HorsesAss.Org

How about this? Metro bus drivers should agree to give up their contractually guaranteed 2-percent COLA increase if the Seattle Times agrees to give up its 40-percent B&O tax cut for which Frank Blethen successfully lobbied last year.

I mean, if, as the Times editorial board argues, “the public sector is not in a position to pay out COLAs right now,” then certainly the public sector is not in a position to hand out 40-percent tax cuts to wealthy, Mercer Island millionaires. Right?

Seems like a fair compromise to me. Your move, Frank.

It is a primary election night in five states (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont), so come and cheer for your favorite teabagger and spend an evening of electoral politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some folks will be there early for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 272 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

You know how you get to know somebody online or in email or on the phone, and then when you finally meet them in person they’re nothing like what you expected? Well the first time I met Ivan Weiss, he was exactly what I expected.

Kinda sad that some of the best journalism today comes from a fake news show.

The Seattle Times’ editors just seem to love stories like this — “Online ranters increasingly pay a price” — apparently drooling for the day when uppity bloggers like me are put in our place.

The Internet has allowed tens of millions of Americans to be published writers. But it also has led to a surge in lawsuits from those who say they were hurt, defamed or threatened by what they read, according to groups that track media lawsuits.

[…] “Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online,” said Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University in California. “A whole new generation can publish now, but they don’t understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, ‘My dentist stinks.’ “

I’ve never claimed that bloggers and commenters should be free to defame their subjects with impunity, but the example above shows why your typical online citizen journalist/participant needs more protection from defamation suits, not less. Obviously, anybody should be allowed to go online and say “my dentist stinks,” because that is a statement of opinion for which one would likely never be found liable in court. I think the Seattle Times editorial board stinks; good luck winning a defamation suit over that.

But just being sued for defamation by a determined plaintiff is enough to crush one financially, thus chilling public discourse via the mere threat of legal action. Yet this is exactly the kinda fearful mindset the the Times seems to be cheerleading.

Times Crown Prince Ryan Blethen, in a previous opinion piece, blames bloggers like me for this very real and imminent threat to online speech, warning that they should “learn to check themselves, and use a modicum of restraint” before, you know, some deep-pocketed asshole decides to make an example of us. But the plaintiff’s side of our defamation laws seems an awfully odd position for a future newspaper publisher to stake out… unless, of course, you view it within the broader context of the industry’s dramatic decline, and Blethen’s documented history of blaming his paper’s woes on external forces rather than, say, his own boneheaded idea to leverage the family business by buying newspapers in Maine. (I’m just sayin’.)

The problem as I see it is that defamation laws that evolved to address the unique circumstances of print and broadcast are simply not well suited to the realities of our more democratic, online media landscape, a nuance that, as I’ve written before, appears to escape Blethen the Younger:

And that is what Blethen, heir to a dead tree publishing throne, obviously doesn’t understand about this new medium. HA isn’t a “publication,” and my words aren’t “spun off the press” in some inviolable, datelined tome. A blog is an ever evolving dialectic, a give and take, a living conversation between writers and readers, and readers with each other, and between one blogging community with the blogosphere as a whole. HA may be my own personal realm, but the world is my fact checker.

Under the old paradigm, where the scarcity of the airwaves and the huge financial barriers to market entry left the bulk of the media in the hands of a powerful and wealthy few, the libel laws were often the best or only defense against the indiscriminate, negligent, and malicious misuse of the power of the press. But in this new medium, this distributed, democratic and decentralized paradigm of the Internet, the best defense against bad journalism is more journalism, the best remedy for falsehood is the truth, and aggrieved parties should only look to the courts as a desperate and last resort.

… [For] in a media landscape increasingly dominated by freelancers, contractors and lone wolves outside the protection of deep-pocketed corporate overlords, the mere threat of costly legal action to resolve disputes threatens the viability of the medium itself, potentially shielding those able to afford attorneys from legitimate criticism by those of us who cannot.

In other words, our defamation laws evolved to protect the average citizenry from powerful publishers like Blethen, not the other way around.

It is, in fact, not reckless bloggers but this blogger-beware meme that presents the real threat to the viability of the Internet as a meaningful and credible medium for disseminating dissent and facilitating public debate. Blethen argues that a lowly comment troll can and should be held to the same defamation standards as a Rupert Murdoch or a, well, Ryan Blethen, but this would be the legal equivalent of hitting a nail with a pile driver.

Unlike Blethen I don’t have attorneys on staff or on retainer, and thus I lack the opportunity to take every potentially controversial post I write, and run it past legal. Neither can I afford to defend myself against even the most frivolous of SLAPP suits. The alternative, which Blethen seems to advocate, is that I write fearfully.

Media-law experts repeat the advice that bloggers and e-mailers need to think twice before sending a message.

“Before you speak ill of anyone online,” Baron said, “you should think hard before pressing the ‘send’ button.”

What an utterly oppressive and ultimately undemocratic sentiment.

The balance that needs to be struck, and that needs to be reflected in our laws, is the balance between the individual harm that can come from truly reckless and malicious free speech, as opposed to the societal harm that comes from crushing dissent. Personally, I’d argue that a legal standard that puts one at risk of financial ruin for posting the words “my dentist stinks,” clearly strikes the wrong balance. But Ryan Blethen and his newspaper apparently disagree, otherwise, I suppose, they would he would be advocating for the law to be changed, rather than for bloggers like me to fearfully mind it.

If they’d made this up on The Wire, critics would have laughed at how unrealistic it was:

The Department of Justice is seeking to hire linguists fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of subjects of narcotics investigations, according to federal records.

A maximum of nine Ebonics experts will work with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta field division, where the linguists, after obtaining a “DEA Sensitive” security clearance, will help investigators decipher the results of “telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media”

And it just made me think of this:

Emily Heffter has the scoop in the Seattle Times:

City Councilmember Tim Burgess has appeared to be positioning himself to run against McGinn in 2012.

Which of course would totally catch Mayor Mike McGinn by surprise, considering the election isn’t until 2013.

It’s an okay ad that makes a point that I can’t help but believe will resonate with voters, the majority of whom already start out at least a little suspicious of Dino Rossi, but what really strikes me about this ad is the new ground it breaks in citing PubliCola as a source to back up one of its claims… and in a U.S. Senate race, no less.

See, the power of a daily newspaper monopoly like the Seattle Times to influence elections comes not as much from the initial coverage of any one story, but from their role as an allegedly credible, unbiased and independent source that the political campaigns can cite to back up their campaign ads. For example, the bullshit Darcy Burner diploma story would not have had nearly the impact it did if the Reichert campaign had not spent a million dollars citing it.

That’s an advantage the Seattle Times will always have over me, for while I am at least as good a writer as any of their editors, and all of their editors are at least as biased and partisan as me, nobody’s going to put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind an ad attempting to cite HorsesAss.org as a credible source. I just don’t have the brand.

But apparently, PubliCola now does, and after only a year and a half of publication. Congrats Josh and Erica.

And to be fair, a little bit of self-congratulations to me, for while Josh et al downplayed my involvement in PubliCola’s startup for arguably good reasons, I put a lot of effort into getting it off the ground, and used HA to promote the hell out of it for its first year. To be absolutely clear, I’ve never had any editorial role in PubliCola, and I’m not always happy about the editorial direction they’ve taken — Josh is simply wrong a lot of the time — but I still believe PubliCola plays an important role in our local political media landscape that would remain unfilled without them.

And with this citation they’ve clearly proven that even relatively small scale new media ventures can quickly break the credibility monopoly formerly held by newspapers like the Times.

No doubt the entertainment industry has a lot of trepidation about the recently announced Google TV (though it sounds to me like Google is just building Android and Chrome into TV’s and set-top boxes, much in the same way that everybody expects Apple to put iOS into its unannounced iTV… I mean, if you’ve played with the NetFlix or ABC apps on an iPad, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything really new here)… but what really struck me from the LA Times article reprinted in today’s Seattle Times was this particular toss-away:

The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just as the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.

Yeah, um, except… what happened to the music industry and what happened to the newspaper industry are two entirely different things.

Music sales, in both units and dollars, rose steadily and healthily for decades before plateauing in the late 1990’s at about $17 billion annually. That’s when digital piracy, particularly the widespread popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, started to take the legs out from under the industry. The dollar value of music sales has pretty much shrunk nearly every year since, to about $10 billion annually today, though thanks in large part to Apple’s iTunes, unit sales in 2009 reached an all time high.

Total paid U.S. newspaper circulation on the other hand had been relatively flat since about 1960, despite huge increases in population, and has been on the decline since the mid-1980’s, well before the market penetration of broadband Internet could have much of an impact on its business. Indeed, if any medium is to blame for stealing away paid subscribers, it is television not the Internet. And while readership has shifted dramatically from print to digital over the past decade, unlike the music industry, it wasn’t digital pirates who put the newspapers’ content free online, but the newspapers themselves.

Furthermore, there’s another huge difference between the music and newspaper industries, and the respective woes they face sustaining themselves in this new medium. While it is true that music industry revenues have continued to slide even as unit sales reach record highs, so too have their unit costs. Thanks to new digital technologies, the cost of recording an album is now a fraction of what it was just 20 years ago, while the cost of distributing a digital track has shrunk to virtually nil. If the old labels can’t figure out a way to exploit these new efficiencies to remain relevant in the new online marketplace, well, that’s their problem, and no real loss to artists who now have multiple means of promoting themselves to new audiences.

But newspapers haven’t benefited nearly as much from new technologies, for while the cost of delivering an online paper is, likewise, virtually nil, they’re still locked into the expensive, capital-intensive medium of print, regardless of how many fewer customers now purchase the print edition. As I’ve previously argued, the whole notion of an “online newspaper” per se is oxymoronic, for the industry’s entire business model is one based on the physical need to print and distribute paper. Absent this medium, much of what a newspaper does as an institution becomes unnecessary, and its legacy print edition becomes a financial drag on the organization as a whole, making it less competitive to newer, totally online competitors.

Indeed, it is reasonable to question whether most dailies can survive the shift from print to digital in much more than name only… which suggests the biggest difference between the music and newspaper industries, at least from the consumer’s perspective. Music labels publish and distribute the collective work of independent artists, whereas newspapers mostly create their own content via staff reporters. Thus if the large music labels were to suddenly collapse and disappear, few consumers would notice, as the new distribution medium is already mature enough to allow independent artists access to the marketplace. But if newspapers were to suddenly disappear there would be an equally sudden collapse in the amount of local journalism being produced… with potentially dire consequences for our democracy.

All the more reason why newspaper executives should not be allowed to absolve themselves of their own mistakes, simply by blaming the bulk of their industry’s woes on external forces.

The winners of Tuesday’s top-two primary for the Washington state Senate race were Sen. Patty Murray (D) and real estate speculator (and perennial candidate) Dino Rossi (R). Little surprise there. Late last week, Washingtonians got a double dose of post-primary polls matching up Murry and Rossi.

Rasmussen released this poll on Thursday showing Murray leading Rossi 48% to 44% in a poll taken the day before (18 Aug). The sample of 750 is large for Rasmussen—their samples are typically 500 likely voters.

On Friday, Survey USA released a poll taken on the 18th and 19th of August, on a sample of 618 likely voters. The results? A stunning 52% to 45% lead for Rossi!

What is going on? First let me wander off-topic for a minute to point out that in my analyses of past elections, I have found both Rasmussen and Survey USA to be pretty good polling firms for head-to-head general elections. Rasmussen has a bad reputation among liberals, but that is mostly based on their presidential approval tracking poll that IS biased slightly in favor of Bush and against Obama (relative to comparable polls) for the seven years that I have been following it. But approval tracking polls are not the same type of poll as a head-to-head election poll, and Rasmussen does just fine with the latter. Survey USA is sometimes dissed as a liberal polling firm by conservatives. Whatever…their track record is pretty good. Going on just the numbers from state polls during to 2008 presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections, I can’t really tell Survey USA and Rasmussen apart.

During the 2010 election season, some big differences I see is that Rasmussen has greatly increased the number of statewide polls they do; Survey USA has decreased the number of statewide races polled. I have no idea what to make of it. Anyway, onto the race.

Since these two polls were in the field simultaneously, I’ll simply combine them and do my usual Monte Carlo analysis to determine the relative probabilities of each candidate winning based on these polls. Of the combined 1,368 “votes”, Murray and Rossi got 1,289 of them; 46.6% went to Murray and 47.6% went to Rossi. When we normalize these so that they sum to 100%, Murray gets 49.5% and Rossi gets 50.5%. Even with this relatively large sample size, this is clearly a statistical tie.

After simulating a million elections using the observed frequencies and sample sizes, Murray wins 392,801 simulated elections and Rossi wins 599,396 simulated elections. In other words the two polls suggest Murray has a 39.6% probability of beating Rossi. Here is the distribution of wins:

Objectively, those are the results. But, as a Murray supporter, I am not overly daunted. This graph of the polling in this race shows why:

Notice anything odd?

Both of the Survey USA polls conducted for this race favor Rossi uncharacteristically strongly. Most other polls either tend to favor Murray, or show a very slight advantage to Rossi. That’s odd. In fact, when the first Survey USA poll came out, neither camp believed it. I wonder if the Rossi camp believes it now?

Personally, I’m skeptical about the poll. It seems like something is going wrong for Survey USA. And looking at the cross tabs doesn’t help. As N in Seattle points out in the Horses Ass comment threads:

If you take a look at the very last column in the survey’s crosstabs, you’ll see that they show Murray and Rossi tied in “Metro Seattle”.

Really? Murray and Rossi tied in Metro Seattle? I doubt it. N in Seattle shows why:

Based on the population proportion, I assume that means King/Pierce/Snohomish Counties.

We’re now counting a rather more comprehensive “survey”, the primary election. In those three counties, Patty has 53% of the vote to Dino’s 30%. SUSA is asking us to believe that in the general election:

a) about 10% of Patty’s primary voters will switch to Rossi, and

b) every primary voter who chose someone other than Patty will vote for Dino, and

c) the voters who sat out the primary but will vote in the general election (about 1/4 of the electorate, and more strongly Democratic than primary voters) will follow the same pattern as in a) and b)

All of the above would have to happen in “Metro Seattle” for Dino to tie Patty here. It ain’t gonna happen. In fact, it ain’t even gonna happen in the rest of Democratic western Washington either.

I suspect even Dino Rossi would agree with N’s analysis.

Notice that there are two other fairly recent polls on the graph. The earliest is another Rasmussen poll of 750 likely voters taken on 28th of July, and showed Murray up 49% to 47%. That is pretty close to tied. The second (in blue) is from Public Policy Polling (PPP) taken on 27th of July to the 1st of August on 1,204 registered voters. This poll showed Murray leading Rossi, 49% to 46%.

The PPP poll surveyed both the primary election and the general election, which gives us the chance to do a little accuracy-checking. For the primary, PPP found that Teabagger Clint Didier would get about 10% of the vote, Murray would get 47% and Rossi would get 33%. As of Sunday evening, Diddier is at 12.6%, Murray is 46.4% and Rossi is 33.3%. Pretty much spot on, considering it was taken about 18 days earlier.

One last exercise for your consideration. If we combine all four polls taken within the last month, and do the same Monte Carlo analysis, things turn around. There is a total of 3153 votes for either Murray or Rossi, Murray gets 50.6% of them,and Rossi gets 49.4%. Now, Murray wins 682,212 simulated elections, and Rossi wins 313,150 of them. In other words, these four polls give evidence that Murray would win with a 68.5% probability. And that includes the Survey USA poll! Here is the distribution…

The take-home message is that the contest, at this point, is pretty close. But I think the more interesting question that arises from all this is…what the hell happened to Survey USA?!?

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

I have to say that I have newfound respect for Clint Didier and his campaign after reading spokeswoman Kathryn Serkes response to Dino Rossi’s predictably mealy-mouthed evasion of Didier’s prerequisites for endorsement:

“So is Dino saying, ‘Fuck you’ to those people [who supported Didier]? ‘Fuck you, I don’t need your votes? I can win with 33 percent.’”

Ah, I love a woman who talks dirty to me, especially about politics. The BIAW’s equally foul-mouthed Erin Shannon better look over her shoulders, as she may have new competition for my unwanted affections.

The truth is, Rossi’s response was a “fuck you” to Didier and his supporters, and Serkes should be applauded for using the most accurately descriptive term available. This is the way real people speak, and while there are certainly times and places that demand more formal language, politicians and their spokespeople make a mistake by abandoning the vernacular in favor of vague politenesses. Voters crave authenticity, even if that comes with the occasional F-bomb.

Of course, such rhetorical bluntness is not without its risks, especially in a media landscape where the boundaries of public discourse are still rigidly defined by the sticks shoved firmly up the asses of the editors at our once-dominant  “family newspapers.” Indeed, back in May of 2004, in my very first post, it was a risk I clearly anticipated when I warned readers what to expect from HA:

Now I know some might find this split between the politically prankish Goldy and the politically earnest David a little arbitrary… or even weird. So to those upstanding members of the political and media establishment who insist I cannot possibly expect to maintain my credibility as an activist while producing an irreverent and outrageous blog, the Goldy half of me respectfully says: “fuck you.”

And I’ve been saying “fuck you” ever since, despite frequent admonitions from critics and fans alike that I would be taken more seriously, and reach a wider audience, if I would only clean up my language. But… you know… if folks can’t tell the difference between being serious and being solemn, well, fuck that.

Ironically, I don’t actually swear all that much. Of my 5,732 posts since May 10, 2004, only 336 have contained some conjugation of the word “fuck.” That’s less than six percent of my posts… fewer than five per month on average. In fact, despite my reputation for foul-mouthed muckraking, the bulk of my posts are neither.

But sometimes a “fuck you” is a “fuck you,” and no other euphemism would be quite as honest, so if politicians, spokespeople and other public figures seem more willing to speak truthfully theses days when speaking truth to power — even when the truth involves, say, calling a sitting state senator a “pig fucker” — then I hope my example has served to help raise the level of public discourse to a more accurate, truthful and honest level.

Last week’s contest was won by Don Joe for the second week in a row. It was the area north of the Laredo, TX, where some wingnuts are still claiming that Mexican drug cartel The Zetas overtook some American ranches.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Deuteronomy 21:10-14
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

Discuss.

I’m glad this article in Saturday’s New York Times got written.

Some counterterrorism experts say the anti-Muslim sentiment that has saturated the airwaves and blogs in the debate over plans for an Islamic center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan is playing into the hands of extremists by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.

Opposition to the center by prominent politicians and other public figures in the United States has been covered extensively by the news media in Muslim countries. At a time of concern about radicalization of young Muslims in the West, it risks adding new fuel to Al Qaeda’s claim that Islam is under attack by the West and must be defended with violence, some specialists on Islamic militancy say.

Interesting stuff. While I don’t think it’s the strongest reason to support the rights of Muslims to build cultural centers with prayer rooms, it is certainly worth noting.

So, while I don’t want to be too nit picky, there’s one word in a paragraph toward the end of the piece that really gets my goat.

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker and a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said in a Fox News interview that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” a comment that drew criticism for appearing to equate those proposing the Islamic center with Nazis.

Really? The style guide precludes you from just saying “drew criticism for equating the Islamic center with the Nazis”? You couldn’t make a declarative statement? That metaphor was too layered and complex?

– This weekend is Seattle Hempfest. During the festivities today, Sensible Washington is expected to announce their plans to try again in 2011 to get a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot.

– Proposition 19 in California picked up another great endorsement this week, the National Black Police Association. At their conference in Sacramento, they pointed to the racial disparity in drug arrests and the overall negative impact on black communities in supporting the effort. However, not all police groups are supporting Proposition 19. Susan E. Manheimer, the president of the California Police Chiefs Association, throws down this whopper in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Prop. 19 allows a state and a workplace where any driver over the age of 21 can get on the road with marijuana in their system.

Proposition 19 does absolutely nothing to change the laws with respect to driving while intoxicated. Operating a motor vehicle under the influence of marijuana will still be illegal in California. Manheimer was very clever in how she constructed this sentence, talking about “marijuana in their system”, rather than being under the influence. If someone smokes pot today, they’ll still have marijuana in their system three days from now. At that point, to insist that they’re still incapable of driving is foolish, but Manheimer seems to indicate that she may actually believe that.

– Dominic Holden notes that the number of marijuana arrests in Seattle has shot up sharply this year. And this is despite the fact that City Attorney Pete Holmes refuses to prosecute any of those arrested. Every person who gets arrested solely for marijuana possession in this city is being arrested for no reason. It’s not clear whether the increase in arrests is the result of SPD being more aggressive towards marijuana enforcement, or if Seattle residents are less afraid of using marijuana openly in the city, but this is another good piece of evidence demonstrating that Mayor McGinn was absolutely correct for opposing additional hires for SPD. If they have time to do this (and enforce jaywalking), it’s really hard to argue that we should be hiring additional officers in the budget crisis we’re in.

– Also in The Stranger this week, Brendan Kiley has an interesting piece on how much of the cocaine making its way into this country is cut with levamisole, a drug that can do a lot of damage to your immune system. What’s odd about this is that illegal drugs generally aren’t cut with anything until they make it into the United States, but this appears to be an instance where the levamisole is being added closer to the source of production. One data point that Kiley neglected to collect was whether or not the same trend was being seen in Europe, where large amounts of South American cocaine are also consumed.