Needlenose

A modest treat from the Obama campaign is above, and here’s a bit of a trick from Team McCain:

We believe this race is winnable, and if the trajectory continues, we will surpass the 270 Electoral votes needed on Election Night.

• National Polls: Major polls last week showed John McCain trailing by double-digit margins – but by the middle of this week, we were within the margin of error on four national tracking surveys. In fact, the Gallup national tracking survey showed the race in a virtual tie 2 days this week.
• State Polls: Iowa - Our numbers in Iowa have seen a tremendous surge in the past 10 days. We took Obama’s lead from the double digits to a very close race. That is why you see Barack Obama visiting the state in the final days, trying to stem his losses. It is too little, too late. Like many other Midwestern states, Iowa is moving swiftly into McCain’s column.
  The Southwest – It is no secret that Republican candidates in the Southwest have to focus on winning over enough Latino and Hispanic voters in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado to carry them to victory. John McCain has overcome challenges Republicans face, and has made up tremendous ground in these states with these voters. For these voters, the choice has become clear, and you have seen a big change in the numbers. John McCain is now winning enough voters to perform within the margin of error – putting these states within reach.
  Colorado – Barack Obama tried to outspend our campaign in Colorado during the early weeks of October and finish off our candidate in Colorado. However, after our visit early this week, we saw a tremendous rebound in our poll position, and Colorado is back on the map.
  Ohio and Pennsylvania – Everyone knows that vote rich Ohio and Pennsylvania will be key battlegrounds for this election. Between the two: 41 electoral votes and no candidate has gotten to the White House without Ohio. Senator McCain and Governor Palin have been campaigning non-stop in these key battleground states and tonight Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pumped up our campaign at a rally in Columbus. Our position in these states is strong and undecided voters continue to have a very favorable impression of our candidate.

Obama campaign faces tremendous structural challenges in the final days of this campaign

• Obama has a challenge hitting 50%: Barack Obama has not reached the 50% threshold in almost any the battleground state. He consistently is performing in the 45-48% range. When we look closely at the primary votes, we see a history of a candidate whose Election Day performance is often at or behind his final polling numbers. If this is true, our surge will leave Obama with even or under 50% of the vote on Election Day.
  
• Early Vote: The Obama campaign has promised that their early vote and absentee efforts will change the composition of the electorate. They have sold the press on a story that first time voters will turn out in droves this election cycle. Again, the facts undermine their argument. In our analysis of early voting and absentee votes to date: The composition of the electorate has not changed significantly and most folks who have voted early are high propensity voters who would have voted regardless of the high interest in this campaign.
  
• Expanding the Field: Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win.. . .

On the Ground

Our field organization has tremendous energy and is out-performing the Bush campaign at the same time in 2004. This week our field organization crossed a huge threshold and began reaching more than one million voters per day, and by week’s end will have contacted more than 5 million voters. Our phone centers are full and our rate of voter contact is significantly out-pacing the Bush campaign in 2004.

Ha, ha, ha — funny stuff, guys! (Check out the links for the punch lines.)

Update: As Josh Marshall notes, the most hilarious bit of creative spin here is the notion that Obama’s ramped-up efforts in once-solid (but now unexpectedly competitive) McCain states like North Dakota, Georgia, and Arizona “shows he doesn’t have the votes to win” — as if Team Barack had given up hope of holding off the McCain juggernaut in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Iowa, and other states where Obama’s already in the lead, and instead is looking to turn the tide in states where he’s still trailing.

It’s one of the clues that Rick Davis is just making up BS and hoping someone falls for it, rather than describing a genuine comeback.  Another is where Davis gets carried away about imaginary private polling numbers from Iowa; rather than just describing McCain’s position in the state as “strong,” within reach,” or “back on the map,” as he does elsewhere, Davis says, “Like many other Midwestern states, Iowa is moving swiftly into McCain’s column.” Which other Midwestern states, Davis forgets to explain.

You have to give Liddy Dole credit for being a team player.  As she prepares to lose her Senate seat next Tuesday, she’s bravely sacrificing herself to make John McCain look like he’s running a clean and respectful campaign by comparison.

Having cut a desperate ad implying that Kay Hagan, her Democratic opponent in North Carolina, had made some sort of secret deal with atheists (to do… well, God only knows what, you might say) — and having been blasted by Hagan’s outraged response — Dole decided to return to the scene of the crime with another ad essentially restating the initial innuendo (video above, via TPM).

Now, it’s entirely possible that Dole’s campaign knows the intelligence level of the voters it’s targeting better than I do, but I find it hard to believe that even famously stupid low-information undecided voters are going to put any stock in the over-the-top hysteria of these ads.  I think Matt Yglesias‘ words of a few days ago are applicable here:

Someone ought to tell these people, though, that there’s some kind of baseline level of plausibility that your attacks need to reach if you want them to be effective. You can say a candidate’s health care plan will cost your family money, you can’t say that a candidate’s health care plan involves chopping up babies and serving them as medicine.

There’s still a couple days left for some frantic, soon-to-be-unemployed Republican to prove Matt wrong, though.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Makes you *wish* it was socialism, but it’s turning into outright kleptocracy:

Banks to Continue Paying Dividends
Bailout Money Is for Lending, Critics Say

U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.

The government said it was giving banks more money so they could make more loans. Dollars paid to shareholders don’t serve that purpose, but Treasury officials say that suspending quarterly dividend payments would have deterred banks from participating in the voluntary program.

As with Iraq reconstruction and Katrina, laissez-faire ideology trumps reality. With Bremer and Brown, the principals involved had little experience in handling the emergency they faced or the foresight to marshall government power to benefit the many. Paulson has been presented as this awesome and brilliant financier, whereas what he’s demonstrating is total incompetence in handling this crisis, mixed with a singular ability to consider only the needs of his banking brethren.

In the British version of the bailout plan, the government put up taxpayer funds in return for receiving warrants (future shares in banks), suspended corporate dividends, and a requirement that the bailout money be paid out in loans. In other words, the goal was to help get the banks on their feet AND help the general economy moving again.

In the U.S. Treasury plan, the first version (“Let’s buy all their toxic assets”) was quickly discarded as unfathomably stupid. Plan B was to become part-owners in the banks (“Socialism!”), but apparently with no other safeguards to make sure the money isn’t being used for anything other than doing the public good. So the banks are using it to purchase other banks, hoarding it to pad their balance sheets, giving out executive bonuses, and paying dividends to their own shareholders.

Anything, in other words, but what the bailout is supposed to achieve. The whole thing is turning into a direct siphoning of taxpayer funds into the pockets of bankers and corporate shareholders.

Ideological blindness mixed with incompetence got us Iraq and Katrina. We shouldn’t be surprised if the bailout plan turns out the same way.

One of the most impressive things about Barack Obama’s lead in the presidential race is that he’s been able to maintain it for so long without while keeping their powder dry on a number of fronts — no ads about McCain’s disastrous choice of a running mate, for example.

But I guess the polls really must be tightening a bit now, because they’re going there:

I think this is the first ad I’ve seen all year with a punch line.

Joe the Plumber evolves into a conservative pundit.  What’s next, a featured blog?  He should be able to blog at least as well as this guy.

Why the fuck are these vote stealing machines still in use anywhere in the U.S.?

I got a couple of calls from these freaks pushing their Prop-Hate anti-gay marriage agenda.  Give the good folks a call now at 800-918-9104.  I’ve been calling them asking if they will help put my ‘plural marriage’ proposition on the ballot.  I’m sure you can think of a fun discussion topic for the nice operators.  Call now!  Call often!

*Update* We should ‘volunteer’ with these freaks then call their mailing list and make ‘helpful’ phone calls “in the spirit of” their most *ardent* supporters.  In fact, we should help out the McCain campaign make phonecalls as well!  Imagine the sympathy we could engender for their causes!

Via Reuters: “Barack Obama speaks to a prospective voter on the phone as he visits the field headquarters of his campaign in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”

One of my more reactionary co-workers has been raving about Obama not being an American, lacking a US birth certificate and therefore ineligable to be POTUS.  I did a little bit of digging and discovered it was just the latest lunatic hope to which the wingnuts are clinging.  Check out this wrong-wing site’s attempt to show that Obama’s posted birth certificate is a forgery.  Coo-coo!  Coo-coo!  Guess Pamela is hoping for a Dan Rather moment.

Fortunately, Shrubya wasn’t able to completely pack all the Federal courts with pinhead ideologues – a sane “US federal judge on Friday rejected a lawsuit claiming Senator Barack Obama is ineligible to seek the presidency because he was either born in Kenya or is a citizen of Indonesia.”

This precisely summarizes the lunacy of extremist gun enthuiasts:

An eight-year-old boy accidentally killed himself while firing a Uzi submachine gun under adult supervision at a US gun fair.

What kind of “adult’ puts an Uzi in the hands of an 8-year old?

*Update* More wrong-wing freaks that wanted to kill Obama