History.

Take a deep breath and let it sink in.

One more reason not to look for exit poll information, if you needed one.

Even if you find some numbers, they are likely to disagree with other numbers you find. So ignore them all!

Drudge and Huffington Post both say they show Obama up by 15 in Pennsylvania.

Gawker says they show Obama up by only 4 in PA.

Who the hell knows?! Wait for the actual results or at least numbers from a more official source like a TV network that is actually privy to the full set of numbers and knows how they were weighted, etc…

From the Dept. of Self-fulfilling prophecies

Gotta love this AP headline and lede:

Stocks surge as investors anticipate yearend rally

By SARA LEPRO and TIM PARADIS

NEW YORK (AP) — Investors believing that Wall Street is on the verge of a yearend rally piled into the market Tuesday, brushing off more weak economic data while they scarfed up stocks and propelled the Dow Jones industrials up 300 points to its highest close in four weeks.

For the irony files

Guess how Joe the Plumber has been supporting himself as he campaigns with John McCain around the country worrying that Obama is going to take his hard-earned money and give it to someone else? He’s been relying on the hard-earned money that other people have been handing over to him:

“I’m not getting paid for things.  It’s starting to get hard to eat,” the now-famous Joe the Plumber tells INSIDE EDITION’s Deborah Norville.

Joe the Plumber, a.k.a. Joe Wurzelbacher, opens up to Norville about the downside of his overnight fame.  All that stumping is keeping him from earning a living as a plumber!

“When is the last time you actually had a regular [plumbing] gig?” Deborah asks.

“[It's been] Three weeks now; I did a favor for a buddy of mine the other day, but I didn’t get paid for it [because] it was my friend.  And he’s an Obama supporter,” Joe says.

On the eve of election day, Joe, a single dad, told INSIDE EDITION he’s getting by with help from friends and family, along with donations from well-wishers.

“It’s hard being on the receiving end, a little bit of pride gets in there sometimes,” admits Joe.

“So you just go to the mailbox and there’s an envelope with a check in it, written to your name?” marvels Norville.

“Yes ma’am,” Joe says.

Joe says he may run for Congress himself down the line.  He’s also working on a book, tentatively called Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream.

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

T minus one

I won’t make any predictions, but if anyone else cares to, I encourage them to do so in the comments. The more specific the better — exact percentages of popular vote, exact states won by the candidates, etc. What’s the point of making predictions if they’re not precise? There will be no cash prize for the closest guess (if you want to get rich making accurate predictions, go to InTrade or open up a storefront psychic shop like the one that just opened across the street from me, although I suspect it’s a front for something else…)

Decline

I read yesterday that according to its current share price, the New York Times Company’s market capitalization is about $1.43 billion. The NYTCo paid about $1.1 billion for the Boston Globe et al. in 1993. Adjusted for inflation, that would be more than $1.5 billion in today’s dollars. So the entire NYT empire is now judged by investors to be worth less than the Times Company paid for one of its pieces 15 years ago.

I’m no financial whiz, and maybe the company is currently undervalued, but these numbers give you a sense of how far the newspaper business has fallen in the last decade, don’t they? (In related news, The LATimes laid off another 10% of its newsroom staff this week, bringing it to just over half of what its size was a decade ago, the Christian Science Monitor went this week from being a daily newspaper to a weekly website, etc., etc., etc…)

Melting pot

Berkeley, Calif.:

Against complacency

Ugh.

Does the headline on the post below look awful to anyone else, with erratic spacing between the letters? It seems to be a problem that shows up using my Firefox browser, but not using Internet Explorer. I don’t know why it suddenly happened, because I haven’t changed or updated my browser recently. It’s very ugly!

UPDATE: Now it seems to be back to normal. Weird! Maybe the WordPress people were fiddling with something behind the scenes. Since they host the blog on their servers and provide the software as-is, I have somewhat limited powers when it comes to fine-tuning the design and layout.

Living in a gated community (involuntarily, and without a key to the gate…)

From the LA Times:

Maria Freyre could not believe her eyes last week when she pulled onto the Lincoln Heights street where she has lived for 45 years.

A neighbor had erected a steel gate across Forest Park Drive, blocking 18 residents’ access to their homes.

A simmering neighborhood dispute had prompted Gardner Compton’s barricade. Forest Park Drive crosses private property, Compton said — his. He was willing to let his neighbors walk on foot along the narrow dirt road, but cars were no longer allowed.

Angry residents called Los Angeles authorities, who pledged that they would move quickly to resolve the dispute and have the gate removed from the street, which has been in use since 1924.

But the street remained blocked Wednesday morning when Freyre, 61, and her 30-year-old daughter, Norma Enriquez, squeezed past the gate to get to the car they had parked outside it overnight.

Residents say they are lugging groceries past the gate and using miner-style flashlights to hike back and forth at night to their cars.

“This is unbelievable,” said Freyre, who was worried what would happen later in the day when her son planned to bring his prematurely born child home from the hospital for the first time.

She glanced past the gate to the quarter-mile walk that David Freyre would face while carrying the infant and his breathing monitor and oxygen tank.

The street standoff, on an isolated hillside above Lincoln High School and the busy intersection of North Broadway and North Mission Road, was causing ripples Wednesday three miles away at Los Angeles City Hall.

“This is a unique situation. I’ve never seen this level of animosity,” said City Councilman Ed Reyes, who represents Lincoln Heights. “It’s a tough situation. We’re trying to maintain public safety for all residents. It’s a delicate issue between residents’ rights.”

Reyes’ staff was scurrying to find temporary housing for 5-month-old Aiden Freyre and his father and mother, Ruth Shafer.

“That’s a priority. We’re working for housing so an ambulance could get to them easily,” Reyes said.

Back on Forest Park Drive, Compton was pleased that the city was taking notice of the situation.

“This is a little test of property rights,” he said . “It’s got everyone’s attention.”

Those damn socialists are everywhere these days — today they want to share a road, and tomorrow they’ll want to sleep in your guest bedroom and eat the food in your fridge. Vote Republican to stop the socialists before they take over!

100,000

That’s a lot of people turning out to see Barack Obama. In Missouri, no less.

Can someone remind me, Does Sarah Palin consider Missouri one of the“pro-America areas of this great nation”? Maybe she would argue that St. Louis doesn’t count, because it isn’t one of “these small towns that we get to visit…these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America.”

Home for sale

I’ve had my eye on this little place at 107th and Riverside ever since I used to walk past it nearly every day. I went to a party once in the 5-story mansion next door (the home of Soros’s old investment partner), and it was pretty nice, but I think prefer this one. Luckily for me, it’s now on the market! What with the real estate and financial industry downturn in NY, I figure this is a great time to scoop it up — maybe I can get it for less than the listing price.

So, anyone have about $30 million they can lend me?

Traffic jam

This, from Editor & Publisher, is a list of the 30 most-trafficked news websites’ in September, with percentage change from a year ago. Regardless of whether she helped or hindered John McCain’s campaign, it looks his choice of Sarah Palin was a boon for someone:

Add three zeroes to give you totals in millions.

NYTimes.com — 20,068 — 37%
washingtonpost.com — 12,956 — 43%
USATODAY.com — 11,439 — 33%
LA Times — 10,022 — 102%
Wall Street Journal Online — 9,047 — 94%

Boston.com — 8,610 — 122%
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle — 5,129 — 18%
New York Post — 4,815 — 98%
Politico — 4,605 — 219%
Chicago Tribune — 4,558 — 46%

Daily News Online Edition — 4,439 — 56%
DallasNews.com – The Dallas Morning News — 3,777 — 115%
Chicago Sun-Times — 3,676 — 64%
The Houston Chronicle — 3,396 — 51%
Newsday — 3,051 — 13%

International Herald Tribune — 2,940 — 121%
The Washington Times — 2,410 — 78%
Philly.com — 2,332 — 73%
The Seattle Times — 2,256 — 22%
Anchorage Daily News* — 2,190 — 928%

Atlanta Journal-Constitution — 2,180 — 14%
Boston Herald — 2,153 — 118%
Baltimore Sun — 2,136 — 30%
Star Tribune — 2,134 — 50%
NJ.com — 2,086 — 70%

Seattle Post-Intelligencer — 2,070 — 17%
Detroit Free Press — 1,994 — 62%
MercuryNews.com — 1,964 — 64%
MiamiHerald.com — 1,895 — 64%
Village Voice Media — 1,745 — (-13%)

*Estimate percent change calculated on small sample size; subject to increased statistical variability.

Powell to endorse Obama?

That’s the rumor du jour, and Lawrence O’Donnell for some reason thinks it is “beyond doubt” that he’ll do it (because Powell is so inclined to stick his neck out or make waves, right? Sure, whatever you say, Larry…). Tomorrow would be a dandy day to do it, in my opinion, especially if McCain has any decent press coming out of tonight’s debate…

Good news for Democrats in early voting?

Despite all the polls favorable to Obama recently, I’m determined to prepare myself for the worst: I don’t really trust the polls this year, and there are still three weeks until election day, and you never know what kind of voter suppression or voting machine manipulation Republicans might accomplish. With those credentials as a determined pessimist established, I have to say that this post at fiverthirtyeight.com heartens me more than any poll numbers I’ve seen:

SurveyUSA has a lot of good habits as a pollster, and one of them is breaking out the results of early and absentee voting in states where such things are allowed. So far, SurveyUSA has conducted polling in five states where some form of early voting was underway. In each one, Barack Obama is doing profoundly better among early voters than among the state’s electorate as a whole:

...    Poll    % Voted                  Non-Early
State  Date      Early   Early Voters   Likely Voters
====================================================
NM     10/13     10%     Obama +23%     Obama +6%
OH     10/13     12%     Obama +18%     Obama +4%
GA     10/12     18%     Obama +6%      McCain +11%
IA     10/9      14%     Obama +34%     Obama +10%
NC     10/6       5%     Obama +34%     McCain +5%

We should caveat that these are not hard-and-fast numbers. Estimates of early voting results are subject to the same statistical vagaries as any other sort of subgroup analysis, such as response bias and small sample sizes.

Nevertheless, Obama is leading by an average of 23 points among early voters in these five states, states which went to George W. Bush by an average of 6.5 points in 2004.

Is this a typical pattern for a Democrat? Actually, it’s not. According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.

There’s a bit more analysis at the post. In addition to the sheer size of those numbers, I’m also heartened because I suspect that people are more likely to mislead pollsters about things they plan to do in the future (it doesn’t feel like a lie if you’re speaking hypothetically about a future action) than about things they have done in the past, so fears of the so-called “Bradley effect” (the supposed overestimation of support for black candidates in pre-election polls) might be unwarranted.

I’m still not going to count any chickens until the election is behind us, but there seems to be a very real possibility that the turnout models the pollsters have been using will be demolished by this election, and that enthusiasm for Obama among liberals, young people, blacks, and so on, combined with what has the potential to be a huge get-out-the-vote effort on Obama’s behalf, will create an Obama landslide.

I know that early voters aren’t representative of voters as a whole, and I know that we’re dealing with very small sample sizes here, but still, it’s getting harder and harder to find bad news for Obama these days. A 700-point drop in the Dow, while bad for my net worth, is presumably also good for Obama’s chances on the day of the final debate — at the very least, it gives him an easy comeback if McCain tries any character-based attacks. (“This is the kind of politics that the American people are tired of, John — on a day when they saw the value of their 401ks drop by over 5%, you keep trying to change the subject to a guy who did some despicable things when I was 8 years old…”)

Will someone please throw some cold water on these numbers, so that I can return to my moderately pessimistic equilibrium?

The end of suburbia?

Here’s a pretty amazing photo from the LA Times showing smoke from one of today’s wildfires overtaking the sprawl in the San Fernando Valley:

That particular fire has burned 3700 acres so far, and it just started. There are even fears that the strong, hot winds could spread it all the way to the Pacific — which is 15 miles away. Maybe it’s time to dust off Joan Didion’s book with the essay about the Santa Ana winds.

Another season, another record

This pair was crazy when I mentioned them back in July. They’re even crazier now.

A Lafayette rock climber and his Japanese partner defied gravity one more time today and broke their own speed record climbing 2,900 feet up the nose of El Capitan.

Hans Florine, 44, and Yuji Hirayama, 39, of Hidaka, Japan, pulled themselves over the top of the immense slab of granite and touched the tree that serves as the finish line on top of El Capitan in 2 hours, 37 minutes and 5 seconds, beating their fastest time by more than six minutes.

The pair sped up the rock as a crowd of more than 100 people, armed with telescopes, binoculars and cameras, watched in awe from the meadow below. At various points during the climb, some members of the crowd rang cowbells in appreciation of the climbers’ difficult ascent.

Florine has been competing with other climbers for the fastest time on The Nose, the most prominent climbing route on El Capitan, for the past 17 years.

It normally takes three days to conquer this route on El Capitan, a 2,900-foot cliff face that has been known to give even seasoned climbers the jitters.

The risks were on display a little over a week ago when Hirayama fell 55 feet and smashed his ankle against a rock during a practice run. No bones were broken, but the ankle was still swollen Wednesday when the duo took their first unsuccessful shot at their record.

Thanks, Bill

Politico:

“We’ve reported the Ayers relationship before, and we had it on our to-do list for a while to take a more comprehensive look,” Keller said in an e-mail. “When the McCain campaign began to make it a major focal point of ads and stump speeches, we decided the time was right.”

“It didn’t take any prodding,” Keller continued. “When the conversation on something controversial reaches a certain level, curious readers look to the Times to help them sort the facts from the fictions and figure out what to make of it. That’s what we did.”

So, when partisan Republicans try to distract voters with their latest distorted smear, the Times feels obligated to dignify the smear by putting an article about it above the fold on the front page, even when you covered the same ground and reached the same conclusions in articles six months ago. It’s journalism! Also known as, being led around by your nose by members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

Ohio voter registration numbers

These numbers reported in the Columbus Dispatch look pretty good for Obama, don’t they?

A record number of Ohioans are registered to vote for the Nov. 4 election, when officials are predicting a record voter turnout with the hard-fought presidential race in the Buckeye State.

Nearly 8.2 million people are registered in Ohio, after 665,949 new voters were added to the rolls since the beginning of the year, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announced today after Monday’s registration deadline.

That means about 94 percent of all eligible voters in Ohio are registered, based on U.S. Census estimates of Ohioans 18 years and older as of July 2007.

Brunner is predicting 80 percent voter turnout this fall, which would mean 6.5 million Ohioans would cast ballots. By comparison, 5.7 million votes were cast in the 2004 presidential election in the state.

Voting already has started in Ohio with the casting of absentee ballots starting last Tuesday. Both presidential campaigns have been making a strong push not only to register voters but to get them to vote early.

Secret Service, unlike Palin and McCain, takes threats of violence seriously

Sarah Palin and John McCain might think it’s fine and dandy to incite crowds by painting Obama as a “pal” of terrorists or even a terrorist himself, but apparently the Secret Service takes these things a bit more seriously:

The Secret Service is following up on media reports today that someone in the crowd at a McCain/Palin event suggested killing Barack Obama, according to Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley. The shout of “kill him” followed a Sarah Palin rant on Obama’s relationship with radical Chicagoan Bill Ayers.

Wiley says the Secret Service did not begin looking into the matter until press reports, namely Dana Milbank’s article in the Washington Post, surfaced today, because no agents at the event heard anything. “The Secret Service did not hear any threatening statements directed at targets under its protection and no threatening statements were reported to us by law enforcement or citizens at the event,” Wiley told Radar. Also unclear: whether the remark was directed at Obama or Ayers if the words were actually “kill” and “him.”