yep...I smell it...
Obama will take Ohio though...its been moving steadily to him...
McCain will take Florida I feel...
U.S. Presidential Race: Official Thread
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran are here to talk about a frustrating 2 points dropped at Crystal Palace. They then discuss the regeneration of Old Trafford. Finally, Nik is joined by special guest Michael Statham from the Football Oranje podcast - who gives us a more in depth look at our EL opposition FC Twente, and then runs through the (many) Dutch connections currently at United.
yep...I smell it...
Obama will take Ohio though...its been moving steadily to him...
McCain will take Florida I feel...
I think Florida is the only place we're likely to see a Bradley Effect - among elderly Jewish voters.
That's because, for the Bradley Effect to happen, you need not only racism, but another reason to lie about affiliation. I can't see any real reason why large numbers of ordinary white people would lie to pollsters, even if their real reason was a racist one - after all, there are mainstream, acceptable reasons to vote for McCain.
Whereas for Jews who've voted Democrat all their lives, there would be a shame element in admitting they're voting Republican. But when they get in the booth, many of them might start panicking about Rev. Wright, Hamas, even the 'Hussein'.
A recent Gallup poll puts support for Obama among Jews at 75%, and especially high among elderly voters - far outstripping the white non-ethnic population. Jewish support for Dems is always high, but that's only 5% lower than 2000, when Lieberman was on the ticket - it's almost within the margin of error! I think this putative "Alter Kaker Effect" may explain a few percentage points there. It should be a large enough number to absorb such an effect, but there's 500,000 Jews in Florida, so you never know it could end up being important.
the Jewish vote for democrats this year will be lower for the reasons you give...but fortunately it has picked up since Obama won the primaries...when Florida and Jewish voters were very pro Clinton...Obama will be campaigning with Bill Clinton in Florida so it should help.
but the reason Florida is so close this time is because the huge AA vote and latinos coming out for Obama.
it will be all about GOTV in the end.
Breaking News on MSNBC....
Skinheads plan to kill Obama and African Americans broken up....
If ever there was an attempt on Obama...with all the hate McCain, Palin and the GOP has been peddling...no matter who pulled the trigger, these people will have their fingers on the trigger.
http://www.whec.com/article/stories/S634769.shtml?cat=566
Skinheads plan to kill Obama and African Americans broken up....
If ever there was an attempt on Obama...with all the hate McCain, Palin and the GOP has been peddling...no matter who pulled the trigger, these people will have their fingers on the trigger.
http://www.whec.com/article/stories/S634769.shtml?cat=566
Skinheads? Were they planning to stomp him to death? Reading that story, I doubt the two individuals in custody could ever possibly have managed to kill the 102 people their plan called for. Killing a hundred brain cells by sniffing glue in between classes at the local Alternative School would be a far more likely outcome, in my opinion. These criminal masterminds couldn't even buy the weapons they needed - they planned to rob a gun store first. So this doesn't exactly send shivers down my spine.
Just heard.
LKE Chirs says, their plans seem a bit beyond their means.
As Fitzjames pointed out in the Syria thread, events are something that the politician fears. And if the financial crisis wasn't crippling enough for McCain's campaign, things like this will surely only go to increase the margin between the two.
LKE Chirs says, their plans seem a bit beyond their means.
As Fitzjames pointed out in the Syria thread, events are something that the politician fears. And if the financial crisis wasn't crippling enough for McCain's campaign, things like this will surely only go to increase the margin between the two.
agree this is not a realistic attempt...but these sort of brain dead scum respond to sound bites like the ones Palin and McCain were using...
btw I note they are now talking more about taxes...and socialism
rather than terrorism....
btw I note they are now talking more about taxes...and socialism
rather than terrorism....He is very slightly ahead in the last poll so never say never.
Brain dead right wing spastics in a plot to kill black school kids and Obama. Just what McCain needed.
All he needs now is Palin to go even further off the rails and it is game over maaaaaaaaaaaaan.
All he needs now is Palin to go even further off the rails and it is game over maaaaaaaaaaaaan.
And also to the sweet, irresistible aroma of inhaled intoxicants. Mmmmm....paint thinner.
The gap seems to have tightened a bit to around five/six points in the national polls. I'm not saying it's enough for McCain to win but there's a decent chance that he'll avoid a landslide defeat.
So the race has tightened from 8.1 points to 7.2 points. Thanks for clearing that up.
I notice there's no mention of the IBD/TIPP poll that puts Obama just three points ahead. Odd that...
I notice there's no mention of the IBD/TIPP poll that puts Obama just three points ahead. Odd that...
Yeah it is. Mostly because it's not one of the main polls. Go figure. Want me to throw in the Big Ten poll that has Obama crushing McCain in all the big 10 states?
No, you don't. So shut it.
Obama will win by at least 100 but probably by a far bigger margin unless something arrives out of left field. McCain is looking old, tired and defeated.
No point in following the national polls. Look at the key swing states and that will tell you everything you need to know.
That's not splenetic?!
Well, maybe a little crusty
I think the article engages with the nuances - of both the two men's public image and the tug of war in any thoughtful voter's own heart when he has to elect a politician - in a way Hitchens' doesn't. There is one very rude line -
And when he picked Sarah Palin, he told the United States of America to go feck itself.
- but it has the advantage of being a really good one! Wieseltier sounds like a proper mature human being, albeit a cynical one - not a schoolboy ideologue like Hitchens.
I think the article engages with the nuances - of both the two men's public image and the tug of war in any thoughtful voter's own heart when he has to elect a politician - in a way Hitchens' doesn't. There is one very rude line -
And when he picked Sarah Palin, he told the United States of America to go feck itself.
- but it has the advantage of being a really good one! Wieseltier sounds like a proper mature human being, albeit a cynical one - not a schoolboy ideologue like Hitchens.
Raoul speaks the truth.
we will know real early next tuesday.
If Virginia is called by 8pm its over (obama will win)
Obama by 6.8 (thats landslide mate)
and this includes your tip poll that the conservative what to point to because it was the closest poll in 2004
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/
Hmm. Straws, clutching?
I don't necessarily believe that it will be a landslide, but that's just a gut feel with no proof behind it. Whatever evidence there is shows McCain losing. Heavily.
Look for me on the news... I am organizing a group of 5 churches, so far, to meet at the Lincoln Memorial.
Gathering will start at 5pm ET.
We will be holding up signs for the tally wear Martin Luther King spoke his 'I Have a Dream' speech, each hour.
Ah, a spot of chicken counting I see....
Ask Al Gore how valuable winning the popular vote is.
Like, Socialism
by Hendrik Hertzberg
November 3, 2008
Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.
“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)
As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.
The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.
Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”
On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain and Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie evidence of Obama’s unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:
YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .
MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.
For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦
by Hendrik Hertzberg
November 3, 2008
Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.
“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)
As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.
The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.
Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”
On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain and Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie evidence of Obama’s unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:
YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .
MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.
For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦
Americans wouldn't recognise socialism if it introduced itself wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the legend "Hello I am socialism".
This isn't particularly a gathering of strictly Obama supporters, but the location will be important if he does win.
Yet, I doubt many McCain supporters would show.
I told a friend 2 months ago...watch for Virginia going blue...and Obama becoming our President...still McCain is going all out in PA...
I cant wait to see Obama's half hour informatial tomorrow....should move some polls again to a 375 landslide for Obama
Pew poll...has Obama 53 McCain 38........15 point lead...and Pew is a very respected pollster.....it is showing a steady increase for Obama over the weeks...
now this may be real funny....
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/10/28/breaking-news-arizona-officially-within-two-points/
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/10/28/breaking-news-arizona-officially-within-two-points/
hehe
McCain's paradox is that he has to go after PA since Obama is probably already over 269 - so the only road to a McCain victory would be to pick off a substantial blue state and win all of the current red swing states that Obama is currently leading in. This reveals the sheer desperation of the campaign and how Obama nearly has him checkmated.
The majority of the polls still are not factoring in a large percentage of black voters turning out.
The pollsters were wrong throughout the primaries due to this factor - usually in Obama's favor.
Looks like they haven't adjusted their polls.
BLOWOUT.
The pollsters were wrong throughout the primaries due to this factor - usually in Obama's favor.
Looks like they haven't adjusted their polls.
BLOWOUT.
Pew has had a 3 point Dem lean this whole campaign. On the other hand, it's one of the few polling cellphones
The black vote may well be underestimated, but he's clearly not going to win by double digits. Anything above 6-7 would be a massive surprise. bear in mind a majority of undecideds will probably break for McCain.
I don't know why anyone's looking at any polls or meta-polls like RCP when there is http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. All hail http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/.
yea, voter's in a some states have started early voitng, and they complained that when they touched 'democratic party' it registered as a vote for mccain, but corrected it the second time.