Esther Press

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

*

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.

*

Here's another.

This post is strictly here to move Ashley down the page (or is it?):



Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, "Islands in the Stream"

John McCain's campaign volunteer Ashley Todd, racist liar and face-cutter.

McCain Communications Director Gave Reporters Incendiary Version Of "Carved B" Story Before Facts Were Known
By Greg Sargent - October 24, 2008, 5:12PM

John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

The KDKA reporter had called McCain's campaign office for details after seeing the story -- sans details -- teased on Drudge.

The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.

The claims to KDKA from the McCain campaign were included in an early story that ran late yesterday on KDKA's Web site. The paragraphs containing these assertions were quickly removed from the story after the Obama campaign privately complained that KDKA was letting the McCain campaign spin a racially-charged version of the story before the facts had been established, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The story with the removed grafs is still right here. We preserved the three missing grafs from yesterday:



A source familiar with what happened yesterday confirmed that the unnamed spokesperson was communications director Peter Feldman. Feldman was also quoted yesterday making virtually identical assertions on the Web site of another local TV station, WPXI. But those quotes, which we also preserved here, are also no longer available on WPXI's site, for reasons that are unclear.

This is problematic because the McCain campaign doesn't want to have been perceived as pushing an incendiary story that not only turned out to be a hoax but which police officials said today risked blowing up into a "national incident" and has local police preparing to file charges against the hoaxster.

There's no evidence that anyone from McCain national headquarters put out a version of events like this.

After the story appeared on KDKA's site and this and other pieces in the local press started flying around the political world, an Obama spokesperson in the state angrily insisted to KDKA that it was irresponsible for the station to air the McCain spokesperson's incendiary version of events before the facts were fully known, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

After that, KDKA went back to McCain's Pennsylvania spokesperson, Feldman, and asked if he stood by the story as he'd earlier told it, but he started backing off the story, a source familiar with the talks says. That prompted KDKA to remove the grafs.

Feldman couldn't immediately be reached, and a McCain HQ spokesperson declined to comment.

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.

Keating Economics: John McCain & the Making of a Financial Crisis
Video, 13 minutes
http://www.keatingeconomics.com
Retrieved: October 6, 2008

Republicans eating their own:

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.

A Washington Post article on my moronic fellow Wisconsinites:

When Republicans whine.

It's a dire day indeed when a poet gets computerized poetry taken down from the Web.

Capitalists of the World, Unite! being the underlying decree.

"You only lose what you cling to," Siddhartha said.

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."

COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.