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I just got off a media conference call with Obama Campaign National Director of Latino Vote Temo Figueroa, as well as members of the Washington Latino Vote Project and the newly announced Latinos for Obama Steering Committee, where we were promised an unprecedented Latino outreach program in Washington state between now and the election.

“This election will be determined by the Latino vote,” Figueroa told the participants, predicting that a handful of swing states will be decided by a few thousand votes.  If those states are New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, I’m guessing Figueroa is exactly right, potentially providing Obama a mountain state swing that could rewrite the electoral map.

As for Washington state, I’m guessing we’re not quite as big a priority, even with the recent SurveyUSA poll showing the presidential race here narrowing to within four points… which is shame because a strong Latino turnout would benefit Democrats up and down the ticket.  So far the Obama campaign has been absent from our airwaves, and I haven’t heard any hint of a TV buy, Latino or otherwise, hitting WA markets anytime soon.

That said, the state Dems’ Latino outreach program is “unprecedented,” consisting of a statewide director, four paid field operatives, plus a Latinos for Obama committee populated with an impressive array of elected officials and other civic leaders.

According to Figueroa, Latinos comprise about 4.1 percent of Washington’s eligible voters (and growing), but as many as 102,000 of these eligible Latinos remain unregistered.  If the Dems can leverage the Obama campaign to dramatically increase both registration and turnout, it won’t just cushion the margin at the top of the ticket and generate longer coattails further down, it could result in a substantial electoral shift for years to come, especially in areas of the state that haven’t been kind to Democrats in recent elections.

We’ll see.

A new poll in the Washington state gubernatorial race has Dino Rossi (“G.O.P. Party”) leading Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) for the first time since February.

This race is a rematch of the 2004 contest that Gregoire won 133 votes out of 2.8 million votes.

The SurveyUSA poll sampled 658 people. Gregoire received 47.4% support, Rossi received 48.2% support, 2.9% preferred another candidate, and 1.5% were undecided. The poll was taken between the 5th and 7th of September, on the heels of the Republican National Convention that ended on September 4th. The poll’s margin of error is ± 3.9%.

Prior to this poll, Rossi had not held the lead for fifteen consecutive polls, stretching back to late February. One July poll had found the race tied.

Clearly, Rossi’s new lead is well within the margin of error. Even so, the evidence offered by this poll gives Rossi a higher probability of winning. (All statisticians mean by “statistical tie” is that the poll leader’s probability of winning is less than 95%.)

We can empirically determine the probability that either Rossi or Gregoire would win an election held now using a Monte Carlo analysis.

A million simulated elections gives Gregoire 440,892 wins and Rossi 548,161 wins. These results suggest that, if the election were held now, Rossi would have a 55.4% probability of winning and Gregoire would have a 44.6% probability of winning.

Here is the distribution of electoral votes resulting from the simulation.

The poll results could reflect a couple of things. The obvious possibility is that Rossi has benefited from a post-convention bounce. Or maybe a post-convention bump—time will tell. The bounce/bump possibility is supported by the observation that the same poll found the race between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain tightened-up to a narrow 49% to 45% lead for Obama. The previous poll was the August SurveyUSA poll that gave Obama a stronger 51% to 44% lead.

The second possibility is that this is a post Democratic Convention bounce for Rossi. The Rossi campaign ran advertisements that sandwiched Obama’s acceptance speech, offering Rossi’s local version of Obama’s message of change.

This leads one to wonder…Given Rossi’s implicit endorsement of Obama’s theme, will he vote for Obama in November? Don’t bother asking him, though. It’s probably not an issue he wants to talk about.

(Cross posted on Hominid Views.)

Because nothing keeps your family safer than having a gun in the house:

The father of a 4-year-old Cottage Grove boy says his child loaded a bullet into a borrowed gun and accidentally shot himself… Doctors removed the bullet, which had slightly penetrated his skull.

[…]  The gun was unloaded, but the boy found a smaller bullet that was the wrong size, and it still fired when loaded in the gun.

You mean the toddler found a “smaller bullet,” just lying around?  Jesus… doesn’t the boy’s father know that small objects like that can be a choking hazard?

When my daughter was that age, I never let her play with any cartridge smaller than a .308 Winchester.  This father should get a clue.

Amazon.com has a different kind of election tracker up. The online bookseller is tracking red and blue sales, state by state. Pretty interesting and pretty scary–as it’s dominated by red books right now. There are only eight blue or bluish states (including Washington, DC). 

The good news is: I’m not sure political book sales are the best way to capture the zeitgeist. People who buy and read political titles are probably a small segment of the electorate overall, and probably, non-political books and movies and popular TV shows would be better at capturing the mood of the country. Prison Break? The Dark Knight?

However, this is a fascinating project by Amazon.

Washington state is leaning slightly red right now, 51% to 49%. The best-selling title in Washington is Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down.

Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope is trouncing John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers, 77 to 23 nationally.

So I missed the last 18 hours or so of the news cycle doing normal people things. And as we all know missing 18 hours of a news cycle means when you come back there is certain to be something idiotic going on.

Turns out the McCain campaign is throwing another bogus hissy fit, this time because Barack Obama dared to compare McCain’s economic plan to the proverbial pig wearing lipstick. So in the continued effort to define what liberals may or may not say, the GOP is now claiming ownership of hackneyed old sayings. All of this is utterly irrelevant to anything, but that’s by design.

Atrios recently observed:

At this point even Republicans all know it’s full of shit, but they don’t care. It pisses off liberals! And that’s really all they care about.

The blogger tristero, writing at Hullaballoo, proposes that statement be known as “Atrios’s Law.” Tristero makes an important point as well:

Republicans feel no compunction about using racist language – no, not racist code words, racist language – while objecting furiously if Barack Obama warns his audience that they will be doing just that.

Because of the way conservatives constructed the playing field, and no one jumped all over them in time to stop it, liberals aren’t allowed even to use common phrases like “lipstick on a pig” to describe an opponent’s plans. But describing blacks as “uppity” is fair fame.

In the sub-text of the campaign, this kind of stuff is important. Republicans are arrogating to themselves the meaning of the English language itself.

It’s enough to make you want to hit yourself in the head with a hockey™ stick. (Ooops, can’t say “hockey.” Sorry.)

It’s enough to make you feel like we need a new bridge™. (Uh, again, sorry about using a Republican trademarked word. I meant “permanent conveyance built of steel over a body of water.”)

Really, I’m so upset about all this I think Ill drop by church on the way home and pray™. Or not.

Um, maybe I can get a dog. And it would be a pit bull™ of course.

On second thought, maybe I’ll just lie™ around and watch old television shows. I always liked Maverick™.

I suppose, if the American people want Sarah Palin a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency, that’s up to them, but as for me, I’d fear for my liberty should she ever take the reins of our government.

Nazi Germany banned books.  The Soviet Union banned books.  Saudi Arabia bans books.  But a small town American mayor firing a librarian for her lack of political compliance?  You’d think that would be a career killer for anybody trying to climb the political ladder in, you know… a democracy.

KOMO News is the first local news outlet to cover the case of legal medical marijuana patient Robert Dalton. Kitsap County prosecutors are trying to seize his property and send him to jail because they allege he had more plants than was allowed and that he said that he was going to give some of his harvest to other patients. At his trial in Port Orchard today, witnesses will be called in Dalton’s defense.

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. Officially, we start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks show up early for Dinner.

For tonight’s activity, we will sit in the central circle and share our Sarah Palin dreams/nightmares followed by an angry flag-disposal ceremony, and capped off by a round of Kumbaya.

Tonight’s theme song might well be one interpretation of a McDream:

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

As a blogger, I love to pepper my posts with personal anecdotes, reality being the sharpest rhetorical bolt in any writer’s quiver. But while I usually try to stay as close to the facts as possible, this post’s story has been generously fictionalized, the names and details altered to protect the participants of the real life anecdote I would prefer to tell.

For to do otherwise could get a loved one convicted of murder.

At the center of the story is a family matriarch, let’s just call her Aunt Sarah, a spry old lady, decades a widow, who seemed to cherish her independence almost as much as she did her grand kids, and who one day in her early eighties was suddenly and unexpectedly diagnosed with end-stage cancer.  Her doctor thought it started in her lungs, but we’ll never know for sure, for despite the fact that she had shown few symptoms, it had already metastasized throughout her body, the doctors giving her little more than six months to live.  She would be dead in three.

The rapid progress of her illness was quite stunning, even to a family that had been ravaged by cancer.  My father, his only sibling, three out of four grandparents (the fourth having died young of a bum heart), and a  plurality of great aunts and uncles have fought the disease, some successfully, some not. But never have I seen such a precipitous decline, from diagnosis to death, as that of Aunt Sarah.

Only three weeks after stubbornly driving herself to the doctor’s office to receive her own death sentence, Aunt Sarah was mostly bedridden, the pain of the advancing tumors almost unbearable, and by six weeks the cancer had clearly started to eat away at her brain.  Aunt Sarah, in her fashion, defiantly insisted that she wanted to die in her own home, and her children dutifully obliged.  Home hospice care was arranged, round the clock aides hired, and a rotating vigil of sorts informally organized, family members coming to sit by her side and pay their last respects to the living, while Aunt Sarah’s body and mind withered away before our eyes.

By the third month Aunt Sarah appeared gone, although her body continued to linger on.  For days she had lay there, mouth ajar, eyes slightly open but apparently unseeing, her body motionless but for her long, labored breaths and an occasional, wracking shudder that seemed to start at her toes and exit through her mouth in a low, pleading groan.

I was there that afternoon when a doctor (or perhaps a hospice nurse) came by on a routine visit, and pronounced that Aunt Sarah would soon pass on—maybe a few days, or a week at most.  Aunt Sarah’s daughter, who by this point was staying with her around the clock, was concerned that she appeared to be in pain, and so the doctor carefully instructed her in the use of a morphine drip, providing ample medication to last the week.

On the recommended dosage he was quite specific.  “This much,” he instructed, “should ease any suffering, but if you notice any changes in her breathing, please feel free to give me a call.”  Clear enough.  “But this much,” he warned, indicating a significantly larger dosage, “Well, you have to be careful not give her too much, or else her breathing will gradually slow and eventually stop, as she peacefully drifts off into a gentle, quiet and painless death.”  There was a brief pause, the silence broken only by Aunt Sarah’s gasps for air.  Nobody said anything, nor needed to.   We thanked the doctor, and gave our goodbyes.

That night, Aunt Sarah died in her sleep.

No, that story did not actually happen, at least not exactly in that way, but something like this did occur in my family, as it does in many other families every day, and throughout the nation.  Some doctors choose to provide the information and the medication necessary to humanely terminate the life of a dying patient, and some families choose to act on it.  If “Aunt Sarah’s” daughter did indeed up the dosage, easing her mother off into a peaceful death, it was an act of love and compassion.  And it was most certainly illegal.

And it would still be illegal under the terms of I-1000, the controversial Death with Dignity initiative on Washington’s ballot this fall, despite the dire exhortations of its opponents.

I-1000 does not authorize euthanasia or physician assisted suicide; it merely allows physicians, under certain narrow circumstances, to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill patients for self-administration.  And it is not, as Oregon’s decade old measure has proven, a slippery slope toward legalizing the very common practice that shortened “Aunt Sarah’s” suffering, let alone a path toward Soylent Green style suicide centers.

To argue that one inevitably leads to the other ignores two realities, the first, a political reality in which I-1000, as limited as it is, will barely pass if it passes at all, a context within even the thought of a successful euthanasia initiative is a political fantasy.  The second reality is that individuals, families and physicians already make these difficult and painful decisions everyday—as was made in the case of “Aunt Sarah”—unregulated, un-talked about, and totally outside the law.

We cannot prevent terminally ill patients from choosing to end their own lives, we can merely make this option more difficult and more painful for them and their families.  Likewise, while our current legal prohibition on mercy saves no lives, it does promote suffering, discouraging some doctors from prescribing adequate pain relief out of fear of legal consequences should the patient or family choose to administer a lethal dose.  It is a prohibition that simply does not work, and as such, if the goal is to protect the vulnerable, it is a goal that would be better served by pragmatic regulations than by moral platitudes.

Initiative opponents scoff at a “right to die,” but what they’re really telling us is that there is only one right way to die: apparently, of natural causes, no matter how long or how painful the death.  Personally, having watched close family members suffer through exactly that, I know what decision I would make in a similar situation, with or without my government’s blessing.

A terminally ill patient, under current law, can legally buy themselves a handgun and ammunition, but not a lethal dose of medication.  Go figure.  And then go out and vote Yes on I-1000.

See, a video like this… this is exactly the kind of race-baiting dirty trick you’d expect from the Republicans… and we’d never want to stoop to their level, even if it meant the difference between winning or losing an election… so whatever you do, do NOT, under any circumstances, pass it along.  Do not email this link to friends or coworkers, and do not embed this video in your own websites.  Because if you do, this video might go viral, especially in southern toss-up states like Virginia and North Carolina where it might do the most damage, and we just wouldn’t want that to happen.  Because it would be wrong.  Very, very wrong.

And while you’re at it, that email that’s been going around containing the list of books Sarah Palin tried to get banned from the Wasilla library? It’s not true. Sure, Palin did repeatedly ask the city librarian how one would go about banning books, and when she replied to the mayor that she would not be all right with such a request, Palin demanded her resignation.  But as far as we know, Palin never issued any written list of the books she wanted banned.

So please, please, if you’ve received this damaging, slightly misleading email, delete it, and absolutely positively do not pass it on. (And if you haven’t received the email, under no circumstances should you conveniently copy it from here.) Indeed, the very worst thing you could do would be to forward this email to your entire address book—repeatedly—because to do so would be dishonest, irresponsible and politically effective… you know, just like that bogus “Obama is a Muslim” email that’s likely cost him untold numbers of the “I believe anything I read in my email” vote.  And we’re better than that.

So the black dude fathering Bristol’s baby and the banned book things…?  Shhhh.

I’m just sayin’….

The Seattle Times reports today that the US Chamber of Commerce is lying on Dave Reichert’s behalf in radio ads that falsely accuse Darcy Burner of supporting “higher taxes on families with children.”  Imagine that.

The radio spot, which started airing Friday in local markets, is part of a $20 million national ad buy with which the U.S. Chamber is supporting some House and Senate candidates.

And that’s on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars the Chamber has spent over the past half decade or so, backing conservative, pro-business candidates in local judicial, executive and legislative races nationwide.  We’re talking maybe half a billion dollars from the US Chamber alone.

One of the criticisms I’ve heard of Darcy’s 2006 campaign was her failure to effectively fight back against the many lies that were told by Reichert and his surrogates, but the 2008 campaign seems much more responsive.  In fact, they’ve already cut a new radio ad that will start running tonight on both KOMO and KIRO:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/burner_special_interest_friends_v2.mp3]

It’ll take of lot of work for Darcy to win in November, but job one is refuting the lies before they have time to take hold.