As a Texan, I apologize for my state.

I think this is worth a link, just for the quotes from everyone who thinks the bailout is a bad idea:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/01/pearlstein/index.html

Puts Kevin's "The House's failure was as bad as 9/11" rantings in perspective.

I'm really liking the polling trends from the last week.

McCain's boneheaded stunts, Obama's presidential debate performance, and Palin taking a nosedive have really got things moving in the right direction.

Of course the Florida GOP Party meeting was secret. Everybody knows you don't discuss rigging voting machines and undermanning polling places in minority neighborhoods out in the open.

Could the good guys really win this time?

P.S. Barack Obama has his own channel on Dish Network now - Channel 73 I think - says right on the guide OBAMA - I think I know why John McCain is getting grumpy now! (I think they have blurb about this on the Political Wire blog.)

I heard someone on Air America analogize a presidential election to a chess game - It often starts out very close, with each side testing the other and taking a pawn, while surrendering a pawn of their own. Essentially a draw. Then, a decisive tactical error occurs and the match suddenly breaks one way or the other. By the end, it turns into a rout. I think this presidential campaign is like that. It has gone back and forth, but now has broken decisively in Obama's favor.

I hope I am not premature in saying this, but I think Grandpa McCain is going to get his geriatric ass handed to him in November. He could lose by 10 percentage points in the popular vote and a landslide in the Electoral College.

This is setting up for the mother of all Bradley Effects.

Obie will be lucky to win Illinois.

The current trend is undeniably in Obama's favor, but we absolutely CANNOT become complacent and overconfident. There is WAY too much time left for that. We need to work as hard now as ever. Volunteer time. Make another donation to the Obama campaign. My resources are limited, but I chipped in another twenty bucks this week.

I expect the debate tonight, and, more importantly, the Branchflower Report on Troopergate will sink McCain even in those states he's still holding on to. I repeat my prediction that, by the time of the election, McCain will win no more than 138 EVs, if that.

The "Troopergate" report has -- according to Mudflats, quoting The Public Record -- a few surprises. (I don't know the site, "The Public Record" so if anyone does and knows if they are reliable, please let me know.)

The most significant is that the woman who both heads the Workmen's Compensation Board in Alaska and also holds a $12 million dollar contract from the state (which she attempted to get renewed even though she was not the lowest bidder)has 'flipped like a pancake' and after having first denied it, now admits that
she was told by Palin that if Wooten -- the brother-in-law -- did not get his comp cancelled, she could kiss the contract good bye.

Shortly after this, and after Todd was stalking Wooten with a camera, trying to prove the bad back he got (from lifting a dead body from a wrecked automobile) was phony, the comp was canceled and he had to sue to get it back.

The whole story is at the excellent Alaskan blog, Mudflats:
http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/troopergate-witness-flips-like-a-pancake/

Funny thing, how Obama's solid lead in all the polls will mysteriously evaporate on election day:

Study Finds States Purging Millions of Voters in Secret, Often Erroneously

Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law released one of the first systematic examinations of voter purging, a practice-often controversial-of removing voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls-click here for report. After a detailed study of the purge practices of 12 states, Voter Purges reveals that election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Upon the release of Voter Purges, today the Brennan Center and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law began filing public records requests with election officials in 12 states in order to expose the purges that happened this year.

"Purges can be an important way to ensure that voter rolls are dependable, accurate and up-to-date," said Myrna Pérez, counsel at the Brennan Center and the author of the report. "Far too frequently, however, eligible, registered citizens show up to vote and discover their names have been removed from the voter lists because election officials are maintaining their voter rolls with little accountability and wildly varying standards," Myrna Pérez stated.

According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, between 2004 and 2006, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls. While the secret and inconsistent manner in which purges are conducted make it difficult to know exactly how many voters have been stricken from voting lists erroneously, Voter Purges finds four problematic practices with voter purges that continue to threaten voters in 2008: purges rely on error-ridden lists; voters are purged secretly and without notice; bad "matching" criteria mean that thousands of eligible voters will be caught up in purges; and insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to erroneous or manipulated purges. The report reveals that purge practices vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that there is a lack of consistent protections for voters, and that there are often opportunities for mischief and mistakes in the purge process.

More at the link.

And this is only one of the methods the Republicans will exploit to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters -- along with disinformation campaigns to discourage people from voting, voter "challenges", broken down voting machines, insufficient numbers of voting machines, and other strategies to ensure that the expected large numbers of Democratic voters either don't go to the polls, or give up and go home in the face of hours-long waiting lines.

And then there will be the hacking and manipulation of electronic voting results.

This stuff is going to be a HUGE factor in the election and could hand the White House to Palin and McCain. And it is receiving hardly any coverage in the corporate media and little attention from "sensible liberal" bloggers.

Conservative Deflator: it may have been Rachel Maddow. When I walked into the room last night while her show was on she was making a comment about one campaign playing chess while the other was playinig checkers. I didn't catch the beginning of the comment, so I'm not sure, but it sounds like a Rachel analysis to me. I'm so glad MSNBC was smart enough to add her to the lineup!

To borrow from the ONION -- Republican Party buys billboard space in America's Inner Cities; Remember to Vote November 5th.

Florida "GOP Party" members meet secretly in Florida to discuss contingency planning.

Agenda

Begin recruiting a suitable patsy.

Assign someone to acquire a rifle.

Re The Bradley Effect. I worry about this also. However, in conversations with co-workers Im finding that a number of them are not supporting Obama by citing reasons along the lines of "elitist" or "dont trust him" or the long-discredited "maybe he is Muslim." They say "Its not because he is black, its because " For this reason I hypothesize that the Bradley effect is already present in the polls. The Republican attack ads of the summer may have had the effect of projecting racially-based voter preference into a more acceptable kind, one that a person is willing to cite in a response to a pollster.

We wont know if my hypothesis is true until Nov 4th.

HRC fed the "he's a Muslim" rap as much as anyone. & if Obie loses, in part as a result of that smear, but then HRC runs in '12 & gets the nom, it will be positively Nixon '68.

I'm no dedicated poll-watcher, but doesn't a nine point difference in Texas seem low. I would expect W's home state to be at least in the low double digits for the GOP. Is there any chance that a major campaign surge there could reduce TX to at least an embarrassingly thin margin?

The McCain campaign is running tv ads in Indiana, a state that has been solidly Republican for decades and has been ignored by campaigns for almost as long. He's playing defense in traditional Replublican stongholds.

Palin is now being used to shore up the base of the party (something McCain still has to work on in OCTOBER?!?!).

The trends are going our way. Obama and Biden are upping both the quantity and force of their attacks on McCain/Palin. Over the last couple of months I have grown to appreciate the long term strategic thinking of the Obama campaign team. They've stuck to their primary messages, they've put resources in states normally deemed 'uncompetive' (the 50 state strategy) that is now forcing McCain to expend money where he thought he was safe, they outreached to evangeligals dividing some of the Republican base forcing McCain to move right to shore up a key constituency and they've worked the long term media meme on McCain from 'POW' to "good man gone bad'.

As others have said, its far too soon to get complacent. Much can happen in month remaining. But the trends look good and I'm gaining confidence in team Obama's abilities.

Pour it on.

Rasputin and DeLayLand combined, and the best they can offer McEvil and his hench-whatever is a measly nine points? This is like one of those all-star cast disaster movies brought to life---but all the actors are half-decomposed corpses so as to match the incredibly-smelly script....

"I'm no dedicated poll-watcher, but doesn't a nine point difference in Texas seem low. I would expect W's home state to be at least in the low double digits for the GOP. Is there any chance that a major campaign surge there could reduce TX to at least an embarrassingly thin margin?" --Posted by: dcwp

Actually, I think there is an outside chance at a "November surprise" in Texas. Demographics are shifting in the state. Many of the urban areas will go for Obama, but surprisingly, many rural areas with strong Latino populations are moving toward Obama as well.

I'm not holding my breath, but nor am I writing Texas off.

Great link in 2nd comment.

Snippet:
\In particular, Johnston documented the fear-mongering taking place among TV journalists that has plainly put the public into the state of submissive panic that Pearlstein wants them to be in, whereby -- exactly as was true for Iraq, eavesdropping, the Patriot Act and a whole host of other measures -- they come to be convinced that they better unquestioningly and immediately submit to the dictates of the political and media establishment, they better relinquish any belief that they should question what they're being told, lest they suffer imminent, inevitable, catastrophic doom.

Damn straight. I went along with Iraq (with great trepidation) because NO ONE questioned the mushroom cloud thing. I expected the press to give both sides. Once again, the press is trumpeting a Bush plan and I'm just not that obliging this time.

Feingold and Dorgan op[posed the Senate plan. Why is the left so ready to woo conservatives with tax cuts to get this plan passed?

We still suffer the poisoning of our party brought on by the arrival of the DLC in 1992. There are worms in our apple, friends and we'll need to clean house piece by corrupted piece.

Oh, I admire the Obama campaign's strategy, from declaration in Feb '07, forward, but I don't trust that there are too few bitters, like the ones I worked with for one summer (between jr & sr year of college) in The Stal, to not matter. One of my colleagues from there would be openly hostile to Malia & Sasha Obama attempting to make use of the Greenfield Park Pool ("don't they have their own?" (direct quote, from '01, about taking his kids to the county park pool in our shared hometown)), so I doubt he'd cotton to a black man in the White House.

People here are, I think, misusing the term Bradley effect. If people don't support Obama - and say so - that isn't the same as having them say they support Obama and then voting for McCain. The latter would be the Bradley effect. There is certainly a racist vote, but there is no evidence that it isn't already factored into the polls. Obama may do more poorly than the norm with undecided voters - but he may also gain from higher than usual turnout among young people and minority voters too.

The conspiracy theories are missing some important points. For instance, in Ohio the Governor and Secretary of State are Democrats, and voting machines have a paper trail. There is an enormous voter registration effort in swing states - which will be a strong counter to periodic purges of the voter rolls.

This isn't 2004, and we should pay attention to the ways in which the hard work from the last 4 years has paid off. (There are still states like Georgia where the situation is a lot worse, agreed.)

Ohio is +8 for Obama. Another nail in the coffin, St John. Tell us how you don't read the polls. We all love that line from those getting crushed.

Marc -- Voter intimidation starts at the (rogue) policial level, squad-cars pulled up in front of polling-stations, & police-unions (one of the few syndical movements GOP can support) are not keen on Dems, blacks, foreigners, or wimps. So, yes, I think the intimidation will still happen, even in Ohio.

To SecularAnimist

I too have been concerned about republican voter manipulation.... especially with their known ties to Diebold Corp. However, that game can really only be played in a close election. If trends continue this strongly in Obama's favor, vote manipulation would be a risky proposition for republicans.

Yeah Marc, no matter what, the fix is always in, never forget it. Never mind that Obama has already successfully fought a Michigan GOP plan to disenfranchise voters who lived in foreclosed housing. And that he already has election lawyers in Florida. And never mind that Diebold wasn't a factor in the 2006 elections — to the point where the Democrats romped in Ken Blackwell's Ohio — even though there was a similar level of hysteria about them, voter roll purges and Rove's sinister talk about the "Math".

Never let facts or a committed campaign organization that fights voter disenfranchisement get in the way of an all-controlling conspiracy that reinforces helplessness.

Just a quick comment about the "statistically significant" line re: CBS poll. As Kevin Drum pointed out on this very site before he left for the Mothership, a lead in a poll is still a lead even if the difference equals the "margin of error." 45 v. 42 with a 3-point margin of error is not "a statistical tie." It would mean a probability of winning of 84%.

Here's Kevin's post. So a 9 point lead means a nearly 100% chance of the lead in the polling not being an artifact of randomness in the sampling. But that doesn't mean an 8 point of 7 point lead is a dead heat.

it may have been Rachel Maddow. When I walked into the room last night while her show was on she was making a comment about one campaign playing chess while the other was playinig checkers.

MCCAIN: Aha! Now I have a king!

OBAMA: Checkmate.

Please go back to your regular "Round Up". The poll figures belong elsewhere.

Marc -- Voter intimidation starts at the (rogue) policial level, squad-cars pulled up in front of polling-stations, & police-unions (one of the few syndical movements GOP can support) are not keen on Dems, blacks, foreigners, or wimps. So, yes, I think the intimidation will still happen, even in Ohio. Posted by: Idi Amin's Last Meal

Yeah Marc, no matter what, the fix is always in, never forget it. Never mind that Obama has already successfully fought a Michigan GOP plan to disenfranchise voters who lived in foreclosed housing. And that he already has election lawyers in Florida. And never mind that Diebold wasn't a factor in the 2006 elections — to the point where the Democrats romped in Ken Blackwell's Ohio — even though there was a similar level of hysteria about them, voter roll purges and Rove's sinister talk about the "Math". Posted by: Jay B.

I think all these things have happened and will happen again. However, with the way things are "trending" the GOP is going to have to do things at polling places so extreme that riots will ensue.

A good Democratic strategy is to bring this up a few times the week before the election, just to keep in the back of people's minds.

Latest reports are that McCain is pulling out of Michigan...

Tangential, but very important business re the Bailout: Let's take Greenwald seriously. He and other bright people have misgivings about the Bailout and think "something" should be done but not even the revised plan:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/01/pearlstein/index.html

Jay B, @13:48

I hope you're right. But... I'll be working at the polls on Nov 4th for the Electoral Board here in my little town in VA and began to get the notices about training and such. We're going to have printed, voter confirmation tickets for the voting machines. Hurrah!

We're also going to have electronic poll books.

WTF? I asked the registrar (a Dem, so I didn't have to tiptoe around it) and she says nothing will be "hack-able", because there's no connection to the internet. Give me a break!

I could see two potential dangers right off the cuff.

One: who writes the software? It shouldn't be too difficult to omit loads of people from our black neighbourhood. If you're not in the pollbook, you have to cast a provisional vote, which means a person sitting with you and guiding you through the paperwork. With the expected pandemonium at the polls, due to larger than usual attendance, if we have lots of provisionals, it'll take *forever*.

And, two: The "city" (there's only one precinct) tends to vote Dem, at about 55%rate (it's the county that kills us). How difficult would it be to mess us up by simply messing with electricity supply? Voila! No poll books. How are we going to vote? Everyone votes provisional? True, we're voting at the fire station which -- I assume -- has a generator, but, still...

The Bradley effect... It may not actually *happen* to any great degree but, it would surely come in handy as an "explanation" for the big discrepancy between pre-election polls and "results".

One more reason to keep knocking on those doors and keeping those phone lines busy (me, I feed those folks; not good at talking directly) and sending money when you can, for the armies of lawyers and observers and the ad-flood...

I'm so excited to see Obama ahead in the polls in North Carolina! I'm so tired of living in a Red State - maybe people are coming to their senses. I told my fiance that I do my own "polling". I count the number of bumper stickers in my eight-story parking garage each day. Today I've seen 9 for Obama and ZERO for McTesty. It's not scientific by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes me feel better.

Great news, as some less elitist individuals I know would say: "Suck it down , Biatch!"

Obamam/Biden '08!

And in Michigan it is reported McCain has pulled his advertising, is closing his campaign offices and is sending staff elsewhere.

One down, 49 to go!