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Open Thread 2/16

by Carl Ballard — Thursday, 2/16/12, 8:01 am

– This so-called birth control battle is about a lot more than contraception…it is about not having to beg, negotiate, or endure a forced public confession to get access to services and medicine denied based on some employer’s morality glitch..

– They should call it PolitiCowersToConservatives.

– Caring Across Generations in Seattle. (h/t)

– God Hates Checkered Whiptail Lizards

– $105 for permission to use one of my images is the average amount that keeps me clothed, fed, and housed enough to continue producing more images.

– And as long as I’m linking to copyright pieces: Authors Have a Moral Right to Profit From Their Works

Obama leads Romney in Washington state

by Darryl — Wednesday, 2/15/12, 2:01 pm

Elway has released a new poll today of 405 registered Washington state voters interviewed from Feb 7-9. The poll offers several interesting head-to-head match-ups with Obama:

Here are the highlights:

Obama is +11% against Romney, 49% to 38%
Obama is +8% against a generic Republican, 50% to 42%
Romney loses about 6% of Republican voters compared to a generic Republican candidate.
When Ron Paul is added to the mix, 17% abandon Romney for Paul.

Republicans are having troubles warming up to the Mittster.

Obama has maintained a solid lead over Romney in Washington state. He led by +8 (49% to 41%) in last November’s Survey USA poll. Before that, the October Washington Poll found Obama leading by +9.5% (50.2% to 40.7%):

Obama will be visiting Washington state on Friday where, among other things, he’ll visit a Boeing manufacturing plant in Everett.

Poll Analysis: Obama nearly 100% against Romney

by Darryl — Wednesday, 2/15/12, 11:20 am

[Update: An analysis using more recent polls can be found here.]

Obama	Romney
100.0% probability of winning	0.0% probability of winning
Mean of 348 electoral votes	Mean of 190 electoral votes

A handful of new state head-to-head polls, including two from swing states, have come out since the previous analysis. Obama leads in all five:

		start	end	sample		%	%	%
st	poll	date	date	size	MOE	O	R	diff
CA	SurveyUSA	08-Feb	10-Feb	2088	2.1	60	31	O+29
FL	Rasmussen	09-Feb	09-Feb	500	4.5	47	44	O+3
MA	WBUR	06-Feb	09-Feb	503	4.4	55	34	O+21
NY	Quinnipiac	08-Feb	13-Feb	1233	2.8	52	35	O+17
OH	Quinnipiac	07-Feb	12-Feb	1421	2.6	46	44	O+2

California has Obama crushing Romney by +29%. Massachusetts, a state Romney once governed, has Obama up by nearly as much (+21%). New York supports Obama over Romney by +17%.

In Ohio, the new poll gives Obama a slender +2% lead over Romney. Obama has led in all four Ohio polls taken this year. The polling suggests to me that Ohio may not be so much a swing state this year….

We now have our first February poll out of Florida. This one gives Obama a thin +3% lead over Romney. Obama leads in the two most recent Florida polls; Romney led in the two January polls before that.

Florida looks more like a swing state than does Ohio, but the recent trend looks favorable for Obama:

The previous analysis showed President Barack Obama leading Romney by 344 to 194 electoral votes and a probability of winning of 99.8%.

With the new polls included, after 100,000 simulated elections, Obama wins 99,989 times and Romney wins 11 times. If an election was held now, we expect Obama to win with nearly 100% probability. Obama’s average electoral vote total climbed by +4 to 348, whereas Romney’s average is now 190 electoral votes.

Electoral College Map

[Read more…]

Teacher Evals

by Carl Ballard — Wednesday, 2/15/12, 8:00 am

I know I’ve been complimenting the legislature a lot recently. It feels quite strange. But fortunately, the state Democrats are back to being gigantic pissants who’ll fuck over their constituents for no reason.

The senate passed a compromise teacher evaluation bill this afternoon, 46-3. Republicans and moderate Democrats had been pushing a teacher evaluation bill for a couple of sessions now, but liberals had balked, echoing union concerns that it was unfair to teachers, who’ve already seen K-12 funding cut by $2.5 billion during the recession and who have already been working on district-by-district pilot projects to determine evaluation criteria.

…

However, Sen. Ed Murray (D-43, Seattle), with an eye on counting moderate Democratic and Republican votes necessary to pass his budget, resuscitated the bill, triggering negotiations between the reform contingent and the opponents.

Yes, as part of an effort to make deeper cuts to education, Ed Murray has decided to fuck over teachers by imposing an arbitrary evaluation system. This will be more teach to the test instead of quality learning in an effort to punish the teacher’s union.

Rich Wood, spokesman for the teachers’ union, the Washington Education Association, complained that the union was left out of the negotiations and didn’t see the bill until a few hours before the vote. He said: “This new legislation must not derail, short-circuit or otherwise interfere with the evaluation pilot work that is already underway, and educators must be allowed the flexibility to meet the unique needs of students in their local schools.”

You know what, I can’t say it strongly enough: if you don’t give teachers a spot at the table when drafting legislation, you obviously don’t give a shit about education. You obviously want it to fail. That any Democrat would vote for that is a fucking disgrace.

There are ways to have testing that let teachers know what they need to work on, and how they can improve. This is clearly not that.

Poll analysis: McKenna leads Inslee 45% to 36%

by Darryl — Tuesday, 2/14/12, 6:30 pm

Elway released a new poll today for the Washington state gubernatorial race between A.G. Rob McKenna (R) and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA-01). The poll surveyed 405 registered voters (M.O.E. 5%) and was conducted from the 7th to the 9th of February.

The poll found that, out of those 405 voters, McKenna leads Inslee 45% to 36%, with 20% undecided. Of the 328 “decided” voters, 55.5% selected McKenna and 44.5% selected Inslee.

A Monte Carlo analysis of a million simulated elections [FAQ] using the observed percentages gave McKenna 918,606 wins to Inslee’s 75,709 wins. The analysis suggests that, if the election had been held this past week, McKenna would have a 92.4% probability of winning, and Inslee a 7.6% probability of winning.

Here is the distribution of electoral outcomes from the simulated elections:

This makes the fifth poll in a row that McKenna has led Inslee—his lead can no longer be explained by chance. The previous poll, taken in mid-January, had McKenna leading Inslee 46% to 43% and with a 71.5% probability of beating Inslee. In fact, Inslee last led in a SurveyUSA poll taken last June.

The most recent analysis for the Inslee—McKenna race can be found here.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

by Darryl — Tuesday, 2/14/12, 3:50 pm

Just in time for Valentines Day, Gov. Christine Gregoire has signed the marriage equality bill. Help us celebrate on Tuesday. Grab your sweetheart and join us for a celebration of love and equality under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.

(Mercifully…there are no Republican debates or primary events to kill the mood….)

Drinking Liberally–Seattle meets every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some of us show up a little earlier for dinner.

Presidential candidate Valentines day cards.

Roy Zimmerman with a new version of vote Republican:

Can’t make it to Seattle? There are also meetings on Tuesday night of the Tri-Cities, Bellingham, and Vancouver, WA chapters. The Tacoma chapter meets this Thursday. And next Monday there are meetings of the Woodinville the Olympia, the Yakima, and the Shelton chapters.

With 232 chapters of Living Liberally, including twelve in Washington state and six more in Oregon, chances are excellent there’s one near you.

Open Thread 2/14

by Carl Ballard — Tuesday, 2/14/12, 8:03 am

– Who could have predicted that Obama’s birth control compromise wouldn’t placate conservatives?

– A joint press release from Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit, Pierce Transit and Kitsap Transit on the awful transportation bill.

– Neighborhood greenways

– Conservatives are good at articulating the complete visions of the society they want; we aren’t so great at that.

– Both left Congress under reasonably disgraceful conditions and were soon rewarded with millions of hard-earned dollars by our meritocracy. When you hit the bricks, new whips, money ain’t a thing.

– Happy Anniversary Shaun

A Banner Day for Decency

by Carl Ballard — Monday, 2/13/12, 10:24 pm

Obviously, the big news is that Gregoire signed the marriage equality bill into law. While we’ve known it was going to happen for some time, it’s still quite amazing. Very recently this seemed like an impossibility, and now it’s a reality. Of course there’s a real possibility that it will come before voters in November, but for now, it’s just wonderful.

~~Also, even though the bill info isn’t updated in the legislative web page~~ [sorry, I linked to the senate version, here’s the correct link, and it works fine. I remain an idiot], I’m getting a press release from Washington NARAL that:

This evening the Washington House stood up for women’s health and passed the Reproductive Parity Act (HB 2330) by a vote of 52-46. This legislation, sponsored by Rep. Eileen Cody (D-34), requires all health insurance policies that cover maternity care to cover abortion care. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington thanks the representatives who voted to protect women’s access to basic reproductive health care coverage.

And it looks like it’s going to pass the state senate.

Rick Santorum is in Tacoma

by Carl Ballard — Monday, 2/13/12, 5:19 pm

And I’m not.

So on the one hand, who cares about the inside baseball stuff? But on the other hand, here’s a story about how the Rick Santorum campaign still feels like it’s amateur hour.

On Friday, I heard that Santorum would be in the area, so I went about trying to find a press person. First, to the campaign website. None of the tabs were a press person, and it looked like there were only a few offices, none in Washington. But! There was an 800 number.

So I tried it on Friday night, but it was pretty late. I tried it again Saturday morning, and was on hold for quite a while, before I decided “fuck it, it’s just not that important that I go.” So the end, right? There have been plenty of campaigns and elected officials who don’t get back to me. I also emailed Romney about his campaign appearance, and they also didn’t get back to me. I assume they see Horse’s Ass, and are like “fuck it, it’s just not important that we have him at our event.” That’s really fine. This blog is written by people in our free time and we don’t have time or the staff to follow up on this sort of thing like the professionals.

So, why am I writing this? Well, about 7:00 on Sunday I get a call back from the Santorum campaign (I didn’t leave a voice mail; I was just on hold for a while). I told them I was a blogger here in Seattle, and would very much like to attend Santorum’s rally. They said, I’d have to contact Nathan, their contact in (I think, but I didn’t write it down) Colorado, but that they’d love to have me. So fine, I left him a voice mail yesterday and again this morning. I called several other times and he never picked up. So I wasn’t making a trip to Tacoma if there was no WiFi or no electricity, and thus am heading home.

I know it’s a minor thing, but, don’t tell me I’m going to be able to attend and then not get back to me with any sort of arrangements. And really, nobody could direct me to someone in Washington who might be able to answer questions?

Now, compare that to when I saw Hillary Clinton 4 years ago. A few calls and I’m on the list, no problem. Compare it to Obama who could organize the Key Arena quickly and who had bloggers (although not me, I had to work) attend. Both of those were on almost as short notice as the Santorum campaign.

Open Thread 2/13

by Carl Ballard — Monday, 2/13/12, 7:54 am

– Blue-green alliances.

– I’m as big a McGinn supporter as you’ll find and I agree with most of this. But I don’t think either the business community or Occupy Seattle are very happy with his handling of Occupy Seattle.

– And keep in mind; we’re not talking about abortion anymore. We’re talking about birth control.

– Obama’s Spotify playlist is pretty pedestrian.

– United States Bureau of Chronology

A dose of weekend media

by Darryl — Sunday, 2/12/12, 10:13 pm

Here are a few things that came out over the weekend (i.e. too late for the Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza).

WA Senate Democrat’s Week in Review podcast:
[audio:http://www.sdc.wa.gov/podcast/ITL_2012_7.mp3]

Obama’s Weekly Address: Extending the Payroll Tax Cut for the Middle Class:

Arianna Huffington talks women’s issues on SNL.

Bill Maher on Republican’s divided America:

Bird’s Eye View Contest

by Lee — Sunday, 2/12/12, 12:00 pm

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was Ottawa.

This week’s contest is related to a TV show or a movie. Good luck!

HA Bible Study

by Goldy — Sunday, 2/12/12, 7:00 am

1 Kings 7:23
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.

Discuss.