HorsesAss.Org

Thursday a federal court rejected a permit to build a 305 foot dock in an environmentally sensitive area on Maury Island, essentially halting Glacier Northwest’s controversial gravel and sand mine for years to come, and State Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark deserves a huge “thank you” for helping to realize a key campaign promise:

Last year, the company gave $50,000 to a political action committee that supported former Republican State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland’s re-election bid. Sutherland lost, but signed a lease for the project days before leaving office. His successor, Democrat Peter Goldmark, who’s campaigned on a promise to try and stop the project, immediately announced plans to more thoroughly scrutinize the lease. In early July, he ordered the company to do no work until it could prove to him Puget Sound would see no harm. Earlier this week, the company responded with a 17-page letter — and a promise that it still planned to start work next week.

Now, the project is on indefinite hold, and a protest scheduled for Saturday on Maury Island instead will become a victory party.

I started writing this post while sitting in the audience of a health care forum with Gov. Howard Dean at Netroots Nation (just reasoned, rational discusion, FYI… no angry, disruptive teabaggers thus far), and was feeling a little nostalgic at this particular turn of events.

It was at last year’s Netroots Nation that I celebrated my biggest blogging accomplishment of the year, my success at forcing the Seattle Times and other media outlets to front-page then-incumbent State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland’s embarrassing sexual harassment scandal… a scandal I broke.

As a blogger, I know that I have made a difference over the past few years, but this was one of the few times that I could really quantify it. Despite being snugly in the pocket of mining and timber interests, Sutherland was a personable guy and a self-proclaimed moderate who appeared to be well liked by members of the press, and up until this point in the election cycle the Lands Commissioner race and the challenge from Goldmark had received very little media attention.

All that changed after the scandal, as journalists and voters started paying closer attention to both the candidates and the issues, with Goldmark eventually squeaking out a one percentage point victory… close enough for me to almost confidently say that my coverage likely helped swing the election.

Of course, one of the main issues in that election was the Maury Island gravel mine, and it’s tremendously gratifying to see Goldmark living up to his campaign promise to block it. This past legislative session notwithstanding, elections do matter, and thus what we all do to influence elections matters too. Yes, it’s hard to quantify, and so much easier just to be cynical, and no individual should pat themselves too hard on the back for the outcome of any election, as it’s the voters in the end who deserve most of the credit for making the right choice. But for those of us who devote ourselves to such things, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-congratulation if that’s what keeps us going.

How long that alone can keep me going, I don’t know.  But I might as well enjoy the moment.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDp3sPN-5fE[/youtube]

(And there are some sixty other clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

A new batch of signature data for Referendum 71 has been released. The number of signatures examined is 58,493 which is 42.5% of the total signatures submitted. To date, 6,348 invalid signatures have been found, giving a raw rejection rate (uncorrected for duplicates) of 10.85%.

The invalid signatures include 5,502 that were not found in the voting rolls, 345 duplicates, and 501 that did not match the signature on file. There are also 30 “pending” signatures at various states of processing for a missing or illegible signature cards. I don’t count these among the invalid signatures.

With 345 duplicate signatures found so far, we can anticipate a final duplication rate of about 1.69%.

The V₂ estimator projects the number of valid signatures to be 121,648 giving an excess of 1,071 signatures over the 120,577 needed for the referendum to qualify for the ballot. The projected (duplicate-corrected) rejection rate is 11.65%.

A Monte Carlo analysis consisting of 10,000 simulated samples give a 95% confidence interval for valid signatures of from 121,175 to 122,415, well above the magic number. Here is the distribution of valid signatures:

There are a few “losses” in red on the left, but the overwhelming majority of outcomes in green have the referendum qualifying. In fact, the referendum failed to make the ballot in only 11 of the 10,000 simulations.

With the results to date, it is pretty clear that, come fall, we will be voting to accept or reject the “Everything but Marriage” law.

Seems that the people of the United Kingdom actually kind of like their health care system, and don’t take too kindly to the infamous lies being spread on Fox Noise. From BBC:

Labour has stepped up its criticism of Daniel Hannan, who waded into the debate over Barack Obama’s health bill.

They claim his view – that the NHS is outdated, unfair and should be scrapped – is shared by many Conservatives.

But David Cameron said Mr Hannan’s view was “eccentric” and accused Labour of making a meal of the row, stressing that the NHS was his top priority.

Mr Hannan has made a series of appearances on American television in recent weeks, describing the NHS as “60 year mistake” and saying that he “wouldn’t wish it on anyone”.

And the right wing lies are pretty obvious and infuriating to Britons:

Kate Spall, who appeared in a US free market group’s TV commercial opposing Mr Obama’s health bill, said her views were misrepresented.

She told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One: ” “Absolutely I was deceived yes because when I then found out the link to the website and it was a huge political machine I was horrified because it was the polar opposite of what I believe in. I absolutely believe in universal health care.”

If you click through to the BBC story you may notice a nice little graphic they have that shows, in percentage of GDP, health care expenditures by country. The US is at 16%, while the UK is at 8.4%. The graphic also includes the rather damning information “45.7 million people have no health insurance.” So we manage to spend twice as much and still leave a tremendous portion of the population vulnerable.

This is what the righties have been reduced to: they’re willing to tell infamous lies about and insult one of our staunchest allies in the world in order to block health care reform. Guess that “special relationship” only applies when Republicans are in the White House.

Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, WA-05, has condemned the crazy disruptors:

“I certainly don’t condone violence, I don’t condone calling President Obama Hitler and painting swastikas on signs at town halls,” continued McMorris Rodgers, vice chairwoman of the GOP conference.

McMorris Rodgers is the first member of the House Republican leadership to decry the Nazi comparisons. It follows a week of attacks by the House Democrats’ campaign arm on House Republican leaders, who Democrats say should speak out against Rush Limbaugh’s remarks comparing Democrats to Nazis in the healthcare debate.

As Think Progress noted, she didn’t mention Limbaugh by name, so it’s not clear whether the big fat idiot will require an apology.

So good on McMorris Rodgers anyhow.

President Bill Clinton delivered the opening keynote address in the Keystone State last night at Netroots Nation. It wasn’t as much a rousing barn burner as it was a frank come-to-Jesus, a bit defensive about his own record on hot button issues like health care reform and gays in the military, but absolutely blunt in telling the audience that we need to provide more support to President Obama than we did to Clinton if we expect real change.

If there’s a break in my day, perhaps I’ll post some audio and video clips. Perhaps.

Today is an absolutely jam packed agenda, starting with a health care reform town hall with Gov. Howard Dean, followed by the much anticipated Pennsylvania US Senate race face-off between Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak, and newly-Democratic incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter, who’s gotta be given credit for stepping into the lion’s den.

Then I’ll be going to the state blogger caucus where I plan to bitch loudly about the dearth of panels aimed at state bloggers (by far the largest contingent of attendees), before heading off to an energy policy forum featuring Washington state’s own Denis Hayes and Rep. Jay Inslee.

After that… I dunno… maybe a nap?

This weekend is the annual Hempfest protestival. It’s an event that has something for everyone (well, except for the uptight tools in the comment threads who think they’re cool when they call me a stoner). I generally hang around the Hemposium tent, where political discussion is the order of the day. Here are some panels I’m looking forward to:

Saturday 2:20PM – Suits in Babylon

State Representative Roger Goodman, the Marijuana Policy Project’s Rob Kampia and others give an update from the front lines of getting government to deal with reality on our marijuana laws.

Sunday 11:00AM – Cannabis Coverage: Reefer sanity for the 21st Century

Phil Smith from the Drug War Chronicle, Mason Tvert from SAFER, Fred Gardner from CounterPunch, and David Nott from Reason discuss media coverage of marijuana.

Sunday 2:20PM – Yes We Cannabis: The hope of the DARE generation

Ian Barry, the Peninsula High School student arrested after smoking a joint as part of a school presentation, will be on this panel with Kampia and Tvert.

And if passing a bowl around and listening to some music is more your style, they’ve got that too.

Since the Secretary of State’s office started releasing final numbers this week, it has become clear that R-71 is headed for the ballot. Short of some scandalous revelation—you know, like finding out that the numbers being released are not the final numbers—the measure should make the ballot using standard statistical inference.

(I kid the SoS with that “scandalous revelation” quip. In fact, they have done a remarkable job turning last week’s data disaster around. The data are now provided in excruciating detail and they have carefully described the meanings behind the numbers, both on the official release page and on their blog. David Ammons has been kept busy answering questions in both blog posts and the comment threads. And now Elections Director Nick Handy has a nifty R-71 FAQ.)

Back to the projections. One point that has repeatedly come up in the comment threads is that the signatures sampled so far may not reflect a random sample of all signatures. Thus, the statistical inference may be wrong.

The point is valid because the statistical methods do assume that the sampled signatures approximate a random sample. One can imagine scenarios where the error rate uncovered would change systematically with time. For example, if petition sheets were checked in chronological order of collection, the duplication rate might increase if early signers forgot they already signed, or if the pace and sloppiness of collection increased toward the end.

For R-71, we don’t know that the petition sheets are being examined in anything approaching a chronological order. The SoS FAQ states:

Signature petitions are randomly bound in volumes of 15 petition sheets per volume.

Rather than speculate on the systematic error, let’s examine some real data. The SoS office releases data that give the numbers of signatures checked and errors for each bound volume in the approximate chronological order of signature verification. As of yesterday, there were 209 completed volumes covering 35% of the total petition.

After the fold, I give a brief section on analytical details, and then show graphs of the trends over time in error rates and projected numbers of valid signatures. But first, I give an update on today’s data release.
[Read more…]

Lost in the furor is a basic economic question: what are we going to make? From The Oregonian, about a Port of Vancouver ceremony for an expansion project:

In a ceremony full of speeches, however, a top longshore official nearly stole the show by asserting that free trade agreements may have benefited cargo shipping, but not American workers.

Brad Clark, president of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 4, aimed his words at Congress in general and, in particular, Democratic U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and U.S. Rep. Brian Baird — all of whom attended the ceremony on a rocky patch of Terminal 5.

“When I started on the docks over 20 years ago,” Clark said from his prepared remarks, “our terminals were full of American-made cargo ready for export. With the signing of various free trade agreements, this is no longer the case.”

—snip—

He concluded: “As we look around this beautiful new terminal, many of you visualize the profits that will be made with the increase in import vessel calls.

“But my vision, my dream, is that before I retire, this space will be used to export cargo — cargo that is manufactured by the American worker.

“If that dream happens, you benefit, I benefit, my union benefits and most importantly, this nation benefits.”

Sometimes you forget we used to send stuff the other way, and people around the world liked our stuff. Americans are pretty hard workers, clever and will do a great job if you don’t crap all over them just to satisfy CNBC.

Susan Hutchison is a Republican.

There will be town halls in WA-03 after all.

Although, while I still don’t have details, those who think they will be able to show up and just scream might find that is not exactly the case.

Back home in Washington State, Darcy Burner is a loser. Twice over. But you wouldn’t know it from the reception she’s getting here in Pittsburgh at Netroots Nation, where she was definitely the most popular person in the hotel bar last night, and where they just announced that she would be the closing keynote speaker at Netroots Nation.

Saturday night’s closing keynote will be headlined by Darcy Burner, director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation. After three days of strategizing around progressive change, Burner will close out the convention with a message on how we make that a reality after everyone has left Pittsburgh. She believes activists must strike a balance between applying sophisticated pressure on their elected leaders and amplifying their efforts to create space for progressive policy.

Opening keynote: President Bill Clinton. Closing keynote: Darcy Burner. That should provide a little perspective.

Darcy may have lost her race last November, but in her new job as director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, she’s playing a much bigger role in the health care debate than the winner, Dave Reichert.

Data for August 12th are now posted. The total signatures examined in completed binders is 48,299, or 35.1% of the total signatures turned in. There have been 5,121 invalid signatures found, for an cumulative rejection rate of 10.60%.

The invalid signatures include 4,491 that were not found in the voting rolls, 242 duplicates, and 388 that did not match the signature on file. There are also 21 signatures at various states of processing for a missing signature card. (For some reason the SoS office still counts these as invalid signatures; I ignoring them.) The 242 duplicate signatures suggest an overall rate of duplication of about 1.74%.

Using this V₂ estimator, the number of valid signatures is expected to be 121,817 providing a buffer of 1,240 signatures over the 120,577 needed to qualify for the ballot. The overall rejection rate (which includes the projected total number of duplicate signatures) is about 11.53%.

To assess sampling uncertainty, I simulated petition samples, drawing numbers for each invalid signature type from a distribution that properly reflects the underlying statistical uncertainty. After 100,000 such simulations, 121,820 signatures were valid on average, and 95% of the simulations yielded 121,184 to 122,449 valid signatures. For 99.989% of the simulations the measure had enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. This number is an unbiased estimate of the probability that the measure will make it to the ballot.

The low uncertainty in qualifying for the ballot is easily seen as a picture. Here is the resulting distribution of signatures relative to the number required to qualify. Red bars (to the left of the vertical dashed line) means the measure is stopped. Green (on the right) means it qualified.

The data released by the SoS office, so far, suggests that the measure is likely to qualify with an excess of about 1,240 signatures. This projection does not account for potential errors other than sampling error.

Last week, Seattle and King County law enforcement officials tried something new, not arresting drug dealers:

More than a dozen black binders, each with at least two inches of criminal evidence, were atop tables on the stage. Names were in bold and underlined on the front.

In the first three rows of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, the suspected drug dealers named in those binders filled the red seats next to family and friends in what felt like an intervention.

“If this was an ordinary day, I would be your prosecutor,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg told the men and women Thursday. Some could get 20 months in prison or even more, he said.

But Satterberg wanted them to walk away.

He announced an opportunity police and prosecutors in Seattle had never given in a community meeting: Stop dealing drugs and you won’t get prosecuted.

Interim Seattle Police Chief John Diaz, had written a letter last week to the dealers. He promised that if they showed at the Central District meeting they would not be arrested and repeated that promise again Thursday.

The idea is taken from a successful program in High Point, NC, where using interventions like this – rather than prison – to deal with drug dealing, worked to reduce crime in the community. The idea is an effective one because it targets one aspect of the drug war that tends to have some nasty downstream repercussions. In low-income communities where a lot of drug dealing occurs, young people who don’t see a lot of opportunities for themselves often choose to become drug dealers for either money or status. But as soon as they end up behind bars for that choice, it becomes significantly harder for them to put that choice behind them. Instead of reforming people in that situation, jail often does the opposite, and cements their lifelong participation in criminal activity.

This program works to break that cycle. By working to keep young people from making the choice to participate in drug markets, the demand for those drugs can be met elsewhere. In High Point, a medium sized town that sits inbetween the larger towns of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, any unmet demand likely just shifted to those larger communities. As a result, residents in High Point have seen former open air drug markets become safer places.

But will it happen here? At Saturday’s event in Shoreline, Diaz said that it wouldn’t be a city-wide effort, and as Philip Dawdy points out, this approach isn’t likely to work in the high-volume drug markets like Belltown anyway, where the dealers aren’t part of the community. In fact, this approach will likely make those groups (arguably the most dangerous) even wealthier.

Also, one of the dealers who was offered the deal had already been re-arrested by the weekend. He was a 39-year-old with a history of drug addiction problems. And he wasn’t arrested for dealing, but for using a crack pipe. This makes me wonder whether or not much thought was put into trying to separate people with actual drug problems from the people who enter the drug trade to make money. Treating both groups the same way doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

That’s not to say that this effort is pointless. It’s far better than sending as many young people to jail as possible, but what happened in High Point simply can’t be achieved here (or in any other large city) on a large scale. As has been pointed out ad nauseam for years, the only way to eliminate black market drug dealing is to treat addicts in a health care setting and to provide safe and legal outlets for recreational drugs that large numbers of adults use responsibly. Until that day, programs like these that divert some people from our prisons might improve a neighborhood (and that’s definitely a good thing), but will ultimately fail to do anything about the overall amount of illegal drug dealing in the city. To some extent, I have sympathy towards the officials who end up in this no-win situation, but that sympathy tends to wane when I hear so few of them willing to challenge the faulty underpinnings of the status quo.

UPDATE: For anyone heading to Netroots Nation this weekend, there will be a panel about the High Point drug diversion program.

It’s no Grand Central, but Philadelphia’s refurbished 30th Street Station, is pretty damn grand in itself, a relic from the heyday of rail travel in America, and a damn sight less seedy and more inviting than it was in the days of my youth. It also seemed to be more crowded too, with a bustling lunchtime rush filling the new food court. (Well, new to me.)

The station is also more conveniently located than I remembered, as I discovered when I walked across the river to score myself a Philadelphia style soft pretzel from one of the many street cart vendors, only to find myself standing outside a Trader Joes. After stocking up on a few snacks and beverages for the long ride to Pittsburgh, I walked back to the station and had myself a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee.

At this point I’m more than halfway through the seven and half hour ride, having just traversed the famous horseshoe curve, and one of the biggest surprises of the trip is how well my Internet access has held up via the AT&T 3G network on my iPhone… and hence my ability to surf and post. Sure, there have been plenty of areas of no service, especially here in what us East Coasters call “mountains,” but anybody expecting to get work done with a similar hookup won’t be too disappointed. And unlike the train cars on the Amtrak Cascades line, there are power outlets at every seat.

As for the rest of the trip, it’s been pretty much what I expected: smooth, quiet ride, plenty of leg room, and the ability to take a walk down the aisle whenever the mood strikes me. Another surprise, though I guess it shouldn’t have been, is the number of freight trains we’ve passed on this trip, many of them laden with coal. Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian may make only a single round trip between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia a day, but for those of us looking forward to a passenger rail revival, it should be encouraging to realize that freight rail never died.

And oh yeah… so far, the train is exactly on time.