Misc.

* Ezra Klein argues Nancy Pelosi is playing three-dimensional chess.

* "Tea Party" is now a registered party in Florida. Excelsior! The sky's the limit.

* John Hodgman now has a daily podcast.

* 40 House Democrats are now threatening to vote no on the health care conference bill unless Stupak is removed.

* Number of Ph.D.’s hired last year to “develop” carrot sticks for McDonald’s: 45. Is this on the usual job list? Interviews at MLA?

* Also at Harper's: Number of U.S. universities that have a Taco Bell Distinguished Professorship of Fast Service: just one. That's the tragedy.

Sunday links 2.

* For all you IJers out there, Infinite Summer has your David Foster Wallace humor minute.

* Hate crime protection for the homeless? Hate crimes are, in general, a very thorny legal issue, but in light of so much violence directed specifically at the homeless it makes sense to see them as a class in need of additional protection.

* Terminator 4 was so good they're going to make Terminator 5.

* Polling headline of the week: 'GOP's Rating with Latinos Falls to Margin of Error.'

* Rachel Maddow on the success of astroturfed right-wing protests since the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000. Via Cyn-C.

* And Eric Holder is still inching towards prosecution of the Bush administration, though in terms of scale and scope the proposed investigation remains far too cautious.

The final SurveyUSA polls predict Obama victories in Pennsylvania and Florida, a loss in either of which probably spells the end for John McCain.

PA: Obama 52%, McCain 43%
FL: Obama 50%, McCain 47%

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post says "When it comes to predicting elections, head down to your local betting hall and talk to some gamblers. They have a much better record at forecasting elections." As of right now, the bookies put the odds at a 93-7 Obama advantage...

Another good-looking headline: 'Polls Show Obama Ahead In All Three Largest Swing States.'

Florida

Oct 29 Quinnipiac: Obama (D) 47%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 28 LAT/Bloomberg: Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 43%

Oct 27 Datamar: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 44%

Oct 27 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 47%

Oct 27 Suffolk: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 44%

Oct 27 Zogby: Obama (D) 47%, McCain (R) 47%

Oct 24 Str. Vision (R): McCain (R) 48%, Obama (D) 46%


Ohio

Oct 29 Quinnipiac: Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 42%

Oct 28 LAT/Bloomberg: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 28 SurveyUSA: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 27 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 27 Zogby: Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 26 Univ. of Akron: Obama (D) 45%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 25 Univ. of Cincinnati: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 46%

Oct 24 PPP (D): Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 44%

Oct 24 Str. Vision (R): McCain (R) 48%, Obama (D) 45%


Pennsylvania

Oct 29 Quinnipiac: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 28 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 46%

Oct 28 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 27 Temple Univ.: Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 27 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 26 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 25 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 52%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 24 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 52%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 24 Str. Vision (R): Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 43%

Breaking news! Scientists have discovered it is possible for a Republican governor of Florida to be something other than a complete douchebag.

Gov. Charlie Crist on Tuesday extended early voting hours across Florida to 12 hours a day.

The executive order comes after record early voting turnout has contributed to long lines at polling sites.

The Quinnipiac and Big 10 Battleground polls have terrible news for McCaniacs. We can't really be this far ahead, can we? Via Daily Kos.

The highlights:

Florida (Quinnipiac)
Obama 49
McCain 44

Indiana (Big 10)
Obama 51
McCain 41

Ohio (Big 10)
Obama 53
McCain 41

Ohio (Quinnippiac):
Obama 52
McCain 38

Pennsylvania (Big 10)
Obama 52
McCain 41

Pennsylvania (Quinnippiac)
Obama 53
McCain 40

CNN's John King says the McCain camp has given up on Colorado alongside Iowa and New Mexico.

They are now finishing with a very risky strategy. Win Florida... Win Nevada, that is a state that is now critical to the McCain math even though it is only five electoral votes. And here is the biggest risk of all: they say yes, they have to win North Carolina, yes, they have to win Ohio, yes, they have to win Virginia— trailing or dead even in all those states right now—but they are betting, Wolf, on coming back and taking the state of Pennsylvania. It has become the critical state now in the McCain electoral scenario, and they are down 10, 12, even 14 points in some polls there...

I hate to give free advice to McCain, but this is lunatic. The RCP average for Pennsylvania is +11.7 Obama. Pollster.com has it at 15.2%. Nate Silver puts McCain's numbers in PA at 2%.

How bad are McCain's internals in Colorado, if he thinks he has a better chance in PA? He has no chance in PA.

FYI: if he does win PA, I will personally burn both Neil and Srinivas in effigy. Sujata too.

UPDATE: Nick at Cogitamus points at one thing that distinguishes Pennsylvania from other potential McCain last-chances: no early voting.

Presumably this has something to do with information based on Colorado's early vote totals; the McCain campaign must believe that they can't achieve a large enough Election Day victory to offset Obama's advantage in early voting.

Of course, Pennsylvania—Pittsbugh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle, in Carville's famous phrase—is also more ripe than Colorado for racially coded campaigning, as Shankar points out in the comments.

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

Matt Y. gives us a taste of when we'll know Obama's won this thing.

Virginia and Indiana close at 7PM Eastern, Ohio closes at 7:30PM Eastern (the portions of Indiana in Eastern Time actually close at 6PM) and then Florida closes at 8PM Eastern with the vast majority of the state (the non-panhandle part) closing at 7PM Eastern. In practice, McCain needs to win all four of those states to have a shot at the election, and he’s currently behind in three of them. It’d still take a while before anyone concedes anything, and political junkies will want to see Senate outcomes in Alaska and Oregon, but it’s very possible that the country will basically know the outcome of the presidential election pretty early.

In the worst case scenario that McCain does manage to win all four—and North Carolina, and Missouri, and Georgia and West Virginia, and all the other states that currently look to be in play—it'll then come down to Colorado, where the polls close at 9 PM EST. If Obama wins there and in New Mexico, he still wins, even if he loses everywhere else.

RCP has a six-point Obama advantage in Colorado.

Is McCain trying to lose? What other answer can there be to the latest terrible, self-defeating spin on his abominable health care plan? He's actually talking about cutting the Medicare budget. Per Kevin Drum, here's how he got here:

1. We're going to eliminate the tax deduction of healthcare insurance and replace it with a $5,000 tax credit for families.

2. Oops, that means a lot of families will end up paying more in taxes. Can't have that. So what we're really going to do is eliminate the income tax deduction, but not the payroll tax deduction. All better now.

3. Oops again. The new plan saves middle class families from a tax increase, but by doing so it blows a huge hole in the budget. $1.3 trillion over ten years, to be exact.

4. What do do? Cut Medicare! Hooray!

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias have more on this. The latest round of pro-Obama swing state polls don't even take this into effect yet, and they still show Obama leading in Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and, yes, Florida—what will those polls look like once the slashing-Medicare issue hits the airwaves?

What is his team thinking? FiveThirtyEight is even arguing that Georgia's still in play.

A good sign: The Florida GOP has begun to panic.

Morning politics.

* Landslide ascendant? New polls from Quinnipiac show Obama breaking away in Florida (51-43), Ohio (50-42) and Pennsylvania (54-39). Lots of reasons for this; in addition to the economic crisis that Ben Smith highlights, there's also McCain's increasingly erratic behavior and the snowballing unpopularity of Sarah Palin. Nate Silver of 538.com was on Countdown last night trumpeting a predicted 330-207 Electoral College blowout—an opinion Dick Morris of all people would call conservative—and OpenLeft has a great chart from the Princeton Election Meta-Analysis showing the distribution of all possible outcomes.

* Which means it's time for McCain to get nasty. Again.

* Speaking of Palin, I'm reserving judgment on the debate until I actually see it. It's very hard to say how the expectations game is going to work; traditionally, the candidate perceived as unimpressive benefits from asymmetric expectations and thereby "wins," and in that sense Palin can't lose. But I'm not sure there's ever been a candidate as manifestly unprepared as Sarah Palin—and basically any mistake she makes, even relatively trivial ones, will serve to ratify the Tina-Fey caricature that has achieved critical cultural mass. In that sense she can't win. So I have no idea what's going to happen. Her recent interviews with Katie Couric have been no better than the early ones—she famously reads all newspapers but won't admit or has no idea what pro-life actually means and it's now been confirmed she couldn't discuss any court decision beyond Roe v. Wade—and the Republicans are working overtime both to prep her and to pre-spin the debate. They're now strongly attacking Gwen Ifill all over. If they're going to cry about it, fine, let's replace Ifill—is Katie Couric available?

* Explosive breaking news from Troopergate probably won't help Palin's popularity.

* What is it about being mayor of New York City that causes people to lust after emergency powers? Now Bloomberg wants an emergency third term.

* And Google endorses marriage equality.

Sorry I've been AWOL today—as I've said a few times the last few weeks, I've been busy suspended my blogging pending a resolution of the Wall Street crisis. Here's some links w/ commentary for the afternoon:

* Sarah Palin fielded questions at a press conference!

“Notice I wrote ‘fielded’ since she didn’t exactly answer them,” the reporter, Ken Vogel of Politico, wrote in his notes sent out to other reporters following the campaign.

There's a transcript at CNN.

* The polls don't seem to like people playing games with the debates. By the way, it looks like McCain will actually show up.

* The Keating Five Scandal in 97 Seconds. Expect to see references to this more and more as we head into October.

* Obama is reaping the benefits of his quiet decision to unshackle the 527s; these ads from MoveOn (on Phil Gramm, Rick Davis, and the economic crisis) and Brave New Pac/Democracy for America (on McCain's health) are both deadly effective.

* Voter registration efforts in Florida are overwhelming the state's ability to process them—a very good sign for those who still think we can take the state.

* It's a good thing John McCain is in DC solving the financial crisis, as his understanding of basic economics is unparalleled.

BARTIROMO: Sen. McCain, has Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke cut interest rates aggressively enough?

Has Ben Bernanke cut interests rates aggressively enough?

McCAIN: I’m not…I’m not…I don’t have that kind of expertise to know exactly whether he has cut interest rates suffiently or not. I’m glad that whenever they cut interest rates. I wish interest rates were zero.

At least the plane trip will give him time to read the three-page Paulson plan. As of Tuesday, he hadn't yet. Really. (Three pages.)

* And Bill Clinton is still sort of a dick.

I'd just add that McCain voted -- twice -- to remove Clinton from office during the impeachment fiasco; McCain has publicly mocked Clinton's daughter for cheap laughs; and McCain repeatedly trashed Clinton's wife when he thought she would be the Democratic nominee.

But never mind all of that. This morning, McCain wanted to score a few points, grab a few headlines, and bolster his bipartisan bona fides, and Bill Clinton was anxious to give the Republican nominee a hand.

The former president is gracious to a fault, isn't he?

Unexpectedly busy day today, but I do have a few links.

* Anti-Obama racism comes to Roxbury, just one town over from my beloved Randolph.

* The Paulon bailout continues to take pretty heavy fire; you can find details and good analysis at Krugman's blog, where he is taking a pretty hard line on the demand for a taxpayer equity stake in the companies we'll be bailing out.

* And Glenn Greenwald takes the Brooksian dream of the Wise Old Men of Washington back out to the woodshed.

* Given that he is the Scourge of Lobbyists, it's ironic that the person tapped to run McCain's transition team lobbied for Freddie Mac just a few months ago.

* And given his well-known penchant for Straight Talk it's odd that McCain hasn't given a press conference in 40 days.

* FiveThirtyEight has polling data showing that the debates may not move the polls very much after all. There's also a new poll out showing Obama with a two-point lead in Florida, which has got to be an outlier.

Sunday morning politics linkdump. Sorry for all these linkdumps, by the way—it was a busy week. Next week should see a return to a little bit more sustained commentary (including the exciting return of debate liveblogging!).

* There have been some interesting debates about poll biases lately. Ron Fournier (grumble) at the AP covers a study that argues Obama would be further ahead were it not for racial animus, by as many as six points. FiveThirtyEight throws cold water on this, as well as looking closely at the possibility of a "cellphone effect" in the polls. If Obama does 2.8% better in polls that include cellphones, that suggests a shifting map like the one below, turning Virginia light-blue and strengthening small Dem leads in Ohio and Colorado.



* A study from political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that Obama will win, when all is said and done, with 54% of the popular vote. That he's naively comparing historical models with this year's unprecedentedly diverse tickets in both camps shows how seriously we should take this analysis.

* A new PPP poll shows North Carolina tied. Other recent polls show South Carolina within six, West Virginia within four, and MontanVoteRonPaula within two.

* There's evidence of a "Palin effect" in Florida driving undecided voters to Obama.

* The Spine tries to get a handle on Obama's early-voting advantage, beginning as early as this Friday in Virginia. The second link has some stats of interest for Dukies and Durham residents:

In addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting Oct. 16.

* The McCain camp has successfully demanded the VP debate rules be changed to protect Sarah Palin.

*Judge orders Cheney not to destroy his VP records.

* SNL mocked McCain this week. He also preemptively mocked himself with an article in Contingencies arguing (for reals) that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Straight out of the Dept. of Bad Timing. Obama's already taken aim at this.

* Will Obama raise my taxes? A helpful widget.

* And American Stranger has a long post on ideology that seems to take as one starting point my post on Slavoj Žižek, Obama Supporter. Essentially Ryan takes aim at the various binds the Left finds itself in with regard to political action, and I largely agree with what he says—though I certainly hope I wasn't in mind as his example of sell-out "liberal 'pragmatism' a la The New Republic." My point, both in the earlier post and now in this one, is simply that the U.S. President has a tremendous ability to make life better or worse for real people with real lives, all over the world, many of whom (believe it or not!) do not have cushy long-term contracts with elite universities. Naderite "Oh, they're all the same!" negativity only makes sense to people who are inoculated by class and privilege from the consequences of that power.

The mere recognition that the perfect not be the enemy of the good doesn't quite throw my lot in with TNR, I don't think, and certainly not so long as we also keep in mind that the good not be the enemy of the better. Our discomfort with pragmatic compromises—and we should be discomforted by them, every time and in every case—isn't by itself a reason not to be pragmatic.

Time/CNN has some good-lookin' state polls out today:

Florida: Obama 48, McCain 48
Indiana: McCain 51, Obama 45
North Carolina: McCain 48, Obama 47
Ohio: Obama 49, McCain 47
Wisconsin: Obama 50, McCain 47

I love that North Carolina number. I honestly don't expect to see it in November, but man, do I love it.

Politics bites.

* Daily Kos's BarbinMD marvels at the quick education of Sarah Palin: from not knowing the most basic facts about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac yesterday to writing an op-ed on the subject in the Wall Street Journal today.

* The first post-convention swing-state polls are coming out, and the news suggests a tight race, albeit one our side still has a slight edge in.

• In Colorado, Obama leads by a 49%-46% margin, actually an improvement for him since McCain's 49%-48% edge three weeks ago. Both results are within the margin of error.

• In Florida, the race is tied 48%-48%, compared to a 48%-46% McCain edge from about three weeks ago.

• In Ohio, McCain leads 51%-44%, compared to a 48%-43% lead for McCain from almost three weeks ago. Rasmussen has been the most favorable pollster for McCain in Ohio.

• In Pennsylvania, Obama has a slim 47%-45% edge, not significantly different from his 48%-45% lead two and a half weeks ago.

• In Virginia, McCain has a 49%-47% lead, not significantly changed from a 48%-47% McCain lead from over three weeks ago.

McCain needs both Virginia (13 EVs) and Colorado (9 EVs) to win, especially in light of the fact that he likely won't retain New Mexico (5 EVs) and Iowa (7 EVs), states Bush carried in his 286-251 victory over John Kerry in 2004. Likewise, if he loses Ohio or Florida, it's game over, and there's been a lot of speculation that the Palin pick could backfire with Jewish voters in Florida.

For Obama's part, he's really only playing defense in Michigan and (to a lesser extent) Pennsylvania, two states I would be quite surprised to see him lose.

* McCain comes out hard against Obama for... having the same position John McCain himself has held for years.

* And, via TPMtv, even Fox News's Chris Wallace has had enough of the Bridge to Nowhere lie.

Eight years after the Recount, the voting machines still don't work. Via MeFi.

The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee has just ruled that the Florida and Michigan delegates will be seated at half-strength in Denver.

The committee agreed on a compromise offered by the Michigan Democratic Party that would give Clinton 69 delegates and Obama 59. Each delegate would get half a vote at the convention in Denver later this summer, according to the deal.

They also agreed to seat the Florida delegation based on the outcome of the January primary, with 105 pledged delegates for Clinton and 67 for Obama, but with each delegate getting half a vote as a penalty.

The net result is +24 for Clinton, but the more important result would seem to be the delegitimization of the last Clinton gambit, the bogus popular vote argument predicated on Clinton's having received one gazillion votes in Michigan to Obama's zero.

I also hope the obnoxious behavior of her supporters in the audience has also been noted for the record.

During his angry tirade before the Michigan vote, Harold Ickes threatened to take the matter to all the way to Denver. Let's hope, please, that it doesn't really come to that.

I get results! There'll be no Florida revote, just as I'd hoped last Friday.