HorsesAss.Org

Watching the Arizona-Stanford game right now, I want to post something that’s been on my mind related to college football. I don’t think I’ve ever met a college football fan who doesn’t despise the BCS system, but the money invested in the existing bowl system is what keeps us from ever getting the playoff system that everyone wants.

If college football fans want to usher in a playoff system, there’s one easy way to do it:

Stop going to the bowl games.

You could force the NCAA to adopt a playoff system by the end of January if the bowls were all played in front of tens of thousands of empty seats. I don’t understand why this isn’t discussed as a way to force their hand. You can yell and scream all you want about how much the BCS sucks, but they’re not going to listen until you figure out how to hit them in their wallets.

Levi Pulkkinen reports:

Thirteen teens associated with Redmond High School are facing drug charges after a long-running undercover operation involving a police officer posing as a student.

In charging documents filed earlier this week in King County Juvenile Court, investigators describe the months-long operation that saw a Redmond police detective enroll in the high school and buy drugs from students there.

Enrolled as a senior in August 2009, the detective described herself as a transfer student who’d recently moved to Redmond from California. She attended classes, ate lunch at the school and lived as a high school student until 11 students were arrested in February.

According to charging documents, the undercover officer was able to buy a wide variety of illicit drugs at the suburban high school, including ecstasy, heroin and cocaine.

Investigations like these are upsetting to me on a number of levels. For starters, if there are 13 different students dealing drugs at your suburban high school, arresting those students will – at best – provide a short window of time where those drugs are hard to obtain. In other words, if there’s enough commerce going on that it requires 13 different drug dealers to satisfy the demand, other sellers will quickly fill that void.

That said, I don’t really believe that there were 13 separate drug dealers supplying the students of Redmond High with drugs. What often happens in investigations like this one is the following scenario:

The female undercover officer enrolls in the school with the intent to seek out the “dealers”. With a little effort, she’s able to locate students who are occasional drug users. She then approaches a 16-year-old boy who perhaps some other students have told her smokes pot. This kid isn’t a drug dealer, but he knows the people who are. The undercover officer approaches him about acquiring drugs, asking “hey, do you know where I can buy drugs?” The 16-year-old, who thinks this new girl from California is kind of cute and now thinks she also likes to smoke pot, wants to impress her and decides to be the middleman himself. He visits someone he knows he can get some drugs from, buys them and brings it to her. He’s now a potential felon.

Without knowing any of the details of the cases against these 13 young people, no one other than the accused themselves has any idea how many would fit the profile I gave, but I have trouble believing that this one undercover cop managed to bring down over a dozen truly dangerous drug dealers in a single high school. Yes, drugs are widespread in our high schools, whether they’re in the city or out in the wealthy suburbs. But for the student in the scenario I gave, while his parents should rightfully be upset that he’s able to find drugs in high school, getting arrested will be far more detrimental to his prospects in life than the drugs were.

As a parent myself, this weighs heavily on my mind. I’m not happy about the fact that it’s so easy to get drugs in our schools (and it’s the main reason why I fight for regulated sales of softer drugs like marijuana and ecstasy – so that they can be as hard to obtain as alcohol), but sending in undercover officers to entrap at-risk teenage boys is not the right solution. In fact, it generally ends up being more of a threat to young people than a benefit.

Roy Zimmerman has updated his song Vote Republican

• The original version: Vote Republican 1.0.
• Vote Republican 2.0:
• Vote Republican 3.0:

(And there are plenty more media from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

You know, I’ve got a little pride here, not to mention some basic math skills and a bit of experience tracking local election results, so I wasn’t just pulling a projection out of my ass when I confidently called WA-02 for Rick Larsen yesterday, after two days of late ballots trending in his favor.

See, in an all vote-by-mail system, there really are only two universes of ballots: those tallied on election day, and those tallied thereafter. The first universe of ballots consists of those received over a three week period stretching from a day or two after the ballots are mailed to voters, through the day of or before election day. The second universe of ballots consists almost entirely of those cast during the final two or three days of the campaign. This is a chronological, first-in-first-out process in which ballots are generally tallied in the order in which they arrive.

While it is impossible to discern a trend within the first universe of ballots, as they are all tallied together in a single election night report, one can reliably plot a trend between the two universes, and to a lesser extent between daily reports in the second… that is, if a late-ballot trend exists. And there’s little doubt that late voters strongly trended Democratic this year in Washington state.

That is why, as expected, Rep. Larsen substantially increased his lead to 3,872 votes today over Palin-endorsed challenger John Koster. And that is why there is little reason to expect the margins in subsequent tallies to vary much from that reported today.

There are about 62,000 ballots remaining to count in WA-02, of which Koster would need to win at least 53.2% to close the gap. Yet Koster has received only 49.2% of the total vote thus far, and only 45.2% of today’s tally. It’s simply not gonna happen. In fact, since the remaining ballots are contemporaneous to those reported over the past couple days, it would be surprising if Larsen didn’t continue to expand his margin.

So, the only question remaining is why HA is the only news organization calling this election?

One of the best feelings in politics comes after a close win where you put in a lot of effort. So when I look at the results in the Senate race, I’m proud to have made a difference. Those phone calls, that getting people to commit to vote, that push for more volunteers. It made people fill out their ballots. We rocked turnout in King County.

You could see the effort put into the ground for Senator Murray at the coordinated campaign. Many times, I was put in a corner on a cell phone to make calls because there were so many people they’d exhausted all the lines and all the good seats. And despite overwork and a lack of sleep, an upbeat staff always had work for me. I’ve volunteered for a lot of campaigns since before I could vote, and this was one of the ones I most looked forward to going to every time.

In a close election everything was important, and Patty’s commitment to her volunteers certainly helped. It’s also nice to have a candidate you support, rather than just a candidate who is better than that other one. One of my favorite calls was from someone who said he was, “so glad you aren’t another Karl Rove robocall” who on top of convincing to turn in his ballot, I convinced to come volunteer.

I’m so proud to have been a small part of that effort that helped push Patty over the top. I know a few other people who I saw there are readers of this blog, so thanks Stephen and thanks Ivan for showing up and thanks to all the other volunteers I had conversations with between calls. Thanks Carly, the volunteer coordinator for my district who was always a pleasure to talk to, and all the other staff. Thanks most especially to Patty Murray for being a candidate worth my time, and for making my effort worthwhile with a well run campaign.

It’s that time of the day again, when the various counties start releasing their latest ballot results, and there are a handful of races I’m still watching with interest.

Of course, the biggest one is the race between Supreme Court Justice/Dress-up Nazi Richard Sanders, and n0t-crazy challenger Charlie Wiggins. Sanders currently leads by over 18,000 votes, and if current trends hold true my back of the napkin calculations show him just squeaking by, but a little movement in Wiggins direction in the remaining ballots could prove decisive. So I’m still crossing my fingers.

And then there’s the WA-02 race between Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen and teahadist challenger John Koster. I’ve already called this one for Larsen, but I don’t get to claim bragging rights until everybody else calls it too. With San Juan County’s final significant ballot dump this afternoon, Larsen’s lead has grown to 2,025 votes, and that’s simply too big a difference for Koster to make up barring a dramatic shift in his direction in the remaining ballots.

Finally, there are a handful of legislative races that remain too close to call, but some of which look extremely promising… again, assuming the remaining ballots don’t trend much too differently than those counted the previous two days.

More to come.

UPDATE:
King County just reported another 74,265 ballots (with another 195,000 remaining), and the Democratic trends continue. State Sen. Rodney Tom has now opened 1,010 vote lead in LD-48 after trailing big-spending Republican Greg Bennett by 133 votes on election night, and Rep. Roger Goodman has finally taken a lead in LD-45, by 375 votes, over Republican thug Kevin Haistings. And in LD-1, Luis Moscoso has extended his lead to 179 votes over teahadist  Heidi Munson, but we’ll have to wait for Snohomish to come in to see if that holds up.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Still waiting on Snohomish, but with Larsen now up 3,322 votes, and dramatically expanding his margin in Whatcom County to nearly 58% of today’s batch, it’s hard to believe nobody else has called this race. (I just heard KUOW describe this as “too close to call,” but, well, it isn’t.)

I’m hearing rumors that long time strongman Tom McCabe is on his way out at the Building Industry Association of Washington, after a string of disastrous and costly campaigns that have splintered the industry and left the once mighty BIAW near bankruptcy, I-1082’s failure being the final straw.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy bigger bastard.

Asshole…

Koster’s campaign said it was monitoring the ballot counting to ensure the process was fair.

“Though John Koster remains in a position to win, we are keenly aware that there are those who will do everything they can to keep this seat out of the hands of the new House majority,” Koster’s campaign manager Larry Stickney said in a statement.

“Therefore, we have a team of observers on the ground at county courthouses throughout the 2nd Congressional District. We are working with attorneys and election experts at the state and federal levels in anticipation of a possible recount scenario,” he said.

Right. Because the only way Koster could possibly lose this election would be massive, Democratic voter fraud.

Oh, go change your diaper, crybaby.

Truth is, we don’t need to do all that much to keep this seat out of Republican hands; Koster did it himself by hiring a gay-bashing, wife-beating, incompetent campaign manager like Larry Stickney.

With the latest ballot report from Snohomish County giving him a 1,451 vote lead, it is now safe to call Washington’s 2nd Congressional District for Democratic incumbent Rep. Rick Larsen.

Rick Larsen (Democratic Party)  110,447  50.33%

John Koster (Republican Party)  108,996	 49.67%

Although trailing on election night, Larsen has now won the majority of votes in each of two consecutive ballot reports, in five of the six counties across which his district spans (Snohomish broke slightly to Koster’s advantage in today’s drop)… the same sort of late-ballot Democratic trend we’ve seen in King County and much of the rest of the state. Since the remaining uncounted ballots are all drawn from the same universe of late ballots counted over these past two days, it is only reasonable to assume that Larsen will continue to draw a majority of these votes.

So all in all, that’s not bad for WA Dems given the political climate. We hold the US Senate against an onslaught of undisclosed, corporate millions, and we give up only one, open House seat in WA-03 (a seat, by the way, that will inevitably be redistricted to be considerably more Republican for 2012.) Hard for local Republicans to crow about that given their party’s wins nationwide.

King County just released results for another 70,821 ballots, which broke 67.3% in favor of Patty Murray, compared to 66.7% on 11/3 and 61.8% on 11/2. Murray has temporarily opened up a 3% lead statewide, pending returns from other counties.

UPDATE:
Rep. Rick Larsen has expanded his lead over John Koster to 1,458 votes, though we’re still waiting for reports today from Island and Snohomish counties. Snohomish is the county I’m crossing my fingers on, as there are also a few legislative races hanging in the balance.

In legislative races, Rep. Roger Goodman has closed the gap to under 100 votes in LD 45, while Sen. Rodney Tom has opened up a 600+ vote lead in LD 48. Doesn’t look nearly as promising Sen. Randy Gordon in LD 41, who just isn’t making up the ground he needs.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Larsen now up 1,606 votes with Island reporting. Still waiting on Snohomish; San Juan isn’t reporting today.

Also, interestingly, with today’s ballot dump, I-1100 is now failing in King County.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE:
The Seattle Times calls the US Senate Race for Patty Murray. (Finally.) As does the Stranger.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE:
KUOW just reported that Dino Rossi has conceded. Or maybe they said that Rossi is conceited. I wasn’t paying close attention.

Tip to the Seattle Times: wanna make national headlines, and feel really, really important? Call Washington’s US Senate race already.

You don’t have to wait for the AP or FOX News or NBC to do it. Really. The Oregonian called their governor’s race yesterday afternoon for Kitzhaber, and he was still trailing at the time, yet everybody took it seriously because they’ve got the word “Oregon” in their masthead so folks figured they must know what they’re talking about.

Yeah, I know, there’s still a helluva lot of ballots left to count, but Patty Murray’s ahead by 28,000 votes, King County turnout is through the roof and disproportionately underreported, and the late ballots—you know, the ones that haven’t been counted yet—are clearly breaking hard for the Dems. It’s kinda obvious.

And… well… you’re the Seattle Fucking Times, for chrisakes. You wanna be our state’s paper of record? Act like it.

UPDATE:
Finally.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Oh, and just to reiterate, HA called the race for Murray about five minutes after King County posted its results on election night.

Voters have rejected Initiatives 1100 and 1105, preserving Washington’s State Store system for now, but if not for a well-funded No campaign, and the confusion created by dueling privatization initiatives, one or the other might have passed. So this is no time for the state to sit back and relax in the expectation that its profitable liquor monopoly is safe for the foreseeable future.

There are those who are simply opposed to a state-owned liquor monopoly on ideological grounds, and there is no convincing them. Then there are those handful of business interests who seek to profit from privatization at the expense of state coffers. But there are a lot of folks who wouldn’t support privatization as strongly if the State Stores simply addressed the convenience issue.

So here are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

Step One: more stores with extended and Sunday hours. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people complaining that they couldn’t buy the booze they wanted on a Sunday, or on a Friday or Saturday night.

Step Two: provide delivery service to bars and restaurants. This may sound a little petty, but there are a ton of restaurant owners who really resent having to pick up their booze themselves, when nearly all their other supplies are delivered. They don’t really expect a privatized system to sell them booze much cheaper, they just expect much better service. Give them that, and they won’t be so eager to put their time and money into the next initiative.

Step Three: modernize! You desperately need a brand new consumer oriented website and accompanying phone app that allows customers to remotely check out inventory at neighborhood stores, purchase their order, and then just drop by and pick it up (check out the Redbox website and app for an idea of what I’m talking about.) Customers could even use these tools to make special orders of items not normally stocked.

And that was just after five minutes of brainstorming. I’m sure if you talk to your employees, they probably have a bunch of ideas too about how to make the State Store experience more efficient and more appealing.

The point is, the worst thing a monopoly can do is behave like one; that’s what pisses everybody off. Innovate or die.

UPDATE:
I posted a link over on Slog, and folks are chiming in with their own suggested improvements. Lots of good ideas. Hey Olympia… are you listening?

Yeah, HA has been down or crawling for much of the morning, and no, I’m not exactly sure why. But I have my suspicions.

I haven’t done too much analysis yet, but it sure does look like the late voters tended to break strongly Democratic, at least around these parts.

For example, at the end of last night, Patty Murray had registered a comfortable 61.82% of King County vote. But in today’s batch of 50,148 votes, Murray scored a whopping 66.7%. Meanwhile, Rick Larsen has taken a small lead in WA-02; we’ll see if that holds up after the Snohomish County vote comes in at 7PM.

Very interesting. And encouraging.

UPDATE:
Matt Baretto of the Washington Poll has a spreadsheet up comparing county by county ballot returns reported on election night, 11/2 to those reported today, 11/3, and it’s kinda stunning. 22 counties reported new results today, and of them, only three—Franklin, Pend Oreille and Spokane—reported higher margins for Rossi. The rest moved in Murray’s direction, sometimes by substantial amounts.

For example, Island went from 51.43 for Murray on 11/2 to 54.42 in the 11/3 returns, Skagit from 47.75 to 48.57, Snohomish from 51.3 to 53.2, and Whatcom from 51.17 to 57.49. And I use these counties as examples, because they constitute the four biggest chunks of WA-02, where incumbent Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen climbed from a 1,400 vote deficit on election day to a 500+ vote lead over challenger John Koster today, based on the latest returns. And that appears to suggest that late voters didn’t just break hard for Murray, but for Democrats in general… which also helps explain a number of legislative races moving in the Dem direction today.

Will this trend hold up? Can’t think of a good reason why it wouldn’t.

California’s Proposition 19 failed at the polls last night, gaining only 46% of the vote. Here are some observations and thoughts [Thursday Updates below]:

– Despite the vote result, recreational marijuana users in California will still be able to purchase and consume high-quality marijuana. With the current system California has now, recreational users just have to visit any one of the doctors around the state who are willing to take their money in return for a medical authorization card. Technically, that makes them “medicinal” users, but the reality is that many of the people who hold medicinal authorizations are either suffering from rather superficial things or completely making it up. Once you have that card, however, you can buy marijuana at any of the state’s many dispensaries. And for those who haven’t taken the time to get a medical authorization, a sizable black market outside of the dispensary system continues to exist.

If anyone in California went to the polls yesterday thinking that their vote on Proposition 19 would have an impact on anyone’s ability to buy or consume marijuana, they were mistaken (the one exception to that is minors, who will still be able to purchase marijuana without having to show proof of age). What Proposition 19 would have done is to establish regulations for the overall industry. Proposition 19 was much more about the back door of the dispensary than the front door. It would have allowed for local and county governments to establish rules and regulations for production and distribution. As it stands now, dispensaries still supply themselves from unregulated growers without any oversight. For now, the DEA has backed off a bit on trying to take down these growers, but supply chains are still largely secret, and a certain percentage of the suppliers are tied to organized crime. The defeat of Proposition 19 was a very clear victory for the drug cartels in Mexico, who would have had an extremely hard time competing in a regulated marketplace.

– It’s not entirely clear how much of an impact Proposition 19 had on the rest of the ballot, but there are some strong signs that it helped California Democrats across the board. Democrats won every single statewide office in the state, from Governor to Insurance Commissioner. People tended to be focused on looking at the youth vote when assessing the effect of Proposition 19, but that was only part of the picture:

But judging by exit polling, which shows a strong conservative tide elsewhere in the country, the conservative surge did not materialize in California. This year’s electorate ended up looking a lot like 2006, according to exit poll data from both years.

Conservatives made up 33% of the California electorate this time around, according to preliminary results from this year’s California exit poll. Four years ago, the figure was 30%. Liberals made up 27% this time, compared with 25% four years ago. The percentage of self-identified moderates dropped to 40% this time, compared with 44% in 2006, the exit poll showed.

A similar pattern showed up when the exit poll asked voters what party they usually identify with. This time around, the results were 42% Democratic, 31% Republican and 27% independent. That compares with 40% Democrats, 35% Republicans and 25% independents in 2006.

While the 18-29 turnout in California was only modestly above average (13% vs. 11%), the enthusiasm of Democratic and liberal voters of all ages seems to have been greater in California than elsewhere. It may not have been enough to get Proposition 19 passed, but it appears to have helped negate the Republican wave in that state.

– One of the more interesting subplots of the initiative was the opposition coming from folks within the existing medical marijuana community. Even Dennis Peron, the man behind California’s initial medical marijuana law, opposed Proposition 19 using some rather bizarre reasoning. Other opponents of Proposition 19 were small growers who feared that legalization would lead to bigger corporations eating into their market share. In fact, the initiative got under 50% in the two rural counties notorious for growing much of the state’s marijuana, Humboldt and Mendocino. In response to this circular firing squad, one Proposition 19 supporter is now compiling a boycott list.

The sources of support and opposition for Proposition 19 were never as simple as potheads vs parents. The reason it went down had less to do with people’s moral views of pot (surveys have long shown that legalization in general has well over 50% support in California) than with discomfort over the specifics of this particular attempt at establishing regulation. Newspapers across the state, as well as the major politicians in each party, came out against the measure, finding enough gray areas (and inventing others) to defeat the measure and postpone the inevitable for a few more years. And as Kevin Drum points out here, California’s initiative-driven economic mess is only going to get worse, making it even more urgent for the state to figure out how to collect tax revenue on all that money being made by marijuana growers – many of whom were quite content to see Proposition 19 fail.

UPDATE: A few more items from Thursday:

– Matt Yglesias has some really sharp analysis here and provides a graph showing the demographic breakdown differences for all ages from 2008 to 2010.

If the demographic breakdown would have been like it was in 2008, the initiative would have still failed, but with a much closer margin (48.4% vs. 51.6%).

– Jeffrey Miron, the Harvard Professor who’s done a lot of great work on the economic impacts of drug legalization, has some self-serving concern trolling here. While I thought that Miron’s criticisms of some of the economic hyperbole of Prop 19 supporters were very valuable, anyone trying to win a statewide initiative effort should probably ignore most of what he’s saying. He gives very good advice for winning a policy debate with your wonky friends, but winning a statewide initiative campaign is a different beast altogether. Sometimes, if not most of the time, using hyperbole rather than reason is the better strategy. I don’t necessarily like this, but it’s the truth.

I think the campaign against I-1100 proved this. The fiscal reasons to vote against I-1100 were far more solid than the public safety issues, but the campaign hammered on the latter while largely ignoring the former. And that strategy appeared to work. People were largely scared at what would happen if access to alcohol was expanded, even though there’s little evidence to show that expanded access has any measurable detrimental effects. Miron believes that marijuana legalization campaigns should focus on the personal liberty aspects of legalization moreso than the public safety aspects. I think that would be a huge mistake.

– Steve Elliott has more insight into the widespread opposition to Proposition 19 from the marijuana growers themselves, who feared that they would lose their foothold in the current unregulated supply chain for the state’s dispensaries.