Goldy

Exodus 21:22-25
Suppose a pregnant woman suffers a miscarriage as the result of an injury caused by someone who is fighting. If she isn’t badly hurt, the one who injured her must pay whatever fine her husband demands and the judges approve. But if she is seriously injured, the payment will be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, cut for cut, and bruise for bruise.

Discuss.

This afternoon, King County Elections will certify the November 3 results with Lisa Herbold holding a 30-something-vote lead in the closely contested District 1 race. There will be an automatic manual recount, but don’t expect the margin to change by more than a vote or two at most. KCE pre-inspects ballots, duplicating those it expects might have trouble scanning, and previous recounts have routinely shown little or no change from the first count.

Congratulations to Herbold, and my sympathies to Shannon Braddock for what must be a heartbreaking loss.

Back when Braddock had a comfortable election night lead and it was Kshama Sawant’s D3 race that looked uncomfortably close (she eventually won by 12-plus percent), there was a rush by some pundits and politicos to judge the election cycle as a loss for Sawant and her socialist/labor alliance. But with Herbold replacing her ultra-liberal boss Nick Licata on the council, the current 6-3 split on the council remains intact. At least.

For the question of who really won this cycle will be answered in the new year, when the issue of 12 weeks parental leave for city employees is inevitably again raised before the council. Yesterday, the proposal went down to defeat, with Sawant, Licata, Mike O’Brien, and Bruce Harrell voting for it. Sally Bagshaw, who voted yes in committee, switched her vote to no before the full council. I’ll leave it to others to speculate on her motives.

But next year, four newly elected council members will have the opportunity to weigh in. If the new council approves 12 weeks parental leave, that will indicate a further shift to left left. If the proposal fails by the same 4-5 margin, that will indicate status quo.

Every member of the council thinks of themselves as progressive. The truth will be in their votes.

Back in March, when I welcomed Paul Constant to our then-unnamed policy/messaging shop, I joked about our boss’s weird hobby:

Most 1 percenters just don’t know what to do with all their filthy lucre. Some rich people collect art. Other rich people collect cars or even houses. But Nick Hanauer, America’s premier self-loathing plutocrat, seems intent on ostentatiously collecting ex-Stranger writers.

Well, I’m happy to announce that Nick has recently added Hanna Brooks Olsen to his crass menagerie.

Hanna has a number of freelance bylines at The Stranger and elsewhere, though she’s certainly best known to local readers as one of the forces behind the popular tumblog, Seattlish. Mostly, Hanna will be heading up a top-secret internal Civic Ventures project, but she’ll also contribute regularly to our Civic Skunkworks blog. In fact, her first Skunkworks post just went live today: “It’s Too Soon to Tell if a Higher Minimum Wage is Eliminating Restaurant Jobs.” Give it a read, and then pretty much ignore just about every headline you see on the so-called “early” impact of Seattle’s minimum wage.

So welcome to Civic Ventures, Hanna. Now let’s all go out there and change the world… you know, hopefully for the better.

1 Timothy 5:23
Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

So, I was searching for a high capacity rugged USB thumb drive, and now this Amazon ad keeps following me around the Internet:

Wow! A tiny form factor waterproof 512GB USB thumb drive for only $15.10? That’s a fraction of the size of a similar capacity drive from a name brand manufacturer, at less than one twentieth the price! It’s gotta be too good to be true, right?

Of course it is. It’s a scam. And it’s not the only one. Amazon’s search pages are actually stock full of ads offering high-capacity drives at literally impossible prices, and if  you click through, you’ll usually find helpful reviewers warning you off… typically scattered among a bunch of scam reviewers touting a “great product!”

No, this particular scam drive isn’t shipped directly by Amazon—but this one is. And Amazon is directly advertising these fakes both on its website and in ads like the one above, making it complicit in the scam. And in so doing, Amazon is surely fooling loyal customers by lending these ripoffs the credibility of its valuable brand. Makes you wonder if you can trust any bargain you find on Amazon? And if it doesn’t, it should, because if it’s happening with USB thumb drives, it’s surely happening in many other product categories.

And no, Amazon isn’t a victim here. The company has spent kajillions developing AI designed to sell us more stuff, so it’s certainly capable of developing technology that flags impossibly priced merchandise as potential scams.

Just imagine the scandal if Walmart was found stocking its shelves with fake discount merchandise, possibly knowingly? So why isn’t this a scandal when it’s happening at America’s largest online retailer?

Anyway, consider this post a free tip to ambitious investigative journalists, attorneys general, and class action lawyers. Because my Goldy senses tell me there’s a lot more to this scam than one impossibly priced fake 512GB drive.

1 Samuel 18:25-27
“Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.

When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.

Discuss.

 

So, on Election Day I predicted that “several races will be left officially undecided after tonight’s ballot drop,” a prediction I apologized for the very next day, writing: “Some will likely tighten up, but I will be awfully surprised if any of last night’s top-line winners end up losing.”

Well, I apologize for my apology.

Over the past few ballot drops the races in both Districts 1 and 2 have tightened to the point where they really are too close to call. No, wait. I take that back. For although Lisa Herbold still trails Shannon Braddock by a 104-vote, 0.56% margin, I’m calling this one for Herbold. And to understand my confidence, you need understand the way our all vote-by-mail ballot counting works.

It is both an over-simplification and a generalization, but ballots tend to be tallied in the order in which they arrive. Election night results include most of those ballots that arrived through Monday; these are the “early” ballots. Most of the subsequent tallies are of “late” ballots from voters who didn’t cast their ballots until Monday or Tuesday. And as we saw two years ago with Kshama Sawant’s stunning 8-point comeback from election night to the final tally, early voters and late voters can sometimes constitute dramatically different electorates.

On election night, Braddock led Herbold 52.92% to 46.48%, but since then the margin has flipped, with Herbold winning a progressively larger share of each day’s totals. Combined, Herbold has won 52.88% of all late ballots, and 57.25% of the Friday evening drop. Assuming about 3,350 votes left to count (and that’s a complicated and iffy assumption), Herbold needs only 51.55% of the remaining votes to win. Based on my experience tracking previous elections, there’s simply no good reason to expect Herbold to fall below that threshold. I would now be surprised if Herbold didn’t win this election.

Meanwhile, in D2, where incumbent Bruce Harrell held a seemingly invincible 10-point election night lead, we have seen an even bigger late ballot swing, with unheralded challenger Tammy Morales winning an impressive 53.44% of the late vote. But unfortunately for her, Morales may have had too large a deficit to overcome: my spreadsheet suggests Morales will need 57.3% of the remaining votes to take the lead, somewhat above the 55.15% she won in the most recent ballot drop. It’s not impossible. But at this point I’d have to put my money on Harrell squeaking out an embarrassingly narrow victory. But to be clear, had Morales benefited from a Sawant-like GOTV effort, Harrell would be out of a job come January.

In any case, it sure does look like all those post-election post-mortems were way premature. The final tally will tell a much different story than the spin we heard on election night.

Galatians 5:12
I wish that everyone who is upsetting you would not only get circumcised, but would cut off much more!

Discuss.

Because, this:

THE most expensive race in state history for a seat in the state House might be tilting a politically divided Legislature even more toward the middle.

In the race to represent Federal Way’s 30th Legislative District, Republican Teri Hickel held an eight-point lead over Democratic Rep. Carol Gregory in Tuesday voting returns. If that lead holds in future vote counts, a win by Hickel would skinny the once-mighty Democratic majority in the House down to a 50-48 margin.

The consequences of this shift should be welcome to Washington voters seeking moderation in Olympia.

Right. Because it’s the Democrats who are immoderate and obstructionist, rather than the Republicans who have pledged not to ever raise taxes ever, for any reason, under any circumstance, no matter what. You know, the Republicans who also oppose marriage equality, reproductive rights, gun responsibility, reducing carbon emissions, teaching evolution, and just about everything else the editors claim to endorse. A Republican Party that is so bereft of ideas or intellect (or, let’s be honest, morality) that it has elevated trickle-down-regurgitating student-harassing child-bride-marrying Matt Manweller to the status of rising fucking star.

That is the party to which the wise editorial board members of our state’s paper of record look to bring “moderation” to Olympia.

Sigh. I try not to wish for the day the Seattle Times shuts down its presses. But honestly—fuck you.

Okay, first off, let me just say upfront that I was wrong. Yesterday I predicted that a bunch of local races would likely be “too close to call,” when in fact, really, none of them are. Some will likely tighten up, but I will be awfully surprised if any of last night’s top-line winners end up losing.

The tightest race right now is in District 3, where Kshama Sawant leads challenger Pamela Banks by 5.4 points, but the late ballots will surely trend in Sawant’s favor. I guess District 1’s race between Shannon Braddock and Lisa Herbold (52.9% to 46.5%) is technically in the too-close-to-call range, but it’s hard to imagine a sufficient late ballot swing.

So then, what did we learn from last night’s election? Absolutely nothing. Every incumbent won reelection, and in all but one race (District 5, where fundraising was almost even), every winner outspent the loser. As usual. Also, we easily passed another property tax levy. Imagine that.

So much for the disruptive impact of district elections.

Speaking of which, for all the excitement allegedly generated by putting nine council seats up for election at once (four of them open!), voter turnout is likely to hit a historic low. Citywide, Seattle is only on track for about 39 percent turnout, compared to over 52 percent just two years ago.

So yeah, nothing to see here. Incumbents win, money rules, and turnout sucks.

Thanks to the shift to district elections, all nine Seattle City Council seats are up for election this year, including an astounding four open seats! So you’d think voter turnout would be sky high, right? Well, not so much.

Turnout is low. Abysmally low. The most recent ballot return statistics suggests that countywide turnout could fall under 40 percent, the lowest general election turnout as far back as I’ve bothered to look.

That’s just awful. And Seattle proper isn’t faring much, tracking toward below 45 percent turnout compared to 52 percent in 2013. So much for district elections generating renewed interest in city council races.

So what does that mean for tonight’s results? I’m not exactly sure. It could mean that voters are just voting really late, and we’ll see a surge of ballots pour in today and tomorrow. Or, since the most reliable voters tend to also be the most conservative, it could be bad news for lefty candidates across the board. (Well, every lefty but Kshama Sawant: D3 is a turnout outlier tracking toward 50 percent thanks to her impressive GOTV efforts.)

One thing I do know is that with “too close to call” stretching toward the 8-point range after Sawant’s 2013 late-ballot comeback, several races will be left officially undecided after tonight’s ballot drop—probably D1, D4, and both Honest Elections and Let’s Move Seattle. Maybe even D8 and D2.

So stay tuned for a week or so of wonky election results analysis.

Deuteronomy 28:49-51
Foreigners who speak a strange language will be sent to attack you without warning, just like an eagle swooping down. They won’t show any mercy, and they will have no respect for old people or pity for children. They will take your cattle, sheep, goats, grain, wine, and olive oil, then leave you to starve.

Discuss.

Revelation 1:9
We suffer because Jesus is our king.

Discuss.

Luke 19:23-27
Why didn’t you put my money in the bank? On my return, I could have had the money together with interest.”

Then he said to some other servants standing there, “Take the money away from him and give it to the servant who earned ten times as much.”

But they said, “Sir, he already has ten times as much!”

The king replied, “Those who have something will be given more. But everything will be taken away from those who don’t have anything. Now bring me the enemies who didn’t want me to be their king. Kill them while I watch!”

Discuss.

When two independent expenditure campaigns were announced last week, one explicitly pro Seattle City Council president Tim Burgess (“United for Tim”) and one explicitly against Burgess’s challenger, former Tenant’s Union leader Jon Grant (“Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders”), I wasn’t the only one to read this as a sign that Seattle’s business establishment was very nervous about Burgess’s reelection prospects. Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders was on the record promising to spend about $200,000, while the insider buzz had United for Tim budgeting at least the same. That’s an awful lot of money to spend on an incumbent who is already outspending his challenger by six to one.

But now in the wake of the Triad shakedown scandal it appears we all may have been half-fooled: that “Seattle Needs Ethical Leaders” was never more than an unethical ruse.

Of course, the PAC’s threatened $200,000 war chest never appeared—and it never will appear—and while some might attribute this collapse to fallout from the shakedown scandal, it is reasonable to suspect if the committee’s sole purpose was to facilitate a shakedown in the first place. Think about it. The committee has its spokesperson go public with a $200,000 budget, while whispering that it would be accusing Grant of some sort of personal ethical lapse. Was the money ever real? Or was it just an elaborate political bluff created by those hoping to profit from a potentially lucrative real estate deal?

(Or even more conspiratorially, perhaps it was an effort to entrap Grant in an ethical lapse? Hmm. That might explain the otherwise inexplicable creation of a text message trail.)

To be clear, Burgess’s backers are clearly nervous. United for Tim has already raised $218,000, most of it from a Chamber of Commerce funded PAC. But that other $200,000? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was always a fiction. Which means this shakedown scandal could be a lot more scandalous than it first appears.