Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

For tonight’s theme song, we’ll scramble to the roof of the Montlake Ale House, raise a toast to rescue and emergency relief workers everywhere and sing Rescue Me by Aretha Franklin Fontella Bass¹.

Oh…and come prepared with your own ideas for this Comedy Central photo caption contest.

Not in Seattle? Check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

¹Thanks to N in Seattle for the correction.

It is just another Republican attempt to gain power through tricks and exploitation, rather than through leadership. We all remember previous Republican coup attempts: the Clinton impeachment, Katherine Harris’ illegal disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legitimate Florida voters, the Republican shutdown of recounts in Florida, the illegal mid-term Texas redistricting, the California gubernatorial recall, and even the Republican’s attempt to steal the Washington governors office by suing over made-up charges of election fraud.

This time, the Republicans are gaming the electoral votes in California. Johann Hari’s guest column in the Seattle P-I explains:

…the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the Electoral College among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favor. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its Electoral College votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 percent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 percent of California’s electoral votes; if 51 percent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 percent of Texas’ electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this — but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California’s Electoral College votes and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a statewide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California’s electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big statewide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state’s 54 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

The effect would be to hand the Republicans an extra state the size of Ohio or Pennsylvania–but without so much as a single extra popular vote going to the Republican candidate. They would simply be gaming the system for a short-term advantage to win acquire the White House in 2008.

At Hominid Views, I’ve been conducting a series of simulation studies for the 2008 election. I’ve used state-wide head-to-head polls pitting, say, Clinton against Giuliani (as well as other match-ups) to repeatedly simulate 2008 elections. The results provide a distribution of electoral college votes that can be used to estimate the probability that each candidate would win if the election were held today.

For example, after 10,000 simulated elections using, whenever possible, polls from the last month, the distribution of Electoral College votes looks like this:

Clinton won the electoral vote 9,530 times, and Giuliani won only 417. (There were 53 ties that would almost certainly be a win for Clinton). In other words Clinton wins about 95.8% of the simulated elections and Giuliani wins 4.2%.

Here is the same simulation, but this time using the “California Counts” rules to divvy up the California electoral votes:

Now after 10,000 simulated elections, Clinton wins only 7,233 (plus 181 ties) and Giuliani wins 2,586. With no change whatsoever in the popular vote, Clinton’s chance of victory decreases to 74.1% and Giuliani is up to a probability of 25.9%.

Giuliani’s increased chance of winning is not attributable to some refinement of democracy, and it doesn’t better reflect the will of the people. Rather, it reflects a trick. Apparently, the Republicans are still not confident in their ability to win through genuine leadership, superior public policy, or popular appeal. That leaves them with little choice but political trickery.

Today I stumbled across this recent Field Poll that shows Californians growing more and more…um…excited about mail-in voting.

Notable finding: “Permanent mail ballot registrants include more registered Republicans than are found in the overall electorate.”

Eli Sanders looks at the Darcy Burner–Rep. Dave Reichert race in Washington’s 8th congressional district and asks, “What makes important people think that Eastside Democrat Darcy Burner can win in November 2008 the same congressional race that she lost last year?”

Sanders asked DCCC chair Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) who was in town to raise money for Burner this week. Van Hollen provides a number of reasons that don’t seem to completely convince Sanders…until he gets to this:

The most significant thing Van Hollen noted during the conference call was that the National Republican Congressional Committee, which last year spent about $2.5 million to help Reichert win, currently has only $2.5 million total cash on hand to help Republicans around the country. Contrast that with the $29.2 million that Van Hollen currently has to offer Democrats and you see not only a snapshot of the hurt that Bush has put on the Republican Party as a whole, but also a clear path to a Burner victory.

The Republican money deficit is far, far more serious than these figures tell. As Andrew Tannenbaum points out:

So far, 22 representatives have announced they are not running. Of these, 17 are Republicans and five are Democrats, and all five Democrats are from safe districts. […] Four of the Republican seats are safe (AL-02, CO-06, MS-03, and WY-AL), but the other 13 will be battlegrounds. In addition, there there are half a dozen seats the Republicans held in 2006 by tiny margins and will have to pour money into to defend. An example is NC-08, in which a totally unknown high school teacher with no political experience, no money, and no support from the national party, came with[in] 329 votes of unseating a wealthy four-term Republican congressman. There are a few Democratic freshmen who come from hostile districts such as Brad Ellsworth in IN-08, but most of them won by decent margins and have voted fairly conservatively in Congress and most are raising money like there is no tomorrow. For example, freshmen Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-20), Ron Klein (FL-22), and Joe Sestak (PA-07) have all raised $1.5 million or more already. The median at this point for all 435 representatives is about $400,000.

NRCC chair Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) will have an enormous cash disadvantage with many open, currently Republican, seats to defend. Unquestionably there will be better investments for the NRCC’s limited funds than WA-08.

Dave Reichert is almost certainly going to have to find most of his own money this election. And given that his recent Bush-headlining fund-raiser raised more money for Burner than for his own campaign, he’ll have to find a strategy that doesn’t shoot himself in the face foot.

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

In talking about congestion pricing on my show Saturday night, I couldn’t contain a brief outburst over how our local media and political elite continue to take seriously the Discovery Institute’s transportation proposals in light of its embarrassing role in promoting Creationism Intelligent Design. My frustration stems not simply from the fact that Intelligent Design is ridiculous anti-science, or that it is part of a well planned and executed multi-year campaign to undermine science education in the US at a time we face growing global economic competition… but that it has been promoted in such a shamelessly dishonest manner.

The Discovery Institute has proven again and again that it makes no distinction between scholarship and propaganda, and that there is no ethical boundary it will not cross in the interest of foisting its Christianist agenda on the American people. This blatant disregard for the most basic rigors of academia — or even fair play — was highlighted recently by a virologist/blogger who discovered that DI fellows had stolen and manipulated a Harvard University/XVIVO video for use in their own presentations, without attribution, permission or license.

Here is the original Harvard/XVIVO video, “The inner life of a cell”, with its scientifically accurate narration intact:

And here is a clip from a Discovery Institute presentation that features an excerpt of the video, now redubbed and retitled “The Cell as an Automated City.” Notice how the presenter describes the video as “state of the art computer animation,” implying that it is somehow the work of the institute:

As ERV points out in his her post, this isn’t just a naive case of copyright infringement. The Discovery Institute has plenty of lawyers on staff and on retainer, so they sure as hell know that scrubbing the Harvard/XVIVO copyright and credits off the video is not only dishonest, but illegal.

Maybe they think it is ‘okay’ because they gave the animation a new title (’Inner life of a cell’ became ‘The cell as an automated city’) and an extraordinarily unprofessional new narration (alternate alternate title– ‘ Big Gay Al takes a tour of a cell!’). Harvard/XVIVOs narration, all of the science, is whisked away and replaced with a ’surrealistic lilliputian realm’– ‘robots’, ‘manufacturing’, ‘circuitry’, ‘nano moters’, ‘UPS labels’. Maybe they think it is ‘okay’ because they turned all of Harvards science into ‘MAGIC!’

Hmm. From my point of view, as a virologist and former teaching assistant, this isn’t just copyright infringement. This is theft and plagiarism. Taking someone else’s work without their consent, manipulating it without their consent, pretending it supports ID Creationists distorted views of reality, and presenting it as DI’s work.

ERV further points out that if the DI fellows responsible for this were at his her university, they would be expelled for their plagiarism.

But this is just business as usual at the Discovery Institute, and it raises a question: if the Discovery Institute can’t be trusted to produce independent academic scholarship on its signature issue, Intelligent Design, how can its Cascadia Center be trusted to produce independent academic scholarship on regional transportation planning? Of course, it can’t, and the media, business and political elites who ignore the institute’s established track record of distorting scholarship and science in the single-minded pursuit of its own private agenda, are little more than willful dupes.

Our region’s transportation planning is too important to be trusted to a faux “think tank” with such a shameful and embarrassing record, and every time one of our local media outlets unskeptically cites one of its reports or recommendations, it grants the Discovery Institute credibility it simply does not deserve. Unlike a real think tank, the Discovery Institute produces “scholarship” to support its existing agenda, not the other way around, and thus it cannot and should not be considered a trusted partner in planning our region’s transportation future.

Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Tonight it will be good clean all-American politics (with any Muslims who happen to show up sent to the back of the bar). I hear that Seattle Dan and Seattle Tammy will be making a rare appearance.

Tonight’s theme song: Why Did I Choose You? by Barbara Streisand.

Not in Seattle? Check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Darcy Burner and friends discuss the 8th CD race:

(This and some 60 other media clips from the past week in politics are now posted at Hominid Views.)

Awww, gee…I hate calling someone a liar.

Even as a degenerate “far left” liberal who grew up in a household colluding with Satan to destroy America (i.e. with a divorced parent), my mother taught me to give the benefit of the doubt. I call someone a liar only after other possibilities become implausible.

I can, in good conscience, call Tim Eyman a liar. I mean, he admitted to lying about taking donor money as personal compensation. Mike McGavick earned the moniker through a whole series of fibs and “parables” offered as fact (discussed here and here).

I’m not yet ready to pronounce Mr. Rossi a serial liar—even considering that he is (1) a Republican, (2) a Washington state Republican and (3) a real estate broker salesman. Not yet…but, man, Rossi and his campaign are sure trying my good will.

Yesterday Neil Modie at the PI reported on the misleading rate of fundraising that the Rossi campaign was boasting about.

His campaign reported last week that he brought in “over $463,300 during the month of October. He announced his candidacy for governor on October 25th.”

Curt Woodward of the AP adds:

In that fundraising statement, spokeswoman Jill Strait bragged about Rossi raising nearly $500,000 “in roughly one week.” The campaign refused to offer any supporting documentation.

So reporters from the mainstream media were duped into writing about the spectacular rate of fundraising—for example, take this post from, umm…Mr. Modie:

Rossi bursts rapidly out of the fund-raising gate

A lot of checkbooks were waiting to open once Dino Rossi declared his long-expected 2008 candidacy for governor Oct. 25.

In the week between his announcement and the end of October, the Republican raised more than $463,000 for his race against Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire, his campaign reported Thursday. And he raised an additional $110,000 the first two days of November.

Or, as Woodward explains:

Based on Strait’s statement and interviews, The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that Rossi’s initial fundraising burst began with his Oct. 25 campaign announcement.

The campaign never raised any issues of accuracy about those reports. But campaign officials knew, and never clarified, that Rossi had been collecting campaign donations for about two weeks by the time he officially announced his gubernatorial bid.

After examining the Rossi’s campaign finance records, Neil Modie learned that:

…[Rossi’s] campaign started accepting contributions Oct. 12 and took in $97,750 even before he announced his candidacy Oct. 25. Of that sum, $86,800 came in donations of $2,800 each, the maximum amount allowed by law for the primary and general elections combined.

An additional $60,873 came in on the day of the announcement, more than half of it in contributions of $2,800 each.

The campaign, seemingly coming to the realization that it’s not nice to fool political reporters, has now issued an apology.

“I apologize to you if you feel like you were misled,” Strait told the AP. “I agree that we could have clarified that the first check came in on the 12th.”

Yep…you could have, but you didn’t. Instead, in issuing the apology, the Rossi campaign lied to reporters again (my emphasis):

After apologizing, Strait claimed that “there was never a secret” that Rossi decided to run for governor on Oct. 11, the day before he collected his first donations.

That statement is untrue: when asked about an impending Rossi campaign shortly before the official Oct. 25 announcement, Strait refused to offer any details of Rossi’s plans, saying only that he would be talking about his political future.

Ouch! The publicly-disclosed Rossi campaign is less than a month old (or the not-secret-unless-you-asked campaign is just over a month old) and already the media is insinuating that the Rossi campaign is a pack of liars.

I’m guessing that one of the first things you learn in Becoming a Politician 101 is “Never, ever, ever piss off the press by getting caught lying to them.” (Lying to the people? Probably okay…but not the press.)

The rest of Woodward’s article sure reads like someone who feels betrayed:

The “nearly half a million dollars” raised in “roughly one week” actually referred to the approximately $365,000 Rossi collected in the last week of October, combined with some $110,000 the campaign says Rossi raised on the first two days of November.

The most recent campaign finance reports do not include November donations, making it impossible to immediately confirm whether Rossi actually raised that much money in the first two days of the month.

And Neil Modie seems a little peeved, too. In yesterday’s article deflating Rossi’s fundraising hyperbole, Neil meanders to the topic of a PDC investigation of illegal campaigning on the part of Rossi:

[Lori] Anderson [Spokeswoman for the state Public Disclosure Commission] said the commission is also investigating a Rossi campaign Web site, telldino.com, because it was registered Sept. 8, before Rossi says he decided to run. Strait, his spokeswoman, said a Rossi campaign volunteer, Thomas Swanson, registered it on his own without telling Rossi so that the Web address would be available if the candidate did decide to run.

Strait said Swanson took the action after he and J. Vander Stoep, a Rossi campaign adviser, discussed the idea of creating telldino.com to enable citizens to give Rossi their suggestions for improving government.

Wait a minute! That sure has the look and smell of a tenny-weeny little fib.

If Rossi had not decided to run by September 8th, what purpose would there be in discussing a new web site for folks to offer Rossi “suggestions for improving government?” Isn’t that exactly what The Washington Idea Bank (a wholly owned subsidiary of Forward Washington Foundation) was created for? The site has a web form for offering ideas…to Rossi’s pre-campaign organization.

Are we really to believe that on September 8th (three days before Rossi secretly resigned from Forward Washington Foundation) a (future?) campaign adviser had discussed creating a new “Rossi Idea Bank” site, but that was all “before Rossi says he decided to run,” and the site was registered for non-campaign purposes? Right.

Now the needle is pegged on my implausiometer.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released a final report making a compelling case that human-induced global warming is happening and will have dire consequences. But maybe you don’t find the expertise of scientists trained in climatological science all that compelling. Here is another way of thinking about global warming:

(This and some seventy other media clips from the past week in politics are now posted at Hominid Views.)

Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

No doubt there will be cries of angst over media consolidation and, more importantly, beer consolidation.

Tonight’s activity might just be a redneck handyman contest for the best constructive use of a firearm in the categories home repair, automotive maintenance and politics.

Finally, tonight’s theme song: Rock The Boat by The Hues Corporation.

Not in Seattle? Check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

UPDATE [Lee]: I believe tonight’s Seattle DL is canceled due to Husky basketball.

UPDATE [Darryl]: Naaaa….there WILL be a DL this evening. The Husky basketball crowd will be gone by 8:00, which is when the game starts.

UPDATE [Goldy]: Darryl and I will be there, and that makes it a quorum by my count. If the rest of you don’t show up, that’s more Manny’s for me and Darryl.

UPDATE [Carl]: I’ll be there too, but I’m still two buses away, so who knows when that will actually be?

I’ve just returned to the Seattle area after an extended spell on the East Coast, and missed all the election brouhaha back in Washington State. So now that I’ve returned, I’ll share a couple of thoughts about those elections….

Last week I spent a couple of days in Chapel Hill, NC and then flew into Reagan/National Airport near Washington, D.C. From there I jumped on the MetroRail (a.k.a. The Metro) and within 15 minutes of leaving the airport got off at Foggy Bottom and walked a few blocks to a friend’s apartment. That night we took The Metro to some other part of D.C. to eat dinner at a funky Japanese-Mexican fusion restaurant. The next day we grabbed the metro again an visited museums. In fact, I used The Metro repeatedly in the week I was in D.C—and always with a big ol’ smile on my face. This afternoon, I took The Metro back to Reagan/National for my trip home. I LOVE The Metro. I travel to D.C. once or twice a year for work, and I almost never have to take a cab (and rarely a bus) because of that wonderful MetroRail.

Man…I can’t wait until Seattle becomes a real city too. You know, one that includes a rail-based regional transit system.

So, it is really too bad about Prop. 1 (RTID). To the fools who voted against it, I just have to say, haul your ass out of Seattle once in awhile and visit a real city (like Chicago, Boston, New York City, San Francisco, D.C.). Folks in real cities consider a rail-based transit system absolutely essential.

Okay…off my soapbox.

The other thing I want to mention is this…it sure looks to me like Joint Resolution 4204, the school district tax levy Constitution Amendment thingie, is going to be approved.

This evening I went to the Washington State election results page and the vote spread has narrowed considerably.

Right now 4204 is down by 11,000 votes. But King County still has some 90,000 absentee ballots to count. If the absentee ballots break at roughly the same proportion as the tally so far, my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that 4204 is going to win by about 8,000 votes. It looks to me like absentee ballots counted in Snohomish, Thurston, and Watcom counties—all largish counties that voted in favor of 4204—will easily offset most of the other counties. (Pierce is the only big county that went against 4204.) That means the King County absentees are really going to decide this election.

I predict that 4204 will be approved by a narrow margin and a mandatory recount will be required, which will ultimately uphold the original vote. And Gov. Christine Gregoire will have to declare a state of emergency as Republican heads all across the state spontaneously, and nearly simultaneously, explode.

This past week Rep. Jim McDermott suggested that Congress participate in a nationally-televised Iran war game. The exercise would help Congress and the American people evaluate the consequences of an attack on Iran.

“We know the Pentagon has conducted war games to examine the casualties and consequences of a U.S. military strike against Iran….We should too.”

“Think what we would have learned if we had done it before Iraq.” It’s hard to argue with that!

(This and some 60 other media clips from the past week in politics are posted at Hominid Views.)

With a little over a year to the 2008 election, there have already been over 100 statewide polls that pit Hillary Clinton against Republican challengers in a general election match-up. These polls can be combined to give us an early glimpse of the national mood (albeit one likely soured by years of Bush administration’s military misadventurism).

I’ve been collecting these polls for awhile now, and finally got around to an analysis of the Clinton—Giuliani head-to-head state poll outcomes. My analyses differ from the typical national head-to-head polls because (1) I am concerned with estimating the electoral college results from the statewide polls, rather than estimating a national popular vote, (2) I make extensive use of Monte Carlo simulation methods to examine the probability that each candidate wins, and (3) by combining multiple polls the sample sizes are much larger.

For example, here is the result of 100,000 simulated elections using all the 2007 state poll data I’ve been able to find:

The red line is drawn at 269 electoral college votes—a tie. The area to the right of the red line are Clinton wins, those to the left are Giuliani wins. (There are a few ties. A tied election would almost certainly result in Clinton being elected since the House Democrats currently control 26 state delegations, and the Republicans control 20 state delegations. The 2008 election will probably increase the Democrat’s control of the House.)

These results suggest that Hillary Clinton would have a 73% probability of being elected President, but only if the 2007 polls in toto reflect the national mood for election day, 2008.

In reality, attitudes change with time, so it is helpful to restrict the analysis to the most recent polls whenever possible.

Here is what happens if we restrict the analysis to polls taken in October, 2007 (unless there are no polls in a state for this month, in which case we take the most recent poll, or, if there are no polls at all, we give the electoral college votes to the party that took the state in 2004):

After 10,000 simulated elections, Hillary wins 9,991 times and Giuliani wins 9 times. Clearly, over the course of the year, Hillary has become more acceptable, Rudy has become less acceptable, or some mixture of both has occurred. (In fact, further analyses reveal that Rudy has made a bit of a comeback from his worst showing in mid-summer.)

The polls to date put Clinton in an extremely strong position to win the 2008 election. Giuliani has a tough row to hoe just to become competitive. He’ll need a lot more than just fear-mongering over 11 Sep 2001 to pull off a win.

(I provide a more complete description of the methods and results here.)

Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

We will have two special guests this evening: George Fearing, a Democrat running to replace (non)Doc Hastings in the 4th congressional district, and Jimmy McCabe of McCranium, who is running as a write-in candidate for Richland City Council Position 3.

Tonight’s theme song: I Ran (So Far Away) by A Flock of Seagulls.

Not in Seattle? Check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Bill Maher offers some new rules for prioritizing things to fear:

(This and some 70 other media clips from the past week in politics are now posted at Hominid Views.)