HorsesAss.Org

I blew out a tire at about 8:25 this morning, heading Eastbound across the I-90 bridge. I limped to the West Mercer exit, pulled over onto the shoulder, and proceeded to swap on the spare. At about 8:35, no more than ten minutes into the incident, a WSDOT roadside assistance truck pulled up behind me, and good thing too, as my “donut” was low on air.

The WSDOT worker was helpful and friendly and prompt. From the driver’s perspective, it’s great to get this sort of “free” assistance, unasked for, but of course his real job is to get cars like mine off the freeway as quickly and safely as possible so as not to tie up traffic.

When conservatives complain about out-of-control government spending they are complaining about services like this. I suppose we could just leave fools like me to our own devices — I’d been meaning to replace my tires for months, and certainly didn’t deserve any free assistance — but that would merely inconvenience and endanger the rest of us when disabled vehicles snarl up traffic. Or, I suppose we could fine every stranded motorist to offset the costs, but that would transform the WSDOT roadside assistance worker from a smiling helping hand into a hated tax collector.

In the end, even though I didn’t really need the help — I’m handy enough to change my own tire, and my donut had enough air to get me to the nearest gas station — it is comforting to know that the help is there if I need it. And perhaps the folks at WSDOT might be comforted to know that on this particular morning they have at least one damn satisfied taxpayer.

Sick cowards:

Officials are investigating the deaths of six sea lions who appear to have been shot Sunday after climbing onto traps in the Columbia River.

Wildlife officials said that the bodies of the sea lions were discovered at noon Sunday on two floating traps just below Bonneville Dam.

“In each of the two traps were three dead sea lions,” Brian Gorman, regional spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said. “There was one Stellar sea lion and two California sea lions in each trap.”

The sea lions appear to have been shot during the night by someone on the Washington side of the river, Gorman said.

I’m far from a PETA type, but I did think it was sensible that the sea lions being trapped were going to Sea World rather than just being killed.

Now some sick individual has probably put the entire thing on hold. I can empathize that law enforcement officers always have a lot on their plate, especially dealing with crimes against humans rather than animals, but it would be great if someone is brought to justice in this case. That’s just wrong.

(Cross-posted at my personal blog.)

From the latest NY Times/CBS News poll:

A majority of American voters say that the furor over the relationship between Senator Barack Obama and his former pastor has not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number say that it could influence voters this fall should he be the Democratic presidential nominee, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

So the media’s incessant focus on Rev. Wright hasn’t changed voters’ opinion of Obama, merely their opinion of other people’s opinion. That must be very disappointing for the talking heads.

At the same time, an overwhelming majority of voters said candidates calling for the suspension of the federal gasoline tax this summer were acting to help themselves politically, rather than to help ordinary Americans.

Which I suppose in the eyes of Hillary Clinton makes the overwhelming majority of voters “elitists.”

Republicans who comfort themselves with the mantra that the 2006 Big Blue Wave was a hundred-year flood that will have no impact on 2008 congressional races… avert your eyes! Because the Democrats have picked up yet another seat in yet another blood red district.

Louisiana Sixth CD (99% Reporting)
Don Cazayoux (D): 49% (49312)
Woody Jenkins (R): 46% (46282)

To put this in perspective, this is a seat the Republicans have held since 1974, in a district President Bush won in 2004 with 59% of the vote, and this special election victory comes on the heels of Democrat Bill Fosters’ win in IL-14 in former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s old seat.  If Democrats are competitive in these districts, they’re competitive almost everywhere.

And for those who delude themselves into thinking Barack Obama is a liability for down-ticket Democrats, like the brilliant GOP strategists who bombarded Louisiana airwaves with ads tying Cazayoux to Obama and Nancy Pelosi, chew on this:

The attacks linking Cazayoux to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama didn’t work. They simply didn’t. Yes, the Republicans pulled in more votes and a greater share of the vote than they did last month in the first round of balloting. So what. This is a very Republican district and yet despite of this lean and the fact that the GOP tried to make this election about Jeremiah Wright, they still lost.

This race was very much put forward by the chattering class as a referendum on Obama’s coattails (which proved to be strong in the very Republican-leaning Illinois 14th congressional district earlier this year), and Obama’s coattails passed the challenge. Simply put, the Republicans may have thought they had found a silver bullet in Obama and Wright (and Pelosi, too, for that matter), but they didn’t.

Sure, November is still a long way off.  But right now I don’t see any good news for Republicans.

(There are some 60 media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Jesus, if that’s how they treat the second place finisher, I’d hate to be the horse that came in third.

Sen. John McCain explained his energy policy yesterday at a town hall meeting in Denver:

“My friends, I will have an energy policy…which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East, that will…then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

Did you catch that? McCain is suggesting that the real reason we are in Iraq is their oil.

War for oil is not a surprise to many of us. The surprise is that the likely Republican nominee for President, in effect, admits it.

McCain apparently tried clarifying his statement but, as Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow point out, there were three different explanations by the end of the day.

Of course this war is about the oil. As was the Gulf War in 1991. Yeah…in that earlier war, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait first. The Coalition liberated Kuwait under the authority of U.N. Resolution 660. But would the U.S. bother to fight a war over Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait if it didn’t involve “our” oil supply? I mean, if Iraq had invaded and occupied, say, Namibia, would the U.S. respond with military force? Not likely.

In fact, South Africa did occupy, oppress, and commit atrocities in Namibia—in violation of numerous U.N. mandates. For some twenty years beginning in 1966, the U.N. passed a series of resolutions that condemed and declared South Africa’s occupation of Namibia illegal:

The General Assembly […]

3. Demands once again that the apartheid regime of South Africa immediately and unconditionally withdraw its illegal administration, occupation army and police force from Namibia;

But Namibia isn’t an oil producing country. No oil…no rush on that illegal occupation. No dead Americans, no dead South Africans.

You may well believe that the coalition’s war against Iraq in 1991 was justified by Iraq’s hostile actions and illegal occupation. But don’t fool yourself…when it comes right down to it, the action was about oil. And every time we fill our gas tanks, we purchase a little bit of human blood on the side.

Likewise, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not about WMD, terrorism, or human rights. It was about the second largest oil reserves in the world. It’s shockingly refreshing to hear McCain, a powerful Republican, actually fess up to the reason behind our military actions.

At the same time, McCain doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by the fraudulent claims made by the Bush administration that misled the Senate and the American people. He doesn’t seem troubled by the heavy toll in human lives (on the order of hundreds of thousands dead) and the untold number of injuries wrought by those lies. Apparently, McCain is just fine with those lies.

For McCain, it would seem, political party is thicker than blood.

Both Times and P-I readers learned this morning about the sad case of Tim Garon, who died of liver failure a week after being denied a transplant for the third time because of his use of medical marijuana. The dead-tree editions of both papers placed the story front page, top-left, a testament to the newsworthiness of Garon’s death, and the issues it raises.

But loyal HA readers have been following this story for weeks, thanks to Lee’s thoughtful and engaging coverage. We first learned of Garon’s plight back on April 22, and it was Lee who broke the news of his death on Thursday. But I don’t bring up the timeliness of Lee’s posts in order to tout a scoop, but rather as an illustration of the relevancy and legitimacy of the brand of advocacy journalism both Lee and I practice.

While I share Lee’s general perspective on the utter failure of our “War on Drugs” and its negative impact both at home and abroad, I don’t share his passion for the topic, and I didn’t grant him posting privileges in order to transform HA into one of our state’s most vocal advocates for legalization. But my, um, libertarian approach to the editorial choices of Lee and his fellow co-bloggers has paid off in spades, producing a long series of posts on our drug laws that have generated a coherent and accessible conversation that rivals anything I have read on the subject in the popular press.

This is not intended as a knock against the coverage in today’s Times and P-I, except to point out that if the newsrooms at our two dailies had permitted themselves to indulge in a little bit of advocacy — an exercise most “serious” reporters look down on as a journalistic vice — they might have championed Garon’s cause before his death rather than after, thus potentially changing the outcome, or at the very least allowing Garon to die knowing that the publicity surrounding his case might ultimately help to save the lives of others.

I’m not arguing that our dailies should have championed Garon’s cause, just that they could have, and that Lee’s urgent and unabashed advocacy was at least as legitimate a journalistic approach to this story as the after-the-fact reporting in today’s Times and P-I. My friends in the legacy media misread me if they think that I believe for a moment that the blogging paradigm is inherently more credible than that which guides their efforts, but I insist that if pursued professionally and honestly blogging can be just as credible, because we wear our bias on our sleeves, not in spite of it. Moreover, while our efforts can be hit or miss, it is our freedom to advocate that often makes the blogosphere more relevant and timely than the daily fare we tend to get from our corporate media.

Which I guess is just a long-winded way of saying, “Thanks Lee, for a job well done.”

Chris Grygiel at Strange Bedfellows reports on a new Elway poll that looks at the Washington state gubernatorial race. I’ll get to Chris’ odd take on the results below, but first I want to examine the poll in some detail.

The poll of 405 people shows Governor Christine Gregoire leading Dino Rossi 43% to 38%. The 5% spread looks to be a small improvement for Gregoire from the 4% spread she had in a mid-April SurveyUSA poll, and definitely better than the 1% spread in the early April SurveyUSA poll and the 1% spread in a late March Rassmussen poll.

The current Elway poll results do fall within its margin of error. Statistically, this means that the probability of Gregoire beating Rossi is something under 95%, based on what we can tell from a relatively small sample.

While it’s easy to dismiss the results as a “statistical tie” (especially when…you know…it’s your candidate who is losing) poll results can be more informative than declaring a “statistical tie.” They allow us to estimate probabilities that Gregoire or Rossi would win in an election held now.

The most intuitive way of extracting that information is to use Monte Carlo simulations of elections and simply count the number of Gregoire wins and Rossi wins. I simulated a million gubernatorial elections of 405 voters each election. Each person had a 43% chance of voting for Gregoire, a 38% chance of voting for Rossi, and a 19% chance of voting for neither.

Gregoire won 889,889 of the elections, and Rossi took 100,318. In other words, the poll results suggest that, in an election held right now, Gregoire would have an 89.9% of winning the election and Rossi would have a 10.1% chance of winning the election.

Here is a plot showing the distribution of votes in the million elections:

The area to the right of the red line shows wins for Gregoire and those to the left are wins for Rossi.

Chris Grygiel had an interesting take on this race (“Rossi gains on Gregoire in new poll,” reads the headline). He portrays Gregoire as losing ground with this poll, because she did even better in a January Elway poll. But the reality is that numerous polls have been taken since January, and the ground that Gregoire lost happened months ago.

A late February Rasmussen poll showed Rossi with a 61% chance of beating Gregoire. That turned around in late March and Early April when polls released by Rasmussen and SurveyUSA each gave Gregoire a 61% chance of beating Rossi. By mid-April, Gregoire was up to an 87% chance of winning an election. Now, in early May, the Elway poll gives Gregoire a 90% probability of winning.

Gregoire seems to have momentum on her side…at least, that’s what the recent polls say.

The TNT’s Niki Sullivan got a call back from the Rossi campaign, telling her he raised about $625,000 in April, far short of the more than $1 million the Gregoire camp says she’ll report.

Rossi’s surrogates had been making a big deal of his relative fundraising success over recent months, but of course that came mostly during the legislative session, when the governor was prohibited by law from raising money.  No doubt Rossi will have plenty of cash come November, but I expect Gregoire to expand her money lead from hereon out.

Coming up, Darryl applies his typically thorough statistical analysis to the recent Elway Poll, and comes up with  a conclusion that may surprise the P-I’s Chris Grygiel.  Stay tuned….

Anyone guess what’s wrong with this screenshot from Fox News?

Yep, the geniuses on staff at Fox and Friends thought that the ‘Douglas’ in the Lincoln-Douglas debates was Frederick Douglass, the freed slave who went on to become an author and politician, and not Stephen A. Douglas.

God help us all.

From the latest CNN Poll:

A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.

“No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

And…

The poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war while 68 percent opposed the conflict.

“Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war,” Holland said. “In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent.”

Gee, I sure hope John McCain keeps running as the candidate who will continue President Bush’s policy in Iraq for another hundred years.

I just received word that Timothy Garon passed away this afternoon. I’ve said what I’ve needed to say about what happened to this man. There’s a lot of tragedy in this world, but it’s especially tragic when people who we don’t expect to be among the ranks of the willfully ignorant bring about a result like this.

It’s also a reminder for those participating in the 2008 Global Marijuana March on Saturday that there’s still a long way to go.