Monthly Archives: October 2008

In the last half hour, the Zogby folks have done some correcting to their site and the numbers now make more sense. I think there was a problem where they'd updated some parts of the site and not others, and now they all match up.

Kerry won 252 electoral votes in 2004. He wound up with 251 because one elector didn't cast his ballot properly but that's irrelevant. If Obama starts with the exact same states plus he wins Iowa (7) and Virginia (13), he's at 272 and he gets to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There are obviously other scenarios that get him there but right now, McCain has pretty much conceded Iowa, and all the polls seem to have Obama ahead in Virginia by 7-11 points.

Zogby presumes Obama has a lock on all the Kerry states but one. He has New Hampshire (which Kerry carried) in the "probable" column. But he also has New Mexico (which Kerry did not win) as a safe state for Obama. New Hampshire has four electoral votes and New Mexico has five. So that explains why Obama is at 273 in the Zogby poll. Before the update, that wasn't evident.

I still think Zogby is unreliable but in this case, their findings match what almost all the other pollsters are saying. And Mr. Zogby is still contradicting his own polling when he suggests that McCain can win if he sweeps all six states where Obama's lead is within the margin of error. Right now, Zogby has Obama at 286 even if McCain wins all six.

I get a steady stream of e-mails from readers of this site who favor John McCain and seem to think they can swing the election his way if they can only flip my (already-cast) vote. One has been bombarding me all weekend with news that the race is tightening; that "the polls" show McCain gaining to within four points of Obama. I finally took the time to write back to the guy and inform him…

1. The poll he's citing is the Zogby Poll and it doesn't say four points. It says 4.8 and it's headlined "Obama Lead Holds Steady."
2. This is the Zogby Poll, which is about as reliable as a fishnet condom. You know, a lot of election watchers cheat and when a pollster tells them what they want to believe, he's the only pollster that matters…but when he has bad news for them, he's biased, full of crap and not to be taken seriously. Not around here. Do a search. We consistently think Zogby is useless. This is the guy who told us halfway through Election Day of 2004 that Kerry would win with 311 electoral votes. Getting it that far wrong a day or two before would be bad enough…but this was with exit poll data!
3. Even Zogby has been up and down this time, with wild swings in many races that are inconsistent with the other polls.
4. Zogby has Obama winning handily from an Electoral College standpoint. He says, as all the polls do, that Obama is sure to win all the states Kerry won, plus Iowa's seven electoral votes. That alone puts Obama at 259. Then Zogby also awards him Virginia, which has 13. That works out to 272 votes and a win for Obama, even without all those other states in which Obama presently leads.
5. But Zogby doesn't seem to read his own polls. He says, "McCain is well within striking distance in each of the six states in which he trails. None of Obama's leads are outside the margin of error. However, unless McCain can take one of the big states won by John Kerry in 2004, such as Pennsylvania, he needs to win these six states. He might be able to survive the loss of Nevada, but probably not any of the others." Yeah, but Zogby's own electoral map has Obama at 273 without any of those six states (Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Colorado). McCain needs to win most of them plus something like Pennsylvania.
6. Why 273? If you go to that map right now, you'll see that 252 electoral votes (what Kerry won) plus Iowa's seven and Virginia's thirteen all add up to 273 votes! Anywhere else, those numbers would add up to 272 but this is Zogby.

Polls are going to be all over the place this week and everyone will seize on any possible outlier if it's what they want to believe. Look at the big picture. It's a big election and a big country. It deserves a big picture.

Guess where I am and what I'm eating.

If you live in California and you're struggling with all them weird propositions, take a look at this blog post by Kevin Drum. I don't quite share his automatic denials of bond issues, though I guess I agree with the theory. I voted for two of the ones he says no to, but otherwise, I think he's correct.

Methinks we especially should not pass Propositions 4 and 8 — for reasons that should be obvious — and Proposition 10, which looks at arm's length like something that will advance the cause of "clean energy." Actually, it would more likely advance the financial well-being of oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who seems to have decided there's serious money to be made if you can out-Algore Al Gore. This editorial explains why. Mr. Pickens is turning up on my TV more often than the Geico Lizard and looks even slimier.

There are folks who don't believe in Global Warming simply because Gore says it's so and they think anything Al Gore says must be automatically disbelieved. I don't think that makes any sense…stopped clocks and all that. But I am skeptical of anything T. Boone Pickens says, especially when he's pouring millions into advancing a cause that should net him billions. If Pickens wants to convince America that he has the world's best interests at heart, he oughta do it as a pro bono project. And it would help if he apologized for funding all those Swift Boat ads against John Kerry.

The late Bill Everett was a giant among comic creators, widely admired by his peers and popular with the readers. His name is invariably linked with his greatest creation, the Sub-Mariner…but he also drew the first issue of Daredevil and claimed to have come up with the basic idea behind the character. Here's a piece on another "creation" of his…his daughter Wendy Everett.

Last evening, I was napping — or rather, trying to nap — when I heard someone pounding on my door. Turned out, it was a McCain volunteer working the neighborhood, trying to convince folks to save the world from the inexperienced commie-terrorist on the ballot.

We have a simple policy here at Casa Evanier: We don't buy anything from or give any money to anyone who comes to the door that way. Ever. If you were going door-to-door handing out free hundred dollar bills, we'd slam said door in your face. Especially unwelcome are those who think a brief porch visit will prompt me to change my religion…and the McCain worker was perilously close to that category.

Still, she seemed like a nice, sincere person…nice enough that instead of scolding her for waking me up or mocking her for thinking she could possibly make one bit of difference, I talked to her for a few minutes. She admitted that California was a lost cause and even told me that she'd been ringing doorbells all day and didn't think she'd flipped one voter from blue to red. The few positive notes had come from other McCain backers thanking her and encouraging her…but also, she told me, declining to donate cash to a lost cause. I did say to her, "John McCain has written off this state. Don't you think it's about time you did, too?" (For some reason, possibly because I was still half-asleep, I forgot to tell her that I'd already voted. As bad as the odds of her convincing me seemed at the moment, they were actually worse.)

One of two things she said that made an impression on me came when she admitted her efforts wouldn't change the outcome but explained, "I just couldn't sit and do nothing." In other words, she was standing on my welcome mat, not so much for the nation's benefit as her own…and y'know, I could almost respect that. She's not going to swing California's 55 electoral votes over to the McCain column but she might make herself feel a little better for having tried. In a like situation, I think I'd feel like I was compounding the loss, adding a colossal waste of time (mine and others') to all the other bad things I believed to be occurring. But obviously, she and I do not see the world in much the same way.

The other lingering impression was not something she said so much as the urgency in her voice. She's scared…scared Obama might be a secret Muslim and/or radical who'll destroy America with a socialist agenda. (I said, "Yeah, he might even start partially nationalizing banks," but she didn't hear me or didn't get it.) On the one hand, I think the current McCain-Palin crusade to make people feel as she does is great — great because it isn't working. Every day, their campaign demonizes Obama by another notch and every day, another state that formerly seemed bright red moves to pink or even light blue. On the other hand, it's a shame to scare people like that. They panic, they get ulcers, they divide our country and spread apocalyptic visions of the future…and worst of all, they knock on my door and wake me up when I'm trying to sleep. That kind of thing — the waking-me-up part — has got to stop.

Thinking of sending out for pizza? Well, if you're really hungry, Big Mama's and Papa's Pizzeria on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles will send over a 54-inch square pizza for "only" $199.99 plus tax. That's just for your basic cheese. Toppings will run you fifteen bucks apiece. They say it'll feed 50-70 people.

The pizza comes in a 54-inch box and I guess if you order one, you have to have a doorway that can accommodate it. After all, you can't exactly turn the box vertical to get it inside.

I was at a party a few months ago where they brought in Big Mama's and Papa's pizzas but in the less awesome 36-inch round size. They came cut into slices, most of them square, and I remember thinking it was very awkward to reach the ones near the top. People ate the slices at the front of the box and then someone had to elevate the back of the box a little to allow the hard-to-reach slices to slide down to the front where they'd be accessible. I also remember thinking that if you'd spread tomato sauce and melted cheese on the cardboard box, it would have been tastier. Bigger is not always better.

I don't know how many of you have been following this story but the other day, a low-level McCain campaign worker named Ashley Todd reported that she'd been assaulted at an ATM in Pittsburgh. A tall black man (she said) had noticed the McCain bumper sticker on her car and this had led to him blackening her eye and carving a backwards "B" on one of her cheeks. The "B" apparently stood for "Barack."

There was a brief period when some bloggers and McCain's Pennsylvania communications director tried to drum up outrage in a way that might make people mad enough to vote for McCain. But most people seemed to sense that there was something amiss with her story…and sure enough, she has confessed it was a hoax and that the damage was self-inflicted. (I don't think, by the way, that this reflects in any way on Senator McCain except, of course, for the fact that his Pennsylvania communications director is kind of a sleazeball.)

Police reportedly knew instantly that the young lady had done this to herself. It was because of the backwards "B," which suggested Ms. Todd had applied the damage in a mirror. When I heard that, my mind flashed back to another unscrupulous fraud who tried pretty much the same scam and made the same mistake.

Some of you probably remember Morton Downey Jr., who had a loud and shrill talk show back in the eighties. He was like Jerry Springer but without the class. Downey was a right-winger who was hated by right-wingers for making them look like screaming maniacs and by left-wingers for what he screamed. His show was popular for a brief period — about fifteen minutes, as I recall — and was cancelled after two years.

Soon after, Downey was in the news again. He reported he'd been assaulted in a men's room at the San Francisco Airport. A bunch of neo-Nazis beat him up, shaved his head and painted a swastika on his face…or so he said. Police noted that the swastika was painted in reverse…and Downey eventually admitted that he'd applied it and that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt.

Moral of the story? When you fake getting assaulted by someone who wrote on your face — and you will; I know you — don't look in a mirror. See what valuable things you can learn from this website?