– Does anyone buy the Cheneys’ books?
– I still support Seattle teachers.
– Being pro-a-war-that-won’t-happen probably isn’t a terrible political position: You don’t get the down side of actually having to deal with the consequences of a war, and if something does go bad (I don’t think it will) you get to I told you so everyone. But wanting to go to war with Iran kind of makes the people advocating for it seem like the worst.
– Move Seattle seems pretty good.
Please join us tonight for an evening of politics and polite conversation over a drink at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.
We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks stop by even earlier for dinner.
Can’t make it to Seattle on Tuesday night? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. The Tri-Cities and Redmond chapters also meet on Tuesday. Wednesday the Bellingham chapter meets. And the Bremerton, Spokane, and Kent chapters meet on Thursday.
There are 184 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon and two in Idaho. Chances are good there’s a chapter meeting near you.
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Sen. Marco Rubio is one of three major G.O.P. candidates out of Florida (along with Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee). This should provide him with a general election advantage of providing a strong showing in this important swing state. The most recent Florida poll, taken in the second week of August, has Rubio leading Hillary Clinton by +12.
In fact, Rubio leads in the most recent polling in the other two classic swing states of Ohio (+2) and Pennsylvania (+7). It hasn’t always been that way. For the past year, Clinton has generally held solid leads in all three swing states, only to lose all three leads over the summer:
So how is it that Clinton can be behind in these three swing states and still lead? It’s because she leads in Wisconsin (+12), Virginia (+1), Texas (+1), Louisiana (+3) and Georgia (+3). Virginia is the only state with a recent poll. Of states with older polls, Wisconsin is at least plausible, but Texas, Louisiana and Georgia seem unlikely to swing blue in 2016.
Clearly, much more polling is needed to get a feel for where the race is at. Clinton has certainly lost ground over the summer, and this is probably a function of two things. First, voters are familiarizing themselves with, and getting used to the idea of voting for Marco Rubio. Second, Clinton has had a terrible summer from the perspective of national popularity. For most of the summer, what news we’ve heard about Clinton, has been largely negative.
The Clinton campaign has been disconnected from a general election audience, as her campaign focuses on another important aspect of the race. They have spent the summer quietly locking up superdelegates, almost guaranteeing her the Democratic nomination. The trade-off for a lousy summer is that the campaign will be freed up early to focus on the care and feeding of general election voters while the Republicans bludgeon their way through an unappealing primary.
Republicans have a very different nomination structure, they don’t have superdelegates, and the dynamics of their over-populated primary are entirely different, so that campaigns have spent the summer attempting to maximize positive news cycles (or, in the case of Donald Trump, positive or negative news cycles). This has allowed the top contenders to “catch-up” to Clinton and, given some more recent polling, possibly top her.
For the polling we have now, however, Clinton holds a thin lead. After 100,000 simulated elections, Clinton won 64,668 and Rubio won 35,332 times (including the 1,511 ties). Clinton received (on average) 280 to Rubio’s 258 electoral votes. In an election held now, Clinton would have a 64.7% probability of winning and Rubio would have a 35.3% probability of winning.
Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations:
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True story: the original inspiration for HA Bible Study was then University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his famous eye-black bible citations. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to randomly cite less familiar scripture—you know, say, 2 Kings 2:23-24 rather than Philippians 4:13—and our weekly HA Bible Study was born!
And so in honor of Tebow being cut from my beloved Philadelphia Eagles yesterday, I offer this extra bit of bible wisdom for him to ponder:
Jeremiah 49:16
Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine heart, O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that holdest the height of the hill: though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.
Discuss.
Genesis 6:1-4
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Discuss.
Kimmel asks people “Do you think President Obama is a Muslim?
Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze is imploding.
Obama: Why I went to Alaska.
Color-blind people see color for the first time.
Thom: Col. Wilkerson: “Dick Cheney is an idiot,” and he “should be in jail for war crimes!”
Greenman: We are the asteriod.
Mental Floss: Misconceptions about social media.
2016 Clowns On Parade:
Thom: The Good, the Bad and the Very, Very Ludicropatheticly Ugly!.
Liberal Viewer: FAUX News asks if #BlackLivesMatter is a hate group.
Congressional Hits and Misses: Hank Johnson edition.
Thom: Thomas Edison was right about solar energy.
Mental Floss: Unusual political parties:
Rare sea creature found off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
Mark Fiore: Obama drills.
Kim Davis, the Thrice Divorced, Four-times Married, Known Adulterer Refuses to Issue Same-Sex Marriage Licenses:
David Pakman: States with the strictest gun laws have lowest rates of gun-related deaths.
Thom: How China messes with American labor.
White House: West Wing Week.
Farron Cousins: Even Bush-appointed judges agree that voter ID laws are racist.
David Pakman: Democratic Party adopts $15/hr minimum wage to national platform.
Greenman: One day at the wind farm.
Obama views glacier melting from climate change.
Sam Seder: Conservatives know the real reason Obama renamed Denali
Richard Fowler: ObamaCare is working, and the proof is insane.
Thom: The Good, The Bad and The Very, Very Rakehelly Ugly!
David Pakman: Mike Huckabee: Planned Parenthood is like ISIS…
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
WA Supreme Court jumps the shark, waiting 11 months to release opinion invalidating schools that already started. https://t.co/YXZURRTlvp
— Jonathan Martin (@jmartin206) September 4, 2015
Oh, please.
I have sympathy for the families who were duped into enrolling their children in charter schools before the court ruled today that they are unconstitutional, but I’ve absolutely no sympathy for the argument that the justices are somehow to blame. The court’s job is to interpret the constitution, and on this issue both the Washington State Constitution and 100 years of legal precedent are rather clear. It was never a sure thing that the court would rule Initiative 1240 unconstitutional because court rulings almost never are, but it was always more likely than not.
Article IX, Section 2 of the constitution plainly reads: “the entire revenue derived from the common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively applied to the support of the common schools.” Clear enough. The whole case hinged on the legal definition of “common schools,” and since School District No. 20 v. Bryan in 1909 it has always been this:
a common school, within the meaning of our constitution, is one that is common to all children of proper age and capacity, free, and subject to and under the control of the qualified voters of the school district. The complete control of the schools is a most important feature, for it carries with it the right of the voters, through their chosen agents, to select qualified teachers, with powers to discharge them if they are incompetent.
Charters, with their unelected appointed boards, totally outside the control of voters, clearly do not meet Bryan’s definition of common schools. I supposed the court could have engaged in judicial activism by futzing the issue for the sake of political expediency. Or perhaps it could have overturned the clear precedent established in Bryan. But there was no good reason to expect that the court would.
If I had to bet money I would have bet that I-1240 would be ruled unconstitutional, at least in part. And anybody with any experience reading the law could have at least foreseen this possibility. Hell, a lower court had already ruled as much!
And yet, charter school operators rushed to start up charters before the court released its opinion—perhaps betting that the court would be loath to dismantle the schools once established. If that was their gambit, they gambled and lost. Or rather, the children enrolled in these schools lost, victims of a stupid if not cynical effort to start up charter schools before the charter school law was legally settled.
Argue all you want with the legal reasoning behind the court’s 6-3 decision—the dissent makes a reasonable argument as well. But the point here is that this ruling was always possible if not likely, and thus it was irresponsible bordering on malpractice to open charter schools to enrollment before the legal issues were fully settled. It’s not the justices who are to blame for the predicament these charter school students find themselves in, it’s the charter school operators who opened their schools knowing full well that the court might soon deliver a legally mortal blow.
– I’m taking Monday off for Labor Day. Do you guys want an Open Thread on Tuesday-Thursday or to wait until Wednesday?
– I support the Seattle teachers.
– Finally a place where cars and bikes can gang up on other people. I don’t mind waiting at drawbridges that much, but I don’t bike past a bridge for my commute (generally).
Last week, a boat carrying migrants and refugees from North Africa sank in the Mediterranean. Of the 300,000 plus who’ve attempted the journey to Europe this year, about 2,500 have died. In Austria, children crammed into a van were rescued, while others weren’t so lucky. And after pictures of a young Kurdish child washed up on a Turkish beach appeared in newspapers around the world this week, the humanity behind this crisis seemed to jolt the world closer to the response required.
In Syria alone, the refugee crisis is enormous. But that’s still only a part of the overall influx of those desperate to find a safer home for themselves and their families. I really don’t have anything more to say about this other than that this is an enormous tragedy that the wealthy nations of the world helped to bring about, and one that it can and should fix. But I have very little confidence that they will.
More news from the past two weeks…
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Jesus (video plays automatically at the link).
The Thurston County Prosecutor announced that the Olympia police officer who shot two men earlier this year will not face criminal charges.
Thurston County Prosecutor Jon Tunheim said that assault charges have been filed against Bryson Chaplin, 21, and Andre Thompson, 24. They are scheduled to be in court on September 22.
Tunheim said Officer Ryan Donald was “acting without malice” and had a “good faith fear” when he shot two men in May.
…
In documents released by the sheriff’s office last week, Donald reported that one of the men had been threatening him with a skateboard before the shooting.
Coming at a person with a skateboard is obviously not OK, if that’s what those people did (and let’s be honest, at this point we can’t take a cop’s word for these sorts of things). But even if you accept that’s what they did, it’s not something to get shot over.
Cops should be calming these situations down, not pulling out and using deadly weapons. They have Tasers and other non-lethal methods (not that those are without problems, but they aren’t bullets). So once again, I’ll say if police can’t do their job while armed, we should take away their guns.
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Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) started out the election season with much buzz. But at this point, pollsters seem less interested in him, so there isn’t a lot of really current polling that pits him against a Democrat. There are only 83 state polls matching up Walker to Hillary Clinton (Jeb Bush has 212 such polls). Consequently, Walker at a bit of a disadvantage, since most of the polls were taken when Clinton was polling more strongly against all opponents.
No biggie…this is a shakedown for these analyses, so I’ll post it with the caveat that there just isn’t enough recent polling for this match-up. Perhaps pollsters will soon find reason to be more interested in the Governor.
After 100,000 simulated elections, Clinton wins 99,503 times and Walker wins 497 times (including the 103 ties). Clinton received (on average) 317 to Walker’s 221 electoral votes. In an election held now, Clinton would have a 99.5% probability of winning and Walker would have a 0.5% probability of winning.
Clinton tends to win in the classic swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan as well as Nevada and New Mexico. But the most remarkable thing about these results is how poorly Walker does in his home state of Wisconsin. Here’s the polling picture:
– Good on Mike O’Brien on Uber drivers.
– Another day, another Democrat going from the legislature to Inslee’s office.
– Another day, another office for Pam Roach to run for.
– This Denali thing sure brought out a lot of problematic people [h/t].
– More Case of the Week Quotient at Overthinking It.
Ten years ago today I received the following email from an HA reader:
I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.
I am telling you this after watching the fucking shipwreck in the Gulf. His incompetence is KILLING people.
After a little bit of sleuthing I turned the tip above into this scathing post that quickly went viral, transforming FEMA’s inadequate response to the tragedy in New Orleans into a national conversation about cronyism. Within days, FEMA director Mike Brown was out of a job. A month later, while testifying before congress, Brown would blame HorsesAss.org by name for his agency’s failures:
The path this story took—from a single reader’s small piece of specialized knowledge, to a local blogger, to a national blog, to the national media—may not be the first example of the transformative power of blogging. But it’s certainly one of the clearest. And I’ll always be proud to have played my little role.
It’s Tuesday…and that’s Drinking Liberally night in Seattle. So please join us for an evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.
We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks stop by even earlier for dinner.
Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. The Long Beach, Tri-Cities and West Seattle chapters also meet tonight. The Lakewood chapter meets on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets. And next Monday, the Yakima and South Bellevue chapters meet.
There are 184 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon and two in Idaho. Chances are good there’s a chapter meeting near you.
Ross Hunter is retiring from the legislature effective RIGHT NOW to head the state Department of Early Learning.
Hunter will start in the $150,000 a year job next Tuesday. He takes over at a time when the state is placing a major emphasis, and increased money, into early learning programs. He said he views the “opportunity to improve outcomes for hundreds of thousands of at-risk children (as) incredibly compelling.”
His departure could set off a scramble among senior Democrats for the job of House Appropriations Committee chairman, a powerful position that has major influence on how the state spends billions of dollars in its operating budget. The chairman of the Finance Committee, which sets taxes, may also be leaving. Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, has announced plans to seek a Senate seat if its current occupant, Jeanne Kohl-Welles, wins a seat on the King County Council in November.
Hunter has a long list of accomplishments, but mostly I’ll remember him saying on Podcasting Liberally that people should vote for him for exec because he couldn’t figure out the Metro Trip Planner. Anyway, I’m sure he’ll be good at his new job.
Is there anyone you’d like to see replace Hunter, either in the district or as the main budget person for for the House Dems?
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!