He Was Voted In Anyway...

Quote of The Day: Respect

For now, we have a new president-elect. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, we owe it to the Democrats to show their president the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president.
- Ann Coulter

Full article here.

221: The Number Of Reasons Franken Is A Loser

Al Franken, the loving liberal and senatorial candidate, has lost his Senate race in Minnesota by 221 votes in the latest count.

The latest count - and probably not the last.

The suspicious thing is that somehow 100 votes were picked up in one of the several recounts, and all 100 went to Franken and Obama - of which Senator Coleman's (Franken's opponent's) campaign manager said was "statistically impossible."

Full story here.

Quotes...

The difference between Coleman and Franken, which stood at 725 votes in Coleman's favor Wednesday morning, has changed several times since then as county officials have checked results, and was 221 by Friday evening.

An election night worksheet from St. Louis County showed Franken with 406 votes from Precinct 1 in Mountain Iron. The revised totals Thursday night showed him with 506. Similarly, the vote total for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama increased from 469 to 569 when the final tallies were complete

"Obviously, this is highly suspicious. They found 100 votes, and it's statistically impossible that all 100 votes went to the two Democrats, even in St. Louis County," said Cullen Sheehan, Coleman's campaign manager.

UPDATE: Pajamas Media has more.

THE FINAL ELECTORAL MAP

Well, not totally final, but close enough...

It's very interesting to note that RealClearPolitics was very accurate in predicting this election.

Though I disputed some of their poll formulas (the Pew poll had Obama by about 15, which was ridiculous), their number seems to be very close. Towards the end they were showing Obama up by about 7%-6%, which is about where the tally stands. Also, their electoral map was pretty much dead accurate.

They take many national polls and state polls, and average them, then show that result and apply it to an electoral map. Very helpful. I created this custom map below to reflect the final results:

click to enlarge

Al Franken Loses By 700 Votes????

News agencies are reporting that Senator Coleman retained his US Senate seat in Minnesota, but only by about 700+ votes, beating comedian Al Franken. Maybe if Franken would've again called Rush Limbaugh "a big fat idiot" it would've helped?

Story from Fox.

Results with 100% of precincts reporting.

Quotes:

Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken are going to have to wait a bit to declare themselves the victor in the Minnesota Senate seat after the 727-vote margin in the race fell within the state's mandatory recount law.

That law requires a recount any time the margin between the top two candidates is less than one-half of one percent.

The Associated Press pulled its call for Coleman after reporting him the winner. Franken told FOX News that he is not conceding. He told supporters it'll be "a little while" before Minnesotans know the results.

The margin is well within the threshold for an automatic recount that could drag into December. Franken could have waived the recount, but he said he wouldn't.

The Onion: Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

From Serious Journalism that rivals the mainstream media, The Onion...

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

BIZARRE!!!

Black Panthers at a polling station in a swing state.   No voter intimidation there.

"We're just standing here right now serving our people."

How To Watch The Election Today

A guide to watching the events of today, from the NYPost...

They forget to mention to ignore Big Media's attempt to call the election early, and discourage McCain voters from getting out.





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ELECTION EVE: THE FINAL LOOK

From RealClearPolitics, here is the last look at the polls and electoral map for this election...


So much for the polls tightening. It looks like a blow-out for Obama. Obama leads well in nearly all swing states.

One can only hope Rush Limbaugh is right: if Obama doesn't have a 10-point lead in the polls, he's not going to win this thing. Here's hoping and looking...

Click any image to make it bigger.

Here is the electoral map with toss-up states listed:

Here is the electoral map with no toss-up states: current polling is applied to winning the state or not.

Here are the RCP polls, and their national average:

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How To Watch The Election

McCain faces nearly impossible odds if most of these polls are right - he's trailing too far behind in critical swing states

UPDATE:  Link moved to here.

Very Good Debate On C-SPAN

C-SPAN is great during the election season. You can get a lot of information unfiltered - raw, with no sound bites.

Here's a great debate with Steve Forbes, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Alan Colmes, and others. Serious issues are discussed, but the conversation is always civil and even very polite, and all sides are heard. Why can't presidential debates be like this????

C-SPAN has no embed code for the video, but here's a link to it.

Check out this outrageous statement by Alan Colmes:

"We have a right to know (about Sarah Palin), and I think the press did its job by asking hard, tough questions about (Sarah Palin)... But we know pretty much about Barack Obama, who has been fully vetted. And also, by the way, his executive experience - he ran a campaign that did pretty well. That's a budget, that's executive, that's running something..."

Obama has been "fully vetted"???? How can he even try to pull off this lie? The liberal Kool Aid has finally toasted all of his reasoning skills. If there is one thing Barck Obama is NOT it's "fully vetted". Most people know nothing about his political and ideological formation (unless they've been watching Fox News).

And this crud about running a campaign qualifies as executive experience?!?!? Mr. Colmes, what you are saying, then, is that anyone who has ever run for any public office is qualified for that job on the basis that they ran a campaign. Outright stupidity. And, he takes this right out of Barack Obama's talking points. Obama came up with this point out of desperation, because he has absolutely no real qualifications for the job other than charisma - which is not a qualification per se, but a trait of electability. AND, Obama doesn't directly manage that campaign itself - that's what campaign managers do, so I guess Obama's campaign manager is more qualified for the presidency than Obama.


MORE HIGHLIGHTS (my comments in italics):

14:00 - Mike Huckabee gives a stirring and eloquent presentation of how conservatives view the abortion issue - it gets back to what our founders said - "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". It's not about the politics, Huckabee says, it's about the intrinsic value of that life and all life.


22:00 Steve Forbes
The fundamental reason for our current economic problems is the weak dollar.
Obama's proposals total about 4 $TRILLION - about $50,000 to $60,000 for each family of 4.
"When you lower the price of good things, like risk taking and success, you get more of them."
Our crazy tax code - get rid of it and start over. 6 billion hours spent a year on taxes.
Unions - the Dems want to do away with secret ballots for unionization.

Donna Brazille (Campaing Mgr. for Gore, senior Democratic Strategist)

"This economy will call for more sacrifices."
"We all are in this together, and we have to share..."
"This will require us all to come together as Americans".

Man, I'm so tired of the liberal mantra, "we all have to come together". I always thought they meant solving solutions with consensus and only by consensus. But now I understand that they mean - "we have to take from those that have and give to those that we the Democrats need in our power base."

"It's time we look out for one another."

Does she really believe this? Because the policies she advocates are not about brother taking care of brother - they're about brother giving to Big Brother, and Big Brother deciding who receives government largess. If Ms. Brazille really believes what she says, she'd advocate for complete privatization of all charity programs - food stamps, welfare, assistance, etc. Clearly the best way to do this is to put it in the control of individuals who have only in their mind the interest of the people in need. Government bureaucrats can never do this well, if at all.


32:30 Rick Santorum (former Repub. U.S. Sentator)

"Whoever is elected had better know who our enemy is - and right now I'm not convinced Barack Obama does."
"No one person in this audience could have predicted on Sept. 12, 2001, that we'd be sitting here today without another terrorist incident. That is not a mistake. The party in power gets absolutely no credit for making our country safer, and in fact making the world safer."

38:00 Geraldine Ferraro
Often charming and humorous, but what a blow-hard. She obviously views herself as the sage and having the right to blather on endlessly, which she often does during this debate.

48:00 Steve Forbes "Can you cite any period in American history where the reduction in tax rates at the federal level did not result in an increased economic activity and more federal revenues?

Colmes' only answer was that Reagan left us with a lot of debt - didn't directly answer the question.
Forbes' retort was that the answer is tax revenues did increase under Reagan, but, as today, the congress spent the money and spent some more.
Forbes:

"It's been compared, their spending proclivities, both Republican and Democrat, to drunken sailors, which is an insult to drunken sailors. Because they're spending their own money."
"That is a spending problem, not a revenue problem."

53:00
Forbes, in response to Ms. Brazille asking "why don't you want to give tax cuts to 95% of the American people", says you have to do it the right way - by lowering the tax rates, which are a big burden, and not giving temporary rebates.

57:00 Rick Santorum asks the panel on the left if we should raise taxes because it's "fair", whether or not it increases tax revenues. The panel on the left never actually answered that point.
Ferraro:

"Flat tax (as a policy) is gone!!" "You may like it, it's easy, but it's never going to go anywhere in this country."

Steve Forbes, after Ferraro said flat taxes don't work, pointed out that 25 countries have adopted it and it's worked everywhere it's tried.

1:08 Huckabee points out that corporations really don't pay taxes - the end-users - the public - does. The people who buy their product are the ones penalized.


1:18 The totally unbiased moderator from MSNBC had the temerity to ask if Gov. Sarah Palin was qualified (this question, of course, was asked of no other candidate). Santorum answered, "If Barack Obama's qualified, Sarah Palin is."

Ferraro said that there was "no comparison" between Palin and Obama, because Ivy League schools only pick the brightest, so that makes them better (not joking!).

Ferraro is wrong here, of course, because we already know of Michell Obama that she was let into Harvard via Affirmative Action criteria, not merit. So the very nature of that admission policy means someone else was not able to go to Harvard, because someone less qualified was admitted instead. I actually think she's right - there is no comparison between Obama and Palin - Palin has way more experience.

1:34 Awesome wrap-up by Rick Santorum.

"If in fact (Obama) is elected... you will see dramatic - and I underscore that - dramatic change... from an economic system, that from the days of Ronald Reagan was focused on wealth creation, to one that is focused on wealth redistribution."
"The world has been stable and safe because America has been the leader, not because America has given up its leadership to international bodies..."

Brings up the point that Obama was the only one in the Senate who actually wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act - so get ready for the radical Gay/Lesbian political agenda.

"This is not just one man you're giving (the presidency and power) to... He's not going to write his health care bill. Ted Kennedy is going to write that health care bill. He's not going to write his tax bill - Charlie Rangel is going to write that tax bill. That's what we have to look forward to. Not the moderate..."

1:47 Steve Forbes.
"Somebody said 'the end of the world can only happen once, and this is not it.'"
Forbes' summary is just great - he sums up the conservative position on everything from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to health care.



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THE Most Popular Election Video On Youtube...

11 million views.

Awesome.







Why is it Democrats can never express these kinds of sentiments?

Why is it Democrats don't get that if good men don't fight, bad men will rule?

Why is it Democrats don't understand that if someone knows how to build a nuclear weapon, they can build one after the inspectors leave?

Why is it the Democrats have never counted up all of the dead resulting from peace movements, appeasement, and cowardice?

Why is it Democrats demand tons of experience from a state governor - but only when they're from Alaska, not Arkansas?

Why is it Democrats demand more experience from the bottom half of one ticket - more than even the top half of their own ticket?

Why is it Democrats cannot name one single thing that qualifies as presidential experience for Barack Obama? No, running a presidential campaign does not count.

Why is it Democrats think this country is so putrid and awful, when literally billions of others would gladly trade countries with them?

Yes, of course, some Democrats can do these things. But those exceptions only prove my point.

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New Ads About To Be Unleashed On Obama

These ads have absolutely no impact on me - it would seem anyone paying half-attention to this issue would already know all this stuff. But somehow, there are still people who don't know this information, and who at this late hour in the campaign will ostensibly be swayed by it.

I'm already incensed over Obama's radical past - it's clear he actively sought out the radical elements of the political spectrum.

All of that notwithstanding, GOPTrust.com is going to air these ads all over the country, apparently.











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Obama Leads by 6%? It Could Be 1.9%...

I'm not a pollster, nor a statistician. Perhaps like you, I am quite bemused by the crazy and vast differences we see in all the various election polls - though I note that in the last few days a lot of these polls have tightened, showing Obama's lead shrinking.

I'm a huge fan of RealClearPolitics. They produce, among lots of other great things, an important number that many in the media follow - the RCP national average of polls - a very helpful number, and in theory a great idea: average all of the best polls so as to arrive at a usable consensus number. One number to rule them all.

But I have a problem with their math, at least their statistical sampling.

It started with wondering why their national poll average has not come down more in the face of most of the major polls reporting a smaller Obama lead - from, say, 9% to 3%. This is a huge drop for Obama, but RCP's average has not come down much, nor has their electoral map changed really in the last few weeks - currently, it looks like an Obama blow-out.

But in looking at their source data for their average, one can see that they use 10 polls. The problem is that they are including a "statistical outlier". The data from Pew Research, as listed on RCP's site, shows Obama with a 15-point advantage. That's about twice the next highest poll, and 5 times the size of a few others in the formula.

The WaPo has a timely article out that discusses the Pew poll:

A Pew Research Center poll released yesterday shows a 15-point lead for Obama, a result based on relaxed criteria for when to consider an African American respondent a likely voter, said Andrew Kohut, president of the center. He said the poll shows that roughly 12 percent of the electorate this year is black, up from 2004, with a similar increase among younger voters. Kohut defended this approach, saying there are historically high levels of interest in this contest among both demographic groups. At the same time, he added, "we've consistently shown less enthusiasm and engagement among Republicans than is typical, and the composition of the electorate shows that."

So the Pew poll assumes that the makeup of this year's electorate will be very different from 2004 due to less Republican turn out and much more turnout among the young and African Americans.

So, should the Pew poll even be included in a national average? I'm not accusing RCP of any bias, I'm just saying you get vastly different national poll numbers when that Pew poll is excluded.

In doing the math myself, I find that the national average, including Pew, shows a 5.9% lead for Obama. 5.9% sure looks a lot smaller than 6%, but RCP reports it as "6.0%".

Now, excluding the Pew poll (which, again, is way higher than the others in their formula), I get 4.9%.

4.9% is certainly a lot smaller of an advantage for Obama than 6%, especially when one considers that the average margin of error could be 3%. Meaning, Obama's "6%" lead could really be only 1.9%. And that's pretty close to a dead heat race.

(If anyone from RCP is reading this, I'd appreciate your comments and any clarification you can provide for your formula.)



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"It's The Gaza Strip Calling, Please Vote For Obama"

While taking a break from driving the Jews into the sea, a resident of the totalitarian state of Gaza takes time to call Americans to get out the vote for Obama. Charming...

Keep The Change

Well, McCain won't do it, but the RNC hits Obama on the redistribution issue...







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Got Experience?

Or judgement?

I like this one...






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SCARY EYES!!!!

I'm pretty sure this video is meant to be a campaign ad, and not a Halloween stunt. Hillary at her scariest.

I've looked into her eyes, and I see warmth and humanity flowing as a river of love and equanimity...

Newt Tears Into Elite Media

I've not much followed Greta Van Sustern's show on Fox News, but this was one great show.

She highlighted a CNN interview with Gov. Palin where the interviewer completely turned around and misused a quote from National Review Online. The misquote was from a Jonah Goldberg article where he mocks Big Media's portayal of Gov. Palin - and the CNN reporter of course quoted the mocking part as if Golberg himself intended to say it.

I was pretty much an outright lie by CNN.

Watch this clip - Newt G. goes off on major media.

This really is an Orewellian, surreal time to be a conservative and observe the major media outlets. This truly will be the year, when we look back on it, that we'll see the major media came out of the closet.




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The Comprehensive Argument Against Obama

Amazing piece at HotAir: The comprehensive argument against Barack Obama

For starters, how about abolishing bans on partial-birth abortion and parental notification, and provide tax-payer-funded abortions.



Quotes...

Perhaps if Barack Obama had taken more time to build his resumé – especially with executive experience – he might have made a more compelling candidate, and might have demonstrated at least a little of the moderation he has claimed. Instead, Democrats want America to support at once the most radical and least qualified candidate for President in at least a century. They have tried to conceal this with the complicity of a pom-pom-waving national media that has shown much more interest in the political background of a plumber from Ohio than in a major-party candidate for President.