Also Also

Hyping the Portal, Supplying the Portal, Tipping the Portal

A couple of days ago, Also Also was afforded the honor of being moved to the front syndication page of the NW Portal, a fast-growing dynamic compendium of progressive blogs from Washington, Oregon and Idaho. With wire stories from each state, some national headlines, and four links apiece from each of 24 different bloggers, the Portal is a very good way to stay abreast of what's happening in the region as well as nationally. And when a story in our corner of the continent turns hot, like the WA goobernor's race, it becomes a key source of informational balance, keeping the echo chamber in check and the media honest. So yeah, we're feeling good to be a part of this growing enterprise.

Firmly anchored in the top left corner of the Portal is Andrew Villenueve's NW Progressive Institute Blog. In a classic example of what makes his creation so valuable, Andrew's writeup of Congressman Reichert's Social Security "town hall" event was perfect information for interested Washingtonians. But it had a broader interest as well--and Josh Marshall, who has been giving blanket coverage to the SS road show, picked up the story as a dispatch from the trenches. Good show! I'm sure Andrew had some very nice traffic today.

So it's growing, it's getting attention--and you can find our last four posts quick-linked there 24/7, along with Blue Oregon, Horse's Ass, Pacific Views, Preemptive Karma, and lots more.

</high salesmanship mode>

--TJ

The Social Security Solution

No matter how great a blog you write, with pithy coined words and sly turns of phrase, sometimes someone's comment is going to overshadow you. It's certainly no knock against Brad DeLong and his steadfast alertness (via Marshall) to the newest verbal deceptions promulgated by Bush on Social Security, but the best description comes from commenter Lee Arnold:

We should respectfully ask the President to carve-out the claw-back, and add-on a new DO-LATER. (This gives the President ultimate flexibility, since he could reverse it, and claw-back the carve-out, with no risk to anyone's liberty to hyphenate in the future.) Once this is done, we can take care of the long-term shortfall for the poor, by going back to a near-term FAIR-PAY by the rich. This will adhere to the well-known principle: If your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep is gonna be your downfall.

Brilliant.

--TJ

Stefan Sharkansky Knows My Name

...since it's on the emails that I've sent him. But I guess he didn't know how to respond to the critique of his methods of allegation, because he didn't, while impugning Carla and I for using handles. But he does try to resurrect two chestnuts from his folly file, using the complaints of County Councilman David Irons (R-Sammamish) as his bulwark. Irons claims King's discrepancy in 2000 was only 17, not 1,230 as King records show.  His statement is echoed by former Elections Superintendent Julie Anne Kempf--but unfortunately, she remembers the 17 figure as being for the 1999 elections. According to the article, Kempf was fired in 2003 for suspicion of lying about late-mailed ballots--but her supervisor resigned for mailing ballots late.

Sharkansky also smells smoke from Irons' comment that Logan hasn't shown him the mailing logs for the military overseas ballots.  His personal conclusion?  "Four months after the fact, the county is unable to provide the documentation that the ballots did go out  on time. " Except that the county has provided that information to the media, as the Times article indicates.  Just not to Irons, who apparently must wait in line like the rest of us for our public records, now that they are busy fulfilling discovery requests from the Rossi team.  Apparently, the thought that perhaps Irons is grandstanding politically in order to save his career from redistricting, did not occur to Sharkansky as a reason for Irons' peevishness.

If King in fact did not trim the "courtesy credits" from their discrepancy total when reporting in 2000, on a comparable basis the error from 2004 is undoubtedly larger. But is it yet an anomaly? Sharkansky's detail of King's discrepancies since 2000  shows an error rate of .16% in 2003, after the time Logan claims the County stopped including courtesy credits in their totals. That would be roughly analagous to the .21% for 2004, especially when you note that the number of ballots cast was over twice that of 2003--and as Carla and I will report in Part 2 of our series, when it comes to errors, size matters.

--TJ

Fisking Sharkansky

[jointly researched and published at AlsoAlso and Preemptive Karma]

Since the election contest in Washington appears to be moving forward to the trial phase, we felt it was important to understand the evidence being proffered by the Republicans to have the election set aside. The prime Republican target for allegations of misconduct has been King County. King is the largest county in the state and has become a lightning rod for Rossi, the state Republican Party (led by the obstreperous Chris Vance) and the rightwing talk/blog echo chamber, led on this issue by Stefan Sharkansky and SoundPolitics.com.

We want to be clear: King County has made some mistakes in this election. Perhaps the most glaring is the one SoundPolitics has dropped from their radar: the 723 ballots initially rejected for not having signatures on file in the computer when they knew that some signatures weren’t yet in the computer. In our opinion, the rejection of valid votes is always worse than the acceptance of invalid votes, unless the result of official fraud.

But where Democrats in a place like Ohio were frustrated by attempts to gain more information from election officials, we have found election officials in Washington to be generally open, helpful and dedicated. Surpisingly this has remained true even in the face of a vitriolic echo chamber and a heavy burden placed on them by the contest litigants.

These experiences are what gives us such a dim view of the way Sharkansky and SP have gone about their campaign. Too often, the charges have been leveled in a careless manner. Unfortunately, what's emerged is a pattern of discovery and accusation, then publication and THEN perhaps checking to see whether the story's right. Corrections are often made grudgingly and fleetingly.

The most visible mistake was asking the postal service about bulk mailing of military overseas ballots, and not asking about the right bulk mail license. With a minimum of fact checking, Carla was able to suss that one out and defuse the allegations. It's not just election stories, either--this week an associate was incredulous that state laws regarding art set-asides on building projects, would cause an unholy 16mil to be spent on art in front of a sewage plant. Apparently no one asked the development team until later, when it was discovered that the set-aside is not calculated on the total development cost, as SP had blithely assumed. SP corrected their error, but not until well after their article ran.

So when Sharkansky declared with typical hyperbole that he was compiling the "definitive" analysis of King County's votes, we were interested but skeptical.

Sharkansky acquired the public records that were available on the county's results and voter rolls, compared them, and concluded that contrary to King's assertion of around 2,100 anomalies, the total number was actually more than 3,700.  Wow! “County Underestimates, Hides Vote Discrepancy 70% Bigger Than Initial Report!” Get Brit Hume on the horn!

Sharkansky's prime contention was that the 2,100 figure represented only a net discrepancy: voters without ballots and separate ballots without voters were allowed to cancel each other out, rather than counting as two separate errors instead of zero.  That's a valid charge, if proven. An unmatched vote is an unmatched vote. But the devil is definitely in the details, and that's where it would have helped to pursue some extra knowledge about trying to replicate the county's totals.  (Hopefully ignorance is the excuse, anyway).

The two vital pieces in reconciling the books are the voter list, and the tally of cast ballots. Ballot tallies are easy enough to compile, we did it as easily as Sharkansky or anyone else can, by downloading data files available at the County site. King County released a list of registered voters as of Nov 1. The next two releases were lists of voters credited with voting (December 30 and January 7). Both were preliminary but successively refined lists.

There are over 2600 individual precincts in King County. Most polling places serve multiple precincts. Cast your ballot at the wrong table and you'll be misfiled.  King County recorded less than one discrepancy per precinct, according to their figures.  Another avenue to error is the fact that the publicly released manual recount figures are not broken down by ballot type (polls, absentee, provisionals, etc.) Rather blithely, Sharkansky reconciles the problem this way: "I used the counts of each type of ballot per precinct from the machine recount, but the precinct total from the manual recount, realizing that the totals would still be off by 1 or 2 in some precincts." Say, arbitrarily, it's _at least_ one in a quarter of the precincts. That's a variance of around 650 that is created not by King, but by Sharkanksy's attempts to fact-check King. 

By Sharkansky’s own admissions, he struggled to create a file that he believed would match what King worked with to reconcile their data. But his struggle was futile from the start, which he must have known: King didn’t reconcile their data at the precinct level, they did it voter by voter, pollbook line by pollbook line. How can you claim you’ve done the definitive analysis, when you don’t even have the right file defined? We don’t think you can.

In the next piece, we’ll talk more about King’s electoral process, and see whether their performance is out of step with the rest of the state.

--TJ and Carla

Dean as Flack?

I had created a blogroll over at the now-latent Torrid's World that had many links I enjoyed. Then I did something wrong, and they all went away. Like Mrs. Joe, who has had to painstakingly replace CD's lost in the Great Meth Break-in of 2003 that struck our home, some favorites fell through the cracks when I tried to replace the original blogroll. One of them was The Blogging of the President.

Set up as a focus on the campaign for re-election, it continues with a good crew of serious writers. They take up the now highly-resonant blog story about the Kos and MyDD site owners taking fees for consulting services from the Dean campaign, at least from the latter's perspective to talk up the candidate. The facts of the story were lost quite early on, despite the WSJ story noting that both disclosed the relationship, and Armstrong (the MyDD blogger) even shut his down during the period. Plus they were both easily-identified Dean supporters to begin with, and come from the progressive/activist wing of the party.

So BTOP is a little annoyed with Chris Suellentop of Slate for continuing to skew the concepts at hand. I have to agree in some areas that Suellentrop takes way too many easy liberties with the identified truth. He makes some sort of NBA analogy to suggest that Kos and Armstrong, because of the company they keep and the popularity of their sites, ought to be acting like professionals. Which I can't necessarily argue with; professional whats? Suellentrop's answer quite obviously is "journalist," which is unfair to both of them, neither of whom claims to either be a journalist or aspire to be one.  He tries to let them off the hook by saying disclosures and attempts to close off conflicts of interest would still be indequate for pros, but since they're amateurs they can get away with it--but it won't get taken seriously.

To which the obvious answer, that BTOP makes in an alternately put way, is--Chris! You're already taking them seriously; you're trying to call them college seniors with signed agents, bound do or die for the pros. Except to them, they're not even sure they're playing the same sport.  I have to agree that as a commentator rather than a news feeder, Suellentrop is most at risk of seeing his market share ebb, and surely being sold to a company that likes profit from their units must make him thoughtful about his future.  The whole idea that Bill Gates is working behind the curtain to crush impudent blogs--that's a little too 24 for me.

But BTOP misses a valid point that Suellentrop makes, which is one of central believability. That comes whether you're an anchor or a commentator or a guy in mom's basement.  The whole "how can we trust anything he says without wondering if he's on the take" angle is a little absurd, but it's not an unreasonable question. Kos did several individual fundraising appeals, calling his group the Kos Dozen just like Dean, and just like Dean I think there were more than a dozen. I think that is outstanding, highly appropriate and properly focused work. Supporting strong candidates at local offices produces the strong statewide and national candidates of tomorrow. But come next Congressional cycle, I'm going to wonder a bit how the list of Kos Candidates to Send Money To was chosen.  Is it going to bother me? Probably not. I'm not a fool; Kos's endorsement doesn't create Pavlovian Money Sweats in my wallet. I'm going to see if the person is worth supporting on my own. But I'm still going to wonder.

This may sound kind of odd, but for football lovers who have HBO and watch Inside the NFL, you may be familiar with Cris Collinsworth, the former Bengals wide receiver who now does color broadcasts  and analysis for Fox as well as HBO.  Each week, the hosts of Inside the NFL pick most of the games on the weekend slate. Collinsworth joins in--except for the game he will be calling.

Is this really necessary? No money is changed hands for the pick results, and while Collinsworth might have some inside information from his extensive NFL connections, certainly so do the others, longtime NFL associates all. But somebody--Collinsworth himself, or the network, or the league--thinks it's a good idea for him not to comment on a subject in which he himself is personally involved. I think the witchhunt about Kos' credibility is nearly ridiculous--especially in terms of the way the right has gleefully used it to take the starch out of the Armstrong Williams debacle, which is utterly different and may have criminal ramifications for someone.  But I do thing there are questions of ethics and perception that some people may rather dismiss than address.

--TJ

Michelle Malkin shares her hate mail

[Verbatim reprinting of some of the material below may offend young or sensitive readers. Racial and sexual slurs are numerous--ed]

There are few people who find Michelle Malkin's columns as mind-numbingly odious as I do--of this I am sure. It's not with pride that I've said and written things about Malkin that run along the lines of "witless thug," but I certainly admit it, and I frankly think it's an accurate charge. So it has to be something pretty mean, thoughtless and downright threatening for me to actually have sympathy for her:

Malkin, you're a dumb fucking whore. You're a philipino piece of shit who should be wiping my ass. Go back to the massage parlor. Sucky sucky long time. How dare you thing you have any right to express any opinions in this country. You're a joke. Go back to nursing school. Whore.

Here's a tip. We know you are lyin' pond scum and a whore to your profession......and, not a very expensive whore at that. So............when we get rid of you neocons; how will you ever pay your rent? You're not good enough to make it as a real writer. fuck you; I hope you get cancer & die a horrible painful death all alone, with your collegues shunning you and the rest of us reading how wrong you are AND WHAT A CRUMMY WRITER YOU ARE.

There are several more, but they're far too depressing to keep quoting. I'm not so naive as to be unaware of hate mail, of course. One of my favorite lines in my favorite book The World According to Garp is when Roberta, the transgendered former tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles, is reading her hatemail and exclaims, "Oh God--this one hopes I'll get gangbanged by the Oakland Raiders." You knew you hadn't made it until you got your first death threat, if you were a black entertainer or pro athlete in the first half of the century. So the rantings of painfully ill-minded people sending such foulness to people they don't even know, shouldn't unexpectedly disturb me--particularly when their target is someone I find so professionally abhorrent.

But I am surprised. I only printed one of that kind, and maybe her choices for inclusion were heavy on the race baiting, but there is a consistent theme--calling her a "filthy whore," a "filthy Asian (or some tortured spelling of Fillipino) whore," and apparently the worst thing race bigots can say about Asian females: that she reminds them of the nonchalant hookers in Full Metal Jacket.

Even that wouldn't be 100% surprising, but the 2nd email jarringly made me think about who is sending these letters: LIBERALS. Is Pat Buchanan firing off angry Whore of Babylon emails to Michelle Malkin? Fuck no. I mean, what the heck is this?

Proverbs 69:69 counsels: "Like a whore who infects those she sleeps with, so doth the ultra-republican faux columnist infect her readers with lies." While you are looking in the mirror, cursing the Left because you weren't born blond, think about the above. Amen.

Do you know any ideological liberals or progressives who dig on heavy stereotyping of all imaginable kinds, and wishing strangers death by cancer? I mean, think of Dennis Kucinich sending email to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, calling him a massa's nigga doing massa's business. It doesn't compute. Equality and respect--that's Denny's gig, man. So who are these people? Is this just another extension of far left liberalism being the radical Islam of modern liberal thought? SDS, Black Panthers, ActUP, Eco-Terror, Ohio Tinfoilists...Air America Dittoheads? Who are they? Are they heretics we can safely jettison as cranks and Not Really Liberals? Are they simply enflamed by recent events? Just catching up to the echo chamber of hate and ad hominem the right has been marketing for 20 years? Agitated on hits of nitrous and the Daily Show?

Michelle, may your selfish, tiny-minded and frankly somewhat bigoted political sensibility never be truly ascendant in our country. But on behalf of the core progressive community, I apologize for the transgressions of others. This, you don't deserve and I'm sorry.

--TJ