Take a deep breath and let it sink in.

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…

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.

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.

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…)

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…)

Berkeley, Calif.:

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.

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!