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In response to Wednesday’s expulsion of me and Josh from a Dino Rossi press conference, I wondered out loud if our friends (and enemies) in the traditional media would stand up for the rights of their new media colleagues:

I don’t know if there are some in the old press who applaud these efforts to exclude new media journalists like me, but they certainly don’t seem to be standing up for us.

Well, it turns out that at least a few print journalists have stood up, and I want to thank them for their support.

Over at The Stranger, Josh’s former co-worker Erica C. Barnett slogged on Josh’s plight, remarking that she’s “still pissed” about the one time she was asked to leave a press conference.  She offers this sage advice:

People who work with the media need to learn that you get better press by letting the media (even the partisan media!) in than by excluding them.

Meanwhile, Bellingham Herald political reporter Sam Taylor offers his own defense of both me and my medium:

I would strongly wager that, while my page views are pretty dang big here in our area, Goldy’s make mine look like a tiny, female Chinese gymnast (of legal age to compete, of course) in a Sumo wrestling contest. Blogging is the new journalism, my friends. Mark my words.

But I was most heartened to read Seattle Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey’s first hand account of the incident, not only vouching for my description of the events, but defending my media credentials, partisan or not:

Being an employee of a big paper, I have hardly ever had that happen to me. The one time I remember was in the 90s as a business reporter being denied entry to a stockholder meeting of the Fisher Companies, which was then under SEC rules a public company. I was furious–shaking–and a good deal less polite to the Fisher vice-president who kicked me out than Goldy was yesterday–and I don’t regret anything I said to that Fisher man, or about him, thereafter. My experience wasn’t exactly the same as Goldy’s, but close enough.

Obviously, a lawyer holding a press conference in his private offices may let in who he likes and exclude who he likes. It may well be, as Goldy suspects, that they excluded him because he’s anti-Rossi, and because his style of expression is less than genteel. Maybe even the name of his blog has something to do with it. But for the record: Goldy is part of the media in Seattle. People who follow politics know who he is. They read him. Whether Feit is paid, or how much he is paid, is beside the point. We are not media because of how much money we make, or that we make any at all. We are media because of what we do.

Goldy, or his man Feit, should have been let in.

As Ramsey clearly explained in the comment thread of a previous post, the Times op/ed page is opinion, and as such “is not bound to be evenhanded”… and I’d argue that yesterday’s Rossi apologia certainly wasn’t.  That was the sort of partisan editorial the Rossi campaign wanted and expected from the Times, and that is the sort of partisan editorial Ramsey delivered.  There is this convenient fiction that journalistic partisanship is a vice unique to the blogs, and that it inherently diminishes our credibility, but in this particular race it is fair to suggest that Ramsey and I are equally partisan… only in favor of different candidates.

In the end, Josh and I were excluded from the press conference not because we are partisans, and not because we are bloggers, but because Rossi’s handlers feared the difficult questions we might ask in the presence of a roomful of reporters.  The “partisan blogger” label was just a bullshit excuse.

Four years ago when I first started blogging, I didn’t really consider myself a journalist either, but over time both my blog and my thinking has evolved.  As Ramsey unequivocably argues, we are a legitimate part of the media, and it is in the public interest that we be treated that way. For as more and more traditional media moves online while blogs like mine expand the quantity and quality of our coverage, the line between the two will continue to blur, making any effort to ghettoize mere bloggers nothing more than a convenient excuse to deny access to journalists who produce unflattering coverage.

And when subjects get to pick and choose the reporters covering them rather than the other way around, our democracy loses.

Apparently internal Democratic polling has challenger George Fearing within five points of incumbent Congressman and lump of coal Doc Hastings, R-Pasco. Read more about it at McCranium.

Also, the General reminds us how Hastings did the bidding of Tom Delay when he was on the House Ethics Committee. There was a fine moment in the history of ethics.

If Republicans wish to accuse us of wishing to settle old scores and rub salt in their wounds, well, they would be correct. The perfidy of the last eight years is more than ample justification to throw the lot of them out of every office we can.

The mind simply boggles at the thought of Doc Hastings having to defend his district.

If you would like to provide, say, $25 worth of salt in the form of a last minute television ad, click here. (Yeah, supposedly cable spots over there are just incredibly cheap. More salt for your buck.)

Looks like even long-time Republican incumbents are really feeling the heat. So what should Republicans do? In the case of struggling state Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, the answer is predictable. Just lie.Senate Republicans Thursday accused Democrat David Carrier of violating state campaign finance laws by receiving $40,000 more from the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee over the past two weeks than the law allows his campaign to accept.

But Carrier, who is running to unseat Republican Sen. Don Benton, denied the charge, calling it “a complete lie.”

“What they’re trying to do is create the appearance of inappropriate activity that isn’t there,” he said.

And what exactly was the heinous crime that has the senate Republicans so exorcised?

Chris Gregorich, executive director of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, said the committee’s contributions remain well within the limit.

As of Thursday, he said, the Carrier campaign reported $31,070 in in-kind contributions and $14,000 in cash from the committee, for a total of $45,070.

Gregorich said the committee wrote a $30,000 check to the Carrier campaign on Oct. 12 that would have put the campaign over the legal limit. But he said the check was written in error by the committee’s treasurer and later destroyed.

Pass the smelling salts. Now the GOP Party is complaining about stuff that didn’t actually happen. It stretches credulity to believe that Senate Republicans actually believed their Democratic counterparts would violate contribution limits by $40,000. I mean, wisecracks aside, these are professional campaign operatives on both sides.

Besides, the voters could give a rip, especially right now. Little things like retirement funds and jobs are weighing a wee bit more on people’s minds than manufactured Republican outrage. But Republicans are always the victims, you know. It couldn’t possibly be that Republicans generally have few positive ideas and people are finally seeing through their boilerplate platitudes about taxes.

And with the PDC complaint coming on behalf of a special interest glutton like Benton, the whole kerfuffle is nothing but a last-weekend smear aimed to the GOP Party base. Like we’ve never seen this play before.

If nothing else it was good to see Carrier call them out on their lie. He’s one to watch.

Here’s hoping Carrier gets added to the list of incredibly pleasant surprises come Tuesday.

A report by Progressive Future and the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center listed I-1000 as one of the best voter initiatives in the United States this year (you can see their full report in PDF form here). This is good news for several reasons, one of which being that progressive groups are seeing the value of promoting liberty as the road to achieving the goals that progressives want to achieve. If you go through the report, you’ll see that a number of the initiatives were chosen because of an emphasis on limiting government interference with our decisions. That’s how the progressive movement can succeed in this country.

In addition to this endorsement, former Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber cleared up another piece of propaganda being spread around by I-1000 opponents:

You may have seen the story of a woman on the Oregon Health Plan that makes the insinuation that services covered under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act are prioritized over chemotherapy because it costs less for patients to die than to live. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unfortunately, a poorly worded letter to this individual contributed to that mistaken impression. Since then, the political campaign against I-1000 has made it difficult for the public to get the facts. I would like to set the record straight.

Like most insurers, the OHP covers nearly all chemotherapy prescribed for cancer patients, including the multiple rounds of chemotherapy this patient received. The request for second-line treatment was denied because of the drug’s limited benefit and very high cost.

When the Oregon Health Plan went into effect in 1994, it was backed by principles that remain relevant today, including a process for setting health care priorities that reflects a consensus of social values and considers the good of society as a whole.

As I’ve explained previously, the argument that we must limit our choices out of fear of what could happen within our broken health care system is pure folly. It’s no different than saying that we should outlaw abortion because it could allow for health care providers to cover abortions but not cover the cost of having the child. As Kitzhaber points out, the hysteria whipped by the I-1000 opposition is completely baseless. Patients in Oregon are not at risk of being told that they won’t receive proper health care because of their death with dignity law, and neither will patients in Washington.

Obama	McCain
100.0% probability of winning	0.0% probability of winning
Mean of 369 electoral votes	Mean of 169 electoral votes

Yesterday’s analysis showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by 362 to 176 electoral votes.

Today there were 32 new polls in 20 states released. Obama get the better of it.

After 100,000 simulated elections, Obama wins all 100,000 times. Obama receives (on average) 369 to McCain’s 169 electoral votes—that gives Obama 100 electoral votes in excess of what he needs to win. If an election had been held today, Obama would have won with near certainty.

Detailed results for this analysis are available at Hominid Views.

Methods are described in the FAQ. The most recent version of this analysis can be found on this page.

UPDATE [Lee]: If there’s anything I take issue with in this post by Josh Marshall, it’s that “Disgrace” may not be a strong enough term for what the McCain campaign is pulling with respect to Rashid Khalidi.

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/harvard.mp3]

Remember a couple months back, in the midst of an apparent “Palin bounce,” when liberal bloggers like me were warned that our personal attacks against Sarah Palin were backfiring?  Well, guess what…

A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said that Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up 9 percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said that the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favored Senator Barack Obama.

In a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said that they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people to serve in his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

What we did was soften her up… sowed the seeds of doubt.  And when Palin got out on the campaign trail and proved herself to be a one trick pitbull, totally incapable of fielding even a few simple questions from Katie Couric, Palin’s approval numbers collapsed faster than the stock market.

Palin is not qualified to be vice president, and it would have been absolutely stupid and self-destructive to refrain from relentlessly pointing that out, simply because she’s a woman.  Perhaps McCain gambled that in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat, the Dems would be too timidly PC to go there.  Well, we weren’t, and we did.  And now McCain is paying the price for the most irresponsible VP pick since Spiro Agnew.

Worst. Campaign. Ever.

From Iowa State Daily:

Elborno said after seeing the people who were asked to leave, she was concerned that McCain’s staffers were profiling people on appearance to determine who might be a potential protester.

“When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.”

Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.

“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

So you think that girl is going to continue to vote for Republicans?

McPalin is alienating an entire generation with their abusive, paranoid style. Four years ago at Shrub rallies you at least had to possess something terrorist-related like a Democratic tee shirt. Now you just have to look like you might want to vote for Obama.

Truly unbelievable. Let’s hope we can put a permanent end to this iteration of the institution known as the Republican Party. They have not one redeeming feature as a major political party. If they get their clocks cleaned as we all hope, when the inevitable “what went wrong” discussions start in earnest, honest grass roots Republicans are going to need to point out that the first step is to stop being lying, paranoid, vicious morons who throw their own supporters out of rallies.

Or, you know, honest Republicans can come on over to the big Democratic tent. Friendly discussions about the appropriate marginal tax rate can be held among fellow citizens of good will. If one truly believes a certain rate is too high, we can investigate it, listen to economists argue, and legislate it and so on. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s called governing.

(Props to Atrios.)

The podcast begins in the WA-08 congressional district, where some journalists and a lot of Republicans don’t seem to understand academic degrees and terminology. A Harvard graduate clears matters up. From degrees to convictions…the panel scrutinizes Rep. Dave Reichert’s illegal campaign loan. Next they examine “G.O.P. Party” candidate Dino Rossi’s deposition over campaign finance law violations. (Oh…that sound you hear? It’s the gnashing of Republican teeth across the state). After a brief sojourn into presidential politics, the panel revisits the strange case of Alaska’s Uncle Ted Stevens seven traffic tickets felony convictions. The podcast closes with panelist’s predictions for the WA-08 and the gubernatorial races.

Goldy was joined by Matt Stoller of OpenLeft, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, Publisher of the Group News Blog, Jesse Wendel, and initiative specialist Laura McClintock of McClintock Consulting.

The show is 51:36, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_oct_28_2008.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting podcasting liberally.]

TPM reports that the McCain campaign is now sliming WA state of all places with it’s latest, ridiculous robocall:

[audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Tpmtv-AntiObamaMcCainCampaignRobocallRunningInArizonaOctober29555.mp3]

Yup, according to McCain, we Democrats are dangerous, because we want to “give civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators.”  What an asshole.

And, what an idiot to waste even a fraction of a cent per call in a state he has no chance of winning.  Good thing McCain is about to get his ass kicked, because if he ran this country in any way near as disastrously as he’s run his campaign, he’d make George Bush look like George Washington.

The reason the BIAW campaign Dino Rossi campaign for governor didn’t let Goldy and Josh in to cover their press conference yesterday is because Goldy and Josh are probably Nazi communists. Who can forget this gem from the March issue of the BIAW newsletter, which Goldy had a great deal of fun with?

What environmentalists offer today, instead of the racist German National Socialism that defined the Nazi party, is an international environmental socialism, an amalgam of Nazism and communism—an international environmental socialism with a centralized planning scheme. But this amalgam is increasingly at odds with itself, causing a rift within the environmental lobby, with builders caught in the middle.

The issue really isn’t about name-calling, it’s about the constant inaccuracy of the right wing. Nobody with an ounce of common sense would try to shoehorn mainstream environmentalism into a made-up box called “an amalgam of Nazism and communism.” But they do it anyway, with any idea that strikes them as even faintly liberal, from tax policy to social policy to foreign policy, from the BIAW to the RNC to Sam the Non-Plumber.

I can never decide if it’s entirely deliberate, or if these people are just so profoundly ignorant of history they simply cannot express themselves clearly. At any rate, a vote for Dino Rossi is an endorsement of the inaccurate and inflammatory baloney being peddled at all levels of the Republican Party right now. It’s all they have left, you Swedish Islamo-Nazi-Liberal-Fascist Meatballs.

I rode up the elevator with Seattle Times editorial board member Bruce Ramsey, as we both headed to wait with the press for Dino Rossi’s news conference.  The difference was, he was escorted into the press room while I was escorted out.

Why?  I’m a “partisan blogger” I was told, while he is a legitimate member of the press.  You can read the Times’ totally, nonpartisan, impartial, objective, fair and balanced editorial here.

I don’t know if there are some in the old press who applaud these efforts to exclude new media journalists like me, but they certainly don’t seem to be standing up for us.  Josh Feit, when he was credentialed by The Stranger, had the same kind of access as Ramsey, but yesterday, a working reporter in the employ of HA and its readers, was also escorted from the building because, I suppose, he wasn’t paid by the right kind of people.

Over time, more and more journalists will be employed by nontraditional outlets like HA, and if the subjects of our reporting get to pick and choose who is a journalist and who is not, it really isn’t honest to call it “journalism” anymore, is it?