will post again soon -

The Whole World was Watching

from SFGate

The Chronicle reports that Ulyssies Moore, 92, has waited his entire life for this election. "I never in my lifetime thought I would live long enough to see an African American become the president, even to be nominated by a major party," said the former World War II Buffalo soldier as he cast his vote Tuesday. "A soldier's eyes never cries, but my heart cried for joy when I cast my vote for Obama."

The world's heart cries for joy. What a moment.

President Obama!

Liking these odds

Betfair provides real-time betting odds (below). But first I have to get you smiling today, so watch this;

And MSNBC will have live results as they roll in;

Every Vote Counts

Homer's back, voting in Springfield.

Election eve poll analysis from fivethirtyeight.com

According to Nate Silver -

"With fewer than six hours until voting begins in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the national polling picture has cleared up considerably. Barack Obama is on the verge of a victory, perhaps a decisive victory, in the race for the White House.

The national polls have all consolidated into a range of roughly Obama +7. That is right about where our model sees the race as well, giving Obama a 6.8 point advantage in its composite of state and national polling. Our model notes, however, that candidates with large leads in the polls have had some tendency to underperform marginally on election day, and so projects an Obama win of 6.0 points tomorrow.

Far more important, of course, is the race for 270 electors. It appears almost certain that Obama will capture all of the states won by John Kerry in 2008. Pennsylvania, while certainly having tightened somewhat over the course of the past two weeks, appears to be holding at a margin of about +8 for Obama, with very few remaining undecideds. Obama also appears almost certain to capture Iowa and New Mexico, which were won by Al Gore in 2000. Collectively, these states total 264 electoral votes, leaving Obama just 5 votes shy of a tie and 6 of a win.

Obama has any number of states to collect those 5 or 6 votes. In inverse order of difficulty, these include Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana. Obama is the signficant favorite in several of these states; winning any one of them may be fairly difficult for John McCain, but winning all of them at once, as John McCain probably must do, is nearly impossible.

McCain's chances, in essence, boil down to the polling being significantly wrong, for such reasons as a Bradley Effect or "Shy Tory" Effect, or extreme complacency among Democratic voters. Our model recognizes that the actual margins of error in polling are much larger than the purported ones, and that when polls are wrong, they are often wrong in the same direction.

However, even if these phenomenon are manifest to some extent, it is unlikely that they are worth a full 6-7 points for McCain. Moreover, there are at least as many reasons to think that the polls are understating Obama's support, because of such factors as the cellphone problem, his superior groundgame operation, and the substantial lead that he has built up among early voters.

McCain's chances of victory are estimated at 1.9 percent, their lowest total of the year."

For the record

It is striking to consider, in this paradigm shifting election, that the dirty deeds of the GOP candidate have gotten so little coverage.

The sordid Keating 5 history got some coverage before and after the Obama campaign released a video on the subject at KeatingEconomics.com, but the story never got the traction it deserved, especially in the context of the economic meltdown.

Then there was the pesky revelation that McCain had Iran Contra ties.

And on October 24th, John Dinges revealed in the Huffington Post that; “John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.” (Spanish language version.)

Yet to be questioned (to my knowledge) is McCain’s “heroic duty” in Vietnam, where he participated in an air war that blanket bombed North Vietnam.

The Obama campaign apparently decided not to confront McCain's misdeeds, perhaps determining that it would hurt the campaign more than it helped. Considering the nearly flawless conduct of the Obama campaign, I can only guess they made the right call.

Still, it is troubling to think that a presidential candidate can avoid facing up to such a record.

Obama's Quiet Hero - a sad day before triumph

Huffington Post links to live coverage of Obama talking about his grandmother.

Here's a page from the family "scrapbook";

Shades of 2000?

Fox reports Florida Voter information found on Interstate 4.

The Desperado does QVC

I've got to hand it to McCain - he can be funny as evidenced last night on SNL. There have been other funny bits that I haven't had a chance to post. If you haven't seen it, Sarah Palin in the Oval Office is a must see. Click on every item in the room. And doing homage to Evita, try this.

For those of us addicted to the polls, check out fivethirtyeight's analysis of what to expect on Tuesday. For more analyis of the prospects Tuesday, see the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune who says McCain needs perfect day to best Obama.

Slate's Power Recap

From the Last Debate to the Final Week in Two Minutes

3 days to go - Making Every Vote Count

The LA Times reports that "voting rights watchdogs are sounding the alarm that a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000 could occur in any of a dozen battleground states."

The article cites the purging of 30,000 new registrations from Colorado's voter registry and 10,000 from Florida's, along with irregularities in other states.

The Times quoted Rick Haseen, a professor of election law at Loyola Law School, "I think we're going to see alot of problems, in part because some voters aren't going to find out until election day that they've been dropped from the rolls. I expect this to happen in Florida, where they had a very aggressive, no match, no vote policy."

The Miami Herald explained the "no match" policy - "The ID check spits out voter registrations that don't match driver's license or social security records. It has left voters on a list dominated by blacks, Hispanics and Democrats in a legal limbo -- unless they supply elections officials with additional proof they are who they say they are."

Under Florida state law, voters whose registrations have been questioned can be forced to cast a "provisional" ballot on Nov. 4th, that will only be counted if the voter can provide proper identification by 5 p.m. on Nov. 6.

Some counties, including Miami Dade, are providing regular ballots to "no match" voters if they show up at the polls with matching identification. But this is not required under the law.

Counties that still refuse to grant a regular ballot are required, under the Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning's latest reading of the law, to allow "no-match" voters to turn in photocopies of their ID at the polls.

With new registrations favoring the Democrats by 2 - 1, disenfranchisement of a large numbers of voters would appear to be an obstruction of fair voting practice by Republican voting officials using the cover of law. With so much attention paid to the issue this time around, election officials have an opportunity to prove their fairness by demonstration of fair practice. And it might just improve their political future.

5 days to go - Get Serious! Part II

Need material to counter the fear mongering in the swing states? Fight the Smears and Under the Radar have all the documentation you need to counter each specific attack.

Bill Clinton came out to rally with Obama last night and addressed the GOP's smear of the week - "Don't tell me about redistribution... What Senator Obama has is a plan that works from the bottom up."

These are good rational arguments, but when reality and the ridiculous get so confused, I turn to Jon Stewart, and today I'll add Stephen Colbert, for their ability to boil the news down to its essence. See the previous post.

5 days to go - Get Serious!

Jon Stewart interviewed Obama last night, from Ft. Lauderdale.

But isn't he a socialist?

Colbert didn't stop there. He invited the Socialist Party candidate for President to the show.

All right, so how serious is this?

Down to business - we need your help to win Florida;

Take a few minutes to contact everyone you know in Blue States. Send them the letter below - customized with their names;

Dear old Friend,

We need your help in Florida. Obama leads in some polls by a small margin, is tied in another and trails in yet another. The state is decidedly undecided.

With only 5 days to go – you can help us win Florida’s 27 electoral votes, enough to decide the election. Here’s what we need to get out the vote;

If you have only a few minutes each day;

Call five for Obama And tell all your friends to call 5.

If you have more time;

Go to Neighbor to Neighbor. Here you can choose who and where you want to call.

Choose your battleground state campaign!

Call voters in New Mexico, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, Oregon, Virginia and West Virginia. Or help us get out the early vote in Florida.

Need information to persuade a voter? – go to Makefloridacount.com and choose an article or video from the archive. There is something for everyone there – you will find endorsements from conservatives, Republicans, Catholics, Rabbis, Chicago Jews, Rednecks4 Obama, labor, Nobel prize winners, news organizations.

Are you a student? go to the AdoptFive college edition.

Reports of early voting show very low student turnout. Check out the next video, personalize it here with your friend's name and send it to all your friends and student voters in the swing states.

Please pass the word to all your friends in the Blue States. We haven't won yet.

Obama will win if we get everyone out to vote. We need your help to make it happen.

For hope and change,

Your friend

Here are the action links for your letter.

Adopt 5 - http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/adoptfivefl/

Neighbor to Neighbor - http://my.barackobama.com/page/votercontact/landing

It's your fault video - http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/taf.shtml?id=&nid=Pu5F0XSYwwst4zz1q1oLODQ0MTk5MQ--

"I didn't vote for Obama" - a voter's story

by kentuckyscott (found on DailyKos) Oct 20, 2008

"I'm a middle-class white guy living in Jacksonville, Florida. I've got a wife and two kids. Because the kids had no school today, I took a vacation day from work, and took the kids downtown to vote early. Fifty-nine minutes later, two smiling children and I proudly sported "I Voted" stickers.

But I didn't vote for Obama.

I voted for my ancestors, who believed in the promise of this country and came with with nothing as immigrants.

I voted for my parents, who taught in the public schools for decades.

I voted for Steve, an acquaintance of mine from Kentucky. (Killed by an IED two years ago in Iraq).

I voted for Shawn, another who's been to Iraq twice, and Afghanistan once, and who'll be going back to Afghanistan again soon -- and whose family earned eleven bucks a month too much to qualify for food stamps when the war started.

I voted for April, the only African-American girl in my high school -- it was years before it occurred to me how different her experience of our school must have been.

I voted for my college friends who are Christian, Jewish, Mormon, and yes -- Muslim.

I voted for my grandfathers, who worked hard in factories and died too young.

I voted for the plumber who worked on my house, because I want him to get a REAL tax break.

I voted for four little angels from Birmingham.

I voted for a bunch of dead white men who, although personally flawed, were willing to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and used a time of great crisis to expand freedom rather than suspend it.

I voted for all those people and more, and I voted for all of you, too. But mostly, I voted selfishly. I vote for two little kids, one who has ballet in an hour, and once who has baseball practice at the same time. I voted for a world where they can be confident that their government will represent the best that is in this country, and that will in turn demand the best of them. I voted for a government that will be respected in the world. I voted for an economy that will reward work above guile. I voted for everything I believe in.

Sure, I filled in the circle next to the name Obama, but it wasn't him I was voting for -- it was every single one of us, and those I love most of all.

Who else is there to vote for?"

Be sure to read the previous post for another beautiful story from Ohio.

Forget Joe the Plumber, I Like Mike

Here's a clipping from Ben Smith's column at Politico, quoting an e-mail from Cincinnati -

"Upon arriving at the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Cincinnati to vote early today I happened upon some friends of my mother's — three small, elderly Jewish women. They were quite upset as they were being refused admitance to the polling location due to their Obama T-Shirts, hats and buttons. Apparently you cannot wear Obama/McCain gear into polling locations here in Ohio.... They were practically on the verge of tears.

After a minute or two of this a huge man (6'5", 300 lbs easy) wearing a Dale Earnhardt jacket and Bengal's baseball cap left the voting line, came up to us and introduced himself as Mike. He told us he had overheard our conversation and asked if the ladies would like to borrow his jacket to put over their t-shirts so they could go in and vote. The ladies quickly agreed. As long as I live I will never forget the image of these 80-plus-year-old Jewish ladies walking into the polling location wearing a huge Dale Earnhardt racing jacket that came over their hands and down to their knees!

Mike patiently waited for each woman to cast their vote, accepted their many thanks and then got back in line (I saved him a place while he was helping out the ladies). When Mike got back in line I asked him if he was an Obama supporter. He said that he was not, but that he couldn't stand to see those ladies so upset. I thanked him for being a gentleman in a time of bitter partisanship and wished him well.

After I voted I walked out to the street to find my mother's friends surrouding our new friend Mike — they were laughing and having a great time. I joined them and soon learned that Mike had changed his mind in the polling booth and ended up voting for Obama. When I asked him why he changed his mind at the last minute, he explained that while he was waiting for his jacket he got into a conversation with one of the ladies who had explained how the Jewish community, and she, had worked side by side with the black community during the civil rights movements of the '60s, and that this vote was the culmination of those personal and community efforts so many years ago. That this election for her was more than just a vote ... but a chance at history.

Mike looked at me and said, "Obama's going to win, and I didn't want to tell my grandchildren some day that I had an opportunity to vote for the first black president, but I missed my chance at history and voted for the other guy."

The World Vote

From the Economist;

Every One Counts!

Personalize this message and send it on here.

Colin X - Black militant with ties to terrorists

For the best analysis of the GOP campaign this week, I recommend Jon Stewart's discourse on the real America and radical militant supporters of Obama -

Meanwhile, all us fake Americans better get out there and win some votes!

Again?

from my e-mail;

"Today was the first day of early voting in South Florida and it was a disaster. My husband went to downtown Miami, and he couldn't vote because the machines were not working properly. Then, he went to Coral Gables, same story. Finally he decided to ask for a absentee ballot."

And from the Guardian's report on today's release of the Pew report -

Election Preview 2008: What if we had an election and everyone came?

"Eight years after the uncovered problems in the 2000 election and more than five years after the creation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, millions of Americans will head to the polls on November 4 in what many are predicting will be the highest turnout election in recent memory.

"Like the infamous Nor'easter that sank the Andrea Gail, another perfect storm may be brewing, only this one has the potential to combine a record turnout with an insufficient number of poll workers and a voting system still in flux."