MCCAIN VOLUNTEER ATTACKED AND MUTILATED IN PITTSBURGH:

Via Glenn Reynolds:

This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy may have yelled at a Palin rally once.

From WTAE-TV in the Pittsburg area.

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, apparently because of her political views, Pittsburgh police said.

According to WTAE's news exchange partners at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ashley Todd, of College Station, Texas, was using an ATM at Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m. Wednesday when a man approached her and put a knife to her throat.

Police spokeswoman Diane Richard said the robber took $60 from Todd, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

From the Chesler Chronicles

Folks: This is not good. American v American in a race war, a class war, a gender war even while jihad has been declared against America?
Forget about all the voting fraud allegations and the chaos at the polls: Do we all have to get guns? Will we need the National Guard to protect us when we vote? Or to walk voters home?

Michelle Malkin has doubts.

Why that McCain volunteer’s “mutilation” story smells awfully weird

I'm leaving my belief in suspension. But this case is at least as real at the man in the McCain crowd yelling "kill him."

Republican HQ Manager's Home Shot Up Over McCain Signs

Meanwhile the MSM reports on the rowdy crowds at Palin rallies.

NY Times Profits slide, downgraded to junk status

Faster please.

Vanderleun:

NY Times Stock Dumps Below $10. Times to Become a Junk Bond. And Now This!

Dateline New York, London, Paris: With American and world markets still reeling from a financial crisis based on the uncertain value of subprime mortgages, journalists took a second hit today when it was revealed that much of their subprime news is defaulting at a higher-than-advertised rate....

“The smaller news sources – your sports scores, local elections, and police reports – we think those still have value. It’s the big news outlets like the Associated Press and the NY Times that are in trouble. They’re holding a lot of Obama and McCain news that they’ve invested in heavily. These have been repackaged and sold to other outlets on the secondary market.”

What if 'SNL' mocked Michelle Obama?

What if 'SNL' mocked Michelle Obama?

Inconceivable.

Pat Buchanan:

Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media.

Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them.

Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.

Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama:

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. ... Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said … we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

A "generated crisis"? By whom? Moscow? Beijing? Tehran?

This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe was warning of a crisis like the Berlin Wall of July 1961, where JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a call-up of reserves, or the missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in Cuba and killing the Russians manning them.

Is Russia about to move on the Crimea? Is Israel about to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear sites? What is Joe talking about?

If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know.

Instead, what we got was Obama's airy dismissal of Joe's words as a "rhetorical flourish" and a media – rather than demanding that Joe hold a press conference – acting as Obama surrogates parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying that new presidents always face tests.

Had John McCain made that hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have run with the story rather than have smothered it.

Contrasting McCain with his hero, Joe declared a few weeks back, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and ... said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

Nice historical reference. Except when the market crashed in 1929, Hoover was president, and there was no television.

Can one imagine what the press would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle?

Joe gets a pass because everybody likes Joe.

Fine. But Joe also has a record of 36 years in the Senate.

Has anyone ever asked Joe about his own and his party's role in cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history and the Cambodian holocaust? Has anyone ever asked Joe about the role he and his party played in working to block Reagan's deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold War?

In the most crucial vote he ever cast – to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq – Joe concedes he got it wrong.

Is Joe's record of having been wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the Iraq war, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her 10-year-old nephew to "teach him a lesson"?

"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know," says Joe humbly. Given his record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much of it.

Saturday, the New York Times did a takeout on Cindy McCain that delved back into her problem with prescription pills. Yet when Hillary's campaign manager, Mark Penn, brought up Obama's cocaine use on "Hardball," he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the gold standard.

The people apparently had a "right to know" of Bush's old DUI arrest a week before the 2000 election, but no right to know about how and when Obama was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine.

The media cannot get enough of the "Saturday Night Live" impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.

Can one imagine "Saturday Night Live" doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her "I've never been proud" of my country, this "just downright mean" America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?

"Saturday Night Live" would be facing hate-crime charges.

How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.

Is there a media double standard? You betcha.

BIDEN'S BUNGLES: A BLATANT BIAS

Joe Biden is a human gaff generator. Yet when he makes erroneous statements or just makes stuff up, it’s passed off as “that’s just Joe,” as if this sort of thing is a characteristic of an otherwise incredibly smart man. But incredibly smart men don’t tell the whoppers Joe tells. Serous statesmen don’t misunderstand the constitution.

Kirsten Powers tells us that Biden gets away with endless idiotic comments because his media pals “know” he’s no idiot. I think that not quite true. They let Joe Biden get away with being an idiot because he’s “their” idiot. Joe Biden is a dangerous man because he thinks he’s smart when in reality he’s a BS artist who has never been called on his BS. It’s gotten him elected and re-elected to the Senate, a relatively innocuous job. It does not make him qualified to be President-in-waiting.

Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden's propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to "gird your loins" because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden's statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden's remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: "It's just Biden being Biden." We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it's not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States "drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon," nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn't take it as evidence that he's clueless.

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting.

Read the rest.

Most Male Workers Have Low Level Jobs, Feminists Never Seem to Care.

Ever notice that feminists are always aiming for the top jobs, never garbage collectors?

The phrase “Apex Fallacy” sprung to mind as it elucidates fully the inaccurate fashion by which they assess the status of women in America. The error in their thinking arises from a collective refusal to acknowledge that the vast majority of male workers toil in the nether regions of our economy. These hordes of men—who make possible feminist lives of leisure—are totally invisible to the harridans who compare women, on aggregate, to the rich and famous alone. Indeed, when judging female progress, juxtaposition is only made with those males at the apex of our status hierarchy. It seems that feminists can discern none but the elite.

I have some workers at my house to re-do the kitchen. There is one woman involved, the wife of the owner, who's doing some painting, but the rest of the workers are men. Why are femininsts not outraged?

Read the rest.

John Galt, bin Laden and Saddam Hussein Contribute to Obama

I turns out that the Obama fund raising powerhouse doesn't care who they get money from:

Is the Obama campaign knowingly receiving illegal contributions? Yesterday one of our readers reported the results of an experiment he conducted:

I've read recent reports of the Obama campaign receiving donations from dubious names and foreign locales and it got me wondering: How is this possible?

I run a small Internet business and when I process credit cards I'm required to make sure the name on the card exactly matches the name of the customer making the purchase. Also, the purchaser's address must match that of the cardholders. If these don't match, then the payment isn't approved. Period. So how is it possible that the Obama campaign could receive donations from fictional people and places? Well, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to the Obama campaign website and entered the following:

Name: John Galt
Address: 1957 Ayn Rand Lane
City: Galts Gulch
State: CO
Zip: 99999

Then I checked the box next to $15 and entered my actual credit card number and expiration date (it didn't ask for the 3-didgit code on the back of the card) and it took me to the next page and... "Your donation has been processed. Thank you for your generous gift."

This simply should not, and could not, happen in any business or any campaign that is honestly trying to vet it's donors. Also, I don't see how this could possibly happen without the collusion of the credit card companies. They simply wouldn't allow any business to process, potentially, hundreds of millions in credit card transactions where the name on the card doesn't match the purchasers name.

In short, with the system set up as it is by the Obama camp, an individual could donate unlimited amounts of money by simply making up fake names and addresses. And Obama is doing his best to facilitate this fraud. This is truly scandalous.

Our reader was not yet done. He tried the experiment on the McCain site: "I tried the exact same thing at the McCain site and it didn't allow the transaction." He then repeated the experiment at the Obama site:

I went back to the Obama site and made three additional donations using the names Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses. All the transactions went through using the same credit card. I saved screenshots of the transactions.

Powerline has more. Obama supporters say that complaining about fraud is whining.

AYERS: RADICAL LOON WHEN OBAMA WAS ONLY 47

Ann Coulter:

The media are acting as if they completely and fully vetted Obama during the Democratic primaries and that's why they are entitled to send teams of researchers into Alaska to analyze Sarah Palin's every expense report.

In fact, the mainstream media did no vetting. They seem to have all agreed, "OK, none of us will get into this business with Jeremiah Wright, 'Tony' Rezko, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and everyone's impression of an angry Michelle Obama on 'The Jerry Springer Show.'"

During one of the Democratic primary debates, Hillary Clinton was hissed for mentioning Syrian national Rezko, and during another, ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking Obama one question about William Ayers.

In the past week, TV anchors have taken to claiming that Obama "refuted" John McCain's statement that Obama launched his political career at the home of former Weather Underground leader Ayers.

No, Obama "denied" it; he didn't "refute" it. If "denying" something is the same as "refuting" it, then maybe the establishment media can quit harping on Palin's qualifications to be president, since she too "refuted" that by denying it.

Read the rest.

Police drag protesters away from Palin motorcade

I GUESS THEY'RE WORRIED ABOUT ANOTHER "BROOKS BROTHERS RIOT" IF MCCAIN LOSES

Glenn Reynolds:

I GUESS THEY'RE WORRIED ABOUT ANOTHER "BROOKS BROTHERS RIOT" IF MCCAIN LOSES: Police departments in cities across the country are beefing up their ranks for Election Day, preparing for possible civil unrest and riots after the historic presidential contest.

HACK: If You Never Hater Reporters Before, This Will Change Your Mind

Michael Hastings is a despicable human being, watches porn in hotel rooms while masturbating and is a scum sucking asswipe known as a reporter ... but I repeat myself.

Read his story if you have the time and a strong stomach. This is the kind of creature we have "interpreting" our candidates for public office. And pretty high on the food chain at that.

Biden Yet Again

Michael Ledeen:

We are just back from a long weekend in and around Billings, Montana, happily without internet connection for most of the time. So it is only now that I’m catching up on the latest utterances of our leaders. I have long said that Senator Biden is one of the dimmest bulbs in that great overdone chandelier known as the U.S. Senate, and his performance in this campaign has certainly added dimness to his luster. As Governor Palin said just yesterday, if she had said the things Biden has said, she’d be carved into little pieces by the MSM and by the narcissistic intellectuals who frequent the oped pages and the talk shows. Whether remembering FDR’s television performances or the great American victory over Hezbollah in Lebanon or a local restaurant that hasn’t existed for two decades, Biden simply invents his world every day. I guess if he doesn’t have a text to plagiarize, he just can’t get it straight.

Suddenly, everyone paid attention to an offhand remark he made to friends at a fund raiser. And for once, I think he got it right, warning that if Obama were elected, he’d be severely “tested” quite early in his presidency. ”

“Watch. We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

“And he’s going to need help . . . to stand with him. Because it’s not going to be apparent initially; it’s not going to be apparent that we’re right.”

This sort of a thing is a commonplace for incoming presidents; I can’t remember one who wasn’t told something like it during the transition period, and a lot of energy is invariably devoted to analyzing likely scenarios and designing adequate responses. On this one, Biden is simply part of the conventional wisdom. The surprising part of his statement is the last sentence. What does he mean when he says “it’s not going to be apparent that we’re right”?

Of course, it may mean nothing. Lots of Bidengaffes are simply the result of an inability to stop talking, and words just come pouring out. But it may mean what McCain is suggesting it means: that Biden knows that Obama has no sense of what the world is really like, and it’s likely that Obama’s initial reactions will be misguided. The inference would then be: so until I, Biden, get him straightened out, he’s probably gonna look bad.”

On the other hand, he may think he knows something real. There are some blog reports suggesting that US intelligence agencies now believe that Iran will be building its first bomb by next February, and Biden may take those reports seriously. If so, President Obama would have to do something. What? Does Biden think that his administration’s first instinct would be to call a conference and then fly to Tehran to negotiate a big deal? Or does he think it would then be necessary to take drastic action? The talking cure seems more to Obama’s taste, but no serious person believes it would succeed.

Who knows? But imagine if Palin had said such a thing. We’d have a million column inches explaining why she doesn’t belong on a national ticket.

Making Voter Fraud Respectable

Jack Shafer at Slate has given up on the attempt to say that voter fraud is not a problem. He defends it as an old American tradition in “Stolen Elections—as American as Apple Pie”

It’s called the “Clinton Defense.” After denying that Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinski, his defenders then said that .. sure he had sex, but everyone lies about sex.

So now we have the excuse that everyone cheats to win an election. Everyone makes Mickey Mouse eligible to vote. Everyone has the dead vote absentee ballots. Everyone buses the homeless to as many polling places as possible to vote under fake names. Everyone does it and we should not get all bent out of shape about stolen elections.

Shafer:

Getting a place on the short list of the greatest voter frauds would require something a lot more brazen than smuggling a few thousand ineligible voters onto the rolls, as ACORN has been accused of doing by some critics. Even a casual fanning of U.S. history books reveals hundreds of more blatant examples, including ballot stuffing, the purchase of votes, counterfeit votes, discarded ballots, voter intimidation, and bloody murder.

Glenn Reynolds:

GETTING AHEAD OF THE STORY: Stolen Elections—as American as Apple Pie. Old spin: Fraud is a myth! New spin: What's wrong with fraud? As I've said before, if the NRA were registering Mickey Mouse to vote, the press would be a lot more upset about it than it is about ACORN.

Again:

CNN: Ex-ACORN worker: 'I paid the price' for voter registration fraud.

Clifton Mitchell helped register nearly 2,000 voters for the community group ACORN. But not one of them actually existed. "I regret it. I paid the price for it," he said.

Mitchell was convicted last year and spent nearly three months in prison. He's one of the few ACORN workers convicted of voter registration fraud.

Read the whole thing. But remember, voter fraud used to be a myth, but in the new spin, it's all-American!

ACORN: Obama's Red Shirts

From Investors Business Daily

Voter Fraud: Republican leaders want to defund and criminally investigate ACORN. Why should taxpayer dollars fund a "nonpartisan" organization that proclaims "Obama needs ACORN, and we need Obama."

That the greatest attempt at voter fraud in the nation's history is being funded in large part at taxpayer's expense is more than a bit ironic. House Minority Leader John Boehner wants it stopped and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wants the group allegedly behind the fraud, ACORN, criminally investigated and prosecuted.

ACORN calls itself a "nonpartisan" group seeking to register minorities and the poor. But its political arm has endorsed Barack Obama, who both trained the group's staff and sued the state of Illinois on their behalf. And Obama's campaign has given ACORN affiliates $800,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive.

In fact, it's a get-out-the-vote for Obama drive as evidenced by a video recently aired by Fox News that showed just how "nonpartisan" the group is. It was taken at ACORN's national convention where Rep. Maxine Waters spoke to a sea of ACORN organizers wearing their uniform of red baseball caps and shirts.

Waters, to great applause and cheers, said: "This has been the worst presidency that this country has ever known. But that's all right. We're getting rid of his (President Bush's) ass. He's got to go."

The next speaker, an ACORN representative defined who "we" meant. She said: "We're getting Obama for president! Obama needs us, ACORN, but we need Obama. Don't we? Yeah!"

A list of government funding of ACORN released by Boehner reveals that some $31 million in taxpayer dollars have been given to the group since 1998. Using Federal Register records, Boehner found ACORN got the money through 54 individual grants in 11 different states.

Read the whole thing.

Code Pink and Karl Rove

Ann Althouse has this video on her web site:


and compares it to Beavis and Butthead:

King Co. Practice Ballot

The Naked Loon:

Powell Endorsement of Obama

Vanderleun:

"I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy's window, and say it smells like roses."
-- Lyndon Johnson

The problem with the daily buzz is that it buzzes. It whines in the ear until many people cannot hear themselves think... if indeed they think at all.

Today's buzz is all about the endorsement of Colin Powell of Barack Obama. Pinhead punditry on all levels is agog in glee and rapt in wonderment. Well, what for many is a big buzz for me remains a big "ZZzzzzzzzz."

What exactly is the surprise here? Did anyone really think that when it became clear that Obama was going to have a real shot at the title, people like Powell would come out and announce themselves as a race traitor? Some might have hoped so, but for Powell and his Republican fellow travelers what decides these things is their social reality, not the integrity of their intellect or even gratitude for favors past.

What we all need to understand when contemplating the turncoat moves of people such as Colin Powell, Peggy Noonan, or Chris Buckley over the last few weeks is that they are merely triangulating their fortunes for a possible future world. It is just cynical positioning.

This positioning is done with the knowledge that there will be no consequences for them if the O-world does not come to pass, but there will be adverse consequences for them if it does. Turning the coat, if you are a conservative or a Republican at this juncture, is a win-win for all of them.

This is because, as we all know, there are no permanent consequences for conservatives or Republicans if they "go off the reservations." There are, as we all know, dire consequences for liberals or Democrats if they go off the reservation by even so much as an inch. Those consequences are loss of influence, friends, allies, dinner party invitations, and other forms of social and political death.

Conservatives can leave the tent and, if they are wrong in judging which way the chips fall or the fan is hit, they will be welcomed back after a brief mea culpa. Liberals can be down with the entire progressive/liberal schtick but if they so much as say, "I'm not so sure about this facial piercing thing," they are out. For good. Unless, perhaps, they stage a public ceremony where they smooch the bronze buttocks of Barack at high noon in Macy's window on 7th avenue in New York, with the media in attendance hosted by Kieth Olbermann. When this is done they will be required to declare, "It smells of roses." And even then it will be a close run thing.

Chris Buckley has nothing to lose and a host of social invitations and lucrative writing and book contracts to gain.

Peggy Noonan has less than nothing to lose and a continued seat at the dinner parties of the rich and Democrat to gain.

Colin Powell has even more of less than nothing to lose than Noonan. He enhances his already overblown reputation as a senior statesman as well as getting himself a chip in the Obama game should Obama win the Presidency. He maintains and even enhances his speaking fees. Obama's winning or Obama's losing is still all good for Colin Powell. He makes more money and status coming and going.

What Powell's endorsement means in terms of bringing actual votes over to Obama, however, is approximately zero. Or so close to zero that the gap lets through no light at all.

How many people do you think that were either "undecided" or edging towards voting against Obama will be swayed by the august endorsement of Colin Powell? Probably about as many who believe, in their hearts, that his endorsement was "not about race." I put that at somewhere between 3 and 5 votes. Nationwide.

It is, of course, all about race. It always has been about race. The race is nothing if it is not about race. Powell knows that, but he didn't get where he is by not being someone who can lie when it is in his interest. Being able to lie straight-faced is the first and last requirement for climbing high in the government. Being successful in the media is the first and last current requirement for not questioning bald-faced lies like Powells. And the pinhead pundits of America are not found wanting in this regard.

The meaning of the Powell lie is that endorsing Obama is good, not only for Obama, but first and boremost it is very, very good for Powell. There's no real risk or downside. He's golden.

Dishonest polls, dishonest victory?

If McCain wins the election after the "polls" show him losing, the results could be bad for many people. We have to ask if polling is damaging democracy.


Eric Scheie at Classical Values:

Like a lot of people, I've been wondering about those polls.

If McCain were to pull ahead of Obama (as he has four or five times before), wouldn't the Obama campaign be so scared that they would want the results either changed, statistically skewed, or somehow not reported?

I realize they don't have the kind of influence to skew the polls, but I was thinking about what Jim Geraghty's mentor said earlier:

"Believe me, there is someone in the Obama campaign who is deathly afraid of the 'McCain pulls even or goes ahead' poll." (And in Gallup, it was within 2 percent.) "That Obama strategist knows how much depends on the whole Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel approach --.work with the media to demoralize conservatives, and keep the perception of a juggernaut going. But a day or two of a few bad polls, and that strategy backfires. The conservatives know they've still got a shot at this."
(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Well I for one am glad these are all reputable pollsters who would never skew their results in the juggernaut's favor.

Because if they were skewing the results to make it look as if Obama was ahead when actually McCain was ahead, then a McCain victory would come as a huge and terrible shock -- a gut-wrenching one that would be bad for the country, because people would think that either McCain "stole the election" or else the voters were a bunch of dishonest "racists" who "lied" to pollsters (the so-called "Bradley effect" -- which actually involves not hiding racism, but fear of being accused of racism.)

That wouldn't be fair at all. Because the more dishonest the polls were, the more they'd help convince voters that an Obama victory was inevitable (thus helping Obama), and more dishonest any McCain victory would appear to be (thus inflicting maximum damage on McCain if he managed to win).

I'm glad they're not doing that.

Democrats Admit Pennsylvania In Play

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 Corbett speaks with Sean Smith, Communications Director for the Obama-Biden campaign for the state of Pennsylvania about an email Corbett received concerning internal polling.

Gallup and New Coke

DJ Drummond explains why the polls are wrong.

The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdoctal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition.
...
So, could I be wrong? I have to be honest and admit that I could. But in that case, we'd have to ask why the polls do not generally agree with each other, why Gallup is trying to spin three different models at the same time to get a grasp of the picture, why McCain and Obama are both so interested in Pennsylvania, yet neither is working very hard in Ohio right now. We'd have to explain why McCain-Palin rallies are now attracting thousands more people than Obama-Biden rallies, why Letterman suddenly found it cool to have McCain on his show and SNL decided they wanted Palin on theirs. We'd have to explain why there are not a lot of Obama signs visible, but we hear about his army of lawyers getting ready. We'd have to explain why McCain and Palin appear to be so relaxed while Obama and Biden look like they're worried.

What I think is happening, is this - the polls' headquarters were based deep in liberal territory, where the assumption was that Obama's candidacy would actually create a groundswell of pro-democrat voters unseen in the country since 1932. That McCain is more experienced with the key issues than Obama was ignored, that the historical significance of the debates shows that the effects appear several weeks later was also ignored. That the economy could be as reasonably blamed on the democrat-controled Congress as on the republican President was never considered. That character would be a salient factor in the decisions of voters was rejected out of hand.

The polls are wrong. Make your own mind up, because your vote will matter.