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Because the governor might die, or otherwise have to leave. And also because Owen often does annoying things. Mostly deciding the unconstitutional 2/3 requirement was rad. Also, on the plus side of the ledger, he doesn’t fuck around when Gregoire is out of the state, and he could. But while I want the Democrats’ budget to pass, I don’t know that this is the best thing (if he’d actually do it).

It’s a 24-24 tie in the senate because Republican minority leader Sen. Mike Hewitt (R-16, Walla Walla) one of the 25 votes that gave the GOP (and a couple of conservative Democrats) the majority for the GOP version of things, is out recovering from surgery.

Conservative Democrat Owen, who’s made momentous decisions before (ruling against the Democrats by deciding that repealing tax loopholes is tantamount to raising taxes and requires a two-thirds vote), could step in a give the Democrats the budget vote they need.

I mean I’d prefer we win the day because someone realizes that the GOP position is horse shit not because someone needs surgery. I mean the people of Walla Walla deserve representation in this budget mess. That said, I wouldn’t shed a tear if it happened. The Democrats have a better budget than the Republicans and the people voted for Democrats in the majority of both houses.

Damn you Savannah!

by Carl Ballard — Friday, 4/6/12, 7:38 am

According to some Travel and Leisure magazine (no, I didn’t know it existed either). Seattle is America’s 6th greenest city.

Seattle did, after all, come in fifth runner-up. And No. 1 was our sibling rival to the south: Portland.

Savannah, Minneapolis, Denver and Chicago also beat out Seattle on the list. But at least the magazine had a lot of nice things to say about Seattle

Yes, if you click the link, one of the things that gets mentioned is that if you bring your own cup to coffee places, you might get a discount. Is that really one of the top 40 environmental things about Seattle? I don’t know what it takes to get higher on a probably mostly arbitrary list, but I say let’s keep trying.

… Sorry, I put the wrong link. I meant to direct you to the Big Blog post that was blockquoted instead of the article mentioned.

The Dems new Jewish scandal

by Darryl — Thursday, 4/5/12, 10:02 pm

The right-wing media has a huge breaking scandal….

The Democratic Party’s newly appointed Jewish outreach liaison is pictured on Facebook in a series of provocative photos with her friends holding dollar bills and referring to themselves as “Jewbags” and the “Jew cash money team.”

Dani Gilbert, who has been a staffer in the office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), was recently appointed as the Democratic National Committee’s Jewish outreach liaison, according to her Twitter feed.

Ooohh….that sounds ~~weally, weally, wascally~~ really, really bad.

The whole thing supposedly exposes a huge riff between Pres. Obama and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Here is the offending picture….

There she is kissing the money!

Except, wait. That Facebook page is from January 2006. I presume Ms. Gilbert was in college (or maybe high school) and was goofing around with some friends.

Inexcusable still. It’s scandalous!

Clearly, Ms. Gilbert should be fired and forbidden from participation in politics.

And kept away from young children.

Hijacking Michigan

by Darryl — Thursday, 4/5/12, 9:13 pm

Rachael Maddow has a pretty remarkable story here….

For Your Conservative Relatives

by Carl Ballard — Thursday, 4/5/12, 5:23 pm

If you know you’ll be getting into an argument with your conservative relatives for this weekend, you might want to bookmark this graph Shaun and others around the web have been posting.

Open Thread 4/5

by Carl Ballard — Thursday, 4/5/12, 8:04 am

– Good for Bruce Harrell for his proposal to allow women to file a complaint with the city’s Office of Civil Rights if they are asked to leave a public place or cover up while breastfeeding.

– I’m not sure weirdness is really something you can measure legislative session to legislative session.

– Eliminating Disability Lifeline, on top of being horrible policy on its own, doesn’t even save money. (h/t)

– War Crimes

– Finally, we need to stop shrugging off the concerns and cries of people in states that feel like lost causes or bastions of GOP influence because those people matter too. We need to stop telling people to move (most can’t), to secede (we don’t want to), or to start fighting (we already are, you just aren’t looking).

– Possibly the dumbest use of I was just asking for people’s opinion ever.

– Where’s my Higgs?

The Compromise Budget WAS The Problem

by Carl Ballard — Wednesday, 4/4/12, 8:29 pm

Remember last year after the legislature passed a biannual budget — that we’re still operating under — and the Seattle Times Editorial Board praised them to high heaven?

The session in the spring was bloody — but also successful. It was an honest budget, with fewer gimmicks than in earlier years. And in the Senate it was done with the cooperation of both parties. If legislators come back, they should do it that way because it is the way that works.

Like it or not (and I didn’t like it) that budget was bipartisan, especially from the Senate. But the Seattle Times thought it was a success. It works. So now, we’re operating under the same budget, and we need urgent reforms.

THE deadlock in Olympia is not about the budget. Really the deadlock is about whether to accept three reforms demanded by Republicans and moderate Democrats or to pass watered-down versions. We urge legislators to go for the full reforms, because they make the state budget more sustainable in the long run.

My God! The budget is unsustainable. And how do we reform our unsustainable budget? With bipartisan (3 Democrats in one house of the legislature and zero in the other so far is bipartisan, FYI) reforms. Reforms like making retirement worse for state workers. Reforms like having a shittier health care package for teachers than the one they negotiate now with their districts. Reforms like 4 year budgets. You know, because we can’t do 2 years, why not 4?

No reforming our taxes to make them more fair or to raise more revenue. No making sure revenue keeps up with the size of the economy. Of course if the legislature passes those types of reform and it doesn’t pan out, expect the Seattle Times to freak out and demand another round of “reforms” of the same type.

Inslee’s Old Seat

by Carl Ballard — Wednesday, 4/4/12, 7:53 am

For the most part, I’ve been happy with the coverage of the 1st Congressional District primary. While there’s some bullshit coverage of Darcy Burner, that’s sort of what you expect from the mainstream sources. There are plenty of good candidates, and for the most part they’re covered about as well as you can expect.

But one thing in particular just drives me off the wall. And that’s whenever I read that they’re competing for “Jay Inslee’s old seat.” The fuck they are. They’re competing to fill a seat with the same number as Jay Inslee’s old seat, but since the redistricting looks nothing like that seat. Hopefully this will die down a bit since there will be an election to fill the old seat until redistricting kicks in.

Sub-SuperTuesday Liveblogging

by Darryl — Tuesday, 4/3/12, 5:02 pm

Why the hell not? I mean, soon we won’t have Newt or Santorum to kick the shit out of anymore.

Newt is already out of the picture. But Lil’ Ricky Santorum keeps on Mitt like a bad case of Giardia. Cesspool ensues.

The polls close in Wisconsin, D.C. and Maryland at 5:00 PM PDT. That’s now!

5:04: It’s all tied up in all three states, with 0% reporting…

5:06: I got a call this afternoon from my favorite neice, Maria Elaine Valdez Holman. “Guess what, uncle Darryl, I voted today,” she said with some excitement. My guess is that most 18 year-olds don’t get quite so excited about voting, but Maria has become quite passionate about politics. She is really looking forward to voting Gov. Scott Walker’s ass out of office. Needless to say, she got her voting issues resolved, but not without some considerable effort, thanks to Walker.

5:32: With less than 1% reporting, we have some results for Maryland:

Romney, 53.2%
Santorum, 26.6%
Gingrich, 10.4%
Paul, 8.3%

5:41: With 1% reporting in Maryland, CNN boldly calls it for the Mittster.

5:42: We just got a teevee turned to CNN at the Ale House (that can be hard to do during Basketball season, and there is a Women’s final on tonight). Anyway, it seems I was misunderinformed…polls in Wisconsin haven’t closed yet. I believe they close at 6:00 PM PDT.

6:00: Polls are closing in Wisconsin. Wolf Blitzer puts his “intensity” face on.

CNN projection based on exit polls:

Romney, 43%
Santorum, 35%
Gingrich, 11%
Paul, 6%

6:02: NPR points out that turn-out may be much lower than expected in Wisconsin. That’s bad news for Scott Walker. The G.O.P. voters are simply not all that engaged.

6:06: CNN projects that Mitt Romney wins in D.C. What took them so long…I mean, Santorum didn’t even make the ballot. But I’m grateful we have that settled.

6:07: Dear CNN…When you have a text insert saying, “Santorum to speak soon” up for 45 minutes, you ought to be asking yourself…”Are we being played by the Santorum campaign?”

6:09: CNN has Ari Fleischer on the teevee. Without sound, I have no idea what he is saying. But I’m guessing he is lying–after all, his lips are moving.

6:14: Finally…after almost an hour of pushing it…Santorum is speaking. All smiles and waiving signs. This looser is on fucking Mars! Oh…wait. He’s giving the speech from Mars, PA.

6:17: CNN banner: “Breaking News: Awaiting Wisconsin Results”. That’s not fucking breaking news. We have been awaiting these results for our entire fucking life!
[Read more…]

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

by Darryl — Tuesday, 4/3/12, 4:02 pm

Please join us tonight for another evening of electoral politics under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally. Tonight’s primaries are in Wisconsin, Maryland, and DC.

Seattle DL meets every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our regular starting time is 8:00pm, but feel free to show up before then to catch the earliest election returns.

Naturally, we’ll be doing a bit of live blogging of the results.

Can’t make it to Seattle? There is also a meeting tonight of the Tri-Cities chapter, and the Tacoma chapter meets this Thursday.

With 233 chapters of Living Liberally, including twelve in Washington state and six more in Oregon, chances are excellent there’s one near you.

Headline of the day

by Darryl — Tuesday, 4/3/12, 3:33 pm

US Supreme Court Affirms Warrantless Ass Searches

Who else…but Goldy.

Goldy goes on to explain that Washington has laws that require a warrant for incarceratory cavity probes.

The gist of the Supreme Court ruling is that jailers have the right to invasive searches without warrants because of the heightened security environment of a jail or prison.

Yet…somehow, lacking warrantless ass searches, Washington state jails and prisons manage to not spiral into utter chaos.

Maybe it’s the climate.

Open Thread 4/3

by Carl Ballard — Tuesday, 4/3/12, 7:58 am

– Seattle’s Road Map to a Climate-Friendly Future

– It’s worth noting that the quickest way to enact restrictions on walking around while carrying a gun is probably for the “wrong” kinds of people to start carrying firearms, causing a freakout among the people who wrote the laws in the first place.

– Call me a skeptic, but I think corporate compassion is mostly PR.

– Pictures of the U-Link breakthrough.

– You, gentle Times reader, should your accept your trite generalizations about female sexuality from noone less than a Latin-spouting Harvardian.

– Our awesome banking system.

– Health care glossary.

Poll Analysis: Inslee 38%, McKenna 34%

by Darryl — Monday, 4/2/12, 8:33 pm

A new Grove Insight poll of the gubernatorial race between Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA-1) and Washington state AG Rob McKenna (R) shows Inslee with a +2% lead over McKenna. The poll surveyed 500 likely Washington voters (M.O.E. 4.4%) from the 26th to 28th of March.

Before doing my usual Monte Carlo analysis of the results, I want to point out that with this poll and the previous Grove Insight poll, I debated whether or not to analyze the results. One of my rules for polls is to, “ignore polls released by party organizations or candidates.” The issue is that campaigns and party organizations commission polls all the time, but we rarely get to see the polling results. When they are released, there is a strategic reason. Therefore, including such polls can lead to a biased overall interpretation, even if the polls themselves are completely honest and accurate.

Both of the Grove Insight polls are, apparently, commissioned by the SEIU. Even though SEIU isn’t part of the campaign or the Democratic party, SEIU has recently endorsed Inslee and they obviously share elements of their politics. I really don’t know if Grove Insight would have released these results if they had been bad for Inslee. It is a close call, but I opted to go with publishing an analysis.

Of the 500 respondents, there were only 360 who had a preference for either Inslee or McKenna, so the effective margin of error is actually bigger than the 4.4% given in the release. A Monte Carlo analysis that held a million simulated elections gave Inslee a win 762,761 times and McKenna a win 225,707 times.

The analysis suggests that, if the election was today, Inslee would have a 77.2% probability of beating McKenna. Note that by statistical conventions we would call this a tie because the winning percentage doesn’t exceed 95%. Here is the distribution of election outcomes resulting from the analysis:

This makes three consecutive polls that contradict the narrative that McKenna is the front-runner:

Although I want input from another poll or two, it is beginning to look like this race is flipping—gone from McKenna having a hefty lead, to a tie. If correct, it’s pretty remarkable is how fast things have turned around….

[The most recent analysis in this race can be found here.]

Another Isolated Incident, I’m Sure

by Carl Ballard — Monday, 4/2/12, 6:09 pm

Another act (h/t) that again has nothing to do with any other incident like it or the noxious political environment the GOP is pushing. Just another nut. No connective tissue. It’s all completely senseless and unpredictable.

Grand Chute police are investigating an explosive device that blew up at Planned Parenthood.

It happened about 7:40 p.m. Sunday at the Planned Parenthood office at 3800 North Gillett Street.

Authorities say a plastic water bottle filled with an accelerant caused the blast and fire, which quickly extinguished itself by the time firefighters arrived.

Fortunately nobody was hurt, and it doesn’t seem to have done much damage. Still, it could have been much worse. And I feel like a broken record here, but while of course the person who did this is responsible for their actions, the anti-choice people should recognize their contribution to this, especially the ones using violent, eliminationist rhetoric.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

I’ve Always Thought the Lt. Governor is Important