Goodnight Bush, ready for the holidays!

"In the situation room

There was a toy world

And a flight costume

And a picture of -- "

For the rest, we are all going to have to go to your local independent bookseller (if you still have one, otherwise, I am sure you know where to go) or Amazon.com to get your copy of Goodnight Bush: A Parody, by Gan Golan and Erich Origen now!

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19%

So, have you seen it?

That's Bush's approval ratings, according to the Political Wire, a nice lump of coal in his stocking this year. For the economy, it's just what you would figure, worse.

How low can he go? He still has 4 months, almost to the day, to hit single digits.

I'm betting he can do it. He has already dropped 11% in the past 3 weeks, by the American Research Group, Inc. figures. Rasmussen had him at 34% approval rating in August, at 4% higher than the American Research Group. I'd say they are in close enough agreement, with a 4 point difference for August.

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As John says,
"Virginia, there is a Santa Claus"

Check out SurveyUSA's poll results for Virginia, September 22: Obama 51% - McCain 45%.

From their site:

Women, Suburban DC Voters Help Obama Find Breathing Room on Virginia Battlefield: In an election for President of the United States in Virginia today, 09/22/08, 6 weeks from Election Day, Democrat Barack Obama edges Republican John McCain, 51% to 45%, according to this latest SurveyUSA poll conducted for WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, WJLA-TV in Washington DC, WTVR-TV in Richmond, and WJHL-TV in the Tri-Cities. Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released one week ago, Obama is up 1 point; McCain is down 1 point; compared to a SurveyUSA poll two weeks ago, Obama is up 4, McCain is down 4.

Since 1952, Virginia has voted Republican 13 times and Democrat only once, in 1964. Today: In the Washington DC suburbs, Obama now polls at 59% and leads McCain by 21 points. Obama leads by 10 in Southeast VA and by 4 in Central VA. McCain's regional advantage is confined to the Shenandoah, where he is 14 points atop Obama. Among women, Obama led by 6 points before Sarah Palin was named to the GOP ticket, now leads by 16. McCain continues to lead among voters older than McCain. Obama continues to lead among voters younger than Obama. But among voters in between, McCain's once 10-point advantage is now a 3-point deficit. Among college educated voters, Obama has gained 6 points and McCain has lost 5 points in the past 2 weeks. Among lower-income voters, Obama's advantage has increased by 17 points in the past 6 weeks.

McCain holds 87% of the GOP base. Obama holds 91% of the Democrat base. Independents split. McCain holds 83% of Conservatives. Obama holds 86% of Liberals. But: Obama leads by 28 points among Moderates, and on that Virginia battlefield, the contest may be decided.

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FiveThirtyEight.com

It's just looking better and better over at Nick Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com, where they have Obama winning by a landslide (+350 EV) at better than 17%, at 17.78%, while McCain's chances of doing so are under 2%, at 1.76%.

Obama at 311.5 EV to McCain's 226.5 EV and winning over 70% of the time, nearly 75%, with him at 50.3% of the popular vote and McCain at 47.9.

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It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas for Obama over at Bloomberg, too.

"Obama, Not McCain, Shows Steady Hand in Crisis", by Albert R. Hunt, who starts out:

For the first time since 1932 a presidential election is taking place in the midst of a genuine financial crisis. The reaction of the candidates was revealing.

and finishes with:

On the financial crisis, last week belonged to Obama.

Let us hope that people are paying less attention to the color of his skin, which AP's Ron Fournier is back to spinning for whomever his wizard is in AP for no good purposes -- but, lo!, Mr. Fournier, the scales have been falling from white America's eyes faster than bigoted Republican conservatives have been able to notice from behind their biased vision --, and more to the color of the money that is fast disappearing from their wallets.

Let Obama be as green, and I would be just as satisfied with him.

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AP's Ron Fournier does it again:
passing off political anaylsis for AP wire reporting

"Bigoted white Dems could doom Obama's effort"

Oh? Is that so? Let's see...

September 21, 2008

BY RON FOURNIER AND TREVOR TOMPSON

WASHINGTON -- Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks -- many calling them ''lazy,'' ''violent'' or responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 -- about 2.5 percentage points.

Remember that Sesame Street song, the one that went, "It's where you put your eyes, that's about the size of it"?

Well, Ron Fournier's eyes are busy subtley deconstructing the results of the The Associated Press-Yahoo survey, done in partnership with Stanford University, to reconstruct them to suggest that Senator Obama will go down to defeat due to bigotry in his own party.

Well, it all depends on where you put your eyes, and what you report.

Mr. Fournier is guilty of slipping an idea into the newspaper-reading electorate's head, while pretending to "tutt-tutt" along with the more enlightened among us, the majority that has learned that while we all have attitudes about one another, have heard and fallen into generalities about groups of people, what matters it to recognize that these stereotypes exist in our animal brains and to remember to always face the person in front of onself and allow them their personhood, to know them before you judge them according to one's instinctive reactions, which is what photographs shown quickly to people measures.

You can see a copy of the survey, conducted by Knowledge Networks, by clicking here and make your own conclusions about what the survey is indicating. It actually looks pretty good for Senator Obama nad the Democrats.

As someone over on the Obama boards pointed out, "the article counted up all the negative adjectives that white survey respondents sometimes connect to blacks -- without looking at the overwhelming positive adjectives that they selected or the fact that the poll overall showed more voters favoring Obama over McCain," and she echoed the question that came to my mind as I read his article:

Did they ask -- in whatever carefully constructed test language they use -- whether believing even one negative thing about blacks would prevent you from voting for a black person about whom you do not believe the chaacterization to be true?" In other words, did the survey allow for the use of intellect over instinct?

As others have noted, the poll actually shows that most Americans favor Obama for president over McCain and hold a more favorable view of Barack & Michele Obama than of John & Cindy McCain.

The commentor concludes, "You can probably extrapolate from poll results a hard core of about 10% of voters who hold strong beliefs that would prevent them from voting for any black person for President -- but there is no evidence that those voters would be likely to vote Democrat in any case-- since it is easy from the poll to see that at least 35% are Republican or McCain voters."

Fournier is apparently biased, and this isn't the first article to reveal that bias. He uses the information in the survey results to construct a support for his opinion, conveniently leaving a lot of the information contained in the survey out. Smarter people know to go digging around for the picture that isn't being shown, especially when Fournier's name is associated with the press piece.

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The red and the blue, two Americas -- 538.com EV projections

And it's not pretty

Unless you like red.

McCain/Palin has unified the center and south, with Florida, Nevada and North Dakota holding out, Ohio slipping away.

The highest return on investment state is far and away CO, followed by NH and NV.

Lower are MI, VA, NM, OH, ND, DE, OR, with SD, WV, IO, FL and ME all below 1.0.

It's time to make the calls to talk to the voters in the states most likely to tip with the highest return on investment, who are willing to give ear to Obama's policies and the arguments for why a vote for McCain/Palin and the Republicans is a vote against their own interests.

It's that simple.

Make Calls.

Visit family in swing states and find out what the campaign is doing there and help out for a weekend.

Write letters to the editor of the cities and towns McCain visits right afterward to correct the record. For a list of the nation's newspapers, click here. Prepare one letter for each issue, group of issues or argument about why a vote for McCain is a vote against our own best interests, citing the central issues of

• the economy
  
• jobs creation
  
• health care -- 47 million Americans without healthcare and costs rising without control and CEO's of private insurers and health groups becoming billionaires is not American. Health care is the central economic issue and has been for years.
  
• the mortgage crisis and the disastrous results of deregulation of the financial markets, taking down banks -- Silver State Bank, on the board of which McCain's sonn sat until July 26, was just closed by the state and federal authorities -- and leading to abuses of oil speculation on the commodities markets.
  
• the truth about taxes; even Snopes says that Obama's tax plan will reduce taqxes for 86% of Americans, not the 95% he claims, but still pretty darn good.
• the war in Iraq and rish of further wars
  

I will be posting samples on the issues that we develop on the mybo boards and sending them along, in case you don't have time to make your own.

There are really only a couple of weeks and the debates to turn this around. It appears that McCain's bounce is leveling out and the campaign will return to the issues on which we can win it. Let's help it to do that so we can get a little decent legislation, protection of the constitution and institutions of the government and economic markets, stability in world affairs, bring our soldiers home as quickly as the ground situation in Iraq permits and work to steer Russia and ourselves clear of another cold war over oil, NATO membership and Russian isolation. Let cooler heads prevail.

This is the urgency of now.

Please contribute, if you can, to the Obama/Biden 08 campaign by clicking here and making your online contribution. It will be credited to you.

It will be put to good use. We need to get the message out there before they do and set the debate ourselves. It isn't going to be a Republican disaster. There is still a red America and a blue America.

Look at the two Americas. This is about who Americans trust, and they don't use the same criteria.

The idealists and intellectuals live in the blue America and are mocked by those who cannot see that those who rule America laugh at them for making it so easy for them to grab and hold power, making them proud to have no health coverage and worry about their job and their mortgage payments, because struggling is American.

I wish everyone could live here and then look back at The United States. It makes no sense. We shake our heads. We'd feel sorry if we didn't feel so sad and scared at what Red America can do.
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