Open Thread

24 Comments

1. 

   PsiFighter37 on November 1, 2008 at 5:22 pm

   Here are my Electoral College predictions. First, what I think is likely to happen – Obama gets 375 electoral votes in this map:

   

   The best possible scenario would be to add, in order of likelihood, Georgia, North Dakota, Montana, NE-02, Arizon, and West Virginia for a total of 412 electoral votes:

   

   Winning any of those deep-red states would be really, really awesome. At this point, I just want to blow out the GOP so that the only states that can lay any claim to are in Appalachia, the Deep South, and pockets of the praries and Mountain West.

2. 

   idredit on November 1, 2008 at 5:22 pm

   Electoral: Obama 342

   Senate:    Dems 59

   House:     Dems + 30

   Last minute surprise: Bush appears on Teeve with a JD speech to the nation…. A Thank you, “I’ve found relief”

   No OBL tape. It’s been magnetized. OBL is pushing daisies…so they resorted to the aunt.

   As Josh Marshall wrote McCainism needs to be defeated, to be rebuked.

3. 

   robertdsc on November 1, 2008 at 5:39 pm

   As long as Obama hits 270, I don’t care how or where he does it.

   By the way, with La Belle Palin saying she’s up for 2012, those 4 years are going to take their toll on her son Trig. Think she’s going to cart him around when his Downs Syndrome asserts itself? What about Piper and Willow? They going to be dragged around, too?

4. 

   idredit on November 1, 2008 at 6:01 pm

   while felons are being purged from voter rolls, In alaska, Sen. Ted Stevens gets a waiver so he can vote – Slate

   So much for moral values:

   Alaska law states that convicted felons are barred from voting if their crime is one of “moral turpitude,” which in Alaska includes a wide swath of illegal activities. “Receiving a bribe” is listed among them, although the state government set up a special review of the Stevens case. In a decision released Wednesday night, the Alaska Division of Elections announced that the senator’s crimes were, in fact, of moral turpitude but that a guilty verdict wasn’t enough to make him a convicted felon for purposes of voting. Until February, when he’s sentenced–and thus “convicted,” according to a more formal definition–he’ll be able to exercise his right to vote..

5. 

   sjct on November 1, 2008 at 6:05 pm

   Waiting til the last weekend before Election Day to drop a “surprise” doesn’t work when some states have already been voting for the past two weeks. It’s like the 12 Days of Christmas; we’ll have had the 17 Days of Electing in NC. I’ve seen so many people wearing “I Voted” stickers I predict there’ll be no one left to go to the polls on Tuesday.

6. 

   idredit on November 1, 2008 at 6:06 pm

   given the various court proceedings –

   Hawai’i officials declare Obama birth certificate genuine

   State officials say there’s no doubt Barack Obama was born in Hawai’i….

   Earlier today, a southwest Ohio magistrate rejected a challenge to Obama’s citizenship. Judges in Seattle and Philadelphia recently dismissed similar suits.

7. 

   KNUCKLEHEAD on November 1, 2008 at 6:08 pm

   I don`t know if this has been posted yet, but here`s a tape of Palin being punked by the The Masked Justices. Les Justiciers Masques
   She believes the person she is talking to is Sarkozy.
   Very funny & very sad.
   Palin is so naive, but jumps right in claiming she hopes to be ‘president’ in 8 years & would love to go “helicopter hunting” with Sarkozy.
   http://blogues.cyberpresse.ca/hetu/?p=70422833

8. 

   granitestater on November 1, 2008 at 6:50 pm

   I’ve spent the day on GOTV here in NH.  I feel pretty good about Obama here, and also pretty solid about removing Sununu from the Senate.

   I’m in CD 1, and my friend and NH’s first Congresswoman, Carol Shea-Porter is in a dog fight.  CD 1 is more conservative than CD 2, and Bradley is slinging crap everywhere.  We think she can, we think she can, we think she can.  

   So, no predictions from me.  Just hope.  Hope that we repudiate the last 8 years.  Hope that the exit polls show that the negative campaign by McCain backfired.  Hope that we continue to trend blue here in NH.

   Vote Hope.

   • 

     idredit on November 1, 2008 at 7:31 pm

     Good of you. I did some phone banking NH PA and Ohio.

     This should cheer you. Gallup Daily Nov. 1, 2008

     Obama 52%, McCain 42% Among Likely Voters, – identical in traditional and expanded

     Obama leads by a similar 52% to 41% margin among all registered voters.

9. 

   dada on November 1, 2008 at 7:18 pm

    

   

   Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the “non-celebrated,” died Friday. He was 96.

   …

   He…moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its “carbuncles and warts,” as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, “Touch and Go.” He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and “never met a picket line or petition I didn’t like.” “A lot of people feel, ‘What can I do, (it’s) hopeless,”‘ Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. “Well, through all these years there have been the people I’m talking about, whom we call activists … who give us hope and through them we have hope.” The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession,” and, in 1995, “Coming of Age,” recollections of men and women 70 and older.

   He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith,” and hope, in his 2003 “Hope Dies Last.” Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for “The Good War,” remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in “Division Street: America,” 1966; limned the Depression in “Hard Times,” 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in “Working,” 1974.

   …

   Terkel’s politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from “a national Alzheimer’s disease” that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated “pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities — that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class.”

   …

   Obama called Terkel a Chicago institution and national treasure.

   “His writings, broadcasts, and interviews shed light on what it meant to be an American in the 20th century,” Obama said in a statement Friday night. “He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, all who loved him, and all whose lives were enriched by the American stories he told.”

   rkymtnnews

   according to a close friend of his, Alton Miller, an associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago…Terkel hoped to live to see Barack Obama elected president.…it’s sad that he didn’t get that final wish, but you can bet he’ll be smiling wherever he is come 5 nov.

   he was, and will always be, a national treasure.

   • 

     Indianadem on November 1, 2008 at 9:41 pm

     Another giant gone. I was reading him during my union activist days back in the 70’s and later got into his radio show that used to run on PBS. To say he was very special is a huge understatement, but I don’t know what else to say at the moment. Rest well Studs.

10. 

    Brad on November 1, 2008 at 7:49 pm

    Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth…somewhere.

11. 

    Drew J Jones on November 1, 2008 at 8:29 pm

    I’ll be the optimist.

    Electoral College: 393.  Obama gets the Kerry states, plus Iowa, Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, and North Dakota.

    Popular Vote Margin: 7.2.

    • 

      Drew J Jones on November 1, 2008 at 8:54 pm

      And, by the way, that’s optimistic only for now.  I’m starting to get a feeling that it might well be something like that.  I think we’re watching some truly amazing things happen in early voting, especially in Georgia and North Carolina but also Colorado and New Mexico.

12. 

    liberaljournal on November 1, 2008 at 8:59 pm

    353 EV
    58 Senate
    +40 House

    If everything goes the way it should…

13. 

    Real History Lisa on November 1, 2008 at 9:31 pm

    Landslide.

    • 

      Oscar In Dallas on November 2, 2008 at 12:26 am

      I’m sticking with the landslide prediction that I made a few months ago.

14. 

    wilderness wench on November 1, 2008 at 9:43 pm

    I don’t believe this election will be decided before 12 AM, 11/5. Probably a bit later. Much flying bullshit in store.

15. 

    Isis on November 1, 2008 at 10:39 pm

    My prediction? Chaos. Election Day Chaos at the polls. That’s what the neocons have in store for us. It’s all they have left.

    (why does my spellchecker flag “neocon”?

    • 

      its simple IF you ignore the complexity on November 1, 2008 at 11:37 pm

      because to allow the word neocon to slide as correct is an affront to the spellchecker’s sense of justice.

      Nothing about the neocons is right except where they fall on a simplistic linear model based on french revolution era political seating charts

      it is the spellcheckers moral duty to flag neocon as wrong, even if spelled appropriately.

      Good job faithful spellchecker… good job.

      • 

        Isis on November 1, 2008 at 11:54 pm

        LOL!!

        I will now pet the spellchecker and give it several treats.

16. 

    americanforliberty on November 2, 2008 at 1:04 am

    Sarah Palin show her foreign policy credentials..

    http://news.aol.com/elections/article/prank-caller-targets-palin/234992

17. 

    michael72 on November 2, 2008 at 2:54 am

    i tend to believe that the first electoral map you have there is the more likely scenerio of the two, though i do find that polling shows missouri and indiana to still true toss ups, with obama slightly ahead in missouri and behind in indiana. N carolina seems to be his. how i would love to see N. dakota go for obama, that would be a huge psychological shock to the republicans. i expect the electoral score to be sonewhere between 353-375+ for obama.

    what has surprised me is how well obama has done overall, and that the race has really not tightening much at all in the entire last month, still leading by 6-9%. very steady national numbers. i attribute that almost entirely to the near catastrophic economic news and it’s all being put at the feet of the reptiles i mean the republicans. i notice in a lot of obama’s speeches and remarks he say ‘bush’ and ‘mccain’ and ‘republican’ at least once or twice in the same paragraphs thereby connecting them in everyone’s minds. and he’s done it so often that….voila!

    in your second map, i can imagine on a very strong turn out him winning georgia and n dakota, but that’s about the extent of it. w. virginia never, he’s 8-13 points behind.

    • 

      michael72 on November 2, 2008 at 3:03 am

      58 or 59 seats in the senate. maybe they’ll have to have a run off in georgia on Dec 4 too if chambliss doesn’t get 50%, and that’s possible.

      250-270 in the House. does anyone really know? it seems as if there’s been too few polls. i know that finally my hometown of syracuse is going to go democratic; it’s been ages. james walsh wisely decided to ‘retire’ this year, he was such a kiss-ass republican, good riddance to him and all like him in the northeast!

      i never thought i’d live to see north dakota, north carolina and indiana as toss up/in play states in a presidential election with a black man as the democratic candidate. it’s amazing.