SOLIDLY OBAMA:

55—California
31—New York
21—Illinois
17—Michigan
15—New Jersey
12—Massachusetts
10—Maryland
07—Oregon
07—Connecticut
04—Maine
04—Rhode Island
04—Hawaii
03—Vermont
03—Delaware
03—District of Columbia

TOTAL of Solidly Obama: 196

He will win these 196 electoral votes no questions asked. He will then need 74 more to get to 270, to be elected president. This can be done quite easily, without even having to worry about the supposed swing states that the media continues to talk about. The following are all leaning Obama quite substantially.

HEAVILY-LEANING OBAMA:

21—Pennslyvania
11—Washington (state)
10—Wisconsin
10—Minnesota
07—Iowa
04—New Hampshire

TOTAL of Heavily-Leaning Obama: 63

SUBTOTAL OF Solidly Obama and Heavily-Leaning Obama: 259

This then means that Obama will need to get only 11 electoral votes to become president. He will be elected by simply winning either, by itself

13—Virginia (where he leads by 11%)

TOTAL: 272

Or, by winning:

09—Colorado (where he leads by 8%) and
05—Nevada (where he leads by 10%)

TOTAL: 273

Or, by winning:

09—Colorado (where he leads by 8%) and
05—New Mexico (where he leads by 10%)

TOTAL: 273

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Though he won’t lose all of the following, Obama can lose all of the current swing states—Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina—and still be elected president.

Obama is pretty comfortably ahead in Ohio. He carries a slight lead in Florida. He carries a less slight lead in North Carolina and Missouri. Indiana is a true tossup.

Ted.com is a really great website. Here's one Talk.

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Here's another.

RECEIVED:

Isabelle Baladine Howald, Secret of Breath, translated from the French by Elena Rivera, Burning Deck/Anyart, Providence, 2008

Jackson Mac Low, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, UC Press, Berkeley, 2008

Leslie Scalapino, It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006, UC Press, Berkeley, 2008

By Mr. Fish at Harper's.

Jack Spicer was a pain in the ass to many around him--a misanthrope, a drunk, a selfish meddler in the relationships of others, but one thing that I do like about him, besides his poetry, is that he wanted criticism of the way that he thought. He nearly begged for it. He was interested in thought and counterthought and what that exchange would bring about.

So much of what I encounter in contemporary poetry is anti-Spicerian. It's like kindergarten. With a typical mob mentality, and the assorted stock characters coming out of nowhere. One of my favorite stock characters of the mob is the self-annointed female protector--this role is always taken--grabbed--by a man. The female protector likes to come in at any moment, even when there is absolutely no threat or implied threat to a female. Here's where the Female Protector misinterprets the lay of the land, adjusts it to stage a threat, and then inserts himself in this Threatening Landscape of His Making, to Fight the Non-Threatening Males, reinvisioned as THREATENING. The Female Protector will fight semi-valiantly--in this day and age, mostly with mockery, slights, churlish, underhanded crap best left to eight year olds--and wait for the praise or simple acknowledgement of the non-offended female.

He will feel complete then. He has fought hard--he has namecalled hard. Survived, yes, but always surviving to be seen licking his wounds, hopefully by the female, who certainly couldn't care less.

We went to see Burn After Reading tonight, which was a risk, I felt, to begin with, as I don't generally find the Coen Brothers' movies very interesting. The same smug, smarmy, empty characters bumping into one another seem to populate their films, with characters' names changed (for no real reason). There is also a painful amount of overacting in their films, which I don't really stomach too well. The plots tend to simply satirize conventional genres, which is fine, I guess, but certainly not very interesting.

I haven't seen their debut film, Blood Simple, in probably a decade, but that remains of interest to me. Portions of Miller's Crossing do as well. The first hour of No Country for Old Men showed they had the ability to get out of their comfort zones. I've seen all of their films, except The Big Lebowski and The Ladykillers. I saw Fargo on the big screen, but everything else have been on dvd, mostly years after the fact.

Which is all the wonder, then, that I found myself at the theater at all. And even more oddly, coming out of it, thinking to myself that this dimwitted espionage farce-caper may be their best film. Yes, there is George Clooney overacting. Yes, there are really underwritten female roles, including, simply, two "cold bitches" (easy enough to write) and a missed chance with the Francis McDormand character. She seems almost there, almost a well-developed character, but much of her character is muddled, and not in a good way. The combinative elements of physical fitness (Hardbodies) and the CIA create some truly wonderful moments, however, unravelling with a demented ease. John Malkovich is perfectly cast as the angry, drunken government man. Brad Pitt's character is a bit uneven and somewhat overly hammy, but still passable. The fitness center manager is nicely drawn as a hesitant love interest to the oblivious McDormand character. There are scenes in the CIA offices that are just top notch, recalling Dr. Strangelove's menacing comedic brilliance, though here it's more situational humor.

Before going to the film, I read some reviews of the film online. I noticed a couple that remarked on the nihilism and the lack of humanity in the film's character. One reviewer at the New York Times wondered where the heart was. Reading these things didn't give me pause because of the lack of heart, but I did wonder whether I'd be stepping into the same smug emptiness that I've found uninteresting in their other films. I have to say now, after watching the film, that I think this may be their most deft use of emotion. The Coens tend to joke their way out of intensity, or avoid it completely, but here they generate truly complex emotions, and they show it. One of the moments that stuck with me was the simple scene of McDormand's character walking down a park path, looking at the single men on the park benches, trying to determine who was her online date. She is hopeful for this meeting, and she is nervous, and this shows. This is fine and well done. But it was the careful attention to the emptiness surrounding the single men (and married men playing single) that was the real achievement. This was not sentimentality. It was not exploitive. It was lightly done. It was depicting very easily a collection of loneliness, that attaches people to other people. I leaned over to my wife at this point, and said, "Wow, for them, that's something new."

The best writing on the criminal bailout is happening at Counterpunch. Another great article today--Glen Ford's "The Last Hold Up."