WTF?

Is Drudge smoking crack?  Again?  Repeatedly?  Has he added meth to the mix?

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com  has Zogby’s 10/29 poll at +7 for Obama.  Note that Nate doesn’t rate Zogby very highly in his tracker, either.

Talk about looking for what you want to see!  Not that it matters given, you know, the electoral college and all of that.

I believe that McCain will ‘win’ the election. Not at all honestly and it will probably make Bush’s ‘win’ in 2000 look like a fair fight. (Where are the UN monitors when you need them. Klatu too. Sign up for CREDO SMS updates for your area and be prepared to fight)

There is too much invested to let the people potentially not elect the retard and the fruit cake to continue the destruction and conversion of America into the perfect answer to the Muslim extremist nations that gave us Bin Ladin and the Taliban/Al Qaida…

They go bat shit crazy and there are enough people here that call that and up it too…

And I thought Mutually Assured Destruction kept then, and us, from destroying the world. What if BOTH parties welcome the solace of suicide and the promise of riches and virgins on ‘the other side’.

Could we all be boned? Stay tuned…

One thing that makes me grin is that IF Obama is elected, will we get ‘christian’ suicide bombers here? I can’t wait! They, being of such stout heart. I don’t think they have the heart for it… I think they are cowards primarily at heart…

http://www.zogby.com/news/ reports that obama is just over 50%, McCain about 7 points behind, and consistent values for the last week INCLUDING Friday.

Was he looking at Indiana?

Hey pinky:
I have been wondering the same thing a lot of Christians are every bit as deranged as their mislim counterparts, what are they going to do?  Domestic terrorism in the form of christianist insurgents may become a real problem especially when you consider the way the christianists have taken over the milatary.

It’s worse than that if you ask Kos.  The early voting totals are suggesting an absolute blowout.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/31/194922/61/404/648444

It’s a Democrat’s wet dream.

...I can only assume that Joe the Plumber must has slipped this bit of information to Drudge.  What with his being politically inexperienced and all, I would expect that he doesn’t understand the sort of strong, resolute message discipline that more seasoned McCain campaign experts like Rick Davis demonstrate when they say, while dressed up in their “Spy vs. Spy” costumes in honor of Halloween, that they have mysterious, unverifiable poll numbers showing the race is tightening up.  Joe hasn’t figured out that whole ‘plausible deniability’ thing yet…

He probably heard despondently drunken talk about how “the polling isn’t where it’s oughta be” and just misunderstood what was being said…

I’ve loved fivethirtyeight as a sort of anti-Drudge tonic, especially where Nate has specifically called out the fedora-ed dimwit for his cherrypicking and general GOP toolishness.

You DEMONcrats are going to loose no matter what we patriots have to do to make it happen.  You seem to forget that we control the NSA, CIA, Justice Department, Pentagon, Military Intelligence, non-Military Intelligence, FBI and Blackwater.  We can make whatever we want to happen just by pushing a button, so all of your “Hope” has been for knot, stupid LIEbrals.

You’d better remove those Obama signs from your lawns before you get rounded up for the re-education camps that (chuckle) will force you to sing Christian hims while you break rocks all day long.

“Rugged” is a generally low-quality parody troll from Sadly, No. The incarnation showing up here is a good deal lower-quality than the one who dances over at SN…

Dick Morris on O’Really was a special holliday spooky treat - Magical Thinking in abundance not previously known since we were told that Iraq would be a cakewalk and we would be greeted as liberators!

Somebody should tell these clowns and their “I think therefore it happens” attitude: Reality is a bedbug and Karma is a female dog.

Scott, I’m enjoying the show.  I don’t mind at all.

If you guys want to keep imagining that this race isn’t tightening, more power to you.  But ask yourself a question:  Why was Obama campaigning in Iowa today if he’s really up by double-digits as the polls would suggest?  My guess is that his internal polls are showing something quite different.

As for the Zogby polling, this is a one-day number (not his usual three-day rolling average) and won’t be released officially until tomorrow.  Drudge obviously received a tip from someone at Zogby and put it up on his site.  If it were an official story, there would be have been a link.

Whether or not McCain wins on Tuesday is anyone’s guess, but it’s going to be a helluva lot closer than you or Daily Kos imagines.

Whether or not McCain wins on Tuesday is anyone’s guess, but it’s going to be a helluva lot closer than you or Daily Kos imagines.

How does John know this? John has waved his magic tool over the toilet bowl and it has spoken in the voice of Joe the Plumber.

Other than that, John, I don’t think that your targeted wishful thinking approach without evidence can outdo Nate at Fivethirtyeight, or that you can even begin to understand the statistical underpinnings of his data aggregation and smoothing methods.

You’d better remove those Obama signs from your lawns before you get rounded up for the re-education camps that (chuckle) will force you to sing Christian hims while you break rocks all day long.

Christian hims???? Is spelling it hymns too “elitist” for you right-wingers???? From my vantagepoint, you’re more in need of a “re-education” than the rest of the commentariat…..

They’re not going to have McCain up one, one day’s worth of polling out of a 3-day rolling sample has him up one for that day.  I think Rasmussen must have had McCain up a bit in a day’s polling a day or 2 ago, because Rasmussen had a one-day move from having Obama up 7 to having him up 5 before it moved back the other way.  The difference is, Rasmussen didn’t release a bit of partial and misleading data so Drudge could wave it around.

Nate has commentary about it, and he points to his discussion of tracking polls.  Zogby weights his party ID according to the exit polls for the last election.  That means his party ID is weighted to track 2004.

Personally, I’m thrilled that Zogby is showing McCain ahead.  Zogby is the idiot who declared last time that John Kerry would win, so I’m assuming he has about the same level of accuracy this year.

I’d also imagine he wanted to put in another campaign stop that still let him go trick-or-treating with his daughters.  Iowa and Indiana are the closest stops and, lo and behold, where he went today.

And indeed, at the Indiana stop, he specifically mentioned that he’d just gotten done trick-or-treating.

The McCain camp put out a memo today suggesting the fact that Obama was campaigning in Arizona was good news for John McCain.

It is to laugh.

Christian hims???? Is spelling it hymns too “elitist” for you right-wingers????

I’ve been singing hims at the Reformed Arayan Church of Butte since I was just a little guppie.  We believe strongly in the patriarchy of G*d, not some prissy lady G*D that you pagans think we should worshipp.  You’d probably like us to sing “hers” instead of hims cause your feminists.  We’ll, my G*d is bigger than yours, so I win and I’ll stick to singing HIMS, thanks all the same, Mr. Athiest!!

It’s a good thing you LIEbrals are gonna loose, look what you’d try to turn The Heartland into.

Ms Kate, I am totally loving your line

“Reality is a bedbug and Karma is a female dog”

Google shows no prior use, so I’m assuming you’re the originator?

Count me among those who think Rugged’s work on this site is fine.  S/he’s a little obvious about the parody, but there’s a need for that.

I rather like Rugged. I recently quit my favorite forum because the misogyny and general douchebaggery became too much for me to handle, but one of the really interesting things about it was that there were a lot of people exploring trolling as performance art. They took it to really extreme levels that were mostly too obnoxious to appreciate, but Rugged makes me giggle. “Demoncrats” is pretty funny; I liked it even more when it was misspelled as “demoncraps.”

Actually, what makes it even funnier is that tommorow’s release from Zogby ISN’T going to indicate that McCain has a 1 point lead, it’s going to show Obama ahead by 5 points.  The data that Sludge is citing is for one day of polling in a three day rolling average tracking poll.

That’s right - the 1 point lead accounts for just 1/3 of the data of a 3 day poll.

It would sort of be like if I was playing a baseball game in which I gave up 4 unaswered runs in the first 3 innings, 5 unanswered runs in the next three, but in the final three I managed to score 1 unanswered run in the last three innings and then claimed victory for the whole game based on the only decent three innings I had in the whole game.

Though I’m sure the wingnuts are havinjg a collective orgasm over this - which only points to the fact that they haven’t the first clue about how tracking polls work.

Oh well… only 3 days until they get to cry and say “What happened?!?” to each other.

Besides all of this, John Zogby has proven to be one of the most erratic and unreliable pollsters this entire election cycle.  And he’s a Republican.  Go figure.

“so all of your “Hope” has been for knot”

Psh.  It’s “naught”, you bone-head.

“Has been for knot” was first used in 1407 in McCallum’s folio,“Poems of Wilde Irelande”. The original “knot” was a hangman’s noose, meaning that someone’s actions had led to a bad end.  Though the usage is archaic, it is the original, so forgive my literary flight of fancy.  Bone head.

I’m all in favor of shaking the dems out of complacency without actually giving up any lead.

This story roxors. While you’re at it can we get a story to make Dems in California think they need to vote while keeping the conservatives at home so prop 8 can fail?

So, John, I suppose when your favorite sports team is up in the last inning/quarter/period, you figure they should just sock it in, walk off the field and just ride on those points to a win?  Really?  I’m surprised you Repugs are such bad strategerizers. 

Obama said he was going to run this campaign as though he were not winning, because he doesn’t want to become complacent.

Some of the polls now are skewed on purpose. My mother lives in Central Florida, and on Thursday she had a pollster hang up on her once she said that she had already voted for Obama. They’re absolutely cherry-picking their participants.

Drudge says Dewey Beats Truman.

*pats Rugged on its pointy little head*

My mother lives in Central Florida, and on Thursday she had a pollster hang up on her once she said that she had already voted for Obama.

Well, if you were specifically trying to capture the opinion of people who hadn’t already voted, it makes sense that you would end the call with someone who has already voted.

@ John: Obama stopping in battleground states where he appears to have a healthy lead is part of a larger strategy he’s been pursuing in this campaign and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with some secret internal poll showing he’s in trouble. There’s good reason to keep up campaigning in places like Iowa and Pennsylvania now, even if he’s ahead: 1. to maintain the lead he does have and counter McCain/Palin’s heavy investment in media buys and appearances there; 2. encourage voter turnout, especially among youth and minority groups who have a hard time getting to the polls despite enthusiasm for a candidate; 3. bolster fundraising and volunteer efforts; 4. help downticket Democratic candidates. In a lot of these places, the crowd is usually warmed up by a state or Congressional Democrat running for office and who makes a joint appearance with Obama.

I don’t doubt the final result will be a bit tighter than we see in the polls this weekend, but not by a whole lot (50-45?).

If the last-minute “they’re catching up” nonsense prevents complaisance among Obama supporters and gets the vote out, I can’t say it bothers me.

But ask yourself a question:  Why was Obama campaigning in Iowa today if he’s really up by double-digits as the polls would suggest?

Well riddle me this, then—why is McCain actually having to campaign in Arizona at this point if he really thinks he has any chance of not entirely getting his ass kicked?  Why are very traditionally red states like Georgia, the Dakotas, and Montana showing McCain just a point or two ahead, at most?

Zogby is a joke of a pollster. He gets his numbers from rolling 12-sided dice, it seems.

On the polling forum I visit (full of math geeks) it’s called Zogby LOL.

The only surprise election night to a lot of people will be Georgia.

Why was Obama campaigning in Iowa today

Others have mentioned sensible reasons, and I’d add one more:  Iowa is where the whole journey began, and that was a large part of his remarks there (or at least the clips I saw).

What margin of victory by Obama will send the MSM into the “mandate” storyline. I imagine if he wins by a popular vote of 60% to 40% and more than 100 EC votes, then we’ll see stories of blowout and landslide. I’ll bet if its 51% to 49% and 5 EC votes, they’ll still write about sweeping change, mandate for his agenda. How close would it have to be for the MSM not to describe it as an overwhelming obliterating defeat for the bad guys?

I imagine if he wins by a popular vote of 60% to 40% and more than 100 EC votes, then we’ll see stories of blowout and landslide.

I’ve heard that a victory is only “officially” a landslide if the winner gets more than 400 electoral votes; I imagine this factoid will be much bandied about if Obama wins by more than just a handful of votes.  The MSM will try their absolute hardest to avoid creating the Mandate For The Obama Administration meme.  Even if it means creating ridiculous standards that “prove” that he didn’t really do all that well, when you put it in perspective.  His margin of victory will probably also be compared unfavorably to elections popularly considered landslides, like Reagan Clinton re-elections.  Despite the fact that Obama is not an incumbent.

Sort of the same thing that the media has been doing for the last year or so where they pretend that we’re not really in an economic downturn because in order for it to be a “real” recession we have to experience three consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage.  Forgetting the fact that, if you actually look around, yes we are obviously already in a recession, textbook indicators or not.

TO—

I think if he gets over 350 EVs they will have to go into “mandate” narrative.

I see him getting 375 and beating McCain by as much as Bush Sr. beat Dukakis by in the PV.

I think if he goes over 350 they’ll have a hell of a hard time convincing the public that Obama does not have a mandate.  But I don’t think they won’t try, or that they won’t at least persistently ignore that as a potential story.  A lot of how the media is conservative has to do with what they consider worth reporting—silence on this particular matter is almost as good as outright denial. 

If he really does get 375, though, I think they’ll have a much harder time of it and will probably have to crack at some point and admit that he did better than expected. 

They will still happily trot out Reagan’s 1980 number (489) or George HW’s 1988 number (426).  Keep in mind that Clinton “only” won with 370 in ‘92, and I can tell you that in the red state south at least, he was NOT seen as having a mandate or even being legitimate.  Enough that I was shocked to see that he’d won by what wikipedia considers a “landslide” percentage of the electoral vote (I was 11 in ‘92 and not clued in enough to make note of how many ec votes he won at the time).  I was convinced throughout his presidency that he’d just barely squeaked into office and would probably be drummed out for the least little reason.  I was also surprised when he was reelected and really expected the impeachment stuff to force him out of office.  The dominating narrative outside liberal enclaves can be pretty powerful, no matter how totally wrong it is.

TO, there are other things besides the raw number though.

If Obama wins GA, ND, MT, and AZ, they really can’t deny it’s a mandate. I thinnk he will win at least one and possibly two of those four.

There was even a poll of LA (!) recently that showed McCain up by three (!!). Margin of Error.

Oh, I agree with you about the numbers.

I just think that, yep, the media very well CAN try to minimize the strength of Obama’s victory, and if they possibly can, they will.  They may not be particularly successful at doing so, and I don’t think they’ll lie outright.  But I’ve seen enough political media in the last 12 years to know that they will do anything they can to make it seem like nobody’s particularly thrilled to be ushering in a Democratic administration.

I also wonder what the media will do with the “historic first” meme, and how much they will allow the fact that Obama will be the first Black president to drip over into the notion that he didn’t win by a noteworthy margin.  For instance trying to pretend that the reason he did as well as he did was because people were excited about the possibility of being “part of history”, or even just that Obama did so well because he mobilized the African-American/“minority” vote (which of course will be presented as a natural and innately unfair advantage, NOT as an accomplishment of his awesome grassroots team getting out the vote despite overwhelming odds).  These ideas are already bouncing around the MSM, so it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that they could gel into the dominant narrative.

Future generations of kids will refer to a certain sexual activity as “taking the Zogby poll at face value”.

Hmm, well another thing is media laziness. Since Obama has been in the lead for about three weeks now, they probably already have the “mandate” story written.

They tried to keep it like 2000 and 2004 for so much of the year for the same reason—that story h ad already been written twice. “It all comes down to X” etc, it was so easy to write. They clinged to it until reality said they couldn’t anymore.

Okay, I guess it’s Random Thought Saturday for me, but this hasn’t come up for a while:  where do the kids of the President go trick-or-treating?  Do they take them out to the suburbs?  Do they go door-to-door in the West Wing?  Do they just have a party for all of their friends?

Inquiring minds want to know. 

Mnemosyne -

Maybe they take them to ritzy Capitol Hill or Georgetown neighborhoods. That’s what I’d do.

Good news!  My special one-hour tracking poll shows Obama up 84 to 16.  It’s roughly as accurate as Zogby’s one-day numbers, which makes it extra extra newsworthy!

I was wondering last night what Sasha and Malia were dressing as, and what their Halloween is looking like this year.  The message from the Obama campaign is that they are trying to keep the girls’ lives as normal as possible for as long as possible, so I hope they got to do whatever they usually do.  I wonder what they’ll do next year?

(Oh, and I would guess that the President’s kids go out somewhere else and trick or treat with other kids they know in a trick or treating friendly place—I mean, that’s what people here do if they have kids but live in dreary neighborhoods full of apartment buildings that aren’t conducive to trick or treating.)

BTW, the Gallup Tracking polls today:

Registered: Obama +11
Likely Expanded: Obama +10
Likely Traditional: Obama + 10

On this day in 2004, Bush and Kerry were tied at 49-49.

WOOOOOOOOOSH!

Thats the sound of the wind going out of Matt Drudge’s sails.

TO—

One of the good things about this campaign is that nobody has tried to go after Sasha or Malia like they went after Chelsea in 1992 or Amy Carter in the late 70s.

The question about MSM bias intrigues me. For example, I live on the West Coast, and daily before work, I read: LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post Intelligencer, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, New York Times, and Washington Post. I scan the news, and pretty much read all of the OP-ED articles.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how one could come to the conclusion that the above mentioned papers are somehow “right biased”. The OP-ED pages appear to me to slant well to the left, and even the selection of news articles takes a left slant. What criteria do various reports use to come to the conclusion that MSM is biased to the right?

The only thing the MSM is biased towards is laziness and profit margins.

The OP-ED pages appear to me to slant well to the left, and even the selection of news articles takes a left slant. What criteria do various reports use to come to the conclusion that MSM is biased to the right?

Bill Kristol, David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg are leftists?  You must live in a scary, scary world.

LA Times: Jonah Goldberg vs Rosa Brooks, Patt Morrison, Gregory Rodriguez, Joel Stein, Tim Rutten, and
Meghan Daum.

Somehow 1 vs 6 leans right? Want to count the other papers? Does the existence of one “non-left” voice mean the paper is biased right?

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how one could come to the conclusion that the above mentioned papers are somehow “right biased”. The OP-ED pages appear to me to slant well to the left, and even the selection of news articles takes a left slant. What criteria do various reports use to come to the conclusion that MSM is biased to the right?

1.  I’m not sure what century you live in, but nowadays most people are not limited to newspapers for their news media needs. 

2.  I can’t speak to all of the papers you mention (unlike you, I work long hours and thus don’t have time to read every Op-Ed at every prominent newspaper in the US every day), but in terms of the paper I read the most often, the New York Times, I would definitely not say that their Op-Ed team leans left at all.  At best they are moderates (or perhaps it’s that the ur-Right contributors cancel out the center-Left contributors—I have literally never seen an openly Leftist op-ed in the Times).  The reporting wing has the reputation of being more liberal, but even then I’d peg them as moderates with a slightly liberal slant that they correct for heavily so as not to be seen as biased. 

3.  Newspapers in general skew a little bit left of media like cable news, so looking mainly at newspapers to gauge the political orientation of the media seems a bit disingenuous.

4.  Per my #2 above, I would guess that people have individual metrics for whether something is “liberal” or “conservative” based mainly on what beliefs they hold and where they would put themselves on the left/right spectrum, and also aided by where they would put their surrounding community and others.  When I lived in Louisiana, I considered myself a raging liberal.  Then I moved to New York and discovered that a lot of my political stances were considered downright right-wing.  Gradually since moving here I have tilted to the left, and now that I consider my own views generally Leftist I have to say that very few media outlets seem “liberal” to me.  I would peg pretty much the entire American media as generally center-right, and the only “liberal” sources I could name would be publications like The Nation, Mother Jones, Utne Reader, and the like (with possible assists from Rachel Maddow and occasionally Keith Olberman, though I’d put them more centrist than the former publications).  I’ve laughed seeing French commentators opine about our election: they see Obama as hopelessly conservative, and McCain as a raving Rightist wackjob (I can only imagine what they think of Palin).

TO:

Thank you for the last post. I found it honest, and in general agree with your assessment.
The last time I looked at the calendar, it said Saturday, Nov 1, 1968, so I guess I live in the 20th century, per your question #1.

I work a minimum wage job as a reservation agent at a little airport, whose owner is nice enough to let me come in early to use to computer to indulge in my reading habit. I usually don’t comment on how hard other people appear to work without some knowledge of the facts, unless I’m trying to be snarky.

I usually don’t comment on how hard other people appear to work without some knowledge of the facts, unless I’m trying to be snarky.

Considering the fact that if I “came in a little early” to read 8 newspapers every morning, that would probably mean leaving the house around 3am (after getting home no earlier than 7:30 pm), I feel that that dig was perfectly apt.

How much one makes has nothing to do with it, though if you are telling the truth (you work few enough hours that you have time to read 8 newspapers every day, and you work those hours at minimum wage), you are probably on the verge of starvation.  Or lying.  Which is probably the most elegant solution here.

Ha, the First Kids trick-or-treating—I was imagining that last night.

Suddenly a company—in the Army sense—of Secret Service agents descend on your block and seal it off….etc….

I hope Michelle simply throws them nice Halloween parties for the next eight years.  Easier on everyone.

>Joel Stein
lol

whatever.

I was wondering last night what Sasha and Malia were dressing as…

Trotsky and Zinoviev, I’m told.

I just think that, yep, the media very well CAN try to minimize the strength of Obama’s victory, and if they possibly can, they will.  They may not be particularly successful at doing so, and I don’t think they’ll lie outright.  But I’ve seen enough political media in the last 12 years to know that they will do anything they can to make it seem like nobody’s particularly thrilled to be ushering in a Democratic administration.

Bingo.  Watch them beat the “need for bipartisanship!” drums so loudly as to drum out everything else.  (“Ah!  Here they are, right where we put them into storage in 2001!”) 

Compare, too, what they had to say in 1994 and the Gringrich election with any results this year.  In ‘94 it was all talk all the time about sweeping changes, mandates, the public going hard to the right, (etc.).  I’d bet now that even if the Dem achievement Tuesday is bigger than the GOP in 1994 we won’t hear much of anything about mandates for progressive policies, or the country swinging to the left.  If we do it will be hedged as an aberration, and that horse will be run in tandem harness with “bipartisan” themes.  The shorter message will (both implicitly and explicitly) be no matter what the vote you must adopt to what the Right and the GOP wants.

HAHAHA!!!

Zogby’s data for Saturday: Obama 52, McCain 42 (Obama +10)

So much for that one point lead, which wasn’t really a one point lead, since it constituted 1/3 of a three day rolling average poll, just as the data from yesterday indicating a ten point Obama lead only constitutes 1/3 of the three day poll.

John Zogby is such a tool… he took some pretty blatant potshots at Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com in his comments about today’s results:

Remember, as I said yesterday, one day does not make a trend. This is a three-day rolling average and no changes have been tectonic. A special note to blogger friends: calm it down. Lay off the cable television noise and look at your baseball cards in your spare time. It is better for your (and everyone else’s) health.

You know he’s talking about Nate, who is a huge baseball statistician and afficianado (he began his career as a stat analyst for Baseball Prospectus), and who dared to call out the silliness of Zogby’s data on MSNBC yesterday talking to David Schuster.

Opopo, I feel you - when I was a kid I lived in TX (same as now), and my parents were Republican (they’ve both changed, too, with mom getting more apolitical and Daddy swinging violently left of his old positions).  I was eight in ‘92 and twelve in ‘96, and I had no idea that Clinton was popular; I thought everyone hated him and he got in by magic or something.  You’re limited to your immediate community unless you both have access to the rest of the world and the desire to check it.