– I like most of these ideas for Revenue-Positive Policy Changes Made Politically Possible By Low-Income ORCA. I’m not sure about 4, although it would probably quicken up the tunnel.

– There is a long space between good and better than the Ferguson PD

– A gated democracy

– On the one hand, the airlines throwing everything against the wall and generally being assholes is pretty much par for the course. On the other hand, what a bunch of assholes.

– You can’t just arrest people for being dipshits who don’t understand the law they were opposed to.

– They haven’t even taken back the reigns of the Senate, and already the GOP can’t help but look at a government shutdown.

– Congrats to the European Space Agency.

– Kirk Cameron seems neat

– I hope you had a happy Veteran’s Day.

– Seriously, everybody, don’t be a vigilante.

– It’s tough to be nostalgic for the Clinton presidency when you were literally an impeachment manager.

– In fairness, Mike Fuckabee, was almost certainly his high school nickname, if I remember high school.

– This is the best correction since this.

After any election loss, there is — or should be — a tendency to look at changing leadership. Since the election, it seems like there should be some consideration of who will lead the Democrats in the Senate (and the House, but we didn’t just lose it in the election). I haven’t seen much discussion of who it should be, so maybe the caucus will just keep Reid without much of a fight.

That would be fine, but since it’s as good a time as any in the foreseeable future, I’d like to see at least a good little fight for it. The fact that the Senate has been dysfunctional has largely been due to GOP obstruction. But Reid hasn’t been particularly able in his time in the Senate to get through that obstruction, at least when the Democrats didn’t have large majorities. The ACA and the stimulus were important, and we shouldn’t diminish them. But he wasn’t able to do much with Democrats’ majorities in the last election.

He is also more conservative than a lot of the caucus on some critical issues. The big one is that he’s anti-choice. It’s a problem making the full throttled argument against the GOP on reproductive rights issues when the leader of the Senate caucus isn’t even there on the issue. I’m sure there are some Red State senators who feel the opposite, and that we should look for ever more centrism. It’s a worthwhile argument to have.

My choice would be Patty Murray, because doy it is, but I could see several people who I’d prefer to have in the position instead of him. Do any of y’all have someone you’d like to see, or do you want to stay with him.

– Oh hey, it looks like the class size initiative is probably going to pass.

– I’m glad to read about the good work being done by the UW chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops [h/t]

– It’s a little late, but an immigration reform executive order sounds pretty OK.

– Chuck Todd is bad on policy even if he knows process.

– Welcome, Oregon to the you can get stoned at a gay wedding club.

– Oh man. The culture war is really heatingzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

– I know that light very well. The worst is then if the bridge is up.

– I’m glad Godden and Murray are being serious about fixing the pay gap for city employees. Here’s hoping that it’s more than just words.

– Well, much of the rest of the country is going to shit, but it’s nice that the Northwest is still OK.

– Of all of the story lines to come out of this election, I think Mitch McConnell as an agent of change might be the dumbest.

– #DudesGreetingDudes

– Christie & Cuomo’s guide to Ebola

Other people have written more elegantly about last night’s election than I will. But I would like to tell a little story about the I-594 victory party: The results had already come in and the mood was pretty good. People mulled around a bit before a round of speechifying.

At some point in that time they played a video montage of various points in the campaign. Probably the toughest was Gabby Giffords’ testimony before the legislature. As it was playing I looked around the crowd and saw several people embrace. Maybe I’m wrong, but it sure looked more like holding one another up embraces than victory embraces. At that moment, I thought of how many people in that room were there because of gun violence. How many people this was personal for.

On top of the fact that this will make policy a bit better in the state, I think the win was good for the people in the room in a more personal way. That’s probably not the best reason to make laws, but I was glad to be a part of that.

– Anyone doing anything on election night? I’ll probably mostly be at the I-594 party since they’re the people most likely to be having fun on what’ll probably be a depressing night.

– I wonder how much of the various museums’ collections are as problematic as what the Burke is returning to Peru. Still, good on the Burke for actually returning the skulls and artifacts.

– How do we deal with problematic, but still wonderful, artifacts from the past like the work of Hitchcock?

– There may be some rose colored glasses in this piece, but how Democrats and Republicans in the Washington delegation work together is going to be an interesting question going forward for DC.

– I would not have guessed some lady writing a novel would be an attraction, but I have walked by Gabriela Denise Frank writing at the library and watched her go for a while. It’s oddly inspiring, even though I’m no novelist.

– The Dark Knight ROI’s

– I know y’all know this but since it’s my last open thread before the election (depending on how late Tuesday’s is, but most post offices will probably be closed), hey everybody vote please. Our trolls are voting, so, you know at the very least cancel them out. But if you need a reason, here are some Spine-Chilling Reasons to Vote in These Midterms.

– It seems many of the president’s detractors were so eager to declare a new “Obama’s Katrina” – the 11th in a series – that they overlooked the nagging detail that the federal response to Ebola has actually been quite effective.

– The Koch Brothers spending money on knocking out Jeff Merkley this late in the game seems a bit strange, especially in Oregon where most of the ballots should already be in.

– Is it not true that your program is fundamentally socialistic to take over private business? With more taxes?

– You guys, I’m really sad for Mars Hill

– #ILookGoodOnAPronto looks like a fun little event.

A while ago, Goldy thought Sound Politics might have gone the way of the Buffalo. I guess they did in the fact that it looked like they would be gone, but they’re still around. This is a bad metaphor so I guess instead of continuing it, I should still make fun of them? This Jim Miller piece [h/t to my friend N via email and to Tensor in comments] goes for it, starting with a violation of Betteridge’s Law and then not getting better after that.

Do Illegal Votes By Non-Citizens Sometimes Determine Elections Here In The United States?

No? Does Sound Politics need a new hobby horse? Yes!

I began thinking about that problem more than two decades ago, and concluded, tentatively, that the answer was yes. After the 2000 presidential election, and all the disputes that went with it, I put more time into the problem and, in 2002 gave an example, Maria Cantwell’s defeat of Slade Gorton, where that may have happened.

It sure is convenient to be able to just assume out of thin air that any close election must really belong to you. Because reasons.

The logic of my underlying argument is simple:

As it is written by a simpleton.

1. There are more non-citizens living in the United States than ever before.

Are there? No links or any other evidence was provided. It wouldn’t surprise me if, for example, when we were building the West with a significant amount of Irish, German, and Scandinavian (among others) immigrants that there was a higher number of non-citizens in the US.

2. Some small proportion of them will be tempted to register and vote, illegally.

Well, if some small portion are tempted to do a thing, that thing must happen all the time in fact. QED, I don’t think we need to even go on.

3. Many places have few checks against non-citizens voting, so most of those tempted will succeed.

Some amount of a small number will be tempted could in theory do a thing then that thing is always already happening.

4. The non-citizens here in the United States tend to favor the Democratic Party.

Again, no need to actually prove this.

Therefore, I concluded, some close elections were being tipped to the Democrats by these illegal votes.

So two unproven assertions and two things that are admittedly not very large combine to… something? Here, let me try:

1) Puppies are adorable
2) Most people who hate puppies are Republicans
3) That time Mitt Romney tied his dog to the roof of a car, or whatever
4) A small number of cars have been owned by Mitt Romney

Therefore, I conclude that people who hate puppies are the only reason that Romney won any states.

All through this time, however, I have been unhappy that I could not find any academic studies of the question. And it was obvious to me that it was not a difficult research problem, that you could get a good start on it simply by running a large survey, and asking the right questions, in the right way.

Hey you know how sometimes our trolls will come into the comment threads with large lists that if you’re a dummy — and don’t understand they’ve been obviously ripped out of context — sometimes seem a bit silly? I mean, I don’t know everything this survey does, but I imagine if our trolls actually cared, as opposed to were just copying and pasting from some nonsense list someone compiled, that they would add asking people who can’t vote if they vote. It’s a large survey and it probably does have value. But I wouldn’t posit this piece as the most important.

Now, finally, three researchers, Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha, and David Earnest, have done that study, and provided direct evidence for the conclusion I reached more than a decade ago.

I mentioned in the last Open Thread a thing that refutes this. So I’ll quote from that instead of Jim Miller’s quoting of the piece, and then pick it back up with Miller.

The limitations are, in fact, numerous, and not limited to those that Richman and Earnest enumerate. Their estimates rely on a key question from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study: “Are you registered to vote?” Notably, this is not the same question as “Are you registered to vote in the United States?” In principle, non-citizens could be registered to vote only in their home country and respond affirmatively, and truthfully, to the question on the survey.(Respondents are asked for the Zip code at which they are registered to vote, but this could be interpreted as the Zip code at which non-citizens receive absentee ballots from abroad. Mexico, for example, has allowed absentee voting by mail from abroad since 2005.) If this sounds outlandish, consider that 20 percent (15 out of 75) of those non-citizens claiming to be registered in 2008 were in fact verified as not being registered to vote in the United States. Another 61 percent (46 of 75) could not be matched to either a commercial or voter database. That leaves only 14 out of 75 non-citizen respondents claiming to be registered in 2008 who were in fact confirmed as registered to vote in the United States.

Anyway, back to the nonsense.

You may want to apply those numbers to make back-of-the-envelope estimates of the likelihood that illegal votes by non-citizens gave Democratic candidates victories in your favorite close elections. For example, this strengthens my conclusion that Cantwell’s victory in 2000, by just 2,229 votes, was illegitimate. And it makes it nearly certain that Christine Gregoire’s 2004 victory over Dino Rossi, by just 129 votes, was illegitimate. In fact, I will go further and say that, if you could have magically eliminated the non-citizen votes from just Seattle, Dino Rossi would have won the final recount.

Um, OK. They asked 55,400 people about their voting habits and 13 said they voted when they weren’t citizens. Assuming none of them misinterpreted the question and none of their answers were entered wrong, that’s 0.000235% of the population voting despite being unable to vote in the country legally. So yes, if you assume that is a correct number, there were 659.3999 of the 2,810,058 people who voted in the Rossi-Gregoire race that voted who shouldn’t have. That’s higher than the total difference in the vote, but (a) there’s nothing to indicate how they would vote if they exist except for the general results mean they probably would have gone something like half-and-half to each candidate, with a few to the Libertarian and (b) the state GOP and conservative blogs spent months and months looking for illegal votes, but really didn’t turn up anyone in this category. I can’t imagine if there were 659.3999 humans out there who had voted illegally that none of them would have been found. Talk about Sound Politics being a bastion of rank incompetence.

There is nothing difficult in the chain of reasoning that I went through years ago, and I am nearly certain that others came to the same conclusion, independently. I think it likely that unscrupulous Democratic operatives saw that they could gain a few votes by making it easier for non-citizens to vote, and that Republican operatives saw that they could be on the side of truth and justice — and gain a few votes, net — by putting tighter controls on registration and voting. Understanding that non-citizens were sometimes tipping elections to the Democratic Party would explain, for example, why George Soros, and others, put money into the Secretary of State Project.

Not the actual, legit disenfranchisement of voters that happens when you put those things in place. It’s the 0.000235% at most of people.

As has happened far too often in recent years, I wish that research had proved me wrong, wish that our close elections were not sometimes being determined by illegal votes.

Done! Today only I can grant wishes.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

I’m totally reading it again!

(For the record: I can think of a few places where illegal votes by non-citizens might help Republican candidates, for example, where there were many immigrants from Russia, or other countries that have suffered from Communism.)

For the record, I’m not sure that immigrants from Russia today are particularly opposed to Communism. Does Jim Miller not know what’s happened in the last couple decades in Russia? Anyway, there can be lots of reasons that people vote.

– On Street Harassment

– I don’t know why we’ve developed a system where Microsoft gives any money to anyone.

– OMG look at all the ferrigners votin’ in R elektionz. Oh, wait, what? Facts?

– The fact that so much misery was created for so little should permanently shame the justices who voted for it. It’s judicial review at its least defensible.

– I cannot tell you how much it warms my heart that K Records is getting involved in the Thurston County PUD race.

– Light Up Your Ride

– The sunset was pretty spectacular last night.

– Join Mayor Murray on a vigil walk for 7-year-old struck on MLK

– I don’t know why you would want to be Ray Rice for Halloween this year, but don’t.

– Wait, some people don’t mark their ballot based on how they feel about the undead?

– The background checks initiative looks like it’ll pass, still vote, for goodness sake.

– It’s led to countless pieces scrutinizing the president’s policies less on the merits and more on their capacity to be emotionally satisfying. Obama is often expected to respond to crises the way a pundit would, and when he doesn’t, his actions are deemed necessarily flawed, often with little regard for merit.

– Oh, but I like their tofu.

After the Marysville-Pilchuck High School shooting, Goldy quite rightly said that now is the time to talk about this, including in ways that are politicized. It’s happening and if we can’t talk about reasonable solutions for dealing with these things as they happen, they’re going to keep happening.

But the other question is when the fuck would be the time we talk about them?

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I had a roommate who was murdered.* It was the better part of a decade ago, and shit still sets me off about it sometimes. I mean I literally cried about it this weekend (and writing this post), and certainly part of the reason I’ve been thinking about it more now is it is the gun debates in the air. But they’re still worth talking about, because they’re the only way we figure out policy.

Shit sets me off sometimes. It was pretty close to where I was working, and for at least a year I would drive past where it happened at lunch or after work even though it was a little out of the way. One time I stopped my car and got out and had actually ate just looking at the building, but usually I just drove past. A couple years ago, I had jury duty and they asked the jury pool about crimes that had been committed to people who we knew. I told the story, as I’d done before without incident, and I don’t know if it was the judge saying “I’m so sorry” because sometimes strangers saying that is more of a problem than people I know, or because I woke up early and it was just a stressful day but I just couldn’t concentrate the rest of the day. I have a cousin who I love very much but who is a big ol’ NRA person and sometimes I argue with him about these things, and it’s super draining.

And so I’ve been reluctant to get involved in this particular debate beyond some snarky posts because, as important as it is, it also sometimes seems like just a big ol’ chance to feel like shit. I have some family who are pretty actively volunteering on the campaign, and for a while I thought I should too, but I just can’t. And I don’t know if there will be a right time for the family and friends at SPU. And I don’t know that there will be a right time for people whose families have just been victims of street crime or suicide with guns. I don’t know that there is or that there will be a right time for me in the future, but I’m still glad we’re having the debate because it’s the only way we can prevent the next one.

[Read more…]

– What’s broken about Mars Hill is the misogyny and homophobia more than the way one guy wrote about it, or even the money stuff.

– I’d like to take a step back and urge you to question why you or anyone would take to the internet to insult a celebrity to begin with.

– Downballot races like County Crank deserve more attention.

– There’s all sorts of Halloween stuff. I don’t think I’m going out this year, but if I do it’ll be as sexy Carl Ballard.

– All the best to Kevin Drum

– Did You Know about cities are some of my favorite Tom The Dancing Bug.

In case you were wondering how to vote on the initiatives, vote the opposite of this:

VOTE YES ON INITIATIVE I-591– The WSRP joins the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs (WACOPS), the Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association (WSLEFIA), and 7 county sheriffs to support I-591. I-591 protects our national guidelines which prohibit the state from confiscating firearms from law abiding citizens without due process. Initiative I-591 would also prevent government interference in temporary gun loans to friends or relatives, and blocks the state from creating a universal gun registry that would set the stage for future confiscation.

Look, if you’re going to loan a murder weapon to someone, the state shouldn’t be involved. It’s especially true if you’re deluded enough to believe that the state is somehow in the process of setting “the stage for future confiscation.” Honestly, saying out loud that you think the state might “set the stage for future confiscation” is proof beyond proof that you don’t deserve a gun, and the state should take it away. They won’t, of course, but they should at that point.

VOTE NO ON INITIATIVE I-594 – The WSRP joins the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs (WACOPS), Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association (WSLEFIA), and 17 county sheriffs in opposing I-594. While supporters of I-594 claim it is about “background checks,” actually it is an 18-page document of complex regulations and restrictions that pose a severe danger to our Second Amendment rights, and criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners. None of the modern mass shootings would have been prevented by the regulations in this initiative. I-594 would expand the state government database of lawful hand gun owners, and in sweeping language it would severely restrict private loans and transfers of guns between friends or relatives.

Um, isn’t “criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners” an oxymoron? I mean if what they’re doing becomes criminal, and they keep doing it, then they’re no longer law-abiding. Unless you think any regulation on guns “criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners” and if that’s the case, then maybe you aren’t in a position to talk intelligently about potential gun regulations. Also, it wouldn’t restrict the transfer of guns between anyone, it would mean that you’ll have to fill out some paperwork some times.

VOTE NO ON INITIATIVE I-1351 – The WSRP supports our school teachers. However, this initiative in the guise of “reducing class size,” actually requires four billion dollars of extra spending in the next biennium with two-thirds going to administration and overhead. This budget busting initiative provides no funding mechanism for this additional spending, so it would lead to tax increases and pressure to impose a state income tax.

We support school teachers, but not at the cost of doing anything to support school teachers. We support the idea of school teachers in the abstract. We support the political good will that comes with saying you support school teachers. We support looking like we care about education.

Also, but not for nothing this paragraph pretty casually admits that you can’t have lower class sizes without an income tax. The state GOP basically can’t come up with non-income tax related ways we might pay for this initiative. I thought there was all that waste fraud and abuse just lying around to save us. Turns out, no.

– A suspension of sweeps of Tent City 3 is great news indeed. Now maybe the city can work on more permanent solutions to homelessness.

– With no further ado, I give you the ten best reasons to ban me from the Bay Area Science Festival after I retweeted a tweet that linked to a blog post revealing a horrible thing someone else did:

– A more walkable Olympia would be nice.

– Artist stitches catcalls into beautiful needlework

– Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ Q&A about innovative policies won’t answer questions about innovative polices.

– Since I mentioned unnecessarily quoting the founders last week, I don’t even understand why you’d go out of your way to misquote them.