HorsesAss.Org

My what a difference a year makes. It wasn’t so long ago that the national GOP had targeted Sen. Maria Cantwell as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in 2006, while WA state Republicans were drooling over what they saw as the inevitable backlash over the 2004 gubernatorial election contest. Now, less than a year before the election, things don’t look so hot for them.

Last week I reported that both Rasmussen and GOP pollster Strategic Vision show Cantwell at the magic 50% or better against anointed challenger Mike McGavick… and now the new SurveyUSA poll is the latest to show Cantwell’s approval ratings tracking up, 55% to 34%, her net approval rising 9 points since last month’s survey. Far from being vulnerable, Cantwell now ranks right in the middle of the 100 senator pack, and most impressively, she now enjoys positive net approval across nearly every demographic group in the state.

What explains her sudden popularity? Well, she’s finally getting a little press around here, but my guess is that voters are beginning to pay a little more attention now that the 2005 election is over and McGavick is making a little more news. Absent an opponent, approval ratings can be a little nebulous, but voters, particularly Democrats and independents, are beginning to view Cantwell in the context of a head-to-head with McGavick. Indeed, Cantwell’s biggest jump was with voters who identify themselves as liberals. There may still be some resentment in this group over a handful of Cantwell’s votes, but they’re realists; no self-respecting liberal is going to hand this seat over to an insurance industry lackey like McGavick.

There was a time when state R’s expected the national party to pour lavish sums into this race, but it’s beginning to look like that money would be better spent defending Representatives Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris. (And who knows… maybe even “Doc” Hastings.)

Wednesday the House of Representatives voted 308-122 to bar torture of military detainees, and I just thought it curious to note that the only member of the WA state delegation to vote against this measure calling for the ethical treatment of prisoners was none other than House Ethics chair Richard “Doc” Mengele Hastings. Makes you proud to be a Washingtonian, huh?

Here’s a guy who can’t even vote against the GOP leadership when it comes to something as basic as torture… and we expect him to impartially investigate members of his own party?

I just hope, for the sake of consistency, that if his committee ever gets around to investigating the likes of Representatives Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, his investigators utilize the same inhumane interrogation techniques Hastings endorses for use by our military. I’m guessing a couple hours of going Abu Ghraib on their sorry congressional asses would not only blow the whole Abramoff scandal wide open, but might also end with DeLay confessing to being the gunman on the grassy knoll.

For those of you offended by the “hypocrite fish” (which by the way, I think was intended to ridicule hypocrites, not Christians), I’m sure you’ll enjoy this new holiday music video by comedienne Sarah Silverman: “Give The Jew Girl Toys”

(Thanks to Eli Sanders of Slog for the tip.)

I just gotta pass on this amusing exchange between outgoing council members Dwight Pelz and David Irons. It’s not verbatim, and it’s from a secondhand source who wasn’t in council chambers at the time, but I’m just a lowly blogger, so secondhand, paraphrased accounts are good enough for me.

Apparently, during the course of a discussion of something or other during the council meeting, Pelz mentioned that he’s running for chairman of the state Democratic Party. Irons piped up, “Can I vote for you?” And Pelz shoots back, “No, but your sister can.” After a pause, Pelz added, “In fact, I’m hoping for four votes out of your family.”

Gotta laugh.

(For those who don’t know, Irons’ sister Di is the State Committeewoman from the 5th Legislative District, and thus will definitely have a vote in January’s election of a new state chair.)

One of the primary recommendations of the Independent Task Force on Elections appointed earlier this year by King County Executive Ron Sims was the creation of an outside “turnaround team” to evaluate and, if necessary, shakeup management of the elections department. In following through on his promise to follow the task force’s recommendation, Sims has chosen a contractor and requested $1.35 million from the council.

But now, as the council balks at appropriating the money, it’s own independent Citizen’s Election Oversight Committee is recommending against hiring a turnaround team at all.

Several members of the Citizens’ Election Oversight Committee, reconvened by the County Council after errors in the 2004 election, said Tuesday that the elections division has made great strides in improving the elections process.

But League of Women Voters representative Joan Thomas said a turnaround team could end up “turning around every bit of progress we’ve made, and starting all over again.”

The county virtually eliminated the mishandling of provisional ballots and dramatically improved its ballot accounting in the November election.

“It’s too late” for a turnaround team, committee chairman A.J. Culver said.

While administration insiders have previously assured me that Sims fully intends to follow the Task Force’s advice, and that Dean Logan’s fate would eventually be determined by the turnaround team’s recommendations, there has also been some internal debate over whether the turnaround team might disrupt the reforms already underway. The general administration consensus is that procedural improvements within elections have already been dramatic — an evaluation strongly echoed by the Citizens Oversight Committee — but that the turnaround team could be useful in recognizing and fixing the “cultural” and management issues that have long afflicted the department. Sims and his staff have also considered the turnaround team a necessary step towards restoring public faith in the system.

In telling the Seattle Times that Sims welcomed the council’s thoughts on a turnaround team, administration spokesman Sandeep Kaushik didn’t so much backpedal as he did leave the door open to reconsideration.

“We did make a commitment to the task force, which is the group that Executive Sims created, to implement this turnaround-team idea. That remains our position at this point.”

Well, at this point, the Council won’t be ready to vote on appropriating funds for the turnaround team until they reconvene in January… right around the time the Task Force is scheduled to reconvene as well. Considering how much is at stake both in terms of money and in continuing the successful transformation that is already occurring in the elections department, the first task before the Task Force should be to reevaluate their turnaround team recommendation in light of the improvements that have already been made.

After successful primary and general elections, the Citizens Oversight Committee seems downright enthusiastic about the improvements they have seen, while council members on both sides of the aisle seem to be questioning whether a turnaround team is still necessary. If the Task Force publicly agrees and drops this recommendation, it will save taxpayers $1.35 million, while further shoring up public faith in the system.

I’m not suggesting that just because KC elections has managed to run a couple of smooth elections, all the endemic cultural issues have been solved… but there are less dramatic and costly remedies. A management consultant could be brought in to review operations and make recommendations. Or perhaps State Auditor Brian Sonntag might be invited to come in and conduct one of those much-ballyhooed performance audits… on the state’s dime.

In any case, I think it’s time for everyone to stop viewing KC elections through the prism of the hyperbolic election contest controversy, and start evaluating it based on its recent performance. We may discover that a turnaround team is a solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.

Yesterday came more bad news for embattled vote counting rigging machine manufacturer Diebold. On Monday, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell unexpectedly resigned due “personal reasons,” one day before a securities fraud class action suit was filed against him, Diebold, and seven other current and former officers. (RawStory has more details on the company’s woes from Diebold insider “Dieb-Throat.”)

Well, now comes word from Black Box Voting that a major security flaw has prompted Leon County Florida supervisor of elections Ion Sancho to announce that he will never again use Diebold in an election, and will request funds to replace the Diebold system in his county.

A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted “no” on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted “yes” indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A “zero report” was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied “ender card” was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6

However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the “mother ship” that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.
The results in the central tabulator read:

Yes:7 ; No:1

Of course, the fact that a system can be hacked, doesn’t mean it has been hacked. It should be noted that while this is exactly the same type of Diebold system used in King County and throughout much of WA state, our state’s electoral integrity survived the most grueling and definitive test of all: the 2004 gubernatorial hand recount. Apart from the ballots legally added between tabulations, the difference between the hand and machine counts was statistically insignificant, proving that there was no manipulation of the data coming from the optical scanners or the GEMS central tabulator.

Curiously, one of the election “reforms” pushed by WA state Republicans is to remove hand recounts from our election procedures, thus eliminating the most definitive check on our automated vote tabulation systems. Hmmm.

The lesson that should be learned from all this is that the franchise is simply too valuable to trust to proprietary software from a private corporation. The only way to assure the integrity of our vote tabulation system is to move towards one based on open source software.

Rep. Doc Hastings, a Republican from Eastern Washington, should be ashamed of himself for allowing the House ethics committee he chairs to turn into a dysfunctional joke. It is an embarrassment to the state, to the country and even to the Republican Party that swept to power on the promise of clean government.

The Olympian’s editorial board doesn’t mince words in this editorial sticking it to Hastings for fiddling while the House burns around him.

It’s time for Hastings to stop his petty squabbling with the Democrats and start doing his job. Lord knows there is plenty to do at a time when one representative is headed for prison for accepting bribes and former House ma-jority leader Tom DeLay is under indictment in a Texas campaign finance scheme. Yet Congress has no functional ethics committee to hold elected leaders accountable.

The Republican leadership gave Hastings the job exactly because of his reputation as a do-nothing congressman, and they are getting exactly what they expected: absolutely nothing. Last year, committee chair Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO), two other members, and most of the committee staff were purged after the panel twice voted to admonish Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX). After a year under Hastings “leadership” a new chief of staff is still not in position, and investigators haven’t even been hired. Meanwhile, seven lawmakers have either been indicted, convicted, pled guilty, or are under investigation for bribery, money laundering, conspiracy and other crimes.

“There is no ethics enforcement in Congress today, and it’s inexcusable,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative monitor of government ethics.

“No matter what level of corruption the members of Congress engage in, the ethics committees do nothing,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a national embarrassment.”

It certainly is, and it’s humiliating that a Washington state lawmaker is part of the problem.

My has Hastings star risen. Formerly just an embarrassment to the 4th CD, he’s now humiliating the entire state, prompting both the Olympian and the Tacoma News Tribune to editorialize against Hastings inexcusable recalcitrance. Hmmm… I wonder when the Seattle Times editorial board — which fancies itself our state’s paper of record — will weigh in on Hastings shameful performance as chair of the Ethics Committee?

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Be there or be thirsty. (I’ll be there.)

Democrat Darcy Burner, running for the party’s nomination to oppose first-term incumbent Dave Reichert, has a post up on Daily Kos attacking Reichert and the GOP leadership for failing to act on homeland security:

One of the critical issues that all Democrats will face in the 2006 elections is the assertion that they are too soft on national security issues. It will certainly be an issue in my race, where I am running for Washington’s 8th Congressional District against an incumbent, Dave Reichert, who is a former sheriff, and whose entire message last cycle consisted of “I will protect you.”

I think that we spend a lot of time allowing the Republicans to ask the wrong questions, and then we attack their answers when we shouldn’t cede them the questions in the first place.

They are asking the question: “Are we tough enough to finish what we’ve started in Iraq?”

The question that needs to be asked is: “Are we safer than we were on September 11, 2001?”

Don’t cede them the question. Ask the right one, and then answer it.

In light of last week’s blistering report card from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, criticizing the Bush administration and Congress’s failure to act on many of their most crucial recommendations, Burner’s post is not only relevant to voters in her district, but to voters nationally. Please read the whole thing, and then recommend it so that it can get some national attention.

Writing for Salon.com, Michelle Goldberg goes into some of the long history behind the right-wing crusade against a non-existent liberal “war on Christmas.

Henry Ford was sounding the alarm about the war on Christmas in his notorious 1921 tract “The International Jew.” “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of [their] attack,” Ford wrote. He listed local outrages: “Christmas celebrations or carols in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Paul and New York met with strong Jewish opposition … Local Council of Jewish Women of Baltimore petitions school board to prohibit Christmas exercises … The Council of the University Settlement, at the request of the New York Kehillah [Jewish leadership], adopts this resolution: ‘That in the holiday celebrations held annually by the Kindergarten Association at the University Settlement every feature of any sectarian character, including Christmas trees, Christmas programs and Christmas songs, shall be eliminated.'”

To compare today’s “war on Christmas” demagogues to Henry Ford is not to call them anti-Semites. Rather, they are purveyors of a conspiracy theory that repeatedly crops up in America. The malefactors change — Jews, the U.N., the ACLU — but the outlines stay the same. The scheme is always massive, reaching up to the highest levels of power.

Goldberg is careful to avoid labeling the current crusade as anti-Semitic… but I’m not. At first I found the deluded rantings of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson to be so pathetic as to be funny. But I’m not laughing anymore. I’ve done a lot of thinking and a lot reading on this subject over the past couple days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

When you talk about a war on Christmas, or anything Christian, most Christians do not instantly think of the enemy as secular humanists or even Muslims… they think of Jews. Yes, like other forms of racism, anti-Semitism has mostly been pushed beneath the surface of respectable American dialogue for the past few decades, but two millennia of institutionalized Jew-hatred is not so easily washed away. Whether the intent is to blame the Jews for the rash of secular “Happy Holidays” that’s supposedly destroying our nation is not the point… many Christians, in buying into this bullshit rhetoric, will naturally blame Jews… whether it be the Jewish lawyers of the ACLU or Jewish merchants or whatever. Furthermore, this latently anti-Semitic “war on Christmas” rhetoric is clearly being harnessed for political purposes.

In her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between good old fashioned religious Jew hating, and modern, political anti-Semitism. While the latter certainly draws upon the former, anti-Semitism is more of a secular, racialist ideology, generally harnessed for political purposes. Indeed, Arendt argues that far from being just a terrible by-product, anti-Semitism was actually an organizing principle of the Nazi’s totalitarian regime.

This is, above all, a political crusade, and when O’Reilly and his ilk rage against a “war on Christmas,” they dangerously appeal to the inner demons of Christian society, for when Gibson talks about a vast anti-Christian conspiracy reaching into the heart of American life, it’s only natural for some Christians to look towards their historical boogeyman. Gibson writes:

“Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards.”

No wait… that wasn’t Gibson, that was Henry Ford again, writing in his infamous 1921 anti-Semitic tract. Eight-five years later, Gibson and O’Reilly are careful not to name the enemy, but the vile rhetoric and its impact are unchanged. For who else would wage a “war on Christmas” than Christianity’s favorite 2000-year-old enemy… the Jews?

The right’s war on the “war on Christmas” is a political strategy intended to divide the nation along religious and cultural lines, and like all wars, there will be victims. How many Fox viewers have openly and angrily derided this attack on Christian America, and how many Jewish children have already been harassed by their schoolmates as a result? Anybody who has ever been a child should understand that this sort of open hostility happens everyday, and that the subtle strains of discrimination that lie beneath the surface of 21st Century America are not so subtle to the children who are its target.

And so the more the likes of O’Reilly and Gibson feign offense at this imagined attack on the rights of our nation’s white Christian majority, the more offense I shall take at their dangerous and hateful rhetoric. Intentional or not, they are harnessing the force’s of anti-Semitism to achieve a political end, and it’s time people started calling it for what it is.

One of the election “reforms” the Washington state GOP has aggressively proposed is eliminating the process of ballot “duplication”, through which ballots that could not otherwise be read by the vote tabulating machines are manually copied to register the clear intent of voters.

“This whole process makes us very nervous,” [State GOP chair] Chris Vance says … “You’ve got human beings making judgments and human beings touching the ballots. It just leads to mischief. … We could say, ‘Let the machines count the ballots and that’s it.’ ”

Yeah… well… according to an article in today’s Seattle Times, calming Vance’s nerves would have required disenfranchising 8.3% of King County voters in November’s general election, and nearly 113,000 voters in the state’s nine largest counties.

There’s a reason the GOP’s early claims last year of a ballot duplication scandal were quietly dropped during Dino Rossi’s ensuing election contest: there is no scandal. WA is a “voter intent” state, and that means officials must do what they can to count a ballot if the voter’s intent can be discerned. Ballot duplication is a transparent, well-documented process performed in every county in the state.

“The purpose of an election is to discern the will of the majority,” says Dean Logan, King County’s elections director. “It’s not to determine whether voters can follow directions.

“Are we going to disenfranchise someone because they used the wrong pen?”

[Secretary of State Sam] Reed, a Republican, agrees. “To deny somebody the right to have their vote counted because they made a mistake is not something we want to do,” he says. Many of those voters are elderly or disabled, Reed adds.

What types of ballots require duplication? Well, some are damaged in the mail, and others are those where voters corrected a mistake, as instructed, by drawing an X through the oval they already filled in, then filling in the right one. But the vast majority are simply ballots where voters used the wrong color pen, or just didn’t follow instructions… circling, checking, or putting X’s through ovals instead of filling them… or using some other creative ballot marking method. On the vast majority of these ballots the voter’s intent is clear and unmistakable… the handful remaining go to the canvassing board for final determination.

So why would Vance and the Republicans want to disenfranchise people who simply make mistakes? Because a statistically significant majority of these ballots come from the very old and the very young, the very poor and the least educated, and of course, first time voters… demographic groups all of which lean Democratic. This is why Democrats, across jurisdictions, tend to pick up votes during recounts, when more care is given towards counting all ballots, and not merely those the machine happens to read on the first pass.

So let’s be honest. Republicans know that if not for ballot duplication, Dino Rossi would likely be our governor, and it would be Slade Gorton running for reelection next year, not Sen. Maria Cantwell. Nearly all of the electoral “reforms” the Republicans have pushed have been naked efforts to achieve a partisan advantage. The harder they can make it for somebody to register to vote, to cast their ballot, or to have their ballot properly tabulated, the easier it is for Republicans to win close elections. The voters who are most likely to be disenfranchised by these “reforms” vote disproportionately for Democrats. Out of touch with the mainstream of voters in WA state, and unwilling to match their agenda to the wants and needs of the majority of the people, the GOP has instead chosen a strategy of shrinking the voter pool to more closely match the demographics of their base.

Had all the Republican “reforms” been in place during 2004, over a quarter of a million eligible voters would have been disenfranchised statewide. That is the GOP strategy for seizing power in WA state, and nationwide. And that is a strategy that Democrats must make their number one priority to fight.

[Cross-posted on Daily Kos]

Does anyone else find it sadly ironic that the United States has to apologize to Germany about the way we treat prisoners?

Sen. Eugene McCarthy is dead at the age of 89.

I was only five at the time McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign became a fulcrum of the anti-war movement, and in the process, took down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. But I’ve often looked back on that era and wondered whether I would have been caught up in his passion.

Indeed, the McCarthy campaign was so inspiring, and the times so politically divisive, that nearly four decades later, the large, Irish Catholic family I married into still celebrates the family split between the Robert F. Kennedy and McCarthy camps, with banners and words flying every St. Patty’s Day. The squabble has long since been dulled by time, whiskey and family ties into little more than an amusing reenactment, but knowing my history — and knowing this family — I imagine the contemporaneous debate must have been quite intense and entertaining.

As for me, my impressions of “the good McCarthy” are all second hand. He’s always struck me as a kind of ideal… a candidate willing to cite philosophy or poetry on the campaign trail, instead of just spouting focus-group-filtered talking points, perhaps most famously flummoxing his audience by quoting the ancient Greek historian Plutarch:

“They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view.”

In an age when high-priced consultants package their well-groomed candidates with petty, single-issue causes like tax cuts or gay marriage or a nebulous “war on terror”, one can’t help but pine for a politician more familiar with Putarch than with pollsters. From what I knew of the man, I suppose McCarthy might have despised the type of calculating, partisan politics in which I traffic. Still, that doesn’t stop me from longing for the type of ideal he represented to his fervent supporters.

Yesterday morning, our good friend Stefan was apparently honored by the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle for his work as a volunteer tutor in the Urban League After-School Program. I applaud Stefan for his volunteerism; I myself do the good parent thing as a volunteer in my daughter’s school… and I can’t tell you how desperate the need is for more parents and community members to get involved. So, thanks Stefan.

But…

I’m having a little cognitive dissonance problem here. I don’t mean to diminish Stefan’s admirable volunteer work, but surely an organization like the Urban League — dedicated to empowering African Americans — could have found some equally admirable volunteer to honor… who has not repeatedly gone on the record making racist comments about King County Executive Ron Sims, our state’s most prominent African American elected official. Take a look at the League’s mission statement:

The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle strives to empower, enable and assist African Americans, other people of color, and disadvantaged individuals in becoming self-sufficient through public advocacy, providing services and developing strong business and community partnerships.

And yet, the man they honored yesterday has repeatedly and shamelessly compared Sims to the brutal African dictator Robert Mugabe.

I was taken aback the first time I saw the Mugabe line on Stefan’s blog, but maybe it’s just my liberal, white man’s guilt. So I thought I’d inquire about Sims’ own personal feelings on the matter, and through a spokesman I was assured that Sims is deeply offended by the Mugabe reference, and clearly understands it to be racist. Furthermore, he was shocked and disappointed to learn that the League would honor a man who publicly makes such racist remarks, and Sims has since made his feelings clear to Urban League president James Kelly.

Now, Stefan clearly believes he is not racist — he told me so himself, at which time he also made clear how offended he was at my insinuations to the contrary. But his repeated use of the Mugabe line not only shows a stunning lack of empathy for the sensitivities of others, but a complete and total disregard.

It is possible for a person of good will, through their own cultural isolation, to inadvertently make remarks that others might perceive as racially offensive. The appropriate response is to apologize, move on, and ask for others to judge you on the whole of your character, rather than a single incident. But Stefan has repeatedly been told by me, by the MSM, and by his own readers, that the Mugabe reference crosses the line… and yet he continues to cross it. Stefan, who was quick to take offense at an anti-semitic sleight in one of my comment threads, could apparently care less that the target of his Mugabe slur clearly perceives it to be racially motivated.

So, how are we to judge Stefan’s character? I’m not one to criticize a blogger based on the contents of his comment threads (mine are often hateful), but given the level of invective spewed over on (u)SP, I wonder how many of his readers share the same sentiment voiced in this comment, which actually criticizes Stefan for his volunteer work:

If it was the horse’s ass receiving an award from a hateful “civil rights” group’s dinner, you be all over him as you should be. I guess it’s ok for Republicans to support hate-mongering racial causes if they are from Seattle. No wonder Seattle is such an Island of goofies–even the “conservatives” seem to be sniffing glue. Sing koombaya for me, Shark. this is a disappointment. These people want to defeat us.

Surely, some of Stefan’s defenders will attempt to use his Urban League award as an inoculation against charges of racism, but his words speak clearly. Ron Sims has now gone on the record stating that he personally finds the Mugabe reference to be racially offensive; if Stefan continues to use it, he will prove to his readers that he has no compunction about throwing a racial slur at the highest elected African American official in the state. And that will speak for itself.

I’m busy. So here’s an early open thread.