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– Tom Schaller has a post at FiveThirtyEight comparing the 1994 midterm election with the 2010 midterm election. This chart tells a very interesting story:

It seems hard to fathom that only 16 years ago the South had a higher percentage of Democrats than the Northeast.

– I’ve started watching the recent National Geographic series on the drug war, Drugs Inc. The first episode was about cocaine. It’s a timely topic since this week marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Plan Colombia. The Drug War Chronicle discusses the successes and failures of our attempts to stop the flow of cocaine from Colombia. We’ve managed to weaken organizations like FARC that have long profited from the trade, but the overall amount of cocaine coming from that part of the world remains unchanged.

– Mike Konczal points out the inherent contradiction between the Broken Windows philosophy and the libertarian view on marijuana laws.

– Dave Weigel calls out Megyn Kelly’s race-baiting.

– Another ugly Taser incident.

– Someone posted Mr. Cynical’s old schoolwork on the web.

Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien has a blog post up on the likelihood of cost overruns on the Big Bore tunnel. The conclusion?

40% chance of any cost overrun

30% chance of a cost overrun greater than $90 million

20% chance of a cost overrun greater than $150 million

10% chance of a cost overrun greater than $290 million

5% chance of a cost overrun greater than $415 million

And these are WSDOT’s estimates, not O’Brien’s.

So I guess the question is, are you comfortable with these odds? And if not, do you feel lucky?

Cienna’s got the scoop over at Slog:

This week, the bar was raised for eight projects hoping to move into the Seattle Center’s Fun Forest site—raised so high that all but three proposals may be out of the game.

On July 13, the review panel charged with choosing a project sent a letter (.pdf) to the eight proposers requesting more information about the project. The panel is honing in on where the money’s at: how many visitors each project expects to attract and their “financial readiness and sustainability” moving forward. The letter also points out that the chosen proposal “cannot result in a net negative budget impact to Seattle Center.”

The groups now have two weeks to firm up their financial plans, compared to, say, the year and half the Wright family had to put together its proposal for a for-profit, paid-admission, Chihuly-themed gallery/gift-shop/catering hall. But, you know, there was a public process right? So it’s all kosher.

Cienna’s conclusion? “Goldy is right; we are being humored.”

First rule of blogging, Cienna: Goldy is always right. Even when I’m not. If an opinion is not worth being blogged with absolute confidence, it’s probably not worth being blogged at all.

And that’s why I’m so confident in restating my opinion that the best proposal for the remaining two-acre patch of the Fun Forest is, well, the Fun Forest. Extend their contract another year, and the $250,000 in annual revenue it already brings in. That will give the Seattle Center the time to hold a fair bidding process — instead of the PR sham we’ve been witnessing — while giving competing proposals the time to get their financial plans in order.

When I first saw the numbers in Publicola, that Clint Didier had raised $593,000, my initial thought was wow… that’s not bad for a fringe candidate polling in the single digits. But when I read the details elsewhere, that this represents his total to-date, that he raised a not so spectacular $220,000 in the previous quarter even with Sarah Palin’s endorsement, and that he only has about $100,000 cash on hand, I wasn’t so impressed.

Even assuming he’s in the midst of another gangbuster quarter — you know, by Didier standards — that means he’ll only have a couple hundred thousand dollars or so to spend between now and the August primary… and yet the ballots drop in another couple weeks. Let’s just say, when it comes to insurgent Tea Party campaigns, Didier is no Rand Paul.

And, if his goal really is to get through to the November election, shouldn’t he be campaigning against fellow Republican Dino Rossi instead of Democratic incumbent Sen. Patty Murray?

Throughout his six-page fundraising letter, apparently sent cold to a Seattle address, Didier focuses almost exclusively on attacking Sen. Murray, with only 38 words dedicated to “my Republican opponent” (who, in case you’re wondering, is an “establishment” “RINO,” “recruited by D.C. power brokers,” who “fails to tell people where he is on the issues”). That’s not much of a strategy for defeating Rossi in August, let alone raising money in Seattle.

It is, however, a good strategy for raising money from the teabagger crowd, to be spent helping establishment Republicans elect Rossi.

I’m not saying that’s Didier’s D.C.-P.O.-Box-based strategy. I’m just not saying it isn’t.

I’ve been following a sad story out of Las Vegas this week. A man by the name of Erik Scott, a 38-year-old (some articles say 39) highly-respected West Point graduate and businessman, was gunned down by police outside a suburban Costco.

It appears to have started when Scott, who has a concealed weapons permit, was taking metal water bottles out of their packaging to see if they’d fit in his cooler. After a store employee confronted him about taking merchandise out of the packaging and noticed his gun, he called 911 and the store was evacuated. Police arrived at the store as it was being evacuated and shot Scott to death while yelling at him to drop his weapon.

There’s a very wide discrepancy between what the police are saying, what witnesses are saying (including Scott’s girlfriend), and what people who know Scott are capable of believing. The police claim that Scott was acting erratically in the store and then pointed his weapon at them. But a number of witnesses say that Scott never pulled his weapon and that the police just started shooting as they yelled commands. Las Vegas police are withholding the surveillance video and the 911 recordings until September, after the coroner’s inquest.

Proponents of gun permits are quick to argue that carrying a gun makes you safer. But this incident highlights an important counterargument to that. Sometimes carrying a gun makes you a target as well. Anyone who has read my thoughts on this subject know that I’m not some radical gun control proponent. In fact, I was happy to see the Supreme Court rule that Chicago’s gun ban was unconstitutional. Too often, cities with a lot of crime use gun bans as feel-good fixes that don’t actually address the underlying causes of violence within their communities.

But in this incident, Scott likely became a victim because the gun he was carrying made him appear to be a threat. Even if Scott did absolutely nothing wrong (and from what I’ve read so far, that’s likely true), his not-quite-concealed weapon was likely the reason he ended up the victim of trigger-happy cops. I’m still comfortable with the idea of registered citizens having the ability to carry guns in public, but the added security of doing so is not without its risks.

Watching the recent fireworks in the Minnesota gubernatorial race, where presumptive Republican nominee Tom Emmer is under increasing fire for supporting a lower minimum wage for restaurant workers, I can’t help but be reminded of Washington state’s 2008 gubernatorial contest, in which a similar statement by Republican nominee Dino Rossi arguably proved to be the turning point in a race that had appeared to be tilting in his favor.

By the end of September 2008, in the midst of the short-lived Palin bounce, polls showed challenger Rossi closing the gap on incumbent Democratic Governor Chris Gregoire, and perhaps even taking a small lead. Republicans were ebullient and Democrats more than a little nervous as the rematch of our bitter, statistically-tied 2004 contest headed into the homestretch.

And then everything changed.

As evident in his current senate campaign, Rossi rarely makes the mistake of clearly addressing issues on which he is out of step with voters, but during a candidate debate near Blaine WA, and perhaps flush with overconfidence from recent events, Rossi finally tripped up.  As first reported by Josh Feit in his pre-PubliCola, exclusive election coverage here on HA, the candidates were asked if the minimum wage was supposed to be a “living wage,” and whether either candidate would consider scaling it back.

“I don’t know of anybody getting rich on the minimum wage,” Gregoire told the hostile crowd (the debate was sponsored by the Association of Washington Business and the questions came from their membership). “The people of Washington are struggling. They go to the gas pumps and can’t afford to fill up the car, they go to the grocery and can’t afford to put food on the table…Washingtonians need to be able to provide for their families. Plenty of people are working minimum wage jobs that need to provide for their families, and I want to stand with Washingtonians.”

She said she supported the voter-approved minimum wage, $8.07 an hour. She also said she supported training programs for teen workers.

Rossi took the opposite point of view. Touting his Washington Restaurant Association endorsement (the most adamant opponents of the minimum wage), he said:   “The minimum wage was not meant to be a family wage. It’s meant to be an entry level wage.”

Josh went on to write about a conversation he’d had that night with a Blaine convenience store clerk who had just sold Rossi a can of beans, some Certs and a Red Bull. “I’m a Republican. I like the Palin thing,” the clerk told Josh, explaining why he planned to vote for Rossi. But when Josh recounted the candidates’ exchange over the minimum wage, the suddenly not-so-star-struck clerk got pissed off:

“If he lowers it,” he said, “I don’t want to vote for him. I’d be cutting my head off. I don’t want to demote myself.”

Suddenly, WA’s highest in the nation minimum wage became one of the hottest issues in the campaign, and within days, the governor had cut a new ad bashing Rossi with it.

It didn’t take a convenience store clerk or a focus group to tell you that this was a bad issue for Rossi. Washington’s minimum wage was tied to inflation via a citizens initiative that passed by a two to one margin only a decade earlier, a policy that remains widely popular with nearly everybody except, well, restaurant owners and other low-wage employers. But rather than attempting damage control, Rossi’s people only stepped in it deeper.

When the state Dems sent an operative to stand outside a Rossi rally in Ellensberg, holding a sign criticizing Rossi’s support for slashing the minimum wage, Rossi’s top economic adviser, Kittitas County Republican chair Matt Manweller (known here on HA as “the Nutty Professor”), simply went ballistic. Prof. Manweller vehemently defended Rossi’s position while angrily attacking the young protester and the 300,000 minimum wage workers he claimed to represent.

“You and those 300,000 people are dumber than a post,” Manweller yelled. Go ahead, watch it. It’s kinda stunning.

The minimum wage remained a focal point throughout the remainder of the campaign as Gregoire gradually pulled into a commanding lead. When the ballots were tallied, Gregoire had won by a comfortable 195,000-vote margin (6.5%), compared to her disputed 133-vote victory in 2004.

No doubt there were other factors that led to Gregoire’s victory, but the minimum wage provided an invaluable toehold at a time when she was quickly losing ground, and proved a potent message for differentiating the two candidates on economic issues at a time of great economic uncertainty.

And it provides a lesson you’d think that Emmer and his fellow Minnesota Republicans might want to learn.

As the image and the tweet make clear, Dino Rossi ran into Ben Stein at the Spokane airport last week, and got him to contribute some money.

Good for you, Dino. And I’m sure the support of one of Richard Nixon’s speechwriters will go a long way toward persuading both teabaggers and independents that you’re a different kind of Republican, rather than, you know, the run of the mill corporatist hack you generally come off as.

But apart from the rather desperate sounding plea for more money (“Anyone else? Anyone? Anyone!!!!?“), the tweet got me thinking: in addition to airports and money, what else do Rossi and Stein share?

For example, the Wall Street reform bill on which Rossi finally broke his monk-like, issue-related silence… where does Stein stand on that? Rossi opposes it, erroneously saying that would leave taxpayers on the hook for another financial bailout; he even calls on Murray to “stand up to big banks” and vote it down.

And Stein? Well it turns out that Wolf Blitzer recently asked him about the bill on CNN’s The Situation Room:

BLITZER: Do you like this bill, Ben?

STEIN: I like it pretty well but it doesn’t really — it isn’t really needed. This recession was caused largely by fraud on Wall Street. There are already antifraud laws all over the place. They’re just not being enforced. This law doesn’t end too big to fail. It just has an orderly process for it. You know what? Too big to fail is not a bad idea. Lehman Brothers was too big to fail. By letting it fail the former secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson created this recession. So I mean I don’t even — I don’t even see what the problem is with too big to fail frankly. I think we’re operating from a lot of false premises here. Too big to fail is not a bad idea.

BRAZILE: Ben, at least use their money to fail and not the taxpayers’ money to bail them out.

STEIN: Well, maybe sometimes you do need to use the taxpayers’ money to bail them out. If we had bailed out Lehman Brothers we wouldn’t have had this colossal recession. It would have cost 10, 15, $20 billion to bail them out. Instead we’ve lost trillions because of this recession. A stitch in time as they say saves nine. We should have saved Lehman Brothers. It was too big to fail. We let it fail anyway and we got a catastrophic recession that hurt the smallest and weakest among us.

So Rossi opposes Wall Street reform because he says it leaves taxpayers on the hook for another bailout — even though the bill includes a Patty Murray sponsored amendment that prohibits exactly that — at the same time he’s touting a contribution from Ben Stein, who likes the bill “pretty well,” but opposes it because “Too big to fail is not a bad idea… sometimes you do need to use the taxpayers’ money to bail them out.”

Uh-huh. So which candidate is it exactly who voters can best rely on to “stand up to big banks”…? It’s hard to imagine it’s a Ben Stein Republican like Dino Rossi.

With the support of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, the U.S. Senate has finally put together the bare minimum 60 votes needed to break the Republican filibuster on Wall Street reform, making passage a sure thing.

Meanwhile, Republican real estate speculator Dino Rossi has finally taken a position on an issue, telling the Seattle Times that he would have voted with his fellow Republicans to block the measure, because, apparently, preventing banks and other financial firms from doing the same sort of things that recently cost millions of Americans their jobs would “stifle job growth,” or something.

And if that sounds confused, just watch Rossi step in it when he attempts to dig into the details:

Rossi depicted Murray’s planned vote in favor of the measure — which could come as early as Thursday — as akin to putting taxpayers on the hook for another possible bailout of financial firms. He contends that it does little to discourage future risky behavior and called on Murray to “stand up to big banks” and vote it down.

[…] Murray’s campaign swiftly derided Rossi for overlooking the fact that Murray co-sponsored a successful amendment explicitly prohibiting using tax dollars to bail out troubled financial companies.

“It seems strange that Dino Rossi took weeks to take a position on this bill without apparently having read it,” said Julie Edwards, a Murray campaign spokeswoman.

But, you know, why bother reading something as big and as complicated as the actual bill when your heart’s not really in this campaign anyway?

From an article on the expected surge in tablet usage:

The research also highlighted the “instant on” functionality and all day battery life of iPad, features that can make it more attractive to businesses than notebooks. “This is in sharp contrast to existing PCs,” Goldman wrote, “which typically take 15-60 seconds to resume from a standby or sleep state.”

This has always baffled me. When I lift the lid on my MacBook, it turns on. When I close the lid, it turns off. Nearly instantly. This is the way Mac notebooks have always worked, for what… nearly two decades now.

And yet Microsoft and its partners have never managed (or bothered) to match the same basic functionality.

I don’t want to start a Mac vs. Windows flame thread here, but what’s the deal? Is it a patent thing?

Joshua Green at The Atlantic writes about the impact that marijuana legalization initiatives will have on partisan races:

I have a short piece in the current Atlantic about the marijuana ballot initiatives sweeping the country. (Paul Starobin also has an excellent cover story in National Journal.) But one issue nobody has examined is what effect these initiatives have on candidates’ performance at the polls. Acting on a tip from an Obama official, I found a few Democratic consultants who have become convinced that ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana, like the one Californians will vote on in November, actually help Democrats in the same way that gay marriage bans were supposed to have helped Republicans. They are similarly popular, with medical marijuana having passed in 14 states (and the District of Columbia) where it has appeared on the ballot. In a recent poll, 56 percent of Californians said they favor the upcoming initiative to legalize and tax pot.

The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.

I think it’s hard to argue with that. Younger people today are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, so if you have an initiative that motivates more young people to vote, Democrats on the ballot will get a boost. But in California, where Proposition 19 will be voted on this fall, the picture may not be so clear.

The reason is because both Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, the two Democrats running for statewide offices this year, both came out against the initiative. And they didn’t just check some checkbox somewhere saying that they were against it. They went full-on drug warrior with their public statements.

Boxer’s campaign put out a statement saying that it would lead to an increase in crime, and that law enforcement costs would go up. Just to underscore how ludicrous that statement is, the official ballot argument for Proposition 19 was signed by a former police chief, a former deputy chief, and a former judge.

Jerry Brown put out an even more ridiculous statement in opposition to Proposition 19 saying that it would open the floodgates for Mexican drug cartels. Jon Walker does an excellent job here drawing the parallels to alcohol prohibition and explaining why Brown’s statement makes absolutely no sense.

The recent polling for both Boxer and Brown hasn’t been good. Brown is trailing Meg Whitman in the Governor’s race. And in recent months, Boxer’s favorability numbers have taken a hit and she’s in a dead heat with Carly Fiorina. Her decline probably has a series of factors, but her opposition to the marijuana initiative is likely playing some non-trivial role in it.

I feel confident in saying that for two reasons. One, it’s an issue that puts her in direct opposition to her base (69% of self-described liberals support it according to the latest Survey USA poll). And two, I tend to think that while very few voters consider marijuana to be a major issue, a lot more of them have a strong enough opinion about the issue (and understand it well enough) for it to play into their overall perceptions of how the candidates would deal with issues more pressing, like the economy or health care. Boxer is being painted as an out-of-touch DC insider who caters to government interests. Her position on marijuana just plays right into that stereotype.

So how is this going to end up? Will the benefits to California’s big ticket Democrats from additional young voter participation due to Proposition 19 be counteracted by both Boxer’s and Brown’s laughable public stances on it? Someone with more time and resources than me could potentially put together some good poll questions to explore that, or to do some statistical analysis from existing polls. But what’s clear is that even if Democratic consultants see the benefit of having marijuana initiatives on the ballot, they apparently still don’t see the benefit of actually endorsing them.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting report in the San Francisco Chronicle about Boxer and her polling woes:

Boxer’s slight numerical lead masks potentially serious problems for the senator, starting with how 52 percent of the respondents hold an unfavorable view of her.

At the same time, her job approval rating is among the lowest that Field has measured for her since she was first elected to the Senate in 1992: 43 percent of registered voters disapprove of her performance while 42 percent approve. Among likely voters, 48 percent disapprove and 42 percent approve.

…

“It’s a reflection of the effectiveness of a Republican strategy to characterize Sen. Boxer as everything that’s wrong with the government,” said Larry Berman, a professor of political science at UC Davis. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., another longtime Democrat facing a tough re-election challenge, faces a similar predicament, Berman said.

As I mentioned above, the job of characterizing Senator Boxer as “everything that’s wrong with the government” becomes a lot easier when Boxer herself takes a position on the marijuana initiative that large numbers of both her base and independents understand as being “something that’s wrong with the government”.

So here’s a question I haven’t heard asked, let alone answered, throughout the contentious debate over who pays cost overruns on the Big Bore tunnel.

If, for example, the tunnel boring machine gets stuck, as happened with Brightwater, and if the contractor is unable to get it moving again, as happened with Brightwater, and if we’re forced to bring in a new contractor at an expense of hundreds of millions of dollars above the original bid, as happened with Brightwater… who is going to write the checks?

Am not asking who will ultimately pay for the cost overruns; that’s what everybody is fighting over. But rather, who will pay the new contractor, in the short term, to complete the job?

Will the state, who is responsible for digging the tunnel, fork over the cash, and then attempt to collect from Seattle taxpayers later? Or, at the point when cost overruns become an actual reality, will the state halt work on the project until Seattle somehow comes up with the cash? I mean, obviously, no contractor is going to start a multi-hundred million dollar job on promises that they’ll be paid eventually… you know, once the city and the state and the original contractor finish years of litigation.

With the legislature insisting that the city is responsible, and the city insisting that the cost overrun provision is unenforceable, and the governor insisting that there won’t be any cost overruns — and the whole project under-bonded by more than half — isn’t there a potential cash flow problem here should the worst happen? And isn’t this the sorta thing we should settle before we sign all the contracts?

I’m just askin’.

For a guy running as “a new kind of Republican,” and railing against a Republican opponent who “is part of the establishment, having been recruited by the D.C. power brokers,” you’d think Clint Didier might have found a more personal and, I dunno, this-Washingtonish return address for his fundraising envelopes.

Oh, and by the way Clint, if you’re wasting your money sending expensive, six-piece, full-color mailers to the kinda Seattle liberals who would immediately hand it over to me for public ridicule, your “new kind of Republican” Beltway direct mail house might want to buy themselves a more targeted list.

This is the sort of stuff that happens along militarized borders. I’m just sayin’.

The Seattle Times’ Jim Brunner reports that real estate speculator and Republican senatorial wannabe Dino Rossi “pulled in $1.4 million during his first month in the race.” On the surface, not too shabby. But… technically, it was Rossi’s first five weeks in the race, and if you’re looking at fundraising trends for evidence of voter enthusiasm, let alone the ability of a candidate to compete in the looming air war, that extra week makes quite a difference.

An additional $1.4 million a month from July 1 through November 2 would bring Rossi’s totals to about $7 million, a hair more than Sen. Patty Murray’s current $6.8 million cash on hand, though far short of her $11.5 million total. That said, Sen. Murray has picked up her fundraising pace since Rossi entered the race, hauling in an additional $1.6 million during the recently ended quarter, and, well, it takes money to make money, so a sizable chunk of Rossi’s monthly haul inevitably goes out the door in fundraising costs. Thus, while Rossi is certainly gaining ground on the incumbent — starting from zero, how could he not? —even $1.4 million per month would leave him at a substantial dollar disadvantage.

But Rossi isn’t really hauling in the bucks at a pace of $1.4 million a month, now is he?

Remember, Rossi famously boasted, and the media faithfully reported, that he raised over $600,000 in his first official week of campaigning, the first six days of which actually fell in the month of May. No doubt there was some pent up pro-Rossi excitement… and despite the campaign finance laws, no doubt a bunch of big donors were lined up in advance. But once he picked all the low hanging fruit, Rossi’s fundraising numbers clearly trended down, only bringing in an additional $800,000 during the month of June.

Extrapolate that number over the four remaining months of the campaign, and Rossi only raises $4.6 million total. Then figure in his fundraising costs plus Murray’s future haul, and that’s enough to buy Rossi a race in which he gets himself outspent by a better than two to one margin. Not so hot for a candidate whose name ID and fundraising prowess are his two biggest qualifications.

And according to Real Clear Politics, Rossi’s relatively anemic results are not from lack of trying:

[H]e basically admitted that because he started so late, his campaign organization is currently in a mad dash to cut into Senator Patty Murray’s huge fundraising advantage.

And a mad dash that first week was. Unfortunately for him, a senate campaign is a marathon, and in this and other respects, Rossi’s starting to look awfully damn tired.

Please join us tonight for another Tuesday evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by earlier and join some of us for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 328 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.