Saturday Open Thread [9.22.12]

The first day of Fall! The local primaries are done, but there is still campaigning going on. The Democratic Coordinated Campaign is walking neighborhoods for candidates this weekend. Are you out working for any candidates this weekend?

Where’s Mitt?

Every day, Daily Kos lists the scheduled campaign appearances by the candidates and their spouses. For at least the last two weeks, I've been gobsmacked (love that word, borrowed it…

He Will Follow.

If Mitt Romney wins the election, undoubtedly a vanishing possibility but still a possibility, he will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu Government in Israel, currently lead by Prime Minister Netanyahu. In case you are living under a rock during the last three years since this latest Likud government has been in power, the Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu is not interested in peace. It is not interested in fairness. It has illegally pursued further expansion of the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. And it seeks, openly and in a manner than can only be described as "frothing at the mouth," preemptive war with Iran. Sound familiar? Indeed, a Netanyahu-Romney pact for war is a foregone conclusion. And isn't it always the other way around? When an American President is recognized as having a partnership or alliance with another foreign head of state or government, isn't it always recognized that the American leader is the senior and superior leader in the alliance? Remember Clinton-Blair, Bush-Blair and Reagan-Thatcher? In our horrible hypothetical future, for the first time I can ever recall, the American President, god forbid Mitt Romney, would be the junior partner being told by the senior partner, Netanyahu, what to do and when to do it. Romney is on record as seeing no way he could ever say no to an Israeli prime minister on anything. So there you have it.

A 1960 Question.

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog last week and have been meaning to pass it along. It concerns an interview with a Mormon feminist (which seems to me to be a contradiction in terms) named Judy Dushku. She relates her personal experience with the Republican nominee for President of the United States, which took place when Mr. Romney was running for the Senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994.

Imagine If…

Republicans embraced the anti-vaccine idiotic message:
I'm glad that (apart from Donald Trump) the anti-vaccine movement isn't really linked to the right. Can you imagine if vaccine skepticism were seized on by the right-wing noise machine? It would spread like wildfire. A third of Americans simply wouldn't vaccinate their children, insisting that the health effects of vaccination are just a "theory." Every Republican in Congress would have to sign an anti-vaccine pledge. There'd be movements to make vaccines illegal in the red states, and dispensers of vaccines would be defunded in those states, and their offices would be shut down. Right-wing billionaires would bankroll documentaries linking vaccination to Hitler and eugenicism, and the Fox/talk radio crazies would flock to those documentaries, which would break box-office records. Half the books on the bestseller list would have covers depicting Democratic politicians as Dr. Mengele.
So... I guess there's a silver lining?

Friday Open Thread [9.21.12]

First Read reports that the actual election (i.e. the casting of actual votes) begins in half the country tomorrow.
"Idaho and South Dakota today are the first states to begin early-in-person voting. Also today, absentee voting begins in Minnesota, West Virginia, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Georgia, Arkansas, Idaho, and Maryland. This brings the total number of states already accepting ballots to 12. Thirteen additional states (South Carolina, New Jersey, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Delaware, Virginia, Louisiana, and Missouri) will begin absentee or early voting on Saturday."
Meanwhile, we have the full Bill Clinton interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

TGIF Polling Report [9.21.12]

Holy Bajeebus. YouGov dropped a metric ton of polls on us yesterday, and their results turned Ohio, Virginia, and Florida a lighter shade of blue. I might have to read up on Nate Silver's grading on YouGuv. Other states got bluer, like Nevada, Michigan, Iowa and New Hampshire. No state changed hands though, and we are stuck with the same numbers on our Electoral College map as we have been for weeks: Obama 347, Romney 191. The stability of the race is a feature. A refresher on my methodology in coloring the map: 1) I do not count Rasmussen or other obviously Republican polls; 2) I prefer Registered Voter results versus Likely Voter results (although by now the transition to likely voter models is almost universal); and 3) if we have multiple polls in a state on one day, then the majority finding rules. And if you want a refresher on why as state is a particular color, the legend key is at the bottom of the map. Here is the new map:

Romney’s Base is Literally Dying

With the Republican base already shrinking, you know as the United States starts turning different shades of brown, there is more bad news for the GOP.
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.