November surprise

You people need to take a Zoloft or something. Obama will win, and win big. His grandmother has made the final, ultimate sacrifice for her little Bear. All of those stupid undecided voters conditioned by a lifetime of Hallmark cards and afterschool specials will be wiping away tears as they vote for the big O.

Is anybody else really freakin' nervous?

I am. Really freakin' nervous

I am reading all of these premature "How Obama Won" pieces around the blogs, and it's not making me feel better. Nate Silver is more realistic, and actually quite sobering. This election might be really, really close.

Today's number

According to the ACLU, there are 5.3 million American citizens who are ineligible to vote because they have been convicted of a felony. Of these, approximately four million have served their time and been released.

I wasn't able to find a racial breakdown of that number, but in 2005, African Americans comprised about 40% of the prison population. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that about two million African Americans are ineligible to vote because they have been convicted of a felony.

In 2006, the total number of African Americans of voting age was about 25 million. Really easy math tells us that about 8% of potential African American voters are ineligible to vote because they have been convicted of a felony.

Using the same sources and methods, the comparable result for white Americans is 1.2%. Which means that the rate of ineligible voters is nearly seven times greater among African Americans than among whites.

Now, of course you can say that felons don't deserve our sympathy, and it's your own darn fault if you give up your right to vote, but that really misses the point. Unless you believe that African Americans are seven times as likely as white Americans to commit felonies, then you pretty much have to acknowledge that there is some sort of structural cause here.

At the end of the day, there's really only one question. Is it okay that one out of every eleven African Americans lacks the right to vote? If you're answer is that it is, and that it all comes down to personal responsibility, then you should keep voting for Republicans.

BREAKING: Most undecided voters are stupid

Confidential to Kevin: You live in Nebraska. Just vote for the fucking Republican already.

Really?

Let me see if I've got this straight. John McCain is a huckster, the caricature of Sarah Palin will do as well as the real thing for a national TV appearance the weekend before the election, and each and every one of the McCain campaign's arguments is a gimmick. Ok then.

Electoral saving time

This may come in handy later.

Khaladi

Yes, yes, it's awful that McCain has stooped to McCarthyistic race baiting. The real story here, though, is that the McCain campaign is still flailing wildly. The Joe-the-Plumber / Obama is a socialist / anti-tax message of the last two or three weeks has been the only time since the convention that the Republicans have managed to have a consistent message for more than three hours running. It wasn't the greatest message in the world, but it wasn't bad enough to be worth throwing away for the sake of the latest entry in the evil association of the week club.

I mean, honestly, this isn't rocket science. Every campaign needs a consistent message. Obama has been saying every chance he gets for two years that he represents a change from the failed policies of the Bush Administration. It was always a foregone conclusion that Obama would say that the Republican nominee, whoever it turned out to be, represented more of the same.

Against that, John McCain could have had a similarly simple message. He could have said that after eight years of bungling, America needs an experienced leader. He could then have said that Obama, because of his inexperience, could turn out to be another bungler in chief, just like Bush.

Obviously, that message went out the window once Palin joined the ticket. Arguably, that means that picking Palin represented a strategic error. The really inexcusable mistake, though, wasn't that McCain abandoned his message for the sake of a short term bounce. Rather, it's that the McCain campaign hasn't replaced his old message with anything new. I had thought that Joe the Plumber had helped McCain find his footing, but I guess not.

One minor error

100 % Silk Democrat Presidents Tie

To get your Democrat Presidents tie for your favorite Democrat, Republican, or just yourself, choose your color below. All major credit cards accepted.

Due to manufacturer error the tie features "Teddy Roosevelt" instead of Franklin Roosevelt. |Source|

Yglesias has more.

And also too, it is important to be doin your prognosticatin

There's no question that the preponderance of the polling evidence indicates that Obama is well positioned to cruise to a comfortable victory, and even stands a chance of blowing McCain out of the water.

Which isn't to say that there's no room to think that the race is much closer than it appears. A handful of polls have consistently shown McCain to be within striking distance. Most prominent among these is probably the tracking poll run by the Associated Press, but there are others. How does one decide which polls to trust?

Nate Silver's work at fivethirtyeight.com has shed important light on the question. Surveying the various polls, Silver has been able to demonstrate that the differences between them boil down to differences in their likely voter models. The short story is that polls lean Republican to the extent that they assume that the 2008 electorate will look like the 2004 electorate, and lean Democrat to the extent that they predict higher turnout among African Americans and new voters.

For prognosticatin purposes, what this means is that we've got to ask whether we believe that the Obama campaign is going to be able to get its voters to the polls. I'd say it's a pretty good bet. Speaking anecdotally, it's pretty clear that the voter registration and turnout effort on campus here in Ann Arbor is orders of magnitude beyond what we've seen in other years. You already knew Obama was going to win Michigan, but there are students everywhere. How many student votes will Obama pull out of the research triangle in North Carolina? I'd guess a lot.

What about the more traditional swing states? Here are a couple of data points worth noticing. In Ohio, African American's make up 12% of the population but made up only 10% of the electorate in 2004. In Florida, African Americans make up nearly 16% of the population but were only 12% of the 2004 electorate. Whatever else you believe about Obama's ground game, surely African Americans will vote in higher numbers than in 2004.

Which brings us to the official prognositcations. My optimistic prognostication puts Obama ahead with 371 electoral votes. My worst case gives Obama 278 electoral votes. Between them, I'd bet on wild optimism. What say you all?

How will Liz Lemon vote?

Way back in Spring of 2007, she confessed that:

"I'll probably tell all my friends I'm voting for Obama and then vote for McCain."

This was pretty funny, even though at the time the world was predicting that the race would be between Hillary and Giuliani.

Now, this has come back to haunt me.

Area man leaves work early, "on principle" man says

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents. | TPM |

I am sure that some of these people will suffer some degree of financial pain as a result. And so I don't want to diminish what they chose to do.

But amongst the writers on this blog, I know that several of us here have worked one (or many more) phone jobs, and I think they would agree with my personal experience: Most days on a telemarketing job, one is looking for any excuse to quit.

"spreading the wealth", etc.

It tells you something about both the Republican Party and the state of our political discourse that Democrats can be roundly accused of committing a gaffe any time they happen to use a turn of phrase which Republicans subsequently choose to manipulate into a dishonest talking point.

Obviously, a dishonest interlocutor can twist your words no matter what you say. The story here is that Republicans would rather confuse the debate by arguing with a straw man than address the issues that people actually care about.

That said, I've been playing around with sort of a grand unified theory of wingnut thinking, and according to my new theory it's not entirely appropriate to evaluate Republican speech using normal standards of rationality.

The key, I think, is to understand that wingnuts are absolutely committed to the idea that some people and some ideas are polluted, and so may not be associated with in any way. According to this line of thinking, the mere act of speaking to a pariah or of uttering a phrase linked to a politically incorrect ideology causes the speaker to become polluted. This pollution stains the speaker, and necessitates that the speaker must either submit to ritual cleansing or else become a pariah.

To see how this differs from the standard, content focused, interpretation of discourse, consider the way that wingnuts deploy their Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers attacks. Merely looking at the formal structure of the wingnut argument, it would appear to be fallacious, since the fact of association with an Ayers or a Wright tells you nothing about Obama's substantive views. Schematically, the conventional interpretation looks like this:

1 - Person A believes that P.
2 - Person B is associated with Person A
3 - Therefore, Person B believes that P.

And this can be seen to be fallacious because the falsity of 3 is entirely compatible with the truth of the conjunction of 1 and 2. On my revised view, the argument is more properly rendered like this:

1' - Person A is polluted.
2' - Person B is associated with Person A
3' - Anyone who associates with a polluted person is polluted in virtue of that association.
4' - Thus, Person B is polluted.

Which, clearly, is perfectly rational.

Now, you might object that it's batshit crazy to think that some people or ideas are polluted and may not be touched by right-thinking folk. Fair enough. But does it really surprise you to learn that the wingnuts are batshit crazy?

So richly deserved

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue." A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out. |CNN|

The story here is, once again, that Palin wasn't vetted. Had she been, McCain would have known that she has a history of stabbing political patrons in the back in order to advance her own career.

Meanwhile, I'd bet dollars to donuts that Palin perjured herself yesterday, and I note that this time around Thomas Van Flein didn't immediately make a copy of the sworn testimony available to the press (as he did with Todd a little while back).

GOP voter suppression efforts swing into high gear in New Mexico

The story starts last week, when several representatives of the New Mexico Republican party, including Rogers, held a press conference to announce that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June in Bernalillo county, which contains Albuquerque. The party released the names of ten of these people -- almost all of whom are Hispanic.

The allegations quickly fell apart. ACORN announced that it had contacted the county clerk's office, who had verified that all of the voters were in fact legitimate. The group now says it has independently contacted 8 of these 10 voters to separately verify their validity.
...
Guadalupe Bojorquez, who works in law enforcement in Albuquerque, told TPMmuckraker today that her mother, Dora Escobedo, was one of the ten voters whose names were released by the GOP.
...
Nonetheless, Bojorquez said that her mother yesterday received a visit from a man who asked for her personal information, including an ID, in reference to her eligibility to vote. Bojorquez told TPMmuckraker that according to her mother, at one point the man asked what she would do if immigration authorities contacted her.

After Bojorquez's mother, frightened, refused to let him in the door, the man waited outside her house. Eventually, Bojorquez's brother arrived at the house, emboldening Bojorquez's mother to go outside, call Bojorquez, and put her on the phone with the man.

Bojorquez said the man told her he wanted to make sure her mother knew that she shouldn't be voting, and continued to ask for her mother's personal information. |TPM Muckraker|

It's Maddow's America now, Mr. Greenspan

EFCA

I knew that I wrote this down somewhere on the internet. Here it is again, reprinted on me own blog:

Well, let's talk about "the institutional integrity & deep lineage of a secret ballot."

The NLRB, and the recognition process it administers, is a product of the Wagner Act of 1935. Prior to the passage of that act, workers got a union by striking or engaging in other direct actions. The Wagner Act represents a compromise meant to protect, on the one hand, the right of workers to organize themselves and form unions, and on the other, the interest of management in maintaining an orderly workplace.

Fast forward to today. The NLRB is bought and paid for by management. Corporations can flaunt the rules without fear of significant penalty, meaning that a worker who takes a stand for an unrecognized union places her job on the line. Polls consistently show that workers would choose union recognition by a 2:1 margin, and yet unions routinely lose elections run by the NLRB.

The reification of the secret ballot misidentifies the right that is at stake here. It is, quite simply, the right of association. For workers, protecting that right means protecting their right to organize and bargain collectively. In the United States today, that right is not protected.

EFCA will help. It isn't a betrayal of the Wagner Act because the Wagner Act isn't about the process of recognition. It's about insuring that forming and joining a union is a live option for every worker.

Everyone's working for the weekend