John McCain was for closing Guantanamo Bay and moving detainees to Leavenworth before he was against it.
What I don’t get is why Republicans want to keep Guantanamo open so badly, and why they’re so opposed to transferring detainees to supermax facilities in the United States?
The McCain-Palin campaign chartered a JetBlue Embraer 190 to fly Alaska Governor Sarah Palin around the country. It ended its voyage in Anchorage earlier this week, and was returned to JetBlue.
The 2-engine jet then flew the 2694 miles from Anchorage to Buffalo yesterday, setting a world distance record for the E190. The standard range is 2071 miles.
The conventional wisdom on the Presidential election seems to point to the economic meltdown as the point in the season when Obama broke away from McCain in the polls and established himself as the definitive frontrunner. I couldn’t disagree more.
The point at which things fell apart for John McCain? September 24th, the first night of the Sarah Palin interview with Katie Couric.
The rolling three day averages for McCain went into the shitter shortly after Palin was humiliated by the least serious network anchor in television history. Getting intellectually pwned by Katie Couric is akin to getting your ass kicked by a drunken dwarf. Palin killed the McCain camp in traditional conservative circles and did nothing but alienate independent voters and women. McCain’s favorability ratings dwindled and then Tina Fey happened. From that point on, the election was a fait accompli in my eyes.
Anyhow, it was obvious from jump street that this woman was woefully unqualified for national office. Of course, McCain and the right wing media machine defended her and accused the critics of media elitism and cultural snobbery rather than admit she was unqualified.
They didn’t vet her, she was a hail mary selection meant to bump the numbers and she was a completely unserious pick. As the post-election recriminations begin, we are finding out just how incredibly reckless, cynical and misguided her selection really was.
Her lack of readiness and tremendous negatives forced McCain towards the scorched earth campaign he launched in the final month due to her inability to right his faltering candidacy.
As Carl Cameron of Fox News eagerly reports (he’s so giddy to tell the story he uses the word “knowledgeability”), there were incredibly fundamental problems with Ms. Palin as a candidate. Shep Smith responds with the requisite dignity.
Whereas Bill O’Reilly acts like a defensive tool when given the story.
Africa is a country? Misunderstanding of basic civics? Didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA? Fucking hell. The most troubling aspect of all of this is that the McCain looked America in the eye and said she was ready to be a hearbeat away from the Presidency. Country First?
Tomorrow is the day. The smart money says Obama’s got it in the bag.
However, Obama’s win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he’s gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen shttp://buffalopundit.wnymedia.net/blogs/wp-admin/post-new.phphowing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side).
Secondly, McCain’s clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.
Busloads of people from Western New York are now in Ohio to get out the vote, because the race has been tighter there – and Ohio is more susceptible to hijinks – than elsewhere in the area. Phonebanks to GOTV are still being held at the Polish Cadets Hall with calls being made to battleground states to ensure that people know where and when to vote, and that they know their rights. You can even make GOTV calls from the comfort of your own home.
On the Mesi, Stachowski, and Kryzan races, you can do lit drops or phonebanks for them, as well. Yesterday, the Republicans threw a dirty trick at Mesi by doing a robo-call during the Bills game that was designed to inflame people’s anger. Don’t let them and their cynical, bigoted bullshit win.
This has been one of the strangest, longest campaign cycles I’ve seen and I’ll be rather relieved when it’s over.
Don’t forget that you can follow us here at WNYMedia.net, and we’ll feature video and liveblogging right here on Election Night, complete with interviews from both Democratic and Republican victory parties.
Drudge has become almost laughable in his ridiculousness. Just about every day, he finds something – anything – to back up the premise that Obama is losing. One day, it’s a tightening of the Gallup “traditional model” poll, which one day had McCain within 2 points of Obama, but now shows Obama expanding his lead to +8. Somehow that poll is absent from today’s Drudge Report.
Today, a Zogby internal shows a one-day one-point lead for McCain! This must mean the voters are breaking for him! This is it! Sirens! Woot woot! One point for one day does not momentum make, and tightening of the polls as election day approaches matters little and is expected to happen. So while Drudge’s influence wanes, let’s look at what’s really going on.
Firstly, Nate Silver at the must-read-brilliant Fivethirtyeight.com explains away the alleged significance of Zogby’s one-day internals:
Firstly, there is a reason that pollsters include multiple days of interviewing in their tracking polls; a one-day sample is extremely volatile, and have very high margins for error.
Secondly, the Zogby polls have been particularly volatile, because he uses nonsensical party ID weightings, which mean that his weighting process involves making numbers doing naughty things that they usually don’t like to do.
Thirdly, Zogby polls are generally a lagging rather than a leading indicator. This is because he splits his interviewing period over two days; most of the interviews that were conducted in this sample took place on Thursday night, with a few this afternoon. The reason this is significant is because lots of other pollsters were in the field on Thursday night, and most of them evidently showed good numbers for Obama, as he improved his standing in 6 of the 7 non-Zogby trackers.
Finally, there was no favorable news for McCain to drive these numbers. Polls don’t move without a reason (or at least they don’t move much).
Take a close look at the party weighting link. Zogby’s party ID model assumes it’s 2004 again, when everyone was just feeling peachy about George W. Bush:
There is one very, very significant concern with Zogby, which is that he has a longstanding rule to set his party weightings based on the exit polls from the most recent election. In this case, that means 2004, when a roughly equal number of Democrats and Republicans turned out. However, according to essentially every available poll, Democrats now have somewhere between a 5-point and a 10-point advantage in party ID.
This particular procedure has bitten Zogby in the ass before. Between 2000 and 2004, there was a shift in party ID toward the Republicans; as a result, Zogby’s numbers were 2-3 points high for Kerry across battleground states.
So, back to reality, from Pollster.com – the tracking composite from September 1 – date:
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Pollster says Obama has 311 electoral votes including leaners, while McCain has 142 including leaners. 85 electoral votes are judged to be “toss-ups”, including Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. (There are 10 hour-long lines to early vote in Georgia right now).
RealClearPolitics gives Obama the same strong & leaner 311 EV, while it gives McCain only 132 EV, counting Arizona’s 10 among the toss-ups.
Here’s the RealClearPolitics tracker of all polls from 2004. Note how Bush led Kerry throughout September and October. Anyone who suggests that Kerry was leading in the polls at this point in that campaign is a liar.
Now, compare the 2004 tracker to RCP’s 2008 lines:
No complacency. No sitting back & relaxing. Things are looking good – better than you’ve probably heard – but there are still three long days to go.
Evidently, Joe the Plumber – who was soooooo angry at the media for finding out what he does, the fact that he’d benefit from Obama’s tax plan, and that he doesn’t pay taxes himself – now has an agent and is looking to get a country music deal.
Wonkette also brought this up, which is dead-on:
As for this clusterf*ck yesterday, one wonders whether McCain’s campaign could have one day done right.
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