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I just flew in to Spokane (and boy are my arms tired), only to learn that NBC’s Tim Russert has died of a heart attack, at age 59 58.

I’ve got an admittedly sick sense of humor, so I have to admit that a couple not mean, but inappropriate headlines immediately popped into my mind, but it’s times like these that reminds us that all of us, even people whose actions we disagree with, are human beings, and thus mortal. So my condolences to Russert’s family and friends.

[via Slog]

US Airways is joining other major carriers in charging additional fees for checked baggage, turning an already tense boarding process into a Darwinian death match for scarce overhead luggage resources. And…

The Tempe, Ariz.-based carrier also said it would cut domestic flights, shrink the size of its fleet, slash 1,700 jobs and add a $2 fee for nonalcoholic drinks during flights.

So let me get this right… we’re already prohibited from carrying beverages through security due to some bullshit, Bush scare tactic, and now the airlines want to charge us table-service prices for a fucking can of seltzer? As if flying at 30,000 feet isn’t dehydrating enough?

Better carry a shitload of quarters with you the next time you fly folks, just in case the plane loses cabin pressure and you have to feed the goddamn coin slot on the oxygen mask.

For those of you too young to remember, flying wasn’t always such a miserable experience. There was a time when airlines treated passengers as more than just those things they pack into the space above the cargo hold. There was a time when airlines focused on service, and treated even us plebs crammed into coach like paying customers, instead of just an inconvenience.

There was a time when flying from Florida to Seattle, if I missed a connecting flight in Houston due to “thunderstorms in Boston” or some bullshit excuse like that, they’d reticket me on the next available flight, even on a competing airline, instead of just shrugging their shoulders and leaving me and a small child to fend for ourselves in an airport for 24 hours or longer.

That’s because there was a time when airlines were in the business of actually moving passengers and their luggage to their final destination. You know… back before deregulation.

I’m not saying consumers didn’t benefit from deregulation; ticket prices dropped dramatically due to increased competition—hell, at under $300 round trip coast to coast, I don’t think I paid a profitable fare for years—but holy crap, enough is enough already!

Perhaps it’s time to consider a little reregulation, to stabilize the industry and bring a modicum of service and reliability back into the flying experience. Perhaps consumers might benefit if the fare didn’t routinely fluctuate between $749 and $404 and back again, depending on which minute you logged into Expedia? Perhaps something other than “the free market” is necessary to fix an industry that has collectively lost $15 billion since deregulation?

Because if the airlines are so willing to cut corners above deck, where the paying customers can see it, I’m damn frightened to learn what they’re cutting behind the scenes.

In this episode, Goldy and his panel take on the BIAW, say “amen” to overly-sensitive journalists, explore issues of secret ballots and voter integrity, note how the top-two primary leads to absurdities like a “Grand Old Party Party,” and tackle our region’s tough mass transit problems.

Goldy was joined by Democratic candidate for Secretary of State Jason Osgood, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, HorsesAss and EFFin’ Unsound’s Carl Ballard and HorsesAss’ blogger emeritus Will.

The show is 49:31, and is available here as an MP3.

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_june_10_2008.mp3]

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

It turns out it wasn’t just us amen bloggers who got caught up in TVW’s imaginary copyright infringement dragnet. The Spokesman-Review’s Rich Roesler blogs on his own Keystone Kafkaesque run-in with TVW Security:

On Friday, the network started contacting bloggers, including me, who use excerpts from its recordings. TVW has long allowed TV and radio reporters to edit and use its content and apparently still does.

But the network, which copyrights its work, says it’s worried about its streaming-video clips turning up in campaign attack ads. That could presumably draw official ire that could threaten the goodwill and access the network has worked hard to gain.

It’s not hard to imagine the content being put to attack-ad use. TVW cameras and microphones have inadvertently caught lawmakers falling asleep at their desks, stammering foolishly in floor speeches and ranting at each other.

Which, um, you’d think would be things it might be in the public interest for voters to know. But Roesler continues:

As I mentioned to TVW, it seems like there’s a fair-use argument to be made here. The fair-use doctrine allows reviewers, reporters and so on to quote or broadcast short snippets of a copyrighted work under certain circumstances.

Damn straight. And to illustrate his point, Roesler joins IP pirates like me by embedding my reposting of the video clip that apparently kicked off the whole brouhaha.

(©2006 TVW. View full source here.)

Ahoy, ye matey! Way to hornswaggle those bilge-sucking scallywags at TVW! Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

Roesler spoke with TVW President Greg Lane, who assures him that the “embed widget” Lane and I discussed earlier this week will be made available shortly, and function along the lines promised, allowing bloggers to set a start and stop time. That’s great, and I expect most bloggers to adopt the TVW widget if only for the sake of convenience, though I’m not exactly sure how that addresses TVW’s concern about political ads. And, there’s still a larger principle at stake here—our well established rights under the fair use exemption—and so I intend to continue to pursue my challenge of the YouTube pull-downs regardless.

Of course, I’ll keep you posted.

Republican GOP apologist Kate Riley has her undies in a knot over Democrats’ efforts to taunt Dino Rossi for refusing to embrace the “Republican” label.

The real horror here is the state Democratic party’s attempt, in a press release today, to invent a scandal out of nothing — and, worse, the premise for their argument is founded on an apparent belief that voters are too ignorant to know that “GOP” and “Republican” are the same thing — or that they will live in a cave between now and the general election, missing what will likely be another tortuous high-profile campaign where each candidate is thoroughly dissected.

Uh-huh. I’ve read a lot of horribly written press releases in my day, but I can’t think of any that I’d call a “horror.” (I mean, it’s just a press release for chrissakes, Kate. Get a grip.) But then that’s the sort of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” partisanship we’ve come to expect from an amen editorialist who applauded Dave Reichert’s sexist dismissal of Harvard grad Darcy Burner as a ditzy blond, while condemning Burner as the reincarnation of Karl Rove.

As for her “voters are smart” defense of Rossi’s petty gamesmanship, her and her paper’s professed faith in our electorate is not only conveniently selective, it entirely misses the point. This isn’t about the top-two primary or the tone of a state Dem press release, it’s about Dino Rossi cynically seeking to avoid his party’s damaged brand—unlike every other Republican running for statewide office—because he believes the “GOP” designation gives him a slight advantage over, well… being plain-spoken honest.

That said, Riley’s apparent assertion that actual words have little meaning is, I suppose, understandable, given the quality of the prose we’ve come to expect from her editorial board.

With unemployment jumping at the fastest rate in 22 years, the US House just passed a 13 week extension of unemployment benefits. Kudos to Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Seattle) for sponsoring the bill and shepherding it through the House.

Curiously, while news of the bill’s passage currently graces the electronic front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post, at the time of this posting neither the Seattle Times nor the Seattle P-I have bothered to update their web sites to report on the legislative accomplishment of the congressman who represents their district.

Hmm. I wonder if slights like this have anything to do with McDermott’s undeserved reputation in some circles as a less than accomplished legislator?

David Sirota’s new book The Uprising, has hit the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list just in time for tonight’s discussion and book signing at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books, 7:30PM, 101 S. Main Street.

Sirota, whose nationally syndicated column appears weekly in the Seattle Times, chronicles the rise of a new populist movement that is changing the face of American politics, and is just, well, fascinating to talk to. I wish I could be there tonight, but I’ve got my own speaking engagement at the same time, in which I get to play second-fiddle to Dan Savage. Ah well.

The Seattle Times rails against Tent City, showing stunning ignorance at the same time:

“Tent City,” which camped in Kirkland in late winter, and is in Bellevue now, is scheduled to move to Mercer Island Aug. 2. This encampment has been on the Eastside since 2004, migrating from one church or temple to the next, 100 people living rent-free in camping gear. What is the point?

[…]

As a protest, it had whatever impact it is going to have. Now it becomes tiresome. There are shelter beds. There are opportunities for work.

Itinerant tent camps are not acceptable in a modern city. We didn’t have them before the 1990s, and most other American cities don’t have them now. They look at us and wonder why we ever allowed it.

Many of the homeless folks who live at Tent City have jobs. What they don’t have is first and last month’s rent, or don’t qualify for public housing.

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right to challenge their detentions in US courts.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

So… we are one vote on the SCOTUS away from allowing unlimited detention, without charge, and without the possibility of appeal, in contravention of the Constitution and hundreds of years of common law.  Remember what’s at stake in this election.

Learn more at The Real McCain.

Fresh on the heels of the Survey USA poll I wrote about this morning, Rasmussen Reports has just released their head-to-head poll pitting Washington state Gov. Christine Gregoire against her Republican challenger, Dino Rossi.

The Rasmussen poll surveyed 500 likely voters on June 9th. Gregoire led Rossi 50% to 43%, with another 2% selecting “other” and 5% who are not sure. The +7% advantage that Gregoire has in this poll is about double that of the SurveyUSA poll (which was taken from the 7th to the 9th of June).

What are the chances that Gregoire would win an election today, based just on this poll? Let’s figure it out using the computational equivalent of a sledge hammer. I simulated a million gubernatorial elections of 500 voters each election. Each voter in each election had a 50.0% chance of voting for Gregoire, a 43.0% chance of voting for Rossi, and a 7.0% chance of voting for neither.

Gregoire won 949,070 times and Rossi won 2,829 times. In other words, the poll results suggest that, for an election held now, Gregoire would have a 95.2% probability of winning the election and Rossi would win with a 4.8% probability.

Here is the distribution of outcomes (percentage of votes) from the million simulated elections (Rossi victories are those to the left of the red “tie” line, Gregoire victories are those to the right):

Since the Rasmussen and SurveyUSA polls were taken almost simultaneously using similar methods, it seems quite reasonable to combine the polls. Of the 1,137 pooled poll participants, 571 (or 50.2%) of them “voted” for Gregoire, 514 (or 215%) “voted” for Rossi and 52 (or 4.6%) choose neither. A million simulated gubernatorial elections later, Gregoire wins 952,104 times and Rossi wins 44,749 times. The pooled set of polls suggest that, if an election were held now, Gregoire would have a 95.5% probability of winning and Rossi would have a 4.5% probability of winning.

You may be wondering why Gregoire’s probability of winning actually increase when the Rasmussen poll is pooled with the SurveyUSA poll. The answer is that Gregoire percent of the vote actually decreases slightly in the pooled analysis. In the Rasmussen poll she led by 50%/(50% + 43%) = 53.8%. In the combined poll, she leads by 50.2%/(50.2% + 45.2%) = 52.6%. But even with a smaller estimated fraction of the vote, there is more certainty that her lead is real (95.2% for the Rasmussen versus 95.5% for the pooled polls). This is because the certainty is more strongly affected by the larger sample size in the pooled polls.

Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections (combined polls):

As I suggested previously, it is unlikely that Gregoire’s lead is an artifact of sampling error. Now, with seven consecutive polls in a row in which Gregoire leads Rossi, it is even more certain that she is truly in the lead.

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

(©2006 TVW. View full source here.)

About an hour ago I received an email from YouTube informing me that at TVW’s request, they had pulled my clip of Dave Reichert talking about his intent to cut Medicare. I am in the process of filing a counter notice, and fully intend to defend my rights under the law.

But as you can see, it didn’t take me very long to upload the clip to another service. TVW is free to request LiveLeak pull this clip too, but there are plenty more video serving services where they came from—not to mention the technical ability to serve the clip myself—and I’m happy to play this game at least as long as TVW. Nothing will stop me from presenting Reichert’s own damning words to the public, short of a court order. (And perhaps, not even that.)

As I told TVW President and CEO Greg Lane yesterday, I will be happy to use TVW’s own embedded player with a time sequence parameter, once they make it available… but I’m not willing to wait. There are several fundamental issues at stake here, not the least of which being my Constitutional right to political speech, and a defense of the fair use exemption, one of the principle tools that make news reporting and commentary possible.

Had Mr. Lane contacted me before contacting YouTube, this confrontation might have been avoided. With a mutually acceptable technical compromise in the offing, it would be a shame to escalate this dispute any further… but that decision is now solely in the hands of TVW.