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It didn’t make any local media reports. But last Friday, a deal was struck in the state legislature that could fundamentally change how elections are held in Seattle.

The deal concerned two identical bills with different numbers that had been overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (29-20) and the House (56-38). Because the bills had different numbers, one had to be passed by the other chamber, by this week, in order to be forwarded to the governor’s desk for her signature. And the Senate version, championed by the venerable Sen. Rosa Franklin, won out. (It’s amazing how much of Olympia’s legislative process comes down to personalities. It’s like middle school on steroids.) Gov. Gregoire is expected to sign it into law.

Oh, the bill? It would allow local jurisdictions (cities or counties) to hold referenda on public financing of elections. And Seattle is at or near the top of the list of Washington cities likely to put such a measure on the ballot in November 2008.

Seattle already had public financing of elections once, in the late ’70s and 1980s, before Linda Smith’s statewide initiative (I-134) killed all such laws in 1991. More recently, eight of the nine Seattle City Council members – the folks who’d have to decide to put any such measure on the ballot – wrote Olympia in support of the bill about to be passed. (The sole exception was new city council member Bruce Harrell, recently elected thanks to his wealthy lawyer and developer friends and to opponent Venus Velazquez’s poor driving judgment.)

The path, then, to a November 2008 Seattle ballot measure is fairly clear: a bill already approved by a supermajority in the House, a governor likely to sign it into law, a city council overwhelmingly supportive. And local activists are already working on what that public financing model might look like. Most likely is some variation of the “Voter-Owned Elections” law passed in Portland, Oregon, in 2005. In the Portland law, any candidate who raises 1,000 $5 donations can then qualify for $150,000 in city money, provided he or she agrees not to take further private contributions.

A hundred fifty thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it’s actually below the average of what serious candidates are spending to get on Seattle’s city council these days. In last November’s election, only two of five races were seriously contested (Harrell’s open seat and Tim Burgess’s unseating of incumbent David Della); both winners had the backing (and money) of much of the local business community. In the other three races, incumbents had raised over $100,000 before anyone else even declared for the seats; they raised double that by the time of the election, despite not being seriously contested. (Jean Godden and Sally Clark breezed to victory over underfunded opponents; Tom Rasmussen, the top fundraiser by the filing deadline, wasn’t even opposed.)

With public financing, that scenario wouldn’t be as likely in 2009. Recruiting candidates would be far easier if candidates with a minimum threshold of support were both guaranteed enough money to run competitive campaigns and didn’t have to spend the majority of every day on the phone begging people for money. If they won, they then needn’t worry about repaying those “debts,” either; the thinly disguised bribery that passes for the current campaign financing system (and that gives a huge built-in advantage to incumbents) would be over. And it can’t come any too soon, with several open seats likely in the city council in 2009 – plus Mayor Greg “Moneybags” Nickels running for reelection. (In 2005, Nickels’ war chest successfully kept any credible candidates from opposing him; a less-than-credible one with virtually no money, Al Runte, still did surprisingly well, suggesting that Nickels bought himself a second term even though voters weren’t sold on him.)

The upshot of all this is that last Friday’s deal ensuring Olympia’s passage of a measure allowing local public financing could fundamentally reshape our elections – and that almost certainly that decision will be in the hands of voters, perhaps as soon as November. Less likely, but also possible, is a King County measure – I-134 also struck down a public financing law in King County. Just think of how differently the Port of Seattle might be run if commissioners, earning a few thousand dollars a year, weren’t getting far more than that in contributions primarily from businesses that have dealings with the Port.

Ultimately, public financing of elections doesn’t just mean better elections; it also means a less corrupt government. And that’s well worth the relatively small amount of public funds needed to make it happen.

I’m filling in for Dave Ross this morning (and for the next 9 days) on News/Talk 710-KIRO. Here’s the show as it’s shaping up:

9AM: Does God hate “soft” men?
If so, I’m in trouble. Valerie Tarico, a Seattle psychologist and former fundamentalist Christian will join us by phone to tell what kind of preaching she’s heard in her survey of local churches. We’ve got a call out to Rev. Ken Hutcherson, hoping he can come on the show and explain to us his controversial take on gender roles: “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.” Because… um… Jesus loves you.

10AM: Is a “virtual” fence a real solution?
A $20 million, 28-mile, Boeing built “virtual fence” is ready for service along the US/Mexico border near Nogales, Arizona, and the Minutemen outraged, saying “virtual fencing is virtually useless. Minuteman National Executive Director Al Garza joins me by phone to make his argument for a double-layered physical barrier along our entire Southern border.

11AM: Ralph Nader is running! (Who cares?)
Ralph Nader announced yesterday that he is running for president, surprising absolutely nobody. The man credit by some with playing spoiler and throwing the election George W. Bush, claims that he is to “shift the power from the few to the many,” but netroots activists like me remain dubious. 100,000 Washington voters cast their ballot for Ralph Nader back in 2000, and one of them was former Seattle City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck; he joins us to give us his current opinion of Nader and his candidacy.

Tune in this morning (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

The Washington Poll released a new poll this week in the Washington state gubernatorial race. The results are pretty good news for Christine Gregoire, as it shows her leading Dino Rossi 53.7% to 42.1% with 3.5% undecided.

The only catch, as Niki Sullivan at The News Tribune points out, is:

The survey’s margin of error is +/- 5.6 percent. That means any number could be off by as much as 5.6 percent in either direction.

And that means that Gregoire’s lead could be anywhere from nearly zero to more than 20 points.

Well…sort-of, Niki.

A poll’s margin of error specifies a range that should include the true value (i.e. true percentage of the population who say they would vote each way when the poll was taken) with a 95% probability. For this poll, the interval of Gregoire voters defined by the margin of error is 48.1% to 59.3%. But the true value could fall outside this interval—anywhere from 0% to 100%. That the true percentage is outside the interval is only less probable, not impossible.

But even within the range 48.1% to 59.3%, all outcomes are not equally likely. The most likely true value supported by the data is 53.7%, and values near the tails (like 48.1% and 59.3%) are much less likely.

Polls have a margin of error because a small number of individuals are “sampled” in a poll. The same principle applies to flipping a coin. If you toss an honest coin 10 times, you expect 5 heads and 5 tails (i.e. a probability of 50% which is the true underlying probability for an honest coin). Typically, you will not get exactly 5 heads. If you repeat this 5-flip experiment, say, a hundred thousand times, and plot the results, the most likely outcome—five heads—only occurs about one quarter of the time. Occasionally, you would even get 10 heads in a row (about 0.1% of the time).

On the other hand, if you flip an honest coin a million times, the results will be very close to half heads and half tails.

Back to politics. Given that the Washington Poll sampled 300 individuals and found a 53.7% to 42.1% split, we can do a reverse engineered version of the coin flip experiment. We can simulate elections over and over again with 300 individuals who, for every election, each have a 53.7% probability of voting for Gregoire, a 42.1% chance of voting for Rossi and a 3.5% chance of being undecided (i.e. not voting). We can then plot the resulting number of votes for Gregoire in all of the elections.

Here is the result of this exercise in which we simulate 100,000 elections, each with 300 voters:

Vote totals to the right of the red line are wins for Gregoire and those to the left are wins for Rossi. Clearly, the vast majority of the wins are for Gregoire. In fact, she won 96,581 of the elections and Rossi won 3,032 of them. In other words, if the election were held today, we would expect Gregoire to have about a 97% chance of winning the election.

There was another Washington Poll for this race taken late last October that showed Gregoire leading Rossi 46.8% to 42.4%. That poll sampled 601 individuals. Repeating the simulation exercise shows that Gregoire had an 88.7% probability of beating Rossi based on results from that poll. So, we could say that Gregoire’s support has probably improved from the previous poll to the current poll.

The story might end there, except that the newest Washington Poll actually resampled 300 individuals from the 601 participants from October, rather than drawing a new sample. This highly unusual political poll design provides for stronger hints about the trend in support for each Candidate than does two polls of randomly sampled voters. A proper analysis would require access to the raw data, but the increased spread sure looks promising for Gregoire.

“No Country For Old Men” wasn’t better. The ending sucked. Yes, Javier Bardem was amazing as the sociopath killer with the awful haircut, but nothing beats George Clooney’s turn as the “fixer” who gets to the bottom of a mysterious case in “Michael Clayton”.

“The Truth Can Be Adjusted,” indeed.

I guess even Republicans deserve a bit of good news once in a while, however small:

Ralph Nader said Sunday he will run for president as a third-party candidate, criticizing the top White House contenders as too close to big business and pledging to repeat a bid that will “shift the power from the few to the many.”

“Shift the power from the few to the many,” huh? Gee… I thought that’s what I’d been doing this past half decade or so, along with a few million of my neighbors in the netroots community? Way to give us the finger, Ralph.

No, I guess instead of dedicating our lives to blogging for little or no money, creating new media infrastructure from scratch with zero resources, and struggling to build a new progressive movement that has empowered millions, actually won a few elections, and has started to change the way politics is conducted nationwide… the real way to shift the power from the few to the many is for a single, cranky, dried up, arrogant, old white guy to go on national television and declare that he is running for president. You know… for us. Because apparently, we’re too stupid to do it for ourselves.

There was a time, decades ago, when I dreamed of a viable third party that might duplicate the success of the Greens in Europe, but then, there was a time when I once looked up to Ralph Nader, consumer protection crusader, as a genuine American hero. I was young. What the fuck did I know?

Over the years, my understanding of electoral politics matured into a deep appreciation for the nuances of our two party system, long before Nader’s tragic 2000 campaign destroyed what little credibility the American Green Party had left. There is a genius to our system, that for the first time in history not only legitimized dissent, but institutionalized it. Yes our system is profoundly conservative at its core in that truly big, abrupt changes are exceedingly difficult to achieve, but this institutional sluggishness is not insurmountable and it has served to maintain the political and economic stability on which past generations have built our nation into the most prosperous and powerful on earth. And when cranks like Nader critique the Democrats and the Republicans as providing little or no choice to voters, they focus solely on the competition between the two parties while ignoring the competition within them.

It took thirty or more years for the forces of the far right to firmly seize the reins of the Republican Party and the institutions that support it, and it will take at least another decade or two for our “people powered” progressive movement to do the same with our party. That Nader can’t see the slow motion political revolution unfolding before his eyes reveals him to be as much a part of the ossified political establishment as the politicians he reviles… his third, futile campaign a last gasp of the status quo fighting to retain its own relevance. The old crusader appearing before the old media, challenging the declining power of the old guard; it is a scene that would be comic if it weren’t so tragic: Nader cast as Lear, railing against a storm of political change that threatens to sweep both him and his foes into the dustbin of history.

From a recent sermon by the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church, preaching on gender roles:

“God hates soft men … God hates effeminate men … If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

Well, that explains the alarming number of one-armed doormen at some our city’s upscale drugstores.

I don’t claim to be a Bible scholar, having only read the New Testament cover to cover once (and let me tell you, the sequel isn’t nearly as entertaining as the original)… but could somebody please point out the scripture where Jesus advocated tearing the limbs off polite people?

At some point, one of Hutcherson’s congregants is going to commit a hate crime, and when they do, I hope the victim or his family sues the hell out of Hutcherson and his “church.”

Courtesy of TheRealMcCain.com.

Over on Slog, Josh writes about outgoing state Sen. Brian Weinstein and his quest to pass his Home Buyer’s Bill of Rights before he retires at the end on this session. Some had suggested Sen. Weinstein was using his Senate committee to hold hostage a condo conversion bill recently passed by the House; Sen. Weinstein, a consumer protection champion, denies the two are related, telling Josh “I expect to pass it.”

He also said he had a good meeting with House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-43, Capitol Hill) about the homeowners’ rights bill. Last year, Weinstein accused Chopp of caving to the BIAW by snuffing Weinstein’s homeowner bill.

He didn’t say Chopp promised to move the bill forward, but he did say: “It was a good discussion. He asked good questions and it was a good meeting. Last year at this time, the bill was dead.”

Oh to be a fly on the wall at that meeting. Sen. Weinstein has a well deserved reputation as a tough negotiator, but what kind of leverage can a retiring senator hold over our famously risk-averse House Speaker?

Well, the buzz amongst the consumer protection community is that Sen. Weinstein has been quietly talking about possibly unretiring should his bill fail to get through the Legislature this session… potentially creating a very messy Democratic primary battle between an incumbent senator and newly minted Democrat, Rep. Fred Jarrett.

Did Sen. Weinstein make this threat to Speaker Chopp? I’ve got no idea, but it certainly would be a doozy. Sen. Weinstein, for all his merits, can be a bit abrasive, and I’ve heard that our amiable Speaker doesn’t like him all that much — so buying Weinstein a one-way ticket out of Olympia might be well worth the price of the bill to both Chopp and the BIAW. And the last thing Speaker Chopp and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown want at this late stage in the game is to have their neatly arranged 41st LD races thrown into disarray. The Democrat seeking to replace Jarrett in the House, Renton’s Marcie Maxwell, is no sure thing, and a Godzilla versus Mothra battle for the Senate seat would surely draw money and resources out of the House race.

The easiest way to avoid this mess is to pass Sen. Weinstein’s bill, which merely gives buyers of new construction a minimum legal warranty on the biggest purchase they’ll ever make in their lives. (Two years on materials and workmanship, ten years on structural defects.) And what’s so wrong about that?

My friend in the mortgage industry back in Philly sent me a funny Powerpoint presentation that’s floating around to help explain the subprime loan mess. I’ve embedded it here using Powerpoint’s semi-adequate Save as Web Page feature. Enjoy.

UPDATE: Apparently, the link does not work for Mac users. I’ll see if there’s another way I can embed it.

UPDATE 2: ‘Sidereal’ in the comments found it at another link. Click here. That should work for everyone. Thanks!

In the several years I’ve lived in Belltown, you’ve been a good neighbor. The people who take classes with you are most nice, well-adjusted kids, and they don’t cause trouble. You’ve got a nice location, right on the waterfront. I use your parking garage often whenever I grab a Flexcar Zipcar for a few hours. All in all, it’s been a good relationship thus far. But there’s something on your campus I’ve got my eye on.

Your basketball court.

See, the City of Seattle took away a half court when they put in the dog park at 3rd and Bell. The closest public basketball court in now up at the Denny Playfield, which doesn’t get the love it should.

Belltown is home to some interesting open space. There’s the Belltown cottages, Victor Steinbrueck Park, the aforementioned dog park on 3rd and Bell, and the Olympic Sculpture Park. The latter has a sign which says, “no active sports allowed.” So while my neighborhood has a gigantic typewriter eraser sitting on a grassy burm, it doesn’t have a b-ball court.

Is there an agreement we can come to that might allow Kurt Rambis-types such as myself the chance to shoot hoops at your court, until the city finally puts up some rims under the Viaduct? I want to play some pick-up basketball without having to leave my neighborhood.

Can we make this happen?

For those of you who, like me, miss my weekend radio gig (and especially for those few of you who have made it clear that you definitely do not), I am pleased to announce that I will be back on 710-KIRO, if only temporarily, filling in for Dave Ross for most of the next two weeks. So tune in 9AM to Noon, February 25th through the 29th, and again March 3rd through the 6th, as I bring my drive time propaganda to the masses while wiping my liberal stink all over Dori’s microphone.

Sure, I’d prefer my own show, but if they’re still letting me sit in for Dave, I suppose I must not suck all that much after all.

The Seattle Times fires off another editorial ripping Democrats for caucusing:

Washington voters pride themselves on their independence. Many had trouble reconciling the fact that they had to sign an oath of allegiance to a party for their vote to count. The parties insisted on that.

Can you believe it? The Democrats insist that only Democrats* participate in their nominating process. What assholes!

You know, if independents and Republicans get to decide who gets the Democratic nomination for president, I should be allowed to weigh in on who the Seattle Times endorses. It’s only fair.

*or people willing to say, for one day, that they are a Democrat.

More from Josh Feit’s interview:

Sure, endorsing Obama was calculated political pandering. But we like being pandered to.

To believe that Gregoire endorsed Barack Obama for political reasons is just wrong. Clearly, the “smart political move” would have been to not endorse in the race. Gregoire pissed off a lot of women by not endorsing the woman in the race. (My mom, for one.) Clinton backers would have dumped some fat checks on the Gregoire ’08 campaign. They may not, at least not for a while.

Hey, I got an idea… Maybe Gregoire was actually inspired by Barack Obama in the same way she was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Why it always has to be a “calculation”, I don’t understand.

Yo know, some of this governor’s biggest achievements have been non-political in nature, such as reaching an agreement between insurance companies and lawyers, or on water rights in eastern Washington.

And you know what? Maybe rushing into the implementation of a cap-and-trade isn’t the best thing. Says Gregoire:

We’re trying to get everybody to stay together. Here’s why: It’s one thing to get a bill passed, but it’s another thing to get it implemented. The way to make it move forward is to get everybody committed to implementation. This isn’t about taking away from Ecology. It’s saying, “Ecology, you develop a cap and trade, but bring it back to the legislature for approval,” versus, “You have the authority to adopt the rules and implement them today.” That’s the difference. That’s what they [business interests] want, and I’m okay with that.

Considering Gregoire ran the Ecology Department under Gov. Booth Gardner, I think she knows what it’ll take to get this done in a way that get all the parties on board. It reeks of competency and cooperation, not calculation.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.