Vee

It's always "a thin margin" or "eked out" when it's a Democrat. Obama trounced McCain and he's about to trounce Mitt but the DC press has refused to ever admit that a Democrat could possibly have a substantial lead, a mandate or a landslide. That's fine. Wait and see.

In other news, Vivica Fox is finally doing something to make me proud again. State Senator Nina Turner is a beast.

Yeah, that's all I'd have to say at this point if I was a Republican voter, too. Incidentally, the new PPP poll has Obama at 50, and Romney at 47.

Do you read any polls? It's the absolute opposite and has been for several weeks. Paul Ryan has begun leaking stories about his post-election plans, and campaign staffers have begun making excuses for the disastrous campaign and claiming only Sandy won it for Obama. Obama is ahead in virtually every key state and his current odds for winning are overwhelming both among gamblers and pollsters. This is the problem with the right wing echo chamber. You guys are shocked, shocked when you only surround yourself with 'good news' and 'unskewed' polls and come out on Election Day and find out that you haven't been paying attention.

Six paragraphs and you already hit Godwin's Law. Kudos.

I think the electorate can be lazy and mean-spirited when it wants to be. God knows we saw the worst of that in the Bush years, and in many other times in our history. But I think we also are capable of greatness as a people. That prismatic state is the same in any country the world over, and I think it's part of the human condition. I think at core most of us believe in the American dream and a spirit of coming together, even if we don't always practice what we preach, even if sometimes it's just superficial lip service to an ideal. But I don't think it's always lip service, and I don't think it's always a sham. I think there's always been greatness possible, and common decency, and I think that's one big reason why Obama is being reelected. People know he's worked hard, people want to see the country continue to recover, they want to have hope. I think they take immense pride in seeing the auto industry recover and seeing people get back to work. A lot of the public likes to cast itself as cynical and jaded for the sake of cool points, but at heart I think we are a very earnest people. Often we just don't want anyone to notice.

I just don't see it being that tight when Romney cannot possibly take several of the key states he desperately needs to win. And when the conservative estimates have Obama at 290-295.

Politico has been known to lean right for years. The David Brooks gambit of a few days ago - an editorial declaring that because Mitt is a shapeshifter with no true beliefs or morals that he will be forced to govern "from the center" and magically create more bipartisanship than mean old Obama - was the most hilarious commentary I've ever read. Good job numbers and finally Rasmussen is beginning his move today back towards the real numbers. Obama up one, Romney down.

Did you see Christie's speech at the RNC? It was about him, not Romney. He'll run. And he's done a lot in the last few days to build up goodwill with moderates and Democrats - me included. New ABC poll has Obama up. Basically everyone is saying Mitt can't do it. I'm hoping for 300+ EV.

Christie knows Romney can't win. He's positioning himself as the lone moderate Republican in 2016 (though Jon Huntsman is far superior). Get ready for a "Biggest Loser" weight loss saga, too, I'll bet. He's a smart man.

The reason Romney has backed off Libya is because clear-headed, incisive reporting on Libya has proven there is nothing there. The CIA has backed that up. A series of unfortunate coincidences and yes, possible security failures, and a national tragedy. But not a cover-up or a gross failure from any department. The other reason is because every time Mitt has tried to go there he has humiliated himself and looked like a fool. Starting in September, and capped off with the second debate. After that, you couldn't get him to say Benghazi on TV with a cattle prod to his nuts. The Republican Congress also doesn't want to explain why they cut embassy security funding. In the right-wing noise bubble you can get away with the endless conspiracies into conspiracies based on no real evidence. You can get away with gleefully reprinting pictures of Chris Stevens' ashen corpse being dragged through the streets and claiming without proof that the Libyan citizens were not taking him to shelter, but instead off to mutilate his body after - this is actually part of the RW coverage - raping him before his death. And maybe that will even work for you in a Republican primary. But it doesn't work in the national race, or in the national eye. It's a paranoid right wing fantasy of a Jimmy Carter reprise, 24, xenophobia and homophobia all wrapped in one insane package. It just doesn't work in the light of day, and that's why the nation has rejected it. It's a loser. But Rush Limbaugh and Drudge and Breitbart say it's still hot, even when America has forcefully rejected it. They never get out of the bubble and take an honest look at the state of the nation. That is why they lose.

You mean these numbers, Casey? Here, I'll even put in RCP's laughable version of "national average." You'll forgive me, but I think the Obama edge in many of these and the very tight race otherwise looks pretty good - particularly since RCP is a known, slanted and shamed right-wing organ. As for Scott Rasmussen, he's another infamous right-wing hack who has been criticized heavily by the media for years now because of inaccurate and poorly-sourced polling which often tightens just before Election Day. And then there's Gallup, which has been a laughingstock for months but particularly in the past month, or as the New York Times puts it, it's Gallup vs. the World. The ABC poll completely avoided and low-sampled the Northeast, and really, there was no point in polling during Sandy because of that. But some people will poll anyway to try and preserve a horse race. If you really want to go with this, though, and never step outside the right wing noise bubble courtesy of Breitbart, Drudge and RCP or look at the real numbers, sampling and other factors, then good luck, Casey. Just don't look at me with doe eyes on Election Night like you guys did in 2008 when everything was 'good news for John McCain.' Republicans are always baffled when they lose, but a large part of that confusion stems from the fact that they never get out of the RW bubble, and only accept the facts and numbers that they choose to believe. All inconvenient truths are blamed on bookish homosexuals like Nate Silver.

I'm saying you're not showing me any actual polling to deal in. I'm also saying that even RCP's electoral maps have Obama at 290 - and that's the one with no toss-ups in the mix.

RCP? Those crusaders against "anti-conservative, anti-Christian media bias?" LOL.

The only person whose campaign has collapsed is Romney's. Everyone knows it. The numbers know it. It's been like this for weeks and it's only gotten worse for him. Rasmussen and Gallup are outliers, and the press knows it. And Chris Christie certainly knows it. The media has been trying to preserve the horse race, but it's been falling away from them for days. The only way to keep it up is to keep pushing the outliers. "Unskew" the polls all you like, but the most conservative estimates have Obama at 290-295 EV. And I haven't even mentioned the debacle that this national tragedy is for Mitt.

The thing is, the Romney momentum myth was dispelled in the last week or so - it was all a bluff. The numbers did not back it up. They've started coming to terms with that, but they continue to pretend he is competitive in Ohio when he's really not very competitive. Except without Ohio there is no game. Sandy or no Sandy, they'll have to face up to that sometime late next week in order to avoid looking like fools on the 6th. I think Nate Silver and most other reliable predictions had Obama at 290-295 EV.

There's nothing official on Romney and Ohio. It's just scuttlebutt right now, though I could swear I had seen a few reputable articles regarding backchannel talk in the past couple days. Let me see what I can find. The media is trying to pretend Romney still has a shot in Ohio, because without that shot that's the end of the horse race. He really doesn't. As per Nate Silver (who the right wing is now smearing as "an effeminate castrati"):

Oh, no, they've gone full bore with that stuff in the last two or three years in particular. BBCA began a much bigger national push starting with the Moffat era. I've seen it around in comic shops and so on.

I'm not surprised River is back. I figured she would be around at least until shortly before Smith and Moffat left, whenever that may be. Matt is signed through at least 2014, I believe, and I think it's confirmed he is doing Series 8, though I don't know whether that airs in fall 2013 or early '14. They never gave her a goodbye in TATM, so I knew she'd be around. Lots left to do. I would cry if they did another tie-in with the SJA kids sometime during the anniversary. Have Luke, Clyde and Maria (or Rani, or whoever that little girl was they added in the last series I haven't watched) pop up to help the Doctor.

Pretty much all the legit polling shows Obama pulling out a commanding lead. Which is why I laughed my ass off when I saw CNN the other night showing Obama up four points in Ohio and Wolf Blitzer staring into the camera calling it "a tie." I've heard Romney may be pulling out of Ohio and trying to peel off Nevada. It can't be done. He cannot win.

From the anniversary celebration today at MCM London: Matt Smith confirmed River Song would return soon enough. Also, there was this cute bit:

Speaking of Joe Scarborough, this morning Joe came to terms with some of the hard math (and I think he may be wrong about Virginia and Florida, to name a few). There isn't a YT upload yet, but it's here and the discussion really starts several minutes in (around 3:30). Oh, and I was right about Virginia - this morning's Pew poll has Obama up 5 over Romney at 51%.

In other news, Colin Powell will be on CBS This Morning today, and looks set to endorse Obama again. ETA: And yes he did!

The most terrifying thing about Joe Scarborough these days is that compared to about 75% of the current Republican legislature and government, he is a compassionate moderate. He's a sane man. A partisan, and almost relentlessly wrong, but he has some sense. Most of the actual elected Republicans today do not, or have ceded it for political expediency - something John McCain's been doing since 2000 in the hope of being president, and now does seemingly out of sheer spite against Obama. And while McCain sold his honor for his campaigns, he still had a set of core beliefs which he deeply felt and stood by in his campaign. George W. Bush, for all his catastrophic decisions, was the same. Even though he was a wrongheaded, arrogant fool, even as he drove this country into senseless war, he cared deeply for the men and women he sent to battle and wept for them. I don't believe Mitt Romney cares about any of that, or anything else any of the most arrogant of those men cared about. He just cares about closing a deal. I've never seen anyone so utterly amoral in my admittedly-limited political lifetime. This, too, is why all the Republican candidates in the last four years, to a man, despise Romney - he has no core. For all their horror, no one could say the neoconservative lobby did not truly believe what they believed about America or the world. I think Mitt Romney only believes in himself. That is unbelievably dangerous. Fortunately, he's not going to win. The wind is now Obama's, as are the polls. I look forward to casting Mitt forever to what The Simpsons called "the land of wind and ghosts."

She's the daughter of Lenny and Lisa Bonet. Absolutely beautiful girl, she also co-starred in X-Men: First Class., a.k.a. the only good X-Men movie. But she had very few lines there, and that's because she's more of a vision than an actress. She does alright in this film, but she has some wooden-ness and is clearly struggling with the weight of carrying it. EJ Bonilla seemed much more natural here than he ever did on GL. But yeah, Billy Kay - it was odd. He does look the same, but he also looks like a slightly heavy adult playing dress-up. It was a tad Jason Priestley or Luke Perry on 90210.