[Update:

“Our nation”s highest court has protected the voting rights of all Ohioans, allowing our bipartisan elections officials to continue preparing for a successful November election. We filed this appeal to protect all Ohio voters from illegal challenges and barriers that unfairly silence the votes of some to the advantage of others,” Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said.]

Lyle Denniston writes:

The Supreme Court on Friday lifted a federal judge”s order that would have required Ohio election officials to set up new procedures to verify voter registration across the state in the weeks before the Nov. 4 balloting. The unsigned (“Per Curiam”) order is here. The order blunts an effort by the Ohio Republican Party to gain access to registration data that would enable it to challenge voters” eligibility at polling places.

The state GOP had complained that the Ohio Secretary of State had violated her duty, under federal election procedures law, to share with county election boards the lists of voters whose names in a voter registration database do not match data in the state”s drivers” license files. The GOP argued that the secretary of state had put a stop to required efforts to pass along the non-matching data so that local election officials could deal with it. Lack of matches could be the basis for challenges.

The Supreme Court said it was not expressing any opinion on whether the state official had violated any duty under federal law. But, it said, it was not persuaded that the federal law gives a private party – like the state GOP – a right to go to court to enforce those provisions in the Help America Vote Act.

Will Ohioans actually get to vote without interference? I’m betting the fight isn’t over by half.

Via Writes Like She Talks…

1225: What if this was the McCain who”d been campaigning 24/7?

“On Good and Evil”

It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.

That’s not a good guy.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

Via Slate…

There is a desire, almost a primal need, to reduce Senator John McCain to a caricature. By doing so, by rendering him as completely other, we enable ourselves to dismiss and even hate the a man who has served our nation most of his adult life.

And so we simplify and place reasons in neat boxes. A reader at Daily Dish, however, offers an epiphany that has given me pause.

McCain was so angry Wednesday night, he looked unhinged at times.

The question is: Why? Clearly, this is nothing new. But last night was nearly over the top. What is seething down underneath there?

You know I’m all for Freudian, Shakespearean and Jungian analysis (with a large dash of Orwell thrown in for good measure) – and god knows McCain has plenty to analyze – but I woke up this morning with this simple thought:

McCain is just indignant. To his mind, Obama has given him his personal word on several matters – public financing, town hall meetings, and of course the infamous lobbying reform bill – and in each case, Obama has broken his word. His personal word. His man-to-man word. Or so McCain sees it.

What do you think?

A Daily Dish reader writes:

They are killing me. I am a registered Republican. I live in Virginia. But I am clearly not a “Virginia Republican…” Ignorant Christian Fascism is not a recipe for success, it’s Saudi Arabia under a different prophet. Count me out. Despite differing with the Democratic platform on a great number of policies, I will gladly vote for the Obama ticket because at a minimum it promises adults at the helm, a rational approach to policymaking, the return of science over theocracy, the restoration of the primacy of the rule of law, and the creative destruction of that assemblage once known as the GOP.

Writer, journalist and blogger Jimi Izrael will be teaching Introduction To Blogging on Mondays and Wednesday from 6:30 to 9:20 p.m. at Cuyahoga County College’s eastern campus beginning Monday, 20 October.

I’ve been wondering about this for months now. I’m glad that serious people who understand how polling and statistical analysis works are speaking out.

From FiveThirtyEight:

Many commentators — the preponderance of them conservative but also some liberals — take it as an article of faith that the current polling numbers overstate Barack Obama’s position because of the so-called Bradley Effect: the notion that some material number of voters will lie about their intentions to pollsters, claiming that they will vote for a black candidate when in fact they will vote for the white guy.

A fairly typical example comes in the form of a blind quote from a Democratic strategist this morning at The Politico:

A huge challenge for Obama, insiders say, is simply determining how much skin color will matter in November. Race is nearly impossible to poll – no one ever says “I”m a racist” – and no campaign wants it revealed they are even asking questions on the issue.

“It”s the uncertainty that kills me – we know it”s going to be factor, but how big a factor?” asks a Democratic operative with ties to the Obama camp. “How do you even measure such a thing?”

Is there really so much uncertainty as this “operative” implies? Black candidates run races every cycle for the Congress and for the Governor’s Mansion, and academics have spent copious time dissecting those results. And while we’ve never before had a major party nominate a black man for President, we did just finish an exceptionally competitive primary campaign in which a black candidate ran against an extremely popular white candidate with more than 35 million voters participating.

As we have described here before, polling numbers from the primaries suggested no presence of a Bradley Effect. On the contrary, it was Barack Obama — not Hillary Clinton — who somewhat outperformed his polls on Election Day.

And then there’s V. Lance Tarrance, Jr., who was there in 1982:

Now that polls indicate Senator Barack Obama is the favorite to win, some analysts predict a racially biased “Bradley Effect” could prevent Obama from winning a majority on November 4th. That is a pernicious canard and is unworthy of 21st century political narratives. I should know. I was there in 1982 at “ground zero” in California when I served George Deukmejian as his general election pollster and as a member of his strategy team when he defeated African-American Democratic California gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley, not once but twice, in 1982 and again in 1986.

Bradley Effect believers assume that there is an undetectable tendency in the behavior of some white voters who tell pollsters that they are “undecided” when in fact their true preference is to vote against the black candidate. This so-called effect suggests the power or advantage to alter an outcome – a pretty serious charge. This would render poll projections inaccurate (overstating both the number of undecided voters and the African-American candidate’s margin over a white opponent) and create an unaccounted for different outcome. However, it is indeed a “theory in search of data.”

Tim Russo this morning has the right idea. We can’t be distracted by ignorant fear and superstition of those whose heads will explode on 4 November when Brack Obama is elected President of our United States of America.

And then there’s Jimi Izrael…

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is How to be a comic book hero.

Joe The Plumber isn’t registered to vote?

Tim Russo writes:

The legal reason? In 2004, the GOP let this entire strategy rest on their precinct challengers, at the polling place level. The challengers were permitted by law to challenge a voter”s registration, get the precinct official to question it, and thus get the voter to vote provisional. In 2008, precinct challengers are no longer permitted. So no one in the precinct representing the GOP can challenge registrations on November 4. That”s the legal reason for making this a pre-election day tampering effort.

The operational reason? This effort collapsed on election day, largely because the GOP had a hard time deploying an organization of people with the onions to stand between a black man and his vote in Democratic precincts. I ran into so few of them on election day in 2004, seeing just one GOP challenger was news, and even those eventually gave up, because not a single person in a black precinct in Cleveland wanted them there. That”s a little hard for a squiddly little douchebag goober from Bay Village to endure. And if they couldn”t do it in 2004, they sure as hell can”t mount even that level of organization in 2008. Continue Reading »

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Leading With Their Left.

The above illustration is not from some fringe group of Republican loonies, but rather from the official Republican Party website for the Republican Party Office in Sacramento County, California.

This was considered, judged acceptable and posted to the website.

Via Metafilter…

Via Andrew Sullivan…

I wrote this morning that if I were a McCain supporter I would buy or borrow a video camera and be at every Obama event I could find.

Why do you suppose that’s not happening?

[Update — 1311, Novamom has provided 10 links as evidence in support of the thesis that Obama supporters are just as bad, if not worse, than McCain supporters in their irrational personal attacks. Here’s the list: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.

Before I discuss this list, however, I’ve asked Novamom to address the questions I put to her concerning the first article — written by Michael Barone — she offered.

Don’t expect to see this response in the Cleveland Plain Dealer — Terry Eger wouldn’t want to do anything to relieve Tim Russo’s too-early-in-the-morning astonishment — but Bill Callahan has a document from Kris Harsh, Cleveland’s ACORN director that tells the organization’s side of the story.

To: Interested Parties
From: Cleveland ACORN
Date: October 8, 2008
Re: The Truth About ACORN”s Voter Registration Drive

With less than a month left until Election Day, we want to take this opportunity to update you on ACORN”s work to turn the unprecedented excitement of this election season into a powerful and lasting movement for change.

Nationwide, ACORN”s voter registration drive concluded Monday October 6th and we helped register over 1,300,000 voters-most of them from low-income, African-American, and Latino communities. This is the largest and most successful drive in our history, conducted in a total of 21 states, with the largest efforts focusing on 16 states, including AZ, CA, CO, CT, Fl, KY, LA, MI, MN, MO, NV, NM, OH, PA, TX, and WI. Our largest successes included over 148,000 registrations in Pennsylvania, over 152,000 in Florida, more than 217,000 in Michigan and over 238,000 in Ohio. Roughly half of these voters are under thirty, and for many of them this will be their first vote ever. Continue Reading »

0825: Liberal Bloggers and the MSM Embrace Work of Sexual Predator

1704: ALERT! GO VOTE TODAY for Tubbs Jones” and Fannie Lewis” replacement.

1650: Liberal Bloggers and the MSM Embrace Work of Sexual Predator

Tim’s general response is also instructive.

0936: The Man Behind ‘The McCain-Palin Mob’

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.