Category: Politics & Elections

Ignore them. The samples are too small and not random.

FiveThirtyEight.com gives Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, …”

Today is the day we give our consent. If you haven’t already, please vote.

Tom Johnson writes a great essay about voting. He begins:

“I love election day. I love voting. I love the old people who work in the polling places, their friendly, businesslike way of going about things.”

Go read it.

RealClearPolitics lets you select your own red states and blue states, then save the map and/or email it.

(Click each state to change it.)

This is the 11th time I have voted for President of the United States.

And I have never voted for the winning electoral votes.

Six times I have voted for the person who lost both my state’s electoral votes and the election.

Three times I voted for the person who won the election, but my state didn’t give its electoral votes to that person.

And once I voted for the person my state gave its electoral votes to, but that person didn’t win the election.

My fellow New Mexicans and Americans, help me out here. Tomorrow, please do your part to make the 11th time the charm.

In Arizona.

Via Oliver Willis

Just sayin’.

Again, giving credit where it is due, I have stolen the title of this post from Atrios.

Pew says 15% say they have already voted and Obama is beating McCain among that group 53% to 34%. In a poll of registered voters taken October 23-26, Obama leads 52-36; 53-38 among likely voters.

Reason Magazine has calculated that even if McCain gets every undecided vote, Obama still wins 306 electoral votes.

And FiveThirtyEight.com tells of a study that says for the presidential election at least, New Mexicans have the greatest chance of having their one vote matter.

I see they finally caught up with that scofflaw Ted Stevens for almost running me down in a crosswalk in front of the National Archives in 1973.

Ha!

And there’ll be at least one less vote for Stevens in his reelection bid next Tuesday.

His.

Felons can’t vote in Alaska until they’ve finished serving their sentence.

Perhaps 50,000 to see Obama in Albuquerque last night; 100,000 in Denver today.

What’s happening?

I for one appreciate the McCain campaign treating us like children. McCain will bring us back to a simpler time. A time when you could identify your neighbors’ jobs by the hats they wore. Like Sam the Fireman, Bill the Cowboy and Jose the stereotype. These are the people in your neighborhood. The people that you meet when you’re walking down the street. They’re the people that you meet each day. And what the people in your neighborhood, the Joe the Plumber, the Wendy the Waitress need are tax cuts for the wealthy and off shore drilling. They don’t need universal health care or last names.

The Colbert Report

Estimates for the crowd for the Obama rally in Albuquerque last night range from 35,000 to 45,000.

Three things to keep in mind.

1. People don’t vote at rallies.

2. Still, John McCain attracted a crowd of less than 1,000 in this same city only hours earlier.

3. If 40,000 people were at the Obama rally, while it lasted the rally was the 7th largest city in the state of New Mexico.

UPDATE: It now appears 45-50,000 were at the rally. That would make the Obama gathering larger than all but four New Mexico cities.

Or, put another way, 2½% of the entire state population.

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone.”

McCain adviser quoted by CNN.com. I’ll leave it to you to figure out who he’s describing.

… less than 1,000 people were at the McCain rally here in Albuquerque today.

We’ll let you know how “That One” does this evening.

Also NewMexiKen has heard or read three different reports today about how quickly individuals were able to get in and cast their vote. On a Saturday.

If you can vote early, please do. The United States is, as you may have heard, a representative democracy. That means you need to vote to choose your representatives. Being informed is good, too.

I know that as soon as I get a little more informed about these presidential candidates and make a decision about them I’ll head on over and vote.

(Oh, and Research 2000 says McCain’s lead is down to single digits in South Dakota. South Friggin’ Dakota!)

Author, actor John Hodgman:

Do I like Obama, personally? I do. Do I think he’s got good policies? Look, I’m like everyone else, I hope so. They sound good. They sound like something I believe in, so I think based on his performance and the way that he has run his campaign, I feel that it is reasonable to feel confident that he is going to take the same discipline and smarts and lack of drama and apply them to the very serious issues today and I think that makes him a good choice for President. Do I think that his candidacy is historic? Sure, that’s exciting too, but what I think it’s really amazing that he exists in the same world that I also inhabit and no other political candidate lives in that world right now. They live in a made-up world that is not reality. I think that that’s why you see Obama surging right now. It’s that the people like the fact that Obama lives in the world that they live in.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

Sarah Palin:

Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Reality:

Now scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for these nerve cell connections to form and function correctly.

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism …

Palin, who McCain claims is an expert on autism, here reveals her ignorance by parroting smart-alecky remarks written for her for small political gain without regard to reality.

This country cannot afford to let ignorance continue to lead our world.

Tonight in Colorado, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of the McCains, described Cindy as “a great small businesswoman.” Her “small” business — Hensley & Co., a family-owned Anheuser-Busch distributor that is the third largest among the 800 in the country — had revenues of nearly $200 million last year, according to Yahoo.

Political Intelligence – Boston.com

Small business? $200 million? These people are so beyond out of touch.

Both presidential candidates are in Albuquerque today. Aren’t we the lucky ones?