Sen. Russ Feingold’s Progressive Patriot Fund is holding an online poll to pick their next Progressive Patriot, with $5,000 going to the winner. Darcy Burner is currently running in third place, but there’s still time to push her into the lead. So vote for Darcy today!
Drinking Liberally
Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. We meet at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E, although some of us will show up a little early for dinner.
Tonight’s activity…perhaps a round of pin the flag on a donkey. Other than that, we will be focused on a most important election, which also gives us our theme song of the night: Black Water by the Doobie Brothers.
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.
John McCain for President… of France
I heard a report on KUOW that said that John McCain was in town today to talk about the environment, when in fact, he’s really only here for a $33,100 per plate dinner. You really think he’d come to WA — a state he can’t possibly win — for any reason other than money?
Of course, one of the many reasons McCain can’t win WA is the tanker contract he cost us, and the 9,000 plus local jobs that would have come with it. In a post on Daily Kos today, Gov. Chris Gregoire points out:
To help our national economy, the Bush Administration sends us $600 “economic stimulus” checks. I have no doubt that many need this money. It will buy a month’s worth of groceries and pay for the rising cost of gasoline.
But the Bush Administration sent $40 billion of economic stimulus to Europe. And I have no doubt that $40 billion and 44,000 new good-paying jobs would feed entire communities and repair lives broken by debt and the loss of homes.
Unfortunately, that $40 billion stimulus package is creating jobs and feeding communities in France. Hey, thanks Sen. McCain.
Food for thought
Um… but I thought markets always make the most efficient allocation of resources? Damn commie agitators.
(By the way, I hope you are all taking advantage of the Real News Network feed I’ve provided in the front page sidebar. It’s a great service worthy of your attention and support.)
Port acquires Eastside rail line
From today’s Seattle Times:
After years of talk, Port of Seattle and King County executives signed a final agreement Monday to put a 42-mile Eastside rail corridor into public ownership.
The deal paves the way for a possible combination of freight rail, commuter trains, and biking and hiking trails, but many details remain to be worked out.
And that’s the way it should be. The important thing here was having this rare remaining corridor acquired for public use, rather than being sold off a parcel at a time and lost forever. Deciding what we’re going to do with the corridor—rail or trail or both—was always less urgent than closing a deal with BNSF.
And by the way, while Ron Sims caught a lot of shit from Eastside rail enthusiasts for his intention to tear up the tracks and replace them with a hiking and biking trail, and from nearly everyone for his complicated proposal to swap Boeing Field with the Port in exchange for the rail corridor, it should be remembered that it was his initiative and vision that set this whole thing into motion in the first place. Without Sims’ leadership on this issue there may have never been a serious public effort to acquire this land.
We have this strange political pathology in Washington state in which we constantly complain about the lack of leadership coming from our elected officials, and yet instantly attack them as arrogant the minute they attempt to display any. Sims’ initial proposal may have been shot down, and with good reasons, but he still deserves much of the credit for preserving this corridor for public use.
As for the rail vs trail debate, I’d love to see an Eastside commuter line, but from what I know about the geography and demographics of this corridor, as well as the condition of the existing tracks, I wouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. But I’d love to be proven wrong.
Open thread
No, the real solution to our transportation problems is to build more roads.
Well, so much for McCain/Feingold
John McCain is coming to Bellevue tomorrow for a $33,100 per plate dinner. No, that’s not one of my frequent typos… it’s $33,100 per plate. For that kind of money, I expect to eat my dinner off of John McCain’s naked body (or preferably, his daughter Meghan’s.)
$33,100. Yet the federal contribution limit for 2008 remains $2,300 per person in each of the primary and general elections. So how does McCain get around this? According to the invitation:
• For Individuals—The first $2,300 to JM 2008, the next $2,300 to the Compliance Fund, the
next $28,500 to the RNC, and the balance of up to $37,000 will be divided evenly between the
Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Wisconsin state parties’ federal accounts.
• For Couples—The first $4,600 to JM 2008, the next $4,600 to the Compliance Fund, the
next $57,000 to the RNC, and the balance of up to $74,000 will be divided evenly between the
Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Wisconsin state parties’ federal accounts.
Of course the RNC as well as the state parties’ federal committees can raise and spend unlimited funds in support of McCain, and at $76,200 per couple, that is exactly what McCain is coming to town to do. So in the end, there really aren’t any federal limits all.
It’s not like the Democrats don’t play by the same the rules, but when you have the guy with his name on the campaign finance laws so blatantly violating the spirit of them, you’d think it would earn him a little cynicism from the press. But no, McCain drives the Straight Talk Express, so if he says he’s for campaign finance reform, I suppose we just have to trust him.
Meanwhile, if folks in Bellevue want to put their money to good work in district, I suggest they drop a little cash in Darcy Burner’s pockets
Chaos at the Convention
While so much attention has been focused on the race between Obama and Clinton, few people have noticed that things aren’t as rosy as they appear with the Republican race. Andrew Malcolm writes in the LA Times Politics blog:
In the last three months, [Ron] Paul’s forces, who donated $34.5 million to his White House effort and upward of a million total votes, have, as The Ticket has noted, been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates.
John McCain (who my father-in-law referred to as a “Democrat” yesterday) clearly doesn’t have enthusiastic support among the Republican base. This is causing problems with Republican GOP conventions across the country where Paul supporters are trying their best to ensure that he gets enough pledged delegates to be able to speak in St. Paul. They created mayhem at the Nevada State Convention, are being targeted by the Missouri GOP for their alleged disloyalty to John McCain, and are finding both success and special GOP counter-measures against them in several other states. Meanwhile, to demonstrate the depth of his support among younger people, his book was at the top of the Amazon bestseller list for a week after it was released on 4/30 and is still in the top ten (#7) today.
Paul has already said he won’t endorse McCain, and with the Libertarians potentially having a candidate with very good name recognition among Republicans (former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr), the GOP may have much bigger unity problems than the Democrats this year.
Nixonland tonight at Town Hall
Historian and author Rick Perlstein will be reading from his new book “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America,“ tonight at 7:30 PM at Seattle’s Town Hall. Tickets are only $5.00.
Even conservative columnist George Will, reviewing the book for the NY Times, calls Nixonland “compulsively readable.” Should be a fascinating evening.
Happy Blogiversary HA
I’m not so good at remembering or celebrating birthdays and holidays; I pretty much dread special occasions as opportunities to let a loved one down. And just to be consistent, it looks like I missed a special occasion of my own the other day: HA’s fourth blogiversary.
On May 10, 2004 I relaunched HorsesAss.org as a blog by posting a bit of a manifesto: “Comedy is easy, politics is hard.” Looking back, I’m a bit amazed both at how wrong and how right I got it. On the one hand I clearly had no idea how blogging would come to dominate my life to the exclusion of all other pursuits. On the other, it’s encouraging to see the that original spirit of the blog has never been lost, even as its readership and influence have grown beyond my wildest expectations:
I want to have fun with politics, yet I also want to get stuff done. I want to be sarcastic, satirical, irreverent — even silly — and yet I want to be taken seriously. I want to be edgy, out spoken, and occasionally foul mouthed, and yet I want to maintain my credibility with stuffy politicos and even stuffier editorial boards.
[…] So to those upstanding members of the political and media establishment who insist I cannot possibly expect to maintain my credibility as an activist while producing an irreverent and outrageous blog, the Goldy half of me respectfully says: “fuck you.”
I thought maybe I might some day build an audience of a couple hundred loyal readers, but 2.5 million visits and 4.7 million page views later, HA remains a big “fuck you” to those who confuse “solemnity” with “seriousness.”
Thank you all for giving me a reason to write.
Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers
Over on Slog, Josh is worried about the DNC’s lack of fundraising, citing a disturbing paragraph in a front page article in today’s New York Times:
But the Republican National Committee, which is permitted to spend money on Mr. McCain’s behalf, has raised $31 million, compared with just $6 million by the Democratic National Committee.
But Josh makes the classic journalistic error, by failing to heed the creed of journalism consumers everywhere: “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.” Even our nation’s paper of record, the NY Times.
The NY Times was flat out wrong; those are cash-on-hand figures, not dollars raised as stated. According to Open Secrets, the RNC has outraised the DNC $123 million to $73 million for the cycle, but even those figures are meaningless when taken out of context. Overall, between the two parties’ major fundraising committees, we have a virtual tie at about $330 million each, with the Democrats holding a substantial $27 million edge in cash-on-hand.
At all levels, that’s a huge reversal from previous elections, when the Republicans typically out-raised and out-spent the Democrats by wide margins.
But even that only tells part of the story. Bucking complaints from the Beltway establishment, DNC chair Howard Dean has doggedly pursued a “50 State Strategy,” pumping money and infrastructure into states the party has all but ignored for decades, rather than hoarding cash for the general election. This strategy has left the DNC perpetually broke, but paid huge dividends in 2006 when Democrats picked up key seats in traditional afterthoughts like Montana. It has also put Democrats in a position to exploit Republican meltdowns like that happening in Alaska. If you ask me, that’s money well spent.
As for the RNC’s $50 million fundraising lead, $20 million of that has come over the past three months, a time during which McCain had the Republican nomination all wrapped up, while Obama and Clinton continued to fight it out. To put this in perspective, Obama and Clinton have raised a combined $420 million for the cycle compared to McCain’s $77 million — a $61 million to $12 million advantage in March alone. And with the Democratic ticket finally settled, expect the DNC to keep pace with the RNC, if not narrow the gap between the two committees.
So while Josh may be worried, I’m not. Folks can’t let up, but comforted by some actual numbers, rather than a scary paragraph in a newspaper, I remain confident that the Democrats are in a helluva position heading into the fall elections.
A modest proposal: cut taxes to improve schools
When KVI host Kirby Wilbur used his radio show to announce a 30% Property Tax Cut initiative, my reaction was admittedly knee jerk. Washington’s public schools rely on property taxes for 100% of their state and local funding; how could our children possibly afford such a dramatic cut? I was outraged.
But once my knees stopped jerking, I decided to step back and take an objective look. So I steeled my bleeding heart, threw out my assumptions, and delved into the numbers. And what I found surprised me:
Wilbur’s tax cuts may be exactly what our schools need.
I will explain. But first, the numbers.
The Paradox
There are a little over one million students enrolled in Washington public schools, an increase of about 100,000 since 1993, and while annual state spending per student has risen during that time, it has consistently lagged behind inflation. Indeed, Washington’s total per pupil spending now ranks 43rd nationally.
Yet, as funding declines, public demand for increased K-12 spending remains steady. In November 2000, voters overwhelmingly passed I-728, calling for class size reduction, and I-732, granting teachers annual cost-of-living adjustments. And polling data consistently shows that voters believe education spending is growing too slowly.
But tax-cutting initiatives have proven equally popular, so it is not beyond the realm of recent experience to imagine Wilbur’s 30% tax cut measure passing in the fall, slashing about $2230 per student annually from the average school district’s budget.
So how do we honor the will of the people—as conservative talk radio so often demands—when the people contradict themselves? Simple algebra. Solve to x.
If per student spending is too low, yet taxes are too high, there can be only one answer:
We have too many students.
The Proposal
It has been said that a child’s mind is a terrible thing to waste, but the same is true of a child’s body. I have been assured by culinary experts in several obscure internet chat rooms, that in flavor and texture a school-age child compares quite favorably to pork, and is equally versatile and nutritious. Properly prepared, it would be virtually indistinguishable in a taco filling or sausage patty… or perhaps as a substitute ingredient in “turkey” tetrazini.
And with one third of students now qualifying for free or reduced price lunch, it only seems fair that overburdened taxpayers turn toward the student body to help offset the cost of this growing public subsidy.
Fortunately, thanks to the WASL test, a mechanism for culling the herd is already in place. For example, if only those students scoring in the bottom 10% of the WASL were harvested to supply the school lunch program, per-student funding would instantly be restored to 1993 levels.
And the benefits don’t end there.
With 100,000 fewer students, class size would drop an average of two students per room, dramatically improving the learning environment while significantly reducing the cost to fully implement I-728. Average WASL scores would rise substantially, simply by eliminating the low end of the curve. And of course, surviving students would be treated to tasty, protein-rich school lunches that bring new meaning to the phrase “you are what you eat.”
But perhaps the greatest benefit would be motivational, for students will be much less likely to slack off when they know that their Sloppy Joe is eponymously named.
Of course, the 10% cut-off is merely an example, and we can likely achieve a similar return on disinvestment while sacrificing fewer children. After all, many of our lowest scoring students are those with special needs — the most expensive to educate — and thus the source of the greatest potential savings. And merely enacting this policy would shave thousands from the rolls as less civic-minded parents moved their children to schools in Oregon, California, and other states with lower academic standards.
Now I know some might find this policy harsh, or even distasteful. But it would be equally harsh to leave our children ill prepared to compete in the global economy, and we simply cannot attract enough qualified teachers without finding the money to pay a competitive wage.
The math is simple. If Washington citizens are serious about improving education, serious about reducing class size, increasing teacher pay, and raising test scores, then we must increase per student spending. But if voters are equally determined to slash taxes… well then… I thank Wilbur and his cohorts for opening my eyes to the harsh reality of this dog-eat-dog world.
And so I offer my modest proposal in the hope of sparking a much needed public debate, and I trust that it will be received in the spirit in which it is intended.
So sad an elephant
Goldy recently wrote about the signs of gloom and doom for the Republicans. The bad new and “expectations management” continues. Just look at a couple of the articles that hit the press this weekend:
Politico has the headline GOP getting crushed in polls, key races:
In case you’ve been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways both at the polls and in the polls.
At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.
In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP — the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.
Things are so bad that many people don’t even want to call themselves Republicans. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has found the lowest percentage of self-described Republicans in 16 years of polling.
It’s hard to dismiss this stuff as “liberal media bias” when elections hand districts (with decades of Republican-control) to the Democrats. The article even has a Republican insider saying:
“The anti-Republican mood is fairly big, and it has been overwhelming,” said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis.
That’s bad. I mean, at some point even the most heroic self-deception must fail, even in a community that is infamous for rejecting reality and facts.
The Republican gloom and doom is featured in this piece appearing in The Weekly Standard titled Gloomy Republicans: For good reason? by Executive Editor (and noted Wingnut) Fred Barnes:
First, the good news. Conservatives won a sweeping victory in an enormously important election the week before last. Unfortunately, it happened in England….
Alrighty then…. That’s the (totally irrelevant) good news. The bad news is that…
Prospects for Republicans in the 2008 election here at home look grim.
[…]More than 80 percent of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction. Democrats have steadily maintained the 10 percentage point lead in voter preference they gained two years ago. And President Bush’s job performance rating is stuck in the low 30s, a level of unpopularity that weakens the Republican case for holding the White House in 2008.
There’s another piece of polling data that is both intriguing and indicative. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC survey last month, John McCain fared better with Republican voters (84 percent to 8 percent) than Barack Obama did with Democrats (78 percent to 12 percent). McCain was also stronger than Obama among independent voters (46 percent to 35 percent).
These are terrific numbers for McCain. But they aren’t enough. In the overall match-up, McCain trailed Obama (43 percent to 46 percent). The explanation for this seeming paradox is quite simple: The Republican base has shrunk. In 2008, there are fewer Republicans. [Emphasis added]
This same pattern holds here in Washington state. In the most recent SurveyUSA Washington head-to-head poll, Sen. John McCain gets 87% of the Republican support compared to 83% of Democrats who support Sen. Barack Obama. (One difference is that among Washington state independents, 55% support Obama and 34% support McCain.)
Overall, however, Obama strongly leads McCain, 53% to 40%. The reason for the double-digit lead is that only 28% of those polled admitted to being a Republican, whereas 41% fess-up to being a Democrat.
SurveyUSA polls provide data on the long-term trend in party affiliation. Here are the percentages since May of 2005:
The numbers show a slight decline of about 1.4% per year in Republican affiliation. At the same time, there is a 2.7% increase per year in Democratic affiliation. The big change is in independents, who have declined by about 4% per year.
The numbers support the notion that, in Washington state, independents are increasingly calling themselves Democrats. An analysis of correlations indicates that the increase in Democratic identity is most strongly associated with a concomitant decline in independents (r = -0.872). In other words, declines in independents “explains” about 76% of the increase in Democrats (found by squaring the correlation coefficient). The decrease in Republican identity “explains” about 20% of the increase in Democratic identity (r = -0.451).
The take-home message is that Republicans have good reason to be gloomy in Washington state. Their brand name is tarnished; the percent of Washingtonians admitting to being a Republican is declining. At the same time Democrats are experiencing growth.
And if Republicans are counting on independents to make up the difference, they are bound to be bitterly disappointed: there are even fewer independents than there were three years ago as former independents start calling themselves Democrats.
Happy Mother’s Day
Is it actually possible for John McCain to actually be older than his mother?
I suppose the idea was that by sitting McCain next to his mother, he’d appear younger by comparison, but it doesn’t come off that way. Hope they give this ad a lot of play.
Fox and friends
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