HorsesAss.Org

If there’s a headline and a link on the front page of the Seattle Times website, it must be news…

The Seattle Times won four first-place honors, and the Tri-City Herald won three, in the 2010 C.B. Blethen Memorial Awards for distinguished reporting.

The annual awards were established in 1977 in honor of Blethen, publisher of The Times from 1915 to 1941.

So, um, the Blethen-owned Times reports that the Blethen-owned Times wins four Blethen Awards. Such an honor.

Last week, people threw out some good suggestions on what to do with these contests going forward. One good suggestion was to have a rotation of themes, so I’m planning to do that from now on. On the first and third Sundays of the month, it’s a regular contest, just a randomly selected location. On the second Sunday, it’ll be a movies/TV themed contest. The view will be something from a movie or TV show (old or new). On the fourth Sunday, it’ll be a news item from the previous month. If there’s a fifth Sunday in a month, it’ll be a regular contest for now, but I’m thinking of a possible theme for that in the future as well (suggestions are always welcome).

The contest two weeks ago was won by wes.in.wa. It was Aurora, OR, where a plane crashed into a house. This is the third Sunday of the month, so this week’s contest is a random location, good luck!

Judges 11:29-40

Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah. He crossed Gilead and Manasseh, passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there he advanced against the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD : “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the LORD’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the LORD gave them into his hands. He devastated twenty towns from Aroer to the vicinity of Minnith, as far as Abel Keramim. Thus Israel subdued Ammon.

When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of tambourines! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Oh! My daughter! You have made me miserable and wretched, because I have made a vow to the LORD that I cannot break.”

“My father,” she replied, “you have given your word to the LORD. Do to me just as you promised, now that the LORD has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. But grant me this one request,” she said. “Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry.”

“You may go,” he said. And he let her go for two months. She and the girls went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. After the two months, she returned to her father and he did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin.

Discuss.

It’s a good ad, and I sure hope she wins, but I was kinda hoping Suzan DelBene would’ve been on the air a little earlier than this.

As Cienna reports over on Slog, the panel tasked with reviewing proposals for redeveloping the Seattle Center’s Fun Forest has recommended a Chihuly Museum as the best use of the 1.6 acre site.

(Sigh.)

The whole selection process was of course a sham intended to mollify opponents of the for-profit glass tchotchke gallery, gift shop and catering hall with the semblance of public input, so that all involved could pat themselves on the back that the Seattle Way was appropriately honored. And like trained monkeys, we all scampered into the public meetings and rode our unicycles on command.

As I wrote back in August:

Last night hundreds of people gathered again to voice our opinions about the best public use of the Fun Forest site at the Seattle Center, and once again we couldn’t help but get the vibe that we were just being humored. Oh, the committee and the Chihuly gift-shop/catering-hall folks at least tried to make a better show of it this time as compared to the insulting propaganda-fest of the first public meeting, but it was still just a show. I didn’t talk to anybody who believed  a decision hasn’t already been made.

The problem is, as much as the committee will ultimately claim that this was a fair and open process, there’s nothing fair or open about taking a year and a half to secretly negotiate the details of the Chihuly proposal, and then publishing an RFP tailored to the same while giving everybody else just six weeks to respond. And so yeah, I kinda resented being there last night playing the role of “Man in Auditorium” in the Seattle Center’s unintentional amateur production of Our Town.

And like most bad theater, it’s not hard to predict how this play ends.

Yup, a complete and total sham.

That said, I suppose I should take a little satisfaction in helping to pressure the Space Needle folks to add to the proposal $1 million for an “artist-designed playground,” plus $50,000 a year for maintenance. But a million bucks doesn’t buy you a lot of playground these days, so it strikes me as an awfully cheap price in exchange for building an 8-foot wall around a couple acres of scarce, in-city park space.

Ah well, money talks, and all that.

I couldn’t be bothered to fly to D.C. for Obama’s inauguration bash, but this… this march is awfully tempting.

Yes, you read that headline right. The Seattle Times editorial board has endorsed a state income tax. You know… back in 1969….

A single-rate income tax, adequate safeguards against rocketing property tax and appropriate reductions in other taxes must be devised if the state is to meet its budgetary needs and solve the school support dilemma.

And in 1970….

Property, sales, business and other excise-taxing sources are bearing too heavy a share of the public-expenditure load. Yet vast amounts of fluid wealth in the form of income escape state taxation. This should begin to bear a fair share of the burden. If H.J.R. 42 is defeated, the additional burden on property and excise tax will become unbearable. For these reasons we recommend approval of No. 42.

And in 1972…

Events now on the horizon leave no doubt but that the state administration and the Legislature will be negligent if they do not permit the voters another opportunity to make a judgment on a state income tax and interrelated fiscal policies.

Fiscally, the state is drifting toward shoals; time is running out for it to continue to fund basic responsibilities in public services with its jerry-built tax structure; nor can the state’s businesses and industries develop the immense number of new jobs needed to accommodate the present jobless as well as the younger generation now phasing into the employment market.

And in 1973…

The Times has been a strong advocate of the principle that a state income tax should be instituted as a means (1) to distribute the tax burden more equitably, (2) to gear public revenues more responsibly to economic growth, (3) to reduce pressures on present tax sources, and (4) to provide education with more dependable revenues.

You can read all these editorials and more in Andrew Villeneuve’s extensively researched and well argued historical retrospective on the Times’ tragic descent into editorial dotage over at the NPI Advocate. Really… read the whole thing.

So what’s changed between 1969 and 2010? Not the fundamental laws of economics or our state’s long term structural revenue deficit. No, what I’d argue has changed is the Seattle Times.

After Christine O’Donnell knocked off Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP primary this week, there’s been a lot of focus on her long history of TV appearances in her 20’s, where she covered a wide range of topics. Much of this has been in the context of “how did this strange person manage to win a Senate primary battle?”, but that’s not what I find most interesting about all of this.

What I’m more curious about is why Christine O’Donnell was ever on television so much in the first place. A lot people in their 20s have strong personal and political views, and many of them go so far as to dedicate their lives at that time to some particular cause. But it’s exceedingly rare for any of those people to successfully get such high-profile media platforms to air their views. O’Donnell was clearly motivated in her causes, but her media ascension at the time seems oddly out of place with the actual substance of her activism. She was talking about the evils of masturbation for fuck’s sake. I was alive in the 90s, and I don’t recall that being a particularly pressing problem in our society at the time. Why was this young woman showing up on various high-profile television shows so often, when her only qualification appeared to be that she screwed around in college and later regretted it?

UDPATE: Commenter rhp6033 shines some light on this with a good comment that I’d missed from earlier this week.

As I briefly mentioned earlier today, we got a new Rasmussen Poll in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and Dino Rossi (R). The poll shows Murray leading Rossi 51% to 46%. The poll surveyed 750 likely voters on the 14th of September.

With this new poll, we have now had seven polls taken (and released to the public) over the past month:

	Start	End			%	%	%
Poll	date	date	Size	MOE	D	R	Diff
Rasmussen	14-Sep	14-Sep	750	4.0	51	46	D+5.0
CNN Time OR	10-Sep	14-Sep	906	3.0	53	44	D+9.0
Elway	09-Sep	12-Sep	500	4.5	50	41	D+9.0
Rasmussen	31-Aug	31-Aug	750	4.0	46	48	R+2.0
DSCC	28-Aug	31-Aug	968	—	50	45	D+5.0
SurveyUSA	18-Aug	19-Aug	618	4.0	45	52	R+7.0
Rasmussen	18-Aug	18-Aug	750	4.0	48	44	D+4.0

In what follows, I’ll ignore the DSCC poll. Not that I have any reason to doubt the poll. Rather, the poll was specifically released because the results favored Murray, thus clearly violating a statistical assumption used for the analysis.

Murray leads in four of the remaining six polls. As usual, I’ll begin with a Monte Carlo simulation analysis of the most recent poll (FAQ). Taking just the new Rasmussen polls there were 728 respondents who went for Murray or Rossi. Following a million simulated elections, Murray tallies 835,577 wins to Rossi’s 158,253 wins.

The evidence offered by this most recent poll suggests that Murray would have an 84.1% chance of beating Rossi if an election had occurred two days ago. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

With three polls released over three days, we might as well combine all of ’em. Of the total of 2,156 individuals sampled, 2,061 go for Rossi or Murray. Murray gets 51.6% and Rossi gets 44.0% of the “votes.” The simulation analysis gives Murray 994,327 wins to Rossi’s 5,404 wins.

Thus, these three polls offer evidence that Murray would have a 99.5% chance of beating Rossi in an election held over that past week.

Rossi does a little better if we combine the last month of polls (all but the DSCC poll in the table). Now we end up with a sample of 4,274 respondents, of which 4056 are for Murray or Rossi. The raw percentages are 49.0% Murray and 45.9% Rossi. The Monte Carlo analysis gives Murray 933,103 wins to Rossi’s 65,250 wins.

If the past month of polling is representative of Washington state voters, the evidence suggests that Murray would win an election held now with a 93.5% probability.

Going back a month or two things did not look nearly so rosy for Murray. This is clear from a graph of the polling in this race:

See that dip that occurs over the summer? When the early September Rasmussen poll came out showing Rossi leading Murray 48% to 46%, I offered a theory:

There is another reason I am not (yet) too concerned. August 31 is still in the “dog days of summer” around here. In my many years of following polling in Washington state, I’ve learned that Washingtonians become very negative in the summer, only to perk right back up in the fall. I can’t really explain it…I’ve just observed it in approval numbers. Murray probably gets the worst of if from the summer malaise. That is, Murray doesn’t really have to worry about close results like these for another month….

I’m such a pessimist…it only took a couple of weeks.

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

Comedian and Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead is in town this weekend for two performances tomorrow night at Theatre Off Jackson, and on Saturday for a political satire writing workshop (click the links for details and tickets). She was very, very funny at Netroots Nation. Highly recommended.

AND… Lizz is joining us tonight for a special edition of Drinking Liberally, 8PM onward at the Montlake Ale House. Come join us for a hoppy pint and some especially hopped up conversation.

While Darryl works on a more thorough statistical analysis of Patty Murray’s 51-46% lead in today’s Rasmussen Poll, I’d like to take a moment to muse on the political impact of Dino Rossi’s recent round of bad news.

Rasmussen’s is now the third independent poll in as many days to show Murray at or above 50% with a modest but statistically significant lead (the fourth if you count the DSCC’s recently released internal poll), all of which come at the most inopportune time for the Republican nominee. For with teabagger Christine O’Donnell’s stunning victory in Tuesday’s primary flipping Delaware from the Likely Republican to the Likely Democratic column, a Republican takeover of the Senate is now well nigh impossible, making a major investment in what has always been a long shot Rossi campaign much less attractive than it was only a week ago.

The thinking was that a Rossi candidacy would put Washington into play in what many predicted to be a wave election year, allowing Republicans to at least claim a roadmap toward control of the Senate. Even Rossi has frequently promoted himself as the 51st seat, in an obvious effort to nationalize the race.

But with O’Donnell’s election taking Delaware off the map — and Republican control of the Senate with it — the NRSC and its allies must now recalculate the electoral math that determines where they will invest their money. Do they spread it around, even in Democratic-leaning Washington, and with polls trending in Murray’s favor? Or do they pull money out of Washington and concentrate it on more promising races like Wisconsin and Nevada, while playing defense in Kentucky?

If control of the Senate is at stake, it’s hard not to argue for the former. But if you can’t win control without Delaware, and you can’t win Delaware, then Washington suddenly becomes much less important. In fact, the Senate itself becomes much less important, potentially prompting conservative PACs to focus their largesse on winning control of the House.

And that poses a huge problem for Rossi, whose entire campaign strategy seems predicated on the expectation that huge gobs of “independent” expenditure cash will be dumped into his race during the final few weeks of the campaign. Indeed, forced to face off against Murray coffer to coffer, Rossi’s got no strategy.

Rossi benefited from some early IE’s (mostly funded by Rossi’s attorney), but we haven’t seen a single one on the airwaves since before Labor Day. Coincidence? Maybe, but the Republicans have their own internal polls too, and since they’re not releasing them, it is reasonable to suspect that they don’t much change this narrative. So perhaps Republican money is already drying up as polling trends show this race to be less and less winnable?

Election day is still six weeks away, but mail-in ballots drop in a little more than three, so there’s not much time left to decide where to spend all that money. And if Rossi doesn’t get some good news awfully soon, he might not see nearly as much of this money as he likely expected.

Three days and three new polls in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and Dino Rossi (R). Today’s poll is by Rasmussen and shows Murray leading Rossi 51% to 46%.

These new results are completely consistent with polls released over the past two days. Two days ago, an Elway poll showed Murray leading Rossi 50% to 41%. And yesterday we saw the release of a CNN, Time, and Opinion Research poll that had Murray leading Rossi by a remarkable 53% to 44%.

I’ll post more analysis of this new poll and some joint poll analyses later today.

Finally some print reporting on 25th LD Republican nominee Hans Zeiger’s anti-gay/anti-Girl-Scout/anti-Islam/anti-Baptist agenda. In the Seattle Times? No. In the TNT? No. In the Puyallup Herald? Nope.

If you want to get ink on your fingers while reading about the controversial candidate, you’re gonna have to pick up a copy of the Seattle Gay News. And in it, you’ll find the following hilarious quote:

Alex Hays, executive director of Mainstream Republicans, told SGN that the HorsesAss piece was “intellectually dishonest” because it quoted selected articles by Zeiger “out of context.”

Huh. You know what’s really intellectually dishonest, Alex? Accusing me of being “intellectually dishonest” without disclosing to the reporter that you are also Zeiger’s political consultant.

Pot, meet kettle, and all that.

Another day another poll in the race between incumbent Senator Patty Murray (D) and real estate speculator and perennial candidate Dino Rossi (R). Just yesterday, an Elway poll showed Murray leading Rossi 50% to 41%. I understand some folks are skeptical about the veracity of Elway’s polls, so this new poll will be interesting….

Today’s poll, by CNN, Time, and Opinion Research, queried 906 likely voters in Washington state. In the poll, Murray leads Rossi by a stunning 53% to 44%. (Among registered voters, rather than likely voters, Murray leads Rossi by 50% to 44%). That’s even more favorable for Murray than the Elway poll!

As usual, I’ll do a Monte Carlo analysis to get a better feel for the odds of each candidate winning as suggested by the new poll results. After a million simulated elections using the likely voter numbers and percentages, Murray won 973,114 times, and Rossi, 25,471 times.

In other words, if the election was held right now, the evidence from this poll suggests Murray would have a 97.4% probability of beating Rossi. Because the winning percentage is over 95%, statisticians would deem this “statistically significant.” That is, Murray’s lead isn’t very likely to be an artifact of a small sample. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulation:

That’s a lot of blue there….

Since yesterday’s Elway poll was taken just a few days earlier, we can reasonably combine the evidence from these two polls. There were a combined total of 1,406 “votes” of which 1,334 went to either Murray or Rossi. Murray took 51.9% of the “votes” to Rossi’s 43.0%. A series of simulated elections from the joint polls gives Murray 992,496 wins to Rossi’s 7,124 wins. In other words, these two polls suggest that Murray would have a 99.3% chance of beating Rossi if the election had been held now. Here’s the distribution:

That’s even more blue!

Clearly…the one thing Rossi is badly in need of in this race is more SurveyUSA polling!

Update: Here is what the polling looks like this year for the race….

Clearly, the summer slump has ended.