follow the money iii

from my bookie to your ear:

a lawyer friend of mine deals with bankruptcy cases. he told me that in 30 years of practice, he's never seen a bankrupt bookie. with this in mind, check out the odds being offered on the two candidates by a large selection of bookmakers. obama is being offered at between 1/14 to 1/10 (you'd have to bet 14 dollars to win back 1 + your original bet). mccain is being offered by most bookies at 6/1 (you bet 1 dollar to get back 6 + your original bet). bookies are very rarely wrong. so although, like many of you, i won't truly relax until the election is over and has been declared for obama, i'm pretty sanguine that mccombover and the repugs are history.

top ten reasons for hope

as campaign season winds down to its inevitable conclusion, i find myself more and more drawn to the hypnotizing roadkill splattered up and down the virtual backroad that is the free republic blog, whose membership ("freepers") are well known and loved on the net as hardcore rightwing central.

and hypnotizing it is to behold: the anger, the sniping, the finger-pointing, the utter lack of recrimination ... verily, it is the jelly on a warm slice of schadenfreude.

but not everyone there has succumbed to wretched defeatism — in one of their famous "freep this poll!" threads already amusing enough for its own characteristic lack of irony, one undaunted poster laid down his 28 reasons obama "ain't won nothing yet. it was extremely tough choosing among so many clear winners, but i've pulled a choice ten for everyone's enjoyment.

so with a hearty hand to freeper rotb, i give you today's "freepers" top ten reasons to hope:

10) Polls are meant by the Enemedia, to SHAPE public opinion, not to accurately report it. Get your news here! Stop torturing yourself! We bring the liberal media lies here, and we dissect them through the lenses of Christianity and Conservatism.

9) The PUMAs who know the hows and whys of Hillary getting cheated, will vote Palin, and will pull others. ... Freeper lonestar67 says, “Surveys have suggested that as many as 20-30% of Democrats may vote for McCain based on the rejection of Hillary. If even fractions of these claims are true, Obama would be hard pressed to win the election— especially in key states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

8) Operation Chaos resulted in an overlarge quantity of Democrat registrations that will never ever vote Democratic.

7) McCain has only started to play the Ayers card. McCain has not yet played the Tony Rezko, Odinga, ...

6) McCain opened 50 offices in California. It’s in play! It should be the bluest of the blue, and it is not.

5) The Christian base that re-elected Bush in 2004, knows Sarah is more than a Sunday Christian, and is praying for her.

4) Three people over 50 (white male and two Mexican women), on two occasions, on October 25th, asked me if I know about Obama not being a citizen. My Dad knows, and he emailed all his friends also. Point being, EVERYBODY KNOWS that Obama ain’t benevolently and humbly forthcoming with his birth certificate, and thus something fishy is afoot in Camelot.

3) The Enemedia overstating Obama’s popularity will cut two ways. The lazy, and the youth, (core Democrat constituencies) will not brave traffic and lines to vote on election day, since they were lied to by the KGBMedia to believe that Obama has a gigantic lead. In fact, if I worked for the GOP, I’d make sure free beer/music parties were being held outside of every major blue city before/on election day. They’re called “raves”.

2) Obama has only 75% of the Jewish vote last I checked, just like Kerry (comfortable R win). Gore got 90% (close R win).

and finally, the number one reason all freepers can expect to see obama fall:

[ drumroll ]

1) Kerry won the Nickelodeon kids vote 57/43, and Obama won it 51/49! If you don’t think kids vote like their parents, then you got another thing coming!

don't freepers say just the most adorable things?

follow the money ii

the scene at virtual forecasting market intrade, one week out:

election '08 market prices (last 30 days)

anatomy of a landslide

(h/t glutz78 @ daily kos)

couldn't agree more

let's just agree to disagree, shall we?

senator obama's supporters have been sayin' some pretty nasty things about western pennsylvania lately. [raucous extended boos] and y'know, i couldn't agree with 'em more! [virtual silence] i couldn't disagree ... with you ... i couldn't agree ... with you more ... than the fact that western pennsylvania is the most patriotic ...

david kurtz @ talking points memo:

you can see the glimmer of recognition of the flub, like he just chased road runner off the edge of the cliff. there's the split-second decision to try to pull off a miracle escape. but his legs stop spinning and gravity takes over and from there it's a long way down. for a guy who spent the last week reminding everyone he's not bush, that's got to hurt.

follow the money

the scene at virtual forecasting market intrade:

election '08 market prices (last 30 days)

just picture the candidates

and a new meme is born ...

asked and answered

dispirited die-hard republicans commiserate over mccain's non-game-changing performance at the second presidential debate and wonder:

why on earth would the mccampaign finally be hitting these issues on the trail, and then he didn’t say one word about it (again!) in the debate when he had the eyes of the nation??? it’s like the man wants to lose. ayres is an absolutely legitimate concern. the (imo very real) possibility that obama isn’t even a natural-born citizen is an absolutely legitimate concern. the fact that in four years he took more money from fannie mae than any senator in history except dodd, is an absolutely legitimate concern. and nobody — i’m not counting rush — is talking about the real reason behind the financial meltdown, which is the government holding a gun to the head of banks, forcing them to make affirmative action mortgage loans that had no chance of being repaid. [link mine]

juan cole volunteers one theory:

in the real world of political ads, mccain and his surrogates are shouting ugly insults at barack obama. he is accused is saying that us airstrikes have killed innocents. this is true and mccain said it, too. they say he was on a committee with a professor who used to be a weatherman 40 years ago. and ... ? how nonsensical these attacks are is demonstrated by the inability of mccain to repeat them to obama's face. what sort of allegation won't hold up in a debate? a flimsy one. one with the form of propaganda. mccain's nasty personal attacks on obama were apparently felt by his campaign to be inappropriate to a live appearance. they feared such smears would look mean in the mouth of a presidential aspirant.

update: even obama himself all but calls mccain a chickenshit on national tv:

i am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the mccain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face. but i guess we've got one last debate. so presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.

update #2: now biden's piling it on out on the trail:

all of the things they said about barack obama in the tv, on the tv, at their rallies, and now on youtube ... john mccain could not bring himself to look barack obama in the eye and say the same things to him. in my neighborhood, when you've got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.

update #3: oh snap! you know it's getting ridiculous when even members of the gray panther cheerleading squad start breaking ranks:

king:

michelle, are you not supporting the ticket?

laxalt:

look, i think — i can't believe the tone of this conversation. here we are, three conservative, loyal republican women. and we are talking about a female who could be the vice president of the united states of america. in my estimation, she is being used unfairly as a tool by a team who, by the way, do not even support, nor does their candidate, equal pay for women for equal work. so if she is going to be the traditional vice presidential attack dog — which i concur with bay, that's very much a traditional role — why didn't her male running mate, i.e. the candidate himself, man up and speak to those issues, calling his opponent essentially unpatriotic, calling him a terrorist? i'm sorry. this is not the republican party that bill buckley, that paul laxalt, that ronald reagan raised me on. and i don't believe the american people like this kind of dirty politics. if they can't win fair and square, they shouldn't trash the other guy.

i must admit, it tickles me to hear a paleoconservative biddy like laxalt throw down a neologism like "man up" to challenge the head of her ticket.

how far the mighty have fallen! it was only three months ago that wesley clark was mercilessly excoriated by the mccain camp, the right wing noise machine and the mainstream talking heads for daring to question the mere idea that prisoner of war status isn't necessarily a qualification for the presidency, which cost clark his place in the obama campaign. back then mccain could count on the eager defense of the media to protect him from almost any legitimate inquiry.

but in that time mccain has foolishly sacrificed the centerpiece of the narrative of his entire campaign: his not-to-be-questioned integrity, a facade which he'd been carefully crafting for decades. he figured that he had built up so much house credit, especially with the media, that he could gamble away some negligible portion of his integrity on a bet that he could quickly and permanently tarnish obama. unfortunately for mccain, clinton gambled first and lost, leaving mccain with no cards to play. like the inveterate gambler he's reputed to be, mccain stubbornly doubled-down and bet his integrity on an empty hand, and predictably lost. and when his camp began to attack the media for acknowledging the nasty turn of his campaign, he drove away his best allies.

without his integrity, he no longer has a compelling story for the voters, and without the support of the media, he no longer has anyone to sell it for him, and he's been flailing and flopping and lurching about ever since for some other reason to justify the continued existence of his campaign.

which just reveals how hollow the enterprise is. this is a vanity campaign. it's all about him. its all about how ex-p.o.w. john mccain deserved to win. now that the sterling biography's gone, and worse, now that the collapsing economy is reminding voters that the election is all about the voters, he can't even articulate a coherent narrative or plan that focuses on their lives and how he intends to improve it. he's nothing left to sell them.

the only question left seems to be whether he'll lose like a gentleman. the answer isn't looking good.

i didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms i believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. in truth, i wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. ... in truth, i'd had the ambition for a long time. — john mccain, worth the fighting for (2002)

if you know what i mean

i'm not aware of too many things, but i know what i know, and i know what i mean, starting with the realization that, despite the fanfare of both her convention and debate performances, sarah palin has outlived her usefulness to the mccain campaign.

while her fate was in dire question after her disastrous interviews with charlie gibson and especially katie couric, her circus-animal-like barking of freshly-injected and barely-understood republican talking points cemented her place in the hearts of social conservatives everywhere — while driving fingernails into the brains of anyone to the left of bill o'reilly:

it's become clear that palin is not winning mccain new voters. instead, she's proven only able to keep an increasingly shrinking and increasingly repugnant hard right bloc from jumping ship.

unfortunately for mccain, when you're drowning, treading water is a tactic, not a strategy. neither is climbing on the other guy's back.

knowing what i know now, i feel confident enough to call a landslide victory for obama:

this is what a coalescing landslide election looks like on a distribution map of all possible election outcomes in the electoral college based on polling on oct 2. there is no part of the distrubtion across the red line, shutting out a mccain victory. the highest peak of obama's blue lines now reaches 14% and it is for more than 350 electoral votes.

at the end of the democratic primary, i wrote that whoever won would be the de facto next president and that november will be simply a formality. the primary was, in effect, the general election. i wrote that because i saw then no chance for a republican victory, and i see now too many obstacles stacked against mccain, and none greater than his loss of credibility and even respect of the public, which was famously the best thing he had going for him.

in his attempt to alienate the voters from obama, mccain has only alienated them from mccain. and without any new muck to rake up for the voters, who found the old muck wanting when they heard it from clinton, mccain can only pointlessly sink further into the cesspit he's still digging for himself. still, there may yet be time for his loved ones to stage an intervention with some long-postponed straight talk:

lose with grace, you stupid bastard.

... that is, if the man wants to exit the stage with a semblance of his soul intact.

as for sarah, i predict for her a long career as a conservative darling and political footnote, someone republicans can always call on to help fill shrinking convention halls with downcast party apparatchiks looking for a little spunk, eye candy and stream-of-consciousness right-wing poetry.

so with a nod and a wink, this vid's for you, moose gal: