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Yesterday’s analysis showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by (on average) 370 to 168 electoral votes. There were 26 new polls representing 17 states released today to weigh in on today’s analysis. For the most part, the polls strongly favored Obama.

Now, the outcome of 100,000 simulated elections is that Obama wins them all. Obama receives (on average) 376 to McCain’s 162 electoral votes—a gain of six. In an election held now, Obama would win with near certainty.

This table shows the electoral vote total for different criteria for the probability of winning a state (Safe=100%, Strong=90%+, Leans=60%+, Weak=50%+):

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.

[EDITOR’S NOTE:  As long as the Reichert campaign is bringing up the issue of resume padding, isn’t it time the media address the real elephant in the room… the simple fact that Reichert’s entire political career is based on the out and out lie that he caught the Green River Killer?  Of course, he didn’t, and most everybody in the media understands that, but nobody is willing to say it publicly because it was the media after all, that willfully gave life to this self-aggrandizing myth.

So in the spirit of full disclosure, I am reprinting this October 2006 special post by Michael Hood, originally titled “It’s the Green River, Stupid.”  And you can read Part II of Michael’s report over on his blog, BlatherWatch. In the meanwhile, please help Darcy refute the lies, by generously giving to her one last time. — GOLDY]

I am not afraid, I’ve had people point guns at me.
— Rep. Dave Reichert

“He desecrated the victims. The public ought to know that.” Tomas Guillen is describing Republican 8th District Congressman Dave Reichert and his manipulation of the Green River murder investigation and the arrest of Gary Ridgway to climb up into party politics.

Guillen’s no political firebrand, he’s a respected Seattle University journalism and criminal justice professor. But as a Seattle Times reporter, he covered the Green River story from its beginnings and has written two books on the subject.

His academic text, Serial Killers: Issues Explored Through the Green River Murders, and Ridgway attorney Mark Prothero’s Defending Gary, both written after Reichert’s 2004 election, tell a starkly different story than does Reichert’s ghost-written autohagiography, Chasing the Devil, My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer.

Reichert’s record as sheriff was exposed in last week’s devastating reporting by the P-I’s Lewis Kamb who found plenty of former colleagues who’d reveal him to be “an ambitious self-promoter, an inexperienced manager prone to poor decisions, even a close-minded detective more obstacle than asset to a serial murder investigation.”

Reichert refused to be interviewed in person for the P-I’s piece, preferring to answer the reporter’s questions in writing. He did not return our attempts at contact.

(The written material, and people we’ve talked to use some strong adjectives to describe the former Sheriff’s professional behavior: manipulative, self-serving, amateurish, ambitious, creepy, bungling, inappropriate, opportunistic, egotistical, voyeuristic, and stubborn. These are quite different from the descriptives we’ve been hearing for years: heroic, gracious, sensitive, muscular, chivalrous, well-mannered, brave, clean and reverent. You decide).

Sheriff Reichert became the public face of the sensational arrest of the serial killer by elbowing his way in front of the cameras on November 30, 2000 when the sensational collar was announced.

Everyone knows Reichert is the guy who caught the Green River killer- Why? Because he reminds us in every introduction; every speech, interview, and on his website.

It helped get him elected in 2004 in his race against KIRO radio host, Dave Ross; and he still flogs it every time he opens his mouth in his race against Darcy Burner.

Recently, on KUOW’s Weekday with Steve Scher, (in a rare appearance in a venue where he might be seriously questioned) he referenced serial killers no fewer than three times in one hour on the local NPR talk show despite being asked no questions on the subject by Scher, who’s unused to politicians who drop blood instead of names.

Here’s an example: Why is Reichert against abortion? He told a interviewer recently, “I have a great respect for life. I’ve seen a lot of death in my career, worked Green River, seen lots of dead bodies.”

Back in Washington, the Honorable Mr. Reichert is known as the Man from Green River- his longest speech on the House floor during his lackluster first term was about “capturing” Gary Ridgway.

The release of Chasing the Devil, in late July, 2004 was exquisitely synched-up with his primary campaign which was a difficult one with a crowded Republican field anxious to replace the retiring Jennifer Dunn.

Bolstered by both his publisher’s marketing and his own political campaign, it was a perfect PR storm. Reichert’s face was thrust onto the front pages of local papers. He was interviewed on CNN and Court TV in full dress uniform (and every hair present and accounted for) talking about “capturing” the killer.

“Reichert used the serial murder case to move forward,” Guillen told BlatherWatch. “It was a travesty.” Photos released when Ridgway was arrested show Reichert in a suit posing in the bottom of a ravine near the Des Moines Highway.

“He used the grave site of a murder victim for personal ambition,” he says.

Meanwhile, his opponents, Bellevue Councilman Conrad Lee, State Sen. Luke Esser and (now GOP State Chairman) Diane Tebelius were lucky if they made page B-1 with their little coffee klatches, blah-blah press releases, and cheesy meet & greets.

(Chasing the Devil was neither a literary nor a popular success. P-I books critic, John Marshall wrote that Reichert painted himself as “muscular, charismatic, devoutly Christian, a dogged mix of Dudley Do-Right and the Lone Ranger.” Not exactly a bestseller: you can now buy a like new copy on Amazon for $1.74.)

Although otherwise a failure, his book as a political instrument was inspired. Media was flooded with pictures of the sheriff in a hunky muscle shirt sifting for bones at a body dump site, or in full Sheriffian regalia sternly leaning into and staring down the cowering serial killer from across a table. Reichert won the primary easily and got a tremendous knee-up in the November election.

(There’s his hair. It’s magnificent. Dave Ross told us: “He’s got great hair, he’s acknowledged he’s got great hair.” He’s known in legal circles as “Sheriff Hairspray.” [Reichert’s hair]… is always ready for the next photo opportunity,” says Prothero).

“My standing orders were that we were going to campaign on issues,” says Dave Ross. “Rumors I got about Dave or the Green River killer or the release of the book- we weren’t going to touch them.”

But there’s more than a little resume inflation going on in Chasing the Devil. There’s some obfuscatin’. Reichert had been “lead detective” in 1982 as the first bodies surfaced in and around the Green River. His book, however, would let you believe he held the title until 1990, never mentioning that several other detectives led in later murders.

The book is more than three quarters done before he makes passing reference to the fact that the task force had commanders over the “lead detectives.” Former Detective Bob Keppel told the P-I, Reichert was “one detective among many,” and never led discussions about the direction of the task force as a true leader would have.

Actually, he had little to do with the investigation having left the task force in 1990 to climb the bureaucratic ladder in the Sheriff’s Department. What’s more, these new accounts show how Reichert’s tremendous ego was responsible for early police blunders that stalled the investigation and let Gary Ridgway continue killing for decades.

But great hair or not, “He got elected based on Green River, when in fact, he didn’t solve it and he didn’t win against Gary Ridgway,” says Guillen.”

The fact is: technology caught the killer, not Detective Reichert’s dogged shoe-leather sleuthing as his press so dramatically implies. Even then, on Sheriff Reichert’s watch, the saliva sample that could have busted Ridgway as early as 1996 when the DNA technology became available, was not tested until 2001.

Women died in that interim.

[Click through to read It’s the Green River, Stupid: Part 2, including the really creepy parts.  And please don’t forget to give to Darcy.  Thanks.]

I hope everybody understands the fraud the Seattle Times perpetrated on voters this morning.  Yesterday, the NRCC shopped around this bullshit gotcha story, fishing for media validators to back up attack ads they already planned to run, and despite serious reservations about the reporter’s ignorance of degree requirements at Harvard, the Times’ editors chose to comply.  Now, regardless of any forthcoming retraction or apology or continued backtracking (and there’s been a ton of backtracking since the story first hit the website,) you can expect the airwaves to be plastered with ads until election day, citing the Times accusing Darcy of lying to voters.

The Times delivered Reichert a steaming pile of shit, neatly tied up in a ribbon.

So now, the only way for Darcy to counter these baseless lies is with more advertising of her own, ads for which she’ll need to raise a lot money if she hopes to keep up with the barrage of attack ads Reichert is airing, courtesy of an unprecedented and illegal loan from his media buyer.  That of course, is where you come in.

Over on Daily Kos, Markos is just as outraged as I am, and he’s asking his readers to do something about it:

Look, here’s the deal: The local media and the local political establishment see themselves as kingmakers. They get to decide who sinks or swims in their areas of influence. Then along comes Darcy Burner, thinking she can crash the gates and get elected for office in the district, and the local elites are pissed. So they conspire with Reichert, a supposed local hero, to dish all sorts of crap about Darcy and bury Reichert’s dirt.

We’re winning this race, but they’re throwing EVERYTHING plus the kitchen sink at Darcy. If we want to win this thing, we’ve got to get her back and push back. We’ve got to leave everything on the road.

Right now Darcy is about $350,000 behind Reichert. I’m not going to pretend that we can raise that kind of money quickly, but can we cover $50,000 of that? Can we help Burner fight against the smears from the state and national GOP?

Darcy has far more in-district and in-state contributors and money than Reichert, and you all deserve tremendous kudos for your strong support, but with election day less than two weeks away it is our responsibility to do our part in this latest national netroots fund drive.

Markos himself has personally donated an addtional $2200, and while I can’t afford to max out given my meager earnings, I just contributed another $200.  That’s an awful lot of money for me, but with victory within our grasp, I hope you all join me in reaching as deep into our collective pockets as we can to put Darcy Burner into office.

Please give to Darcy today.

Rasmussen just released its latest poll in Washington’s gubernatorial race, showing Gov. Chris Gregoire leading Republican challenger Dino Rossi by a 50 to 48 percent margin.

These numbers are nowhere near the recent Elway Poll that showed Gregoire with 51-39 lead, but suggests a steady trend in Gov. Gregoire’s favor from Rasmussen’s previous two surveys, that showed the race tied 48-48 on October 2, and a 52-46 Rossi lead on September 10… this despite the unprecedented millions of dollars in relentless attack ads from Rossi’s allies over the past few weeks.

So all in all, I’d rather be in the governor’s shoes right now than Rossi’s.

Darcy Burner does indeed have a B.A. from Harvard in computer science and economics; that is an established fact.

So, when Reichert, the NRCC and their enablers at the Seattle Times argue that claiming a degree in “economics” is misleading because it fails to mention the “computer science,” wouldn’t the opposite be equally true?  Wouldn’t it be just as misleading to claim a degree in “computer science” while failing to mention the emphasis on economics?  Are they really implying that anything less than spelling out “a degree in computer science and economics” is a deliberate misrepresentation?

Hmm…

Let’s see if this, Rep. Dave Reichert’s official Congressional biography, makes the front page of the Seattle Times:

REICHERT, David G., .a Representative from Washington; born in Detroit Lakes, Becker County, Minn., August 29, 1950; graduated, Kent Meridian High School, Renton, Wash., 1968; B.A., Concordia Lutheran College, Portland, Oreg., 1970; U.S. Air Force Reserve, 1971-1976; U.S. Air Force, 1976; police officer, King County, Wash., 1972-1977; sheriff, King County, Wash., 1997- 2004; elected as a Republican to the One Hundred Ninth Congress and to the succeeding Congress (January 3, 2005-present).

Problem is, Reichert never earned a B.A. from Concordia in 1970, because they didn’t even grant their first bachelors degree until 1980.  In fact, the year Reichert started was Concordia’s first year as a Junior College; before then, it was merely a Lutheran high school.

What Reichert has is a two-year Associates degree from a small, Christian, Junior College.  (And possibly, not even that; has Heffter bothered to ask Concordia’s registrar for Reichert’s records?)  Thus Reichert’s official bio, which he has allowed to go uncorrected for four years, and which has been picked up by numerous news organizations and other web sites, is an undisputed lie.  Gonna print that on your front page Mr. Blethen?  I didn’t think so.

But more important than the parsing of the word “and” in Darcy Burner’s degree, or the substitution of the letter “B” for “A” in Reichert’s, should be their actual education, and how well that prepares the two candidates to deal with our nation’s unprecedented economic crisis.  Reichert has a two-year degree from a small, ultra-conservative Christian school.  (And by “ultra-conservative” I mean Missouri Synod Lutheran, whose positions on reproductive rights and the societal role of women leaves them far to the right of most fundamentalist Evangelicals.)  Meanwhile, Darcy earned a B.A. in computer science and economics, in the process completing five courses in economics plus two related math courses at Harvard, one of the most prestigious and rigorous universities in the world.

Isn’t that what should really be important to voters instead of these stupid gotchas?

UPDATE:
Looks like somebody is covering their tracks.  After four years of allowing an erroneous biographical entry on congress.gov tout a four-year B.A. degree when he only earned a two-year A.A., Reichert’s entry is miraculously updated, but only after being publicly scolded for his resume padding.  Of course, the lie still lives on in the Google cache.

After interviewing former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis, here is what reporter Emily Heffter chose to print in the Seattle Times:

Harry Lewis, a Harvard computer science professor and former dean of the school, confirmed that Burner did study economics at Harvard.

“She doesn’t have a degree in economics,” he said. “It’s a specialty within the computer science degree that she has.”

And here is Dean Lewis in his own unexpurgated words (the emphasis is mine):

I’m the professor and ex-dean who was quoted in the story, and as it happens, also the guy who wrote the CS degree requirements. At the time Darcy was at Harvard, she would have needed, as part of her CS degree requirements, several courses in a technical specialization area related to CS. She fulfilled that CS degree requirement by specializing in Economics (which meant, by the way, that she couldn’t have taken just the easy, non-mathematical Ec courses). So it’s not exactly a minor (which we didn’t have then, though we do now), and it’s also not anything that the registrar would be able to certify (because it’s an internal requirement of the computer science faculty). But it’s something everyone getting a degree in CS had to do (though other students would have other specialties). The way Darcy is describing herself is accurate.

And here is Dean Lewis’ account of his interview with Heffter:

Talked to her and told her you had a degree in CS with a specialization in Ec. She said you were claiming to have a degree in Ec and I just repeated myself. She asked me what that consisted of and I said a block of Ec courses. She started to ask me if that would make you qualified … and I cut her off, saying I couldn’t judge economics qualifications. She thanked me and said that was helpful.

Darcy Burner does indeed have a degree from Harvard in computer science and economics, and it is utterly outrageous that the Times would choose to turn the NRCC’s parsing of the word “and” into a front page gotcha story defaming Darcy’s character.

They owe her an apology.

Three former Washington State Governors have endorsed the Death with Dignity Initiative I-1000, Republican Dan Evans and Democrats Booth Gardner and Gary Locke. A fourth, Republican John Spellman, is opposing the measure. I’d been planning to write a final post about all of the myths and lies being spread by the I-1000 opposition, but Spellman’s recent editorial in the Seattle PI contains enough of them that it serves as the perfect springboard for this post anyway.

It is not often I publicly disagree with my former gubernatorial colleagues, Booth Gardner and Daniel Evans. While I respect them both, I must firmly disagree with their support of the assisted suicide initiative, I-1000.

Both frame the issue as one of strictly personal choice. But what’s at stake is actually much broader. Derek Humphrey, co-founder of the Hemlock Society, has asserted repeatedly that euthanasia and assisted suicide will inevitably prevail in our society because they make economic sense.

Think about that for a second. What on Earth is he saying? Obviously it’s cheaper to have people with serious illnesses die sooner rather than later. But when economics enters the picture, it’s no longer a matter of strictly personal choice. Do you really think that, once implemented, assisted suicide will remain merely a “personal choice,” isolated from not-so-subtle coercions of everyday life and magically protected from health care rationing?

Yes, I do, and we can look at Oregon for the proof. Oregon’s law has been on the books for 10 years now, and there’s absolutely no evidence that it’s moving any closer to being anything other than a personal choice. No one anywhere wants coercions, and no one anywhere is talking about coercions. As in Oregon, only the terminally ill individual makes the choice under I-1000, not doctors, not health care providers, not family members, not the government. The belief that I-1000 will lead to an end where people have less choices has no basis in reality.

[Read more…]

From BrianK in the comment threads:

I am an accountant. As part of my licensing and for other reasons, I am occasionally asked if I have an accounting degree. I always reply that I do have the appropriate accounting degree necessary to do my job.

I attended Portland State University when I earned this degree. PSU does not offer a degree in Accounting. Looking at my printed hunk of parchment, I see that I really have a degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in Accounting. Because that’s what they call it at that institution.

I don’t believe that I am misrepresenting myself to anyone.

Really, how hard is that for Emily Heffter and her editors at the Seattle Times to understand?  Darcy Burner has a degree in computer science and economics, and Harvard’s failure to use the terminology they prefer, doesn’t make it any less so.

I myself have been called a partisan hack, and maybe it’s true, but the difference is, I’m not the largest newspaper in the state.  I’m not Washington’s self-proclaimed paper of record.  And I’ve never pretended to be impartial, balanced or objective.  No, I’m just a partisan, foul-mouthed, dirty fucking blogger, but with its latest NRCC press release cum front page story, the Times has proven itself to be less credible than even me.

Dave Reichert, Dino Rossi, the BIAW and the WSRP are all busy violating state and federal campaign finance law, and the Times chooses to splash this kind of bullshit semantic hair splitting on their front page?  Really?

Partisan hacks.  That’s what they are, partisan hacks.  And they should be ashamed of themselves.

Yesterday’s analysis showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by an average of 368 to 170 electoral votes. Today there were 18 new polls representing 12 states released that weigh in on the score. The net result is a small gain for Obama.

A Monte Carlo analysis consisting of 100,000 simulated elections finds that Obama wins every one. Obama receives (on average) 370 to McCain’s 168 electoral votes—a gain of two. If an election had been held today, Obama would have had a near 100% probability of winning.

The long term trends in this race can be seen from a series of elections simulated every seven days over the period 22-Feb to 22-Oct. After a very slight period of decline, Obama is again gaining with time:

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.

The big topic of conversation was the seemingly illegal contribution to Rep. Dave Reichert’s campaign by Media Plus. Did Reichert violate the letter of the law, or just the spirit of the law? Are Republicans like Reichert and Rossi ignoring election financing laws, and treating post-elections fines as the cost of doing business? From there, a heady discussion arose about liberalism and conservatism, and what liberals must do about conservatives.

Goldy was joined by Matt Stoller of OpenLeft, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, Publisher of the Group News Blog, Jesse Wendel, and Eat The State’s Geov Parrish.

The show is 56:26, and is available here as an MP3:

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

So I guess all those folks who pooh-poohed last week’s polls as partisan propaganda are eating a little crow now.

Meanwhile, I’ll have more on this later, but Matt Stoller pretty much puts knife through the scandal that isn’t.

I’ve heard a number of political observers wonder how the RGA and the BIAW can possibly spend the enormous sum of money they’ve dumped into the final two weeks of Dino Rossi’s campaign when the airwaves are already saturated with political ads?  One answer:

The Building Industry Association of Washington is making Dino Rossi’s “citizens movement” a little more attractive to strapped-for-cash citizens. It might surprise “Reduce the Minimum Wage” Rossi that the BIAW is luring paid canvassers with a wage of $12 an hour, almost $4 an hour more than Washington’s minimum wage.

So… if Dino Rossi really has all the grassroots support he claims, why is he spending $12/hour hiring canvassers, while Gov. Gregoire and the Democrats are mostly relying on thousands of unpaid volunteers?

Hmm….