts of fluid wealth in the form of income escape state taxation. This should begin to bear a fair share of the burden. If H.J.R. 42 is defeated, the additional burden on property and excise tax will become unbearable. For these reasons we recommend approval of No. 42.

And in 1972…

Events now on the horizon leave no doubt but that the state administration and the Legislature will be negligent if they do not permit the voters another opportunity to make a judgment on a state income tax and interrelated fiscal policies.

Fiscally, the state is drifting toward shoals; time is running out for it to continue to fund basic responsibilities in public services with its jerry-built tax structure; nor can the state’s businesses and industries develop the immense number of new jobs needed to accommodate the present jobless as well as the younger generation now phasing into the employment market.

And in 1973…

The Times has been a strong advocate of the principle that a state income tax should be instituted as a means (1) to distribute the tax burden more equitably, (2) to gear public revenues more responsibly to economic growth, (3) to reduce pressures on present tax sources, and (4) to provide education with more dependable revenues.

You can read all these editorials and more in Andrew Villeneuve’s extensively researched and well argued historical retrospective on the Times’ tragic descent into editorial dotage over at the NPI Advocate. Really… read the whole thing.

So what’s changed between 1969 and 2010? Not the fundamental laws of economics or our state’s long term structural revenue deficit. No, what I’d argue has changed is the Seattle Times.

After Christine O’Donnell knocked off Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP primary this week, there’s been a lot of focus on her long history of TV appearances in her 20’s, where she covered a wide range of topics. Much of this has been in the context of “how did this strange person manage to win a Senate primary battle?”, but that’s not what I find most interesting about all of this.

What I’m more curious about is why Christine O’Donnell was ever on television so much in the first place. A lot people in their 20s have strong personal and political views, and many of them go so far as to dedicate their lives at that time to some particular cause. But it’s exceedingly rare for any of those people to successfully get such high-profile media platforms to air their views. O’Donnell was clearly motivated in her causes, but her media ascension at the time seems oddly out of place with the actual substance of her activism. She was talking about the evils of masturbation for fuck’s sake. I was alive in the 90s, and I don’t recall that being a particularly pressing problem in our society at the time. Why was this young woman showing up on various high-profile television shows so often, when her only qualification appeared to be that she screwed around in college and later regretted it?

UDPATE: Commenter rhp6033 shines some light on this with a good comment that I’d missed from earlier this week.

As I briefly mentioned earlier today, we got a new Rasmussen Poll in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and Dino Rossi (R). The poll shows Murray leading Rossi 51% to 46%. The poll surveyed 750 likely voters on the 14th of September.

With this new poll, we have now had seven polls taken (and released to the public) over the past month:

	Start	End			%	%	%
Poll	date	date	Size	MOE	D	R	Diff
Rasmussen	14-Sep	14-Sep	750	4.0	51	46	D+5.0
CNN Time OR	10-Sep	14-Sep	906	3.0	53	44	D+9.0
Elway	09-Sep	12-Sep	500	4.5	50	41	D+9.0
Rasmussen	31-Aug	31-Aug	750	4.0	46	48	R+2.0
DSCC	28-Aug	31-Aug	968	—	50	45	D+5.0
SurveyUSA	18-Aug	19-Aug	618	4.0	45	52	R+7.0
Rasmussen	18-Aug	18-Aug	750	4.0	48	44	D+4.0

In what follows, I’ll ignore the DSCC poll. Not that I have any reason to doubt the poll. Rather, the poll was specifically released because the results favored Murray, thus clearly violating a statistical assumption used for the analysis.

Murray leads in four of the remaining six polls. As usual, I’ll begin with a Monte Carlo simulation analysis of the most recent poll (FAQ). Taking just the new Rasmussen polls there were 728 respondents who went for Murray or Rossi. Following a million simulated elections, Murray tallies 835,577 wins to Rossi’s 158,253 wins.

The evidence offered by this most recent poll suggests that Murray would have an 84.1% chance of beating Rossi if an election had occurred two days ago. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

With three polls released over three days, we might as well combine all of ’em. Of the total of 2,156 individuals sampled, 2,061 go for Rossi or Murray. Murray gets 51.6% and Rossi gets 44.0% of the “votes.” The simulation analysis gives Murray 994,327 wins to Rossi’s 5,404 wins.

Thus, these three polls offer evidence that Murray would have a 99.5% chance of beating Rossi in an election held over that past week.

Rossi does a little better if we combine the last month of polls (all but the DSCC poll in the table). Now we end up with a sample of 4,274 respondents, of which 4056 are for Murray or Rossi. The raw percentages are 49.0% Murray and 45.9% Rossi. The Monte Carlo analysis gives Murray 933,103 wins to Rossi’s 65,250 wins.

If the past month of polling is representative of Washington state voters, the evidence suggests that Murray would win an election held now with a 93.5% probability.

Going back a month or two things did not look nearly so rosy for Murray. This is clear from a graph of the polling in this race:

See that dip that occurs over the summer? When the early September Rasmussen poll came out showing Rossi leading Murray 48% to 46%, I offered a theory:

There is another reason I am not (yet) too concerned. August 31 is still in the “dog days of summer” around here. In my many years of following polling in Washington state, I’ve learned that Washingtonians become very negative in the summer, only to perk right back up in the fall. I can’t really explain it…I’ve just observed it in approval numbers. Murray probably gets the worst of if from the summer malaise. That is, Murray doesn’t really have to worry about close results like these for another month….

I’m such a pessimist…it only took a couple of weeks.

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

Comedian and Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead is in town this weekend for two performances tomorrow night at Theatre Off Jackson, and on Saturday for a political satire writing workshop (click the links for details and tickets). She was very, very funny at Netroots Nation. Highly recommended.

AND… Lizz is joining us tonight for a special edition of Drinking Liberally, 8PM onward at the Montlake Ale House. Come join us for a hoppy pint and some especially hopped up conversation.

While Darryl works on a more thorough statistical analysis of Patty Murray’s 51-46% lead in today’s Rasmussen Poll, I’d like to take a moment to muse on the political impact of Dino Rossi’s recent round of bad news.

Rasmussen’s is now the third independent poll in as many days to show Murray at or above 50% with a modest but statistically significant lead (the fourth if you count the DSCC’s recently released internal poll), all of which come at the most inopportune time for the Republican nominee. For with teabagger Christine O’Donnell’s stunning victory in Tuesday’s primary flipping Delaware from the Likely Republican to the Likely Democratic column, a Republican takeover of the Senate is now well nigh impossible, making a major investment in what has always been a long shot Rossi campaign much less attractive than it was only a week ago.

The thinking was that a Rossi candidacy would put Washington into play in what many predicted to be a wave election year, allowing Republicans to at least claim a roadmap toward control of the Senate. Even Rossi has frequently promoted himself as the 51st seat, in an obvious effort to nationalize the race.

But with O’Donnell’s election taking Delaware off the map — and Republican control of the Senate with it — the NRSC and its allies must now recalculate the electoral math that determines where they will invest their money. Do they spread it around, even in Democratic-leaning Washington, and with polls trending in Murray’s favor? Or do they pull money out of Washington and concentrate it on more promising races like Wisconsin and Nevada, while playing defense in Kentucky?

If control of the Senate is at stake, it’s hard not to argue for the former. But if you can’t win control without Delaware, and you can’t win Delaware, then Washington suddenly becomes much less important. In fact, the Senate itself becomes much less important, potentially prompting conservative PACs to focus their largesse on winning control of the House.

And that poses a huge problem for Rossi, whose entire campaign strategy seems predicated on the expectation that huge gobs of “independent” expenditure cash will be dumped into his race during the final few weeks of the campaign. Indeed, forced to face off against Murray coffer to coffer, Rossi’s got no strategy.

Rossi benefited from some early IE’s (mostly funded by Rossi’s attorney), but we haven’t seen a single one on the airwaves since before Labor Day. Coincidence? Maybe, but the Republicans have their own internal polls too, and since they’re not releasing them, it is reasonable to suspect that they don’t much change this narrative. So perhaps Republican money is already drying up as polling trends show this race to be less and less winnable?

Election day is still six weeks away, but mail-in ballots drop in a little more than three, so there’s not much time left to decide where to spend all that money. And if Rossi doesn’t get some good news awfully soon, he might not see nearly as much of this money as he likely expected.

Three days and three new polls in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and Dino Rossi (R). Today’s poll is by Rasmussen and shows Murray leading Rossi 51% to 46%.

These new results are completely consistent with polls released over the past two days. Two days ago, an Elway poll showed Murray leading Rossi 50% to 41%. And yesterday we saw the release of a CNN, Time, and Opinion Research poll that had Murray leading Rossi by a remarkable 53% to 44%.

I’ll post more analysis of this new poll and some joint poll analyses later today.

Finally some print reporting on 25th LD Republican nominee Hans Zeiger’s anti-gay/anti-Girl-Scout/anti-Islam/anti-Baptist agenda. In the Seattle Times? No. In the TNT? No. In the Puyallup Herald? Nope.

If you want to get ink on your fingers while reading about the controversial candidate, you’re gonna have to pick up a copy of the Seattle Gay News. And in it, you’ll find the following hilarious quote:

Alex Hays, executive director of Mainstream Republicans, told SGN that the HorsesAss piece was “intellectually dishonest” because it quoted selected articles by Zeiger “out of context.”

Huh. You know what’s really intellectually dishonest, Alex? Accusing me of being “intellectually dishonest” without disclosing to the reporter that you are also Zeiger’s political consultant.

Pot, meet kettle, and all that.

Another day another poll in the race between incumbent Senator Patty Murray (D) and real estate speculator and perennial candidate Dino Rossi (R). Just yesterday, an Elway poll showed Murray leading Rossi 50% to 41%. I understand some folks are skeptical about the veracity of Elway’s polls, so this new poll will be interesting….

Today’s poll, by CNN, Time, and Opinion Research, queried 906 likely voters in Washington state. In the poll, Murray leads Rossi by a stunning 53% to 44%. (Among registered voters, rather than likely voters, Murray leads Rossi by 50% to 44%). That’s even more favorable for Murray than the Elway poll!

As usual, I’ll do a Monte Carlo analysis to get a better feel for the odds of each candidate winning as suggested by the new poll results. After a million simulated elections using the likely voter numbers and percentages, Murray won 973,114 times, and Rossi, 25,471 times.

In other words, if the election was held right now, the evidence from this poll suggests Murray would have a 97.4% probability of beating Rossi. Because the winning percentage is over 95%, statisticians would deem this “statistically significant.” That is, Murray’s lead isn’t very likely to be an artifact of a small sample. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulation:

That’s a lot of blue there….

Since yesterday’s Elway poll was taken just a few days earlier, we can reasonably combine the evidence from these two polls. There were a combined total of 1,406 “votes” of which 1,334 went to either Murray or Rossi. Murray took 51.9% of the “votes” to Rossi’s 43.0%. A series of simulated elections from the joint polls gives Murray 992,496 wins to Rossi’s 7,124 wins. In other words, these two polls suggest that Murray would have a 99.3% chance of beating Rossi if the election had been held now. Here’s the distribution:

That’s even more blue!

Clearly…the one thing Rossi is badly in need of in this race is more SurveyUSA polling!

Update: Here is what the polling looks like this year for the race….

Clearly, the summer slump has ended.

For what it’s worth, what the headline says.

I spent last Sunday afternoon making phone calls for Patty Murray; there’s nothing like one on one contact with other people to get that feeling like you make a difference, and I’ll be back plenty more times over the course of the next couple months. I’d encourage HA readers to volunteer for candidates. Here are the federal candidates’ volunteer pages (except Jim McDermott, who I couldn’t find a place to volunteer on his page, hope he can pull out the election despite that).

* Patty Murray

* Suzan DelBene

* Denny Heck

* Jay Clough

* Rick Larsen

* Adam Smith

* Jay Inslee

* Norm Dicks

And the State Democratic Party can help you find more.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oeSFAIKaX4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Attorney General Rob McKenna has yet to reply to my email asking if he still endorses far-right-wing rising star Hans Zeiger, now that his anti-Muslim/anti-Girl-Scout/anti-Baptist views have come to light. But at least one local Republican appears eager to come forth and denounce Zeiger’s impressive portfolio of wing-nuttery:  Hans Zeiger.

The last time I looked at the writings of House candidate Hans Zeiger, the 25-year-old Republican was drawing fire for his published views on Girl Scouts (“a pro-abortion, feminist training corps”) and public schools (“polluted with the filth of moral relativism.”)

Zeiger said he no longer stands by those columns and blog posts, made when he was 18 and 19. He had some of them pulled down from the Web, which unleashed attacks by Democrats and liberal bloggers accusing him of hiding his real views.

But Zeiger’s posts continue to trickle out, and one unearthed by blogger David Goldstein (warning: foul language) is especially incendiary.

The post on WorldNetDaily, “The right must unite against Islam,” calls for conservatives to rebuild their coalition after their 2006 defeats by making a common enemy of “the cult of Islam.”  […] I asked Zeiger about it today. He called the column “unacceptable.” and repeated comments that he has grown a lot since being a “young and naïve” college student schooled on talk radio.

Yes, according to Zeiger, he’s done a lot of growing up these past four years, and is very, very sorry for the two books and couple hundred columns worth of wackadoodle hate speech he published during his nine-year stint as Andrew Villeneuve’s evil twin. Kinda reminds me of the Monty Python sketch in which a convicted serial killer charms the court by offering a profuse and heartfelt apology.

But the problem is, all apologies aside, this is who Zeiger really is. Indeed, according to his own online Voters Guide statement:

Elected Experience:
No information submitted

Other Professional Experience:
Hans Zeiger is an author and a senior fellow at a national non-profit organization.

That’s his entire resume. Zeiger is an “author” and, at 25, a “senior fellow” at The American Civil Rights Union, a right-wing think tank whose board includes Ed Meese, Ken Starr, Linda Chavez and Robert Bork. And why do you think they hired this 25-year-old kid as a “senior” fellow? Because of what he wrote as an author. In fact, Zeiger was hired by the ACRU back in 2007, just months after writing the anti-Islam screed he now recants as “unacceptable.”

Since his first book was published at the precocious age of 16, with a foreword by Oliver North, to the day after his primary victory, when he first started scrubbing the Internet of his vast and embarrassing written record, Zeiger’s whole identity has been wrapped up in his prolific and often offensive right-wing rantings. Over the past nine years Zeiger has produced a portfolio that is as impressive as it is crazy. That’s why he’s been described by his fellow Republicans as a “wunderkind” and a “rising star.” And that’s why a national right-wing think tank would make him a “senior” fellow at the tender age of 22.

So for Zeiger, rightfully worried that general election voters might be shocked and offended by his views, to attempt to dismiss his very raison d’etre as mere youthful indiscretion is as absurd as it is disingenuous. It would be sorta like me attempting to use my notoriety as a controversial blogger to propel me into public office, only to take down HA as an irrelevant distraction.

Goldstein regrets having accused Luke Esser of fucking pigs, the candidate told me today. He called the post “unacceptable,” and repeated comments that he has grown up a lot since 2006.

So does he still think Esser fucks pigs? “Luke Esser’s sexuality is very complex, and I would not profess to make sweeping judgments about it.”

I mean, it was almost four years ago, right? All the way back in 2006. I’ve matured a lot since then… just look at my hairline.

Or is there some statute of limitations on authorship for which my lack of a J-School education has left me unawares? Is seven years too long to hold Zeiger responsible for his own words?

“Our public schools have assaulted the Christian faith time and again, and the present hyper-glorification of Islam only exacerbates the confusion to which young students are now subjected. We must decide, with finality, whether we will be a people reflective of our Christian heritage in ordered liberty, or whether we will deepen our wounds already inflicted by the poisonous doctrines of multiculturalism and moral relativism.

While America decides, parents must be vigilant. They must beware of the radical Islamization of their children’s schools.”

Or is the statute of limitations more like four years?

“Conservative Christians have prepared their children far better than liberals to fight the battles of our generation. Liberals, in fact, haven’t had many children. They’ve aborted too many. And out of the curse of abortion has come this blessing: The left is losing demographically.”

Or for one as young as Zeiger, is a post from a mere one year ago too ancient to criticize?

“As an operative view for society, atheism is destructive, to say the least.”

I’m not doubting Zeiger’s ability to change or mature or even, dare I say, evolve. Nor do I dismiss the possibility of redemption. It was a mere three years ago that Zeiger railed against “the tyranny of political correctness,” and yet in the years hence, as a writer, Zeiger has certainly appeared to submit to exactly that. His more recent pieces have tended to be more measured, more cautious and in turn, more boring. Indeed, I think it is fair to speculate that if Zeiger’s writing style had been this understated and uncontroversial from the start, he’d have no published portfolio nor wunderkind reputation to speak of.

Instead, I’d argue for Zeiger the same standard that I have long argued for myself: that if you want to judge his character, his temperament and his values, then you must read Zeiger and his words within the broad context of his entire oeuvre, and not by the selected excerpts of the author or his critics.

As for me, I feel comfortable that should I ever run for public office, I could proudly stand by and defend nearly every word I’ve written, even the foul ones. Sure, I might wince at some of what I wrote during my high school and college years, but mostly due to the quality of the writing, not the content. And while I’ve no doubt been wrong or wrongheaded from time to time, I’d never attempt to scrub the Internet of my mistakes, for I remain confident that my collected work speaks well of who I am and what I stand for.

Zeiger, on the other hand, while he often writes about honor and morality, has sought to hide from voters who he really is… or at the very least, who he recently was. And that is a coverup our local media should not allow him to get away with.

UPDATE:
Oh yeah… and this:

Earlier this morning Lee asked why Palin-backed tea partier Clint Didier couldn’t even come close to achieving in Washington state the same sort of stunning primary election upset as even nuttier Christine O’Donnell won last night in Delaware, and perhaps the short answer is: been there, done that.

One of the consequences of the Republican wave of 1994 is that it swept far-right-wing Evangelical Christians into control of the party in many regions of the state, a movement that prompted far-right-wing, Evangelical Christian Ellen Craswell to seek the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 1996. Riding this renewed surge of right-wing energy, and employing a grassroots strategy reminiscent of today’s Tea Party, Craswell edged out the relatively moderate, Republican establishment candidate Dale Forman in the primary, only to move on to a crushing 16-point defeat against Gary Locke in the general.

I guess blunt campaign rhetoric like describing gay rights as “special rights for sodomites” didn’t go over too well with Washington’s more moderate electorate.

During the next few years Washington’s Christian right continued to fight for control of state and local Republican Party organizations, leading to the whittling away of GOP majorities, and culminating in 2000’s disastrous gubernatorial nomination of ultra-conservative John Carlson, and his near 20-point blowout loss to Gov. Locke despite a less than impressive first term. This ultimately led to the hollowing out of the state party over the past decade, despite the efforts of former chairman Chris Vance to impose party discipline and nominate more mainstream-ish candidates.

Indeed, the once solidly red suburban districts swung blue, not because the electorate became dramatically more liberal, but because the former “Dan Evans Republicans” were now running as Democrats.

The point is, while there were many factors that led to a string of Democratic victories in statewide elections and an almost unbroken series of legislative pickups over the past seven cycles, the roots of the Democrats’ recent resurgence can be traced back to their devastating defeat in 1994, and the seeds of self-destruction planted by the overconfident far-right-wing of their Republican rivals.

The Ellen Craswellization of the WSRP proved a total bust, and the party has been paying the price ever since. That’s a lesson Delaware Republicans are about to learn, but which even many of the more radical elements of our own GOP seem to now pragmatically, if reluctantly acknowledge. Indeed, perhaps the only thing worse in the long term for national Republicans than failing to gain control of Congress due to Tea Party hubris, might be for them to win, and be forced, like Washington state Republicans before them, to learn this lesson the hard way.