Archives for October 2010

My ballot was mailed earlier this week, but unlike Goldy, I was torn over I-1100. I’d really like to see the state’s monopoly over liquor sales go away. The state store system is archaic, and one can easily look at state-by-state statistics to see that states with privatized liquor sales don’t have more problems with drunk driving (one of the bogus scare tactics that proponents have been using to get people to vote against it). There’s an argument to be made that underage people could potentially access liquor easier, but I think that’s a problem that can be solved with better enforcement and larger fines.

On the other hand, I wasn’t convinced that I-1100 adequately addressed the drop in revenue that would occur from dismantling the system. And in a year where our revenue problems aren’t showing any signs of improving, this outweighed my desire to move to a regulatory system that was more customer- and retailer-friendly. I ended up voting against it.

I’m currently reading Last Call by Daniel Okrent, a book detailing the history of alcohol prohibition. What’s interesting is that when the late 19th century movement to ban alcohol was gathering steam, the movement ran into a similar problem:

By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg – 71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall. Only external revenue – the tariff – provided a larger share of the federal budget, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the tariff’s continuation was the most intensely debated issue in American public life. It would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn’t collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.

It may make us feel uncomfortable to have our budgets rely on revenue generated by the sale of alcohol, but that was the reality then and it’s the reality now. In fact, Okrent points out that taxes on liquor helped fund each of the wars of the 19th century, from the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War. Right now, our state relies on the revenue it generates from controlling the sale of liquor. I’d be perfectly happy with breaking that dependency, but it doesn’t happen from wishful thinking alone. It requires figuring out how to restructure our tax system to allow for us to replace that lost revenue. With the outcome of I-1053 and I-1098 about to be decided as well – each having a large impact on how our tax system is structured, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not we’ll be able to do this in the near future – and that was too much uncertainty for me this time around.

We have fallen into a relatively dry spell for polling in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and real estate salesman Dino Rossi (R). Rasmussen has now released their latest Washington state poll showing Rossi leading Murray 48% to 47%. The poll of 750 likely voters was taken on Tuesday and has a margin of error of 4%.

This poll breaks Murray’s streak of eight consecutive polls with the lead. Before today’s release, the most recently taken poll was also by Rasmussen (17th Oct), and showed Murray with a +3% lead over Rossi (49% to 46%).

Using my usual Monte Carlo analysis employing 1,000,000 simulated elections, we find from the newest Rasmussen poll that Murray wins 415,950 elections to Rossi’s 573,763 wins. Thus, evidence from this poll alone suggests that, if the election had been held last Tuesday, Rossi would have a 58% probability of beating Murray to Murray’s 42% probability of beating Rossi. Given that the winning probability is under 95%, a statistician would tell us that the results suggest a statistical tie. Here is the distribution of simulated election outcomes:

A more comprehensive picture of the election emerges by combining all polls from the past two weeks. Besides the two Rasmussen polls already mentioned, we include the Marist poll taken from 14-17 October on 589 likely voters, giving Murray a +1% lead and a Public Policy Polling poll taken from 14-16 October on 1,873 likely voters and gave Murray a +2% lead. (Other polls in this race started the survey prior to the 14th of October so aren’t included.)

The combined meta-poll has 3,962 “votes” of which 1,920 go to Murray (48.5%), 1,862 go to Rossi (47.0%), and 180 (4.5%) just go away. In the Monte Carlo analysis, Murray wins 746,418 times and Rossi wins 249,788 times. In other words, the four polls suggest that Murray would win an election held over the past two weeks with a probability of 74.9%, and Rossi would win with a probability of 25.1%.

This collection of four recent polls gives the appearance that the race has tightened up a bit (compare this to the 98% win probability for Murray from pooled polls early last week). Keep in mind, however, that three of the four most recent polls are robopolls. As I discussed previously, there is a strong trend of robopolls showing Murray under performing relative to live-interview polls. Perhaps we will get a live-interview poll tomorrow….

Still no apology from the Seattle Times to our immigrant community for our sole daily’s credulous participation in the AP’s smear of OneAmerica Votes‘ immigrant voter outreach program.

Of course, considering this story was unfolding in its own backyard, you’d think the Times might consider doing a little original reporting of its own, rather than just copying and pasting the AP’s inflammatory headline: “In Washington, illegal immigrants canvassing for Democrats.” And if they had, they might of spoken to volunteers like Rim Abera, a 20 year-old college student and Franklin High grad.

Rim’s family, originally from Eritrea, came to Seattle from the Sudan when she was a baby. But despite achieving citizenship nine years later, her parents never registered to vote until 2008, when then-18-year-old Rim became energized through her work with OneAmerica Votes.

That’s the story the AP and the Seattle Times won’t tell you, and that’s the story the righties truly fear. For if more immigrants like Rim and her family do register to vote, and more of them show up at the polls and cast their ballots, well, that just doesn’t bode well for the right wing agenda.

A new poll released today shows Democrat Scott McAdams surging ahead of Republican Joe Miller 29% to 23% in the Alaska U.S. Senate race. This is the first poll to show McAdams leading Miller; incumbent Lisa Murkowski, running as a write-in candidate, leads the field with 34% support, with 13% remaining undecided.

Could Seattle’s former Yukon colony soon sport two Democratic senators? I wouldn’t bet money on it, but even a Murkowski victory would be a big blow to Borg Queen Sarah Palin on her home turf.

UPDATE:
Mudflats’ server is clearly having trouble keeping up with the traffic, but Markos has more details and analysis.

If Republican Jaime Herrera is expecting to run away with the election in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, she better pick up the pace, for just a week out from election day, Democrat Denny Heck appears to have the momentum.

According to a new KING-5/SurveyUSA poll, Herrera now leads Heck 50% to 46%, with a +/- 4% margin of error. That’s a big difference from just two weeks ago when Herrera led by a 53% to 42% margin.

Cross-tabs aren’t available yet, but I was particularly intrigued by this analysis from SurveyUSA editor Jay Leve:

“Democrats today are more likely than in 3 previous polls to identify themselves as certain voters, and the party breakdown of this poll reflects that.”

Huh. That sounds to me like the expected Republican enthusiasm gap is beginning to narrow. And if that’s true, that would bode well for Democrats up and down the ticket. (Or at the very least, bode less ill.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y3pic_Sny4[/youtube]

John Koster, the Republican challenger in Washington’s 2nd Congressional District doesn’t like to talk about Social Security “privatization,” unless, you know, he’s convinced he’s talking to a room full of fellow Republicans.

And that was exactly the situation on February 16, 2010, when Koster not only explained how confident he was that privatization would work, but even boasted about advocating for it a decade early:

“Individual retirement accounts will work. I advocated for those ten years ago, and you look at where Medicare and Social Security and those entitlement programs are going to soon consume nearly twenty percent of our annual federal budget. Twenty percent. And phasing those individual retirement accounts in will work.”

Of course, that’s total bullshit. Social Security ran a $180 billion surplus last year—the only federal program to run a surplus—and has an accumulated reserve of over $2.4 trillion. If we do absolutely nothing at all to “fix” Social Security it can continue to pay full benefits through 2037, and benefits at only a slightly reduced level indefinitely thereafter. So when Republicans like Koster talk about Social Security being a drain on the federal budget, they’re really talking about the federal government’s obligation to pay back the money it borrowed from the Social Security trust fund.

Koster’s solution? Privatize Social Security and then gradually eliminate federal benefits for retirees. That’s what he means by “phasing in” individual retirement accounts. In other words, he’d rather push retirees into the maws of Wall Street so that he can extend the Bush tax cuts to Wall Street billionaires and the rest of the top two percent of American households.

Meaning this isn’t just class warfare, but intergenerational warfare. Something WA-02 voters of all ages might want to consider as they mark their ballots in the race between Koster and Democratic incumbent Rep. Rick Larsen

In talking up his odds of defeating incumbent U.S. Sen. Patty Murray despite having lost two statewide races himself over the past six years, Republican challenger Dino Rossi likes to point out that he’d previously been handicapped by running in a presidential year. Republicans tend to do better in non-presidential years, when turnout is lower.

(I’ve always found this a curiously revealing assertion for a Republican to make, as it implicitly acknowledges that Republican candidates and their policies are markedly less popular with the general public than the results at the polls might indicate, and that Republicans thus benefit from lower voter participation. You’d think Republicans might be a little embarrassed by this admission, but oddly, no. But then, that’s a subject for another post.)

To some extent Rossi is right. About 25% fewer voters cast ballots in WA’s 2006 U.S. Senate race between Maria Cantwell and Mike McGavick than they did in the 2004 race between Murray and George Nethercutt, and the turnout drop-off between 2008 and 2010 is likely to be even greater. This should favor Rossi regardless of the political climate, as Democrats as a whole tend to be less reliable voters than Republicans, so when turnout drops, it almost always disproportionately hurts Democratic candidates.

But the question is, by how much?

For turnout is only one of many factors in an election, and while presidential year turnout certainly worked against WA Republicans in both 2004 and 2008, Rossi himself enjoyed the unique advantage of running against Gov. Chris Gregoire, who has never proven to be particularly popular, even amongst Democrats.

Patty Murray, on the other hand… well… folks just seem to like her.

For example, take a look at the 2004 race, a presidential year when both Murray and Gregoire were on the ballot. Murray actually outpolled John Kerry at the top of the ticket, receiving about 3% more votes than his 1,510,201 total. But Gregoire pulled in about 9% fewer votes than Kerry, and almost 12% fewer than Murray, only 1,373,361 total once all the recounts and court challenges were done.

And in 2008, even though she went on to defeat Rossi by a comfortable 6.5% margin, Gregoire once again tallied only about 91% as many votes as the Democrat at the top of the ticket, President Barack Obama.

That’s a pretty substantial drop-off, suggesting that Gregoire’s relative lack of likability made Rossi look more competitive than he otherwise might have against somebody like, say, Patty Murray. Who, you know, he’s actually facing off against this time around.

So yeah, turnout is going to be substantially lower in 2010 than it was in 2008, and that favors Rossi. But Murray is simply better liked by Democrats and independents than Gregoire ever was, and that’s a factor that by comparison, works strongly to Rossi’s disadvantage. And it’s a disadvantage I’ve never believed he could overcome.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec6V6AYl-Zs[/youtube]

Via Seattle Untimely.

I thought this kind of nonsense wasn’t supposed to happen in Seattle any more?

It’s the Tuesday before the election. And that make for an excellent excuse to enjoy an evening of politics under the influence. Please join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some of us will be there early for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 250 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

Um, here’s the thing Piper… you may think you’ve somehow stuck it to Rep. Geoff Simpson by reprinting his allegedly “profanity-laden” response to your email thread with Sound Transit’s Geoff Patrick, but the truth is, you are “a paid shill of the right-wing,” you are a “prostitute,” and judging from the “sick voyeurism” of your inquiries, you most certainly are a “piece of shit” and an “asshole.”

And in fact, that’s one of the traits that so endears Rep. Simpson to many of his supporters: his willingness to discard politics as usual, and speak the plain truth to right-wing, paid-shill, piece-of-shit assholes like you.

Oh. And by the way. If you’re going to reprint Geoff’s email, for the sake of full disclosure, shouldn’t you also reprint the entire email thread that ultimately prompted his response, so that your handful of readers on the EFF blog can judge for themselves what kind of right-wing, paid-shill, piece-of-shit asshole you really are? I mean you wouldn’t want to look like a hypocrite, would you?

So as a public service I’ve reprinted it for you after the break. I mean, the EFF is all about full disclosure, right?

[Read more…]

If you thought the brutal head stomping of a MoveOn activist outside last night’s U.S. Senate debate in Lexington KY was some sort of random act of mob violence, well, think again. It turns out that the assailant was Tim Profitt, Paul’s now-former Bourbon County Coordinator. And, according to the victim, it appears to have been premeditated as well.

“The Rand Paul campaign knows me and they have expressed their distaste for my work before,” Lauren Valle, 23, told TPM and two other reporters on a conference call this afternoon.

According to Valle, several men surrounded her before Paul arrived at the event in Lexington last night.

“They surrounded me,” she said. “There were about five of them, they started motioning to each other, and they got behind me.”

Valle says her partner, whom she identified as Alex, overheard the men threaten, “we’re here to do crowd control and we might have to take someone out…”

“Rand Paul’s car arrived, and as soon as it did, a couple of them stepped right in front of me and so I stepped off the curb to get around them, back out to the front, and at that point they started grabbing for me and I ran all the way around the car with them in pursuit, and the point at which they see the footage is after I’ve run all the way around the car and am in front of the car and that is when they take me down,” Valle said.

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing, the thought that this might have been an unprovoked, premeditated act of physical violence, or the thought that assailants actually believed that a 23-year-old, female MoveOn activist presented enough of a clear and present physical threat to Paul, that they chased her around car, tackled her to the ground, and stomped on her head in self-defense?

Because if they really believe that our mere presence is so dangerous, absolutely anything could happen next.

Attention 41st LD voters: in the state Senate race between Democrat Randy Gordon and Republican Steve Litzow, only one of the two candidates is Jewish. And despite his Jewishy sounding name, it’s not Steve Litzow. Just in case that kinda stuff is important to you.

Now be a mensch, and vote.

If voter fraud is as rampant in Washington state as Republicans like to say it is, then Secretary of State Sam Reed might want to rethink his enforcement priorities.

From: Ammons, Dave
Subject: `Voting service’
To: blatherwatch-mail@yahoo.com
Cc: “Blinn, Katie”, “Handy, Nick”, “Zylstra, Brian”
Date: Monday, October 25, 2010, 11:06 AM

Please take down your blog post on Voting Service. I assume this is satire, but our Elections Division reminds that you could be charged with a crime:

This is illegal:

RCW 29A.84.610 Deceptive, incorrect vote recording.
A person is guilty of a gross misdemeanor who knowingly:
(1) Deceives any voter in recording his or her vote by providing incorrect or misleading recording information or by providing faulty election equipment or records; or
(2) Records the vote of any voter in a manner other than as designated by the voter.
Such a gross misdemeanor is punishable to the same extent as a gross misdemeanor that is punishable under RCW 9A.20.021.

We are pretty sensitive about talk of ballot selling, etc. And of course the ballot would never be counted, because the signature would not match the one on file for the voter. But attempted vote fraud can be penalized by a prison sentence and a big fine.

If you have any questions, please contact Katie Blinn, assistant director of elections and an attorney, 360-902-4168.

David Ammons
Communications Director
Office of Secretary of State

Um… really Dave? The most pressing threat of voter fraud in Washington state is a satirical blog post lampooning Republicans’ hyperbolic claims of voter fraud in Washington state? For this you send an email threatening legal action?

I don’t doubt Ammons when he writes that his office is “pretty sensitive about talk of ballot selling, etc.,” but he should remember that most if not all of this talk has come in the form of bogus charges from Republicans… charges that can only stem from either a genuine (if loony) belief in massive, endemic, Democratic voter fraud, or from the fact that the accusers are a bunch of cynical, democracy-hating liars. So if Ammons and Reed really believe that intimidating bloggers is the best means of protecting the integrity of our elections system, rather than harassing BlatherWatch, perhaps they should focus their lawyers’ attentions on the vicious, hate-spewing, voter-fraud-conspiracy-spinning, paranoid propagandists at Sound Politics and Orbusmax?

(And again… really Dave? You’re gonna take your cues from a sociopathic, delusional,  wingnut who calls himself “The Orb”…? … A proto-fascist, shooting-spree-waiting-to-happen, who Michael aptly describes as “a rightie blogger whose political agenda requires he not get the joke,” and who ironically considers me “frightening,” “treasonous” and “a danger”…? Really?)

The truth is, elections in Washington state are extraordinarily clean, resulting in only a handful of voter fraud prosecutions, even in the wake of the hotly disputed 2004 gubernatorial election contest. In fact I asked Ammons for an actual count of recent voter fraud cases, and he responded, “None that I’m aware of…”

We do want to be hypervigilant about potential fraud. There is a lot of misinformation out there – urban myths, if you will – that keep roiling in some quarters, including some media outlets.  It’s something our Elections folks take seriously, to the point about not joking about it.  Too many people don’t get the humor and think it’s really possible to do such shenanigans, or worse.

No doubt. But I’m not convinced that pandering to the baseless fears of humorless conspiracy theorists is the best communications strategy.

Indeed, as a sometimes-satirist myself, I’d argue that the best remedy against the slanderous ravings of the likes of Stefan Sharkansky and Jim “The Orb” Walker, is to heap even further ridicule upon them. And in that noble public service, BlatherWatch deserves an official thank you from the Secretary of State for a job well done.