| Obama | McCain |
| 100.0% probability of winning | 0.0% probability of winning |
| Mean of 363 electoral votes | Mean of 175 electoral votes |
Today there were 17 new polls for 16 states released, but not much has changed with the electoral map, except that a new West Virginia puts Obama in the lead by +8%. On the other hand, McCain leads in a Missouri poll today–following two consecutive leads by Obama in the state.
The Monte Carlo analysis employing 100,000 simulated elections finds Obama winning every single one. Obama receives (on average) 363 to McCain’s 175 electoral votes in a hypothetical election held today.
Detailed results for this analysis are available at Hominid Views.
Methods are described in the FAQ. The most recent version of this analysis can be found on this page.
Panic In Global Stock Markets
Panic selling engulfed stocks markets around the world overnight, and many suspended trading, as global indexes fell from over 7% in Asia to 9.6% in Japan.
The U.S. market opened this morning with the Dow over 700 points down, but it has recovered somewhat and was 255 points down a few minutes ago.
Meanwhile, the McCain camp released its own “Troopergate” investigation report, which not surprisingly exonerated Sarah Palin. The real “Troopergate” report has been delivered to Alaska legislators but not yet released to the public; it is 300 pages long with 1,000 pages of supporting documents.
While the world’s financial markets collapsed on what is being called “Black Friday,” McCain and Palin continue to campaign against Bill Ayers.
(fiddle playing; flames crackling in background)
McCain Panics As Poll Numbers Drop
An increasingly shrill John McCain thumps on Bill Ayers as the stool is kicked from under him by the dramatic implosion of conservative Whack-O-Nomics. You know what? I wouldn’t vote for Bill Ayers for president, either! It’s the only thing McSenile and I agree on.
Vote For The Write-In Guy!
If I had to choose between McCain and Ayers, I’d vote for a write-in candidate named Barack Obama. He’s a senator from Illinois or someplace like that. He has a better economic plan than Senator Deregulation. Right now, we need a better economic plan than more Whack-O-Nomics.
Glad to hear it, Darryl. Now we can turn our attention toward re-electing Governor Gregoire.
It should be clear after last night’s debate in Spokane that Gregoire has hard answers and a plan for everything, and Rossi is just spinning out bullshit.
Rossi never answered a single question. Instead he repeated his bullshit mantra that he “wants to change the culture in Olympia.”
Heaven help this state if we get Bush-style governance here, but that’s just what we would get with Rossi. That’s what he means — crony capitalism that favors his rich buddies, ideological political hacks in key positions, anti-worker policies, and economic stagnation.
We need to kick this guy’s ass, and kick it hard, and send his supporters a clear message that their brand of politics and governance is dead and buried in this state.
Dow Down 43
That’s not bad, considering the market opened 700 points lower — maybe rationality is returning to the market now that they’re practically giving away shares.
DJIA Down 227 now, at about 7:35 a.m. PDT. The MSNBC site couldn’t display the numbers twice when I tried to refresh, apparantly it’s having trouble keeping up with the numbers. This things like a roller coaster today. Hope you’ve got a strong stomach, if you are a day-trader.
Those Polite Republicans …
A reporter who covered the boisterous* McCain – Palin campaign event** in Milwaukee writes,
“When the event was over and we got on the press bus to the airport, some of McCain’s supporters gave us a single-finger salute.”
(Quoted under fair use.)
* This is a euphemism.
** This is a euphemism, too.
Roger Rabbit Commentary: So much for Republicans’ self-described civility. It’s pretty easy to visualize these yahoos throwing a noose over a tree limb. I know how to keep GOP rallies civil: Surround ’em with National Guard troops like you do with any other violent mob.
“I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads you don?t have much of a vision for the future or you?re not ready to articulate it.”
— John McCain, 2000
@6 Best buying opportunity of my lifetime! Back in ’87 a friend asked if I was worried. I told him, “If this isn’t the end of the world you’ll make money by buying now. If this is the end of the world your money will be useless anyway.”
For the last month I’ve been checking “Hominid View” BEFORE I check my stocks. That way I am happy for a fleeting moment.
This from the UK website The Independent. In a column titled: The peculiar tragedy of this flawed hero, John McCain…The author, Matthew Norman, writes:
Another passage of beauty:
Outsiders, complete outsiders with no stake in this thing and, from my view, no axe to grind one way or the other can see right through this grumpy old man.
I particularly enjoyed the part about Cindy’s body language.
You can see the entire piece here: http://tinyurl.com/UKtake
Obama vs. McCain
Once again, we have a choice between moonbeam Neo-socialism and crooked crony capitalism. I’ll be writing-in Ron Paul on November 4.
Looks like Palin “standing up to the oil companies” wasn’t just an accident.
In the winter/early spring of 2008, the Republicans were concerned about Hillary Clinton’s ability to draw in women voters, either as a candidate for president or vice-president. The media speculated that any Republican nominee might profit from naming a woman V.P. candidate, to help offset that advantage.
At about the same time, Alaska hired a Massachusetts public relations firm to manage the issue of building a second oil pipeline. Although the project was still controversial in Alaska, and opposed by the consortium of oil companies which jointly owned the existing pipeline, it was felt that Alaska needed national attention on the issue.
The P.R. firm, however, focused less on publicising the pipeline, and more on publicising Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. They marketed her as an expert on oil/energy policy who was fighting the oil companies and entrenched interest groups in Alaska politics to push the project through. They convinced national media to send camera crews to follow her around for several days of meetings on the issues.
Those meetings were unusual in that Sarah Palin’s schedule as governor was surprisingly light on substance. She concentrated on public events and ceremonys, with some meetings with legislatures, and was rarely in the office on school holidays. But suddenly during the time period in question, she seized upon this one issue and pushed aside even that light schedule of events to focus almost exclusively on that one issue – coinciding with the arrival of the P.R. firm and and the media attention which it drew to Alaska.
Source: PR consultant helped Palin grab spotlight
Palin’s supporters say, of course, that it shows her single-minded (bulldog) pursuit of a project which would benefit Alaska citizens. Detractors say that it shows that her V.P. selection was not accidental, that it was the result of a P.R. strategy – paid for by taxpayers – to secure her the national spotlight and the eventual V.P. nod.
If the Republicans were really determined to nominate a woman for the V.P. spot, there were limited options available. For example, Sen. Elizabeth Dole is considered too old to be matched with a presidential candidate who’s age is already an issue. Many other Republican women have political disqualifications of one type or another. Therefore, Palin found herself in a pool with only a limited amount of competition, and unlike the more prominent men who were the “obvioius” picks (Lieberman, Romney, Church, et al), her evangelical/conservative/pro-life credentials were solid.
So for Palin, the strategy was low-risk, in that it had no political downside and it didn’t cost her a penny of her own money. The upside went from being good to great – at worst it made her look better in Alaska and gave her some national exposure as groundwork for her next political move, at best she had a shot at skyrocketing to the V.P. position alongside a Republican candidate who had a good chance of not living through his term in office, if elected.
If Obama loses, I’ll be surprised. He’s pretty mcuh got it in the bag. Now if he jsut doesn’t do what he says he’s gonna do, we should be OK.
Hard to keep up with the market today. 100+ swings in the DJIA are occuring every few miutes. A few minutes ago it was at -450, I refresh the screen and it’s at -353.
These are the days that will become legendary in future years, as older traiders regall youngsters with tales of how it was during the “crash of 2008”.
A couple of days ago I related how one expert on the radio advised people not to start buying until the market hits 8,000. I was skeptical at the time – another 1,500 point drop???? Was the floor really that low????? But right now the DJIA is within easy reach of closing below the 8,000 milestone, having already breached it once in early trading today, and sitting at 8,225.87 as of a few minutes ago.
Remember how, two or three years ago, some of the wingnuts on this board crowed about the superiority of the Republican Economic Plan as the Dow approached 13,000? At that time they were trying to convince us to let Wall Street manage our Social Security accounts, as they could “obviously” do a better job than having the federal government invest in T-bills. (Of course, there is no real “individual Social Security account”, and the surplus on the Social Security books is only temporary to help manage the bulge in payouts caused by the pending retirements of millions of baby-boomers.)
What surprises me is why anybody would be selling long-term stock investments now. You would think that with them already having gone this low, you would just hold onto them and ride the market out. Why sell at the bottom?
Maybe margin calls are forcing sales?
Actually, the use of credit cards tied to mortgage accounts might make this problem even greater than we expected. Major brokerage firms issue credit cards to clients which are secured by the investment account. That credit card acts as part of their “margin” account. But the customers have, for years, been urged to put all their monthly expenses on the card. Some people even use them to buy expensive cars, and even houses. But if the market drops and your margin exceeds 50%, and if the broker can’t get hold of you immediatly, they will sell stock to cover the margin call, regardless of the price at the time.
This is an out of left field question, but how are Sweden and Denmark weathering this economic collapse? I don’t even know the keywords to ask to Google that. Any suggestions of good websites or blogs that cover that?
– John
The McCain chart mirrors the DOW. Ouch! Other than unleashing right-wing hate, it looks like the Ayers/ACORN blitz is taking McCain/Palin nowhere but down.
http://www.pollster.com/polls/.....ge-mvo.php
Well, we know what happened in Iceland. An experiment in de-regulation and international banking turned disasterous.
The banks were de-regulated so they could “compete” internationally. The banks offered high interest rates to lure depositers from the U.K and Europe, hoping to make more off investments in U.S. sub-prime loan markets. It worked well for a couple of years, bringing in returns which were larger than the rest of the the GDP of Iceland.
But when the credit markets crashed, so did the banks, and the Icelandic government was left with claims against it’s equivilent of FDIC insurance. But Iceland’s government had never contemplated facing a problem of this scale. After all, it had assumed that if the banks failed, it would be using taxpayer money to pay it’s own citizens as the primary depositers. Instead, it was faced with claims hundreds of times bigger than than the entire Icelandic national budget, mostly going out to non-citizens.
When the Icelandic government didn’t immediatly promise to make good depositers (it didn’t know how in the world it was ever going to do that), the U.K. government announced it was going to pursue all legal remedies to protect U.K. depositors, including freezing Icelandic assets in the U.K. This only aggravated the problem.
In the meantime, Iceland is asking the Russians for a loan to tide them over, so the entire nation doesn’t have to declare bankruptcy. Let me repeat that. Iceland is asking the Russians for a loan. It would be a wonderful opportunity for Putin, who could add a few conditions to such a loan – such as permanant naval/air bases on the scale of Guantanamo, etc.
There are some decent Republicans out there, people willing to stand for what is right and just.
One Republican who stands tall for American justice is David Iglesias. He has a post up at Huffpo today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....33614.html
He’s not a politician but he sure as hell stands for something. I think he’d make for a great Attorney General in an Obama administration.
I think America really needs people of his character to take the Republican party back from the right-wing extremists. Although Democrats deserve absolute full support this election, I believe that in the long view America needs a strong second party that represents true conservative values. Such a party can contribute to uniting us as Americans as well as towards lifting our country back to its feet.
We don’t need to beat the Republicans in November, we need to destroy them. We need to destroy them to save them, save America, and to give people with the character of Iglesias the chance to restore American conservatism to its rightful place on the political stage. I believe that, with our support, they can return the nation’s right-wing extremists to the backwaters of American society where they belong.
I’m thinking that moderate Republicans like Iglesias and the McKay brothers (locally) might be the salvation of the Republican party. They got pushed out of the Republican party by the neo-cons and pretty much thrown under the bus for their lack of “loyalty” in pursuing the neo-con projects, by fair means or foul. At this point I don’t know what their party affiliation is, but I think that they, rather than John McCain, could be the Republican Party’s last best chance for real change.
You think if mccain wins, and after his 1 year of rule and after he dies of cancer, the 3 years of palin, ( assume the country survived at all ), would destroy the republican party for generations?
My fear is that during the depression, the country would split apart like the USSR did or that the republicans would go fascist to maintain order and we would never have a chance to vote democratic again.
As of 11:40 A.M. PDT, the DJIA is at 8,085.29 – within striking distance of the 8,000 benchmark. Cue limbo music: “How low can you go?????”
In the meantime, the Republicans are promising to contest any close election results, saying that an Obama win would put us into a “nightmare” where the result wouldn’t be known for months.
Parties wage war over voter fraud, intimidation
Looks like the G.O.P. has taken on the nature of a mafia protection racket – you might not want to join their club, but if you don’t vote for them the consequences won’t be pretty….
Obama’s ‘Radical’ School Reform
In this campaign, we’re witnessing both the most extreme and most ineffective Republican use of guilt-by-association tactics. Ineffective, because the McCain-Palin mudslinging is falling on the deaf ears of a populace whose attention has been seized by a terrifying economic collapse.
Bill Ayers is an odious man. Not only did he undeservedly escape justice due to prosecutorial misconduct, not only is he unrepentant, but he is still a radical.
The rightwing rap against Obama is that he’s a terrorist-hugger (won’t stick; barely knows Ayers) and shares Ayers’ radical views (tough to make that one stick, too, because Obama has publicly denounced Ayers’ radical views; so the wingnuts’ only hope of getting Obama is by tarring him as a supporter of Ayers’ “radical school reform agenda”).
But what, exactly, was this “radical” school reform that Obama espoused?
Let’s start with Obama’s “association” with Ayers. The two served together on an Annenberg Foundaton committee, which met 6 times over a span of 6 years to disburse $100 million of private grant money.
The Annenberg Foundation was created by the late Walter Annenberg, founder of TV Guide magazine, and a rightwing Republican who was a prominent Nixon supporter. It is now run by his widow, a Republican and a McCain supporter. So, it’s gonna be tough for the righties to attack Obama for his service per se on that private charity’s board. That leaves the education reform agenda itself.
Rightwing commentators assert that Annenberg’s “agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.”
This is what Education Week, a professional educators’ trade publication, says: “The project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers. The Annenberg Foundation’s … grant in the city focused on three priorities: encouraging collaboration among teachers and better professional development; reducing the isolation between schools and between schools and their communities; and reducing school size to improve learning.”
The Chicago Consortium on School Research said in a report: “The Chicago Challenge did not articulate specific goals for individual school development, nor did it specify any specific activities or processes to follow. Rather, it believed that educators, parents and community members could and should identify their own ways to solve local problems and improve their schools. The Challenge initially encouraged schools to focus their efforts on three basic problems of school organization that were seen as obstacles to improvement: a) the lack of time for effective teaching, student learning and teacher professional developement; b) the large size of school enrollments and instructional groups hindering the development of personalized, supportive adult-student relationships; and c) schools’ isolation from parents and communities, which reduced their responsiveness to local needs and their accountability to their most immediate constituents.”
Andrew Romano, writing in Newsweek, calls these objectives “pedestrian.” He quotes conservative blogger Ross Douthat, writing in Atlantic, as saying, “that’s as far as the Ayers issue can take you on substance, and it isn’t very far at all.”
“So,” writes Romano, “it’s no wonder that McCain and Co. have chosen to shout ‘terrorist’ in a crowded theater.”
Conservative columnist George Will, writing in Washington Post, in explaining why Republican efforts to associate Obama with Ayers aren’t gaining traction, observes that “the McCain-Palin charges have come just as … many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts — telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seems surreal.”
As Romano observes, the Ayers strategy could backfire on McCain by making him appar to undecided voters worried about the eocnomy that he’s “utterly disconnected from what’s happening in the world, and the details of the Ayers connection … blur away into a broader impression of a flailing, desperate, out-of-touch candidate.”
(Includes material quoted from Newsweek and other sources under fair use.)