Archives for October 2012

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Birmingham, Alabama.

This week’s is somewhere in Washington state, good luck!

[HA Bible Study is on hiatus through the November election as we honor Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by studying the scriptures of his Mormon religion.]

Doctrine and Covenants 38:32
Wherefore, for this cause I gave unto you the commandment that ye should go to the Ohio; and there I will give unto you my law; and there you shall be endowed with power from on high;

Discuss.

Dear Person who left this in my yard:

It’s gone now…got in the way while I was raking.

But before you put up a new one, please have the courtesy to fill out the application in the box by the door. Please print legibly, and pay particular attention the the section labeled, “Next of Kin.”

Love and Kisses,
—Darryl

Jon does Barack.

Mark Fiore: microtargetting undecideds.

Sam Seder with a new edition of Random Rush.

The Candidates Have Dinner Together:

• Obama and Romney joke at Al Smith dinner (via TalkingPointsMemo).
• Young TurksAnalyzing Barack’s jokes at the Al Smith charity dinner.
• Young TurksAnalyzing Mitt’s jokes at the Al Smith charity dinner.
• Maddow: Romney camp embarks on misinformation campaign to hide extremist policy.

Sam Seder: Breaking down Benghazi; the G.O.P.’s scandalquest.

White House: West Wing Week.

Newsy: Another appeal’s court finds DOMA unconstitutional.

Sam Seder: FAUX and Fiends lose their minds over BASIC MATH.

Obama: Commit to vote.

Pap: The continuing G.O.P. war on voting.

Willard (and friends):

• Stephen switches positions (via DailyKos).
• Mitt Romney’s problems with women.
• Young Turks: Romney to CEO’s—‘Help’ employees vote ‘right’ way
• Thom: Romney encourages employers to tell employees how to vote
• Stephen reveals Mitt’s plans for Day One
• Romney recorded asking employers to sway worker’s votes.
• Obama explains Romnesia (via Crooks and Liars):
• Bashir: Diagnosing Romnesia (via The Political Carnival).
• Jennifer Granholm: How Romnesia took the nation by storm.
• Sam Seder: Paul Ryan’s pathetic soup kitchen photo op.
• Kimmel: Mitt’s new women’s ad
• Mitt’s math-challenged tax plan.
• Maddow: Bush foreign policy infects Romney campaign
• ONN: Mitt’s leaked Google search history!
• SlateTV: Romney boys can’t contain their Obama debate anger
• Tagg Romney jokes about taking a swing at the President.
• Ed: Tagg shows disrespect.
• Lawrence O’Donnell: Your dad is a liar…so take a swing at me (via Crooks and Liars).
• Sam Seder: Tagg wishes he could punch the President
• Sharpton: Tagg Romney’s ‘Take a swing at Obama’ comment is a symptom of GOP disrespect & racism
• Zina Saunders: Pick-a-Prez:
• Mitt Romney’s condescending views toward women

Maddow: Maricopa County Elections puts wrong election date on form—in Spanish only.

Sam Seder: Federal Appeals Court rules DOMA unconstitutional.

Jennifer Granholm: Debunking conservative myths—what your Republican uncle needs to know.

Liberal Viewer: FAUX News or CNN less biased on Romney politicizing death of ex-SEAL.

SlateTV: The Boss is back!

Maddow: Party differences apparent in donor list.

Debate, Town Hall Style:

• Stephen: On Megyn Kelly’s town hall debate analysis
• Who won?
• Key & Peele: Luther on Obama’s town hall debate win.
• Thom: Myth Master Mitt Romney.
• Sam Seder: Obama smacks Romney’s Libya accusations as offensive
• Ann Telnaes: Biden helps Obama prepare for debate 2.
• Romney’s way: He talks…you listen.
• Sam Seder: Mitt Romney’s Libya FACE PLANT!
• Bashir: Right-wing “act of error” on Libya
• Right wing debate delusions: An ‘act of terror’ is NOT really a ‘terror attack’?!?
• Ed: Right-wingers still blame Candy Crowley for Romney’s poor performance.
• Newsy: Romney’s binders full of women
• Conan: Obama impresses the judges.
• Jon on binders full of women.
• Sam Seder: Did Romney make his case for affirmative action with his binders?
• Susie Sampson’s Tea Party Report: Romney’s Binders
• Ann Telnaes: Another Romney binder.
• Young Turks: Binders full of women—great story because MITT LIED
• SlateTV: The “Binders full of women” meme
• Jonathan Mann: Binders full of Women.

Young Turks: “Lowlife Scumbag”…Congressional debate gets heated.

John Fugelsang: The week in amnesia—a tale of two 9/11s:

Mitchell and Maddow: Obama touts advocacy for women.

Thom with The Good, The Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly.

Jennifer Granholm: Issa’s sensitive document dump jeoporadizes security.

Sam Seder: Rep. Joe Walsh opens up new front on the War on Women™.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

I’m not a fan of our nonpartisan election system here in Washington where we don’t have to register by party to vote in the primary. But I had thought when the national scandal about GOP operatives dumping voter registrations.

A campaign worker linked to a controversial Republican consulting firm has been arrested in Virginia and charged with throwing voter registration forms into a dumpster.

The suspect, Colin Small, 31, was described by a local law enforcement official as a “supervisor” in a Republican Party financed operation to register voters in Rockingham County in rural Virginia, a key swing state in the Nov. 6 election. He was arrested after a local business owner in the same Harrisonburg, Va., shopping center where the local GOP campaign headquarters is located spotted Small tossing a bag into the trash, according to a statement Thursday by the Rockingham County Sheriff’s office. The bag was later found to contain eight voter registration forms, it said. The arrest was reported Thursday night by WWBT-TV in Richmond.

But maybe not as tough as I’d thought.

In Virginia, where the Pennsylvania man working for the state GOP was arrested Thursday, Chesterfield County’s General Registrar Larry Haake was seen explaining to Richmond’s CBS 6 in late September that he had received complaints of Strategic employees discovered doing the same thing in a library last month.

“They were responsible for people that appeared in some libraries in Chesterfield County, supposedly to conduct voter registration drives,” Haake said, “but they were asking voters for whom they are going to vote.”

Haake says he informed the GOP of the incident at the time, but, apparently, no action was taken.

If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.

I think this is what you get when people keep screaming ACORN, ACORN, ACORN. They think they’re just leveling the playing field.

That Seattle Times staffers are upset about The Seattle Times giving Rob McKenna free advertising. But honestly, this would be a lot more meaningful if the newsroom felt like it had stood up to Frank Blethen on newsroom issues.

It threatens the two things we value the most, the traits that make The Seattle Times a strong brand: Our independence and credibility.

Ultimately, The Seattle Times’ independence and credibility are harmed more by, for example, Truth Needle segments that say things that are true are false if Democrats say them and ignoring things GOP candidates says that aren’t right. The newsroom has an obligation to independence and credibility. They’d be better able to withstand any fallout from their publisher being in the bag for McKenna if their paper hadn’t been in the bag for him and much of the GOP.

When the paper reads like a free ad for a certain type of GOP elected official, it’s tough to complain that there’s a free ad for a certain type of GOP elected official.

– This story about puppy mills in Lewis County will break your heart.

– The Burden of a Black President

– Before spending millions on Initiative 1240′s unproven charter schools that admit only a tiny fraction of students, with no guarantee of improved performance, let’s do what the state Supreme Court has told us to do

– Charming people watching the previous debate.

– I love this XKCD piece on presidential election conventional wisdom.

Over at The Stranger, Dan Savage and Goldy have teamed up to lay out the Big Case against gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna:

Rob McKenna has been running for governor his entire adult life. And his whole electoral strategy has always relied on tricking enough King County voters—voters like you—into believing he’s not another one of those Republicans. McKenna doesn’t want you to think he’s one of those Romney/Ryan class-warfare-waging, Koch-sucking GOPers who wants to bust unions, repeal Obamacare, ban gay marriage, outlaw abortion, and unravel what remains of the social safety net, all in the service of cutting taxes on corporations and millionaires.

It is an electoral strategy that almost worked for Dino Rossi in 2004, and one that McKenna has been expertly executing for years. You may have seen those posters asking you to vote for President Obama, R-74, and Rob McKenna—McKenna opposes both President Obama and R-74—and it’s clever messaging. It is also a complete and total fucking lie. And McKenna is praying that you’re stupid enough to fall for it.

But you’re not that stupid, are you?

The piece is epic…it systematically, issue by issue, lays out the case that McKenna is NOT the politician that he has been selling to King County voters. It’s a damn fine read, too.

My guess is that, if you’ve read this far, you need no further convincing. You’ve seen the arguments before—probably right here—on each point. But you’re not like every other King County voter, because most King County voters don’t read either HorsesAss or The Stranger.

Instead, they’re reading the Seattle Times Political Action Committee. They probably haven’t a clue about the Real McKenna.

Instead, these arugula-eating, Prius-driving, war-hatin’ liberals may only be listening to KUOW and KPLU. Rob may come off as, meh, but inoffensive; they don’t see the Big Picture.

Instead they’re young, politically disengaged, voters struggling with a minimum wage jobs. They’re likely unaware of the huge stake they have in this race.

What Goldy and Dan have done is given YOU a tool: A detailed, well-written, logical, and organized portfolio of The Real McKenna.

You now have the framework to educate your family, friends and neighbors that Rob Mckenna is no Dan Evans Republican. He is much closer to a Scott Walker—just a lot smarter and more cautious.

Friends don’t let friends get fooled!

This is a terrible decision from The Seattle Times.

The Seattle Times Co. jumped directly into two of the state’s hottest political contests Wednesday, launching an $80,000 independent-expenditure campaign promoting Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna and announcing a similar effort in support of the referendum to legalize gay marriage.

I don’t like either of these, but the R-74 ad makes a tiny bit of sense on its own. They look like they might win a squeaker, so the Seattle Times can say, “oh look our ads made the difference.” I don’t think that’s good for the brand of independent minded fair people, but at least I could see a path to it working. But since McKenna is losing, and will probably lose, the pitch will be buy an add, it won’t help you? Or do they think it will turn it around?

In case HA readers have forgotten, I’d like to remind you that Washingtonians will elect 10 people to represent them in the House of Representatives in the upcoming 113th Congress. That, of course, is an increase of one over the nine Representatives we’ve sent to DC for the last 20 years.

Incumbents are running for reelection in seven of the redrawn Congressional Districts, and every one of them is all but certain to win. Therefore, I offer congratulations-in-advance to Rick Larsen, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Doc Hastings, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Jim McDermott, Dave Reichert, and Adam Smith … the Representatives in, respectively, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Districts. That’s three Democrats (Larsen, McDermott, Smith) and four Republicans (Herrera Bueutler, Hastings, McMorris Rodgers, Reichert).

But what of the two open, and one brand-new, seats?

It was widely acknowledged that the principal goal of the Democratic members of the Redistricting Commission was to center the new 10th CD on Olympia, and to anoint Denny Heck, who lost in 2010 to Herrera Beutler in the then-open WA-03, as their candidate. He faces underfunded Republican Dick Muri, who unsuccessful challenged Adam Smith in the old WA-09 two years ago. Well, it looks like Tim Ceis and Dwight Pelz got their wish, as the Cook Political Report rates WA-10 Solid D and DailyKos Elections calls it Likely D. The two organization agree that WA-01, where Suzan DelBene faces teahadist John Koster, and where most of Washington’s Congressional-race attention has been concentrated, Leans D. Boy, I hope they’re right.

The third open seat came as something of a shocker. Norm Dicks surprised many Washingtonians when he announced his retirement after 18 terms representing the 6th District. Conventional wisdom suggested that WA-06 had remained in Democratic hands largely because of Dicks’s seniority (ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee) and close ties to the strong Navy presence on Hood Canal and Puget Sound. The sprawling, largely rural WA-06 doesn’t fit the usual mold of Democratic CDs.

Well, conventional wisdom appears to have been wrong. Even though a Republican self-funding Weyerhaeuser relative is on the ballot, both Cook (Likely D) and dKos put the District strongly in the Democratic column. In fact, on Monday DailyKos Elections upgraded WA-06 from Likely D to Safe D.

The principal reason behind this happy outcome is the superb Democrat running in the 6th District, Derek Kilmer. I’ve known Derek ever since I arrived in Washington in 2001; at that time he and his wife Jen were colleagues of my sister in the 36th District Democrats. We in Seattle were disappointed when they relocated to Gig Harbor (he’s Vice President of the Economic Development Board for Tacoma-Pierce County), but it was clearly the right thing for them. I’m thrilled that the people of WA-06 see the same positive qualities in Derek that I recognized.

When Derek won his first political race (State Rep from the 26th LD in 2004), I began thinking that he could be a great candidate to replace Norm Dicks when the old warhorse decided to hang ’em up. I didn’t expect it to come quite so soon, but it seems like I was onto something.

So Derek will, in all likelihood, slide into Norm’s position as a Democratic Congressman. That leaves the overall status of Washington’s delegation in DC in the same place it was when the Redistricting Commission finished its work — five Democratic CDs, four Republican CDs, and one up for grabs. If, as most pundits predict, DelBene keeps the odious Koster away from DC, we’ll be 6-4 Democratic. Not nearly what I’d like it to be, but I believe that would be an accurate description of our state.

[Cross-posted from Peace Tree Farm]

– Great endorsement, Seattle Times.

– I think Oliver is somewhat selective, but yes, there are many areas where liberal ideas clearly are the default, for now.

– This post on Obama’s popularity in Ireland contains some of the worst puns in human history.

– Yet another Biblical family.

– Good luck to the SeaTac Fuelers who have their day in court today.

– I’m not so sure about you.