The Commentariat -- Nov. 2, 2012
David Porter of the AP: "New Jersey will deploy military trucks to serve as polling places on Election Day in storm-battered communities, the state secretary of the state announced Thursday during a visit to this flood-ravaged town. The state is also extending the deadline on mail-in ballots. Department of Defense trucks will be parked at regular polling places that have lost power, as long as the sites are still accessible. Paper ballots will be used."
Presidential Race
Greg Sargent: The monthly jobs report, released this morning (see today's News Ledes for links) "was unexpectedly decent: 171,000 nonfarm jobs added in October, and unemployment essentially unchanged at 7.9 percent.... What these numbers really mean is that the last remaining catastrophe that could have derailed Obama's reelection effort didn't happen." ...
... Steve Benen: "... the figures offer good economic news for the American people, and good political news for President Obama." With charts. ...
... If you liked Benen's charts, indulge yourself in this post by Bill McBride of Calculated Risk. ...
... The View from Right Wing World. David Brockington of Lawyers, Guns & Money: "... the wingnut response, or in the words of one retweet I read, 'The jobs numbers come out today, and either they prove Obama is a complete failure or that he cooked the books. Those are the only choices.'"
Raymond Hernandez of the New York Times: "In a surprise announcement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg [of New York city] said Thursday that Hurricane Sandy had reshaped his thinking about the presidential campaign and that as a result he was endorsing President Obama. Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in his third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of both Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney..., saying that both men have failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation. But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the best candidate to tackle the global climate change that the mayor believes contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 38 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage." ...
... Bloomberg made his endorsement in an editorial opinion piece in Bloomberg News.
Michael Shear & Mark Landler of the New York Times: President Obama campaigned in Wisconsin & in Las Vegas, Nevada, Thursday. "Until Election Day, the president will be in nearly constant motion, flying to three states a day, as he works furiously to lock down what his campaign insists are narrow but durable leads. Mr. Obama was scheduled to spend all Friday in Ohio, and he is likely to return to the state at least one more time before Tuesday. In addition, the president's campaign released a television ad Thursday featuring effusive praise from [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell, [a Republican].... After avoiding attacks on Mr. Obama for 72 hours because of the storm, Mr. Romney plunged back into the fray in Roanoke, Va., mocking the president for proposing a cabinet-level post devoted to business development. Mr. Obama discussed the idea in an interview with MSNBC that was shown Monday, just as Mr. Romney was entering cease-fire mode." ...
... Here's the Powell ad:
Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post: Michelle Obama is on the campaign trail this week & is fundraising, too.
Nate Silver: "Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states."
"The Blackmail Caucus." Paul Krugman: "I've seen a growing number of Romney supporters [arguing that] ... if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy.... Arguing for Mr. Romney on the grounds that he could get things done veers dangerously close to accepting protection-racket politics, which have no place in American life." CW: I couldn't agree more with Krugman's takedown of the Des Moines Register's stupid rationale for endorsing Romney.
!!! Peter Baker of the New York Times: "Matt Romney, a son of the Republican presidential nominee, traveled to Moscow this week seeking Russian investors for his California-based real estate firm just days before his father is to wrap up a campaign in which he has vowed to take a tougher stance with the Kremlin.... The Romney campaign said it had no comment.... But while in Moscow, Mr. Romney told a Russian known to be able to deliver messages to Mr. Putin that despite the campaign rhetoric, his father wants good relations if he becomes president, according to a person informed about the conversation."
In a Washington Post op-ed, former Mississippi Governor, former RNC chair, & all-around unreconstituted redneck Haley Barbour, in a Washington Post op-ed, says the President has a lot of control over how disaster funds are distributed to states: "Republicans worried that [New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie saying anything favorable about [President] Obama is politically disloyal need to remember that a governor's first responsibility is to his or her state and its people. Those in the media looking to determine political winners and losers in this situation should stop."
Wherein Dana Milbank proves he doesn't know the first thing about probability & statistics. ...
... Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post: "... some argue that Republican nominee Mitt Romney will come out on top because Obama's poll totals linger just below 50 percent. The arguments are based on what campaign pollsters used to call the 'incumbent rule,' the idea that when an officeholder seeks reelection, undecided voters would break decisively to challengers in the final days of the campaign. The problem is that such late shifts have become increasingly rare. They may never have been much of a factor in close presidential races and show few empirical signs of occurring among the undecided voters of 2012."
Congressional Races
Steven Shepard of the National Journal: in Indiana, GOP U.S. Senate candidate "Richard Mourdock's support has collapsed following his comments about rape at a debate last week, and the GOP nominee in the Indiana Senate race now trails by a significant margin, according to a new independent poll released on Friday [which] ... shows Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly leading Mourdock, the state treasurer, 47 percent to 36 percent.... In September, the two candidates ran neck-and-neck...." CW: Donnelly is no friend of women. He's against abortion except in cases of rape, incest or health of the mother. It's pathetic that in much of the country, for a Democrat to win, his Republican opponent has to be a knuckle-dragging loon.
Voter Suppression
David Dayen of Firedoglake: "A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday placed a stay on a lower court ruling that would allow voter disenfranchisement based on poll worker error. The panel, all appointed by either Bush 41 or Bush 43, ruled that Ohio may disallow ballots where the voter used the wrong precinct to vote. This is true even if the poll worker directed the voter to the wrong precinct. Otherwise, the opinion says, this would 'absolve voters of all responsibility for voting in the correct precinct.' ... the Sixth Circuit merely stayed the ruling of the lower court. The appeal still must be heard. But we are five days out from the election." ...
... BUT wait, there's more. Joe Guillen of the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "A small fraction of Ohio voters' absentee ballot requests may have been mistakenly rejected due to a recently discovered glitch in the transfer of change-of-address records. Even though the deadline for voters to register or change their address was three weeks ago, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted just this week sent about 33,000 updated registration records to local elections officials." ...
... David Dayen: "He just didn't send the data.... This is ... just an example of how Husted has put his thumb on the scales of this election in the most pivotal state. And remember, he has to count the votes, too."
John Aravosis of AmericaBlog: at a predominently-black Broward County, Florida (yes, that Broward County!), the number of early voters suddenly drops by 1,000+ votes. How did that happen? The story is evolving? CW: thanks to Akhilleus for the link. Frankly, I'd be surprised if the Obama campaign didn't have a poll-watcher there counting noses. However, I didn't specifically see any poll-watchers when I voted early. Might be a failure of the system. ...
... Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times: in early Florida voting, Democrats are "crushing" Republicans in getting out the vote among "sporadic" -- i.e., UNlikely -- voters. ...
... CW: obviously, Democrats think Florida is still in play. In a last-minute call, Bill Clinton is coming to Fort Myers today. This is Republican country, although Fort Myers itself does have a tiny pocket of heavily-Democratic precincts. Except as I noted above, I have some anecdotal evidence -- my own experience -- that Democrats have a better GOTV system than do Republicans. Within 24 hours of the time I voted, I got an e-mail from the Obama campaign thanking me for voting. So they noticed. A few hours later, Sen. Marco Rubio (RTP-Fla.) robo-called, urging me to vote for Romney. A Republican lady robo-caller was on the phone this morning with something about Democrats killing jobs. And one of those fundamentalist orgs robo-called me yesterday. After I said I disagreed with something Billy Graham said about gay marriage, my "survey" was over. So only the Democrats know it's too late to persuade me. ...
... AND from the fundy crowd, here's a dire warning from Mike Huckabee that "your vote will be recorded in eternity" and it may not withstand "the test of fire." Translation: if you don't vote Republican, you'll go to hell:
Other Stuff
Read the cover story by Paul Barrett. Barrett covers all bases. ...
** Tim Egan: "Climate change is to the Republican base ... untouchable and unmentionable. Their party is financed by people whose fortunes are dependent upon denying that humans have caused the earth's weather patterns to change for the worse.... President Obama has been silent on this issue of great import to his children, Sasha and Malia, and their children. He is afraid of those pockets of coal-mining, climate-change-denying voters in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.... A profile in courage he is not, but at least his party has some smart advocates for treating the patient before the meteorological malady kills it.... The other cherished idea of Republicans that was thrown to Sandy's winds is the notion that people don't need government in times of domestic trauma.... When the full bill for New Jersey's recovery comes due, no single state or private entity in the land will able to come close to paying for it." ...
... Jim Dwyer of the New York Times: "The consensus of scientists globally is that climate change has taken place and has contributed to the rise of sea levels by close to a foot over the last century.... Yet climate change has been close to unmentionable during the presidential campaign. The agenda has been set by minority voices, some of them quietly financed by industries that might be threatened by measures to curb greenhouse gases. Somehow, by denying the existence of climate change, they managed to shut down debate over what to do about it. That is why a disagreement between the governor [Cuomo] and the mayor [Bloomberg] about sea gates is so refreshing."
** Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "The [TOTALLY NONPARTISAN] Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper's findings and wording. The decision, made in late September against the advice of the agency's economic team leadership, drew almost no notice at the time.... But it could actually draw new attention to the report, which questions the premise that lowering the top marginal tax rate stimulates economic growth and job creation. 'This has hues of a banana republic,' [Sen. Chuck] Schumer [D-NY] said. 'They didn't like a report, and instead of rebutting it, they had them take it down.' ... The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical." ...
... Steve Benen: "As David Leonhardt noted when it was published, the CRS analysis undermines a 'defining economic policy' of modern Republican thought. Indeed, the entire Romney/Ryan economic plan is predicated on the assumption that supply-side theory works, and here was the CRS saying it doesn't.... We simply cannot have a functioning federal system in which neutral, independent offices are ignored, pressured,and/or censored when Republicans don't like what they have to say. We've now seen this recently with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Congressional Budget Office, and democratic norms dictate that GOP officials cut this out.... For what it's worth, the CRS pulled the report from its website, but Senate Democrats have liberated it, republishing the analysis on their own site."
Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "Security officers from the played a pivotal role in combating militants who attacked the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, deploying a rescue party from a secret base in the city, sending reinforcements from Tripoli, and organizing an armed Libyan military convoy to escort the surviving Americans to hastily chartered planes that whisked them out of the country, senior intelligence officials said Thursday. The account given by the senior officials, who did not want to be identified, provided the most detailed description to date of the C.I.A.'s role in Benghazi." ...
... Lolita Baldor of the AP: "CIA security officers went to the aid of State Department staff less than 25 minutes after they got the first call for help during the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday, as they laid out a detailed timeline of the CIA's immediate response to the attack from its annex less than a mile from the diplomatic mission.... The timeline was offered just days before the presidential election in a clear effort to refute recent news reports [by Fox "News"] that said the CIA told its personnel to 'stand down' rather than go to the consulate to help repel the attackers."
John Burns & Ravi Somaiya of the New York Times: "Despite widespread suspicion about [British TV personality Jimmy] Savile's behavior over decades, and Mr. Savile's acknowledgment in his autobiography that he had a predilection for young girls..., a number of missteps and missed signals ... allowed Mr. Savile to escape scrutiny for most of his career.... Seven police investigations were begun into Mr. Savile before he died last year..., according to British news reports, but officers have said that separate police forces across Britain were unable to connect the dots, partly because a national crime database did not come into effect until 2010.... Newspapers, afraid of Britain's strict libel laws, decided not to publish their suspicions, although several had conducted their own investigations over the years."
News Ledes
CW: I missed this from the Nov. 1 Los Angeles Times: "Letitia Baldrige, an etiquette maven who served as social secretary to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and later wrote books and a syndicated column advising readers on good manners in contemporary America, has died. She was 86."
New York Times: "The American Red Cross struggled on Friday to reassure beleaguered New York City residents that its disaster-relief efforts were at last getting up to speed, after the agency's delayed arrival in devastated areas of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens drew intense criticism." CW: they were probably delayed looking for soupçons of soup cans from Mitt Romney. ...
... New York Times: "Across the city, New Yorkers who had found each other through Facebook and Twitter, churches and community groups, City Hall and local elected officials, tried in ways small and large to ease the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy. Several volunteers said the relief provided by their small-scale community efforts was the first to arrive in some of the most hard-hit parts of the city, outpacing large organizations like the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency."
New York Times: "After days of intensifying pressure from runners, politicians and the general public to call off the New York City Marathon in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, city officials and the event's organizers decided Friday afternoon to cancel the race."
New York Times: "In the last assessment of the job market before the presidential election, the Labor Department announced Friday that the nation's employers had added 171,000 positions in October. The unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent, from 7.8 percent in September." ...
... Reuters writes a much more upbeat account of the same numbers: "U.S. employers stepped up hiring in October and the jobless rate ticked higher as more workers restarted job hunts, a hopeful sign for a lackluster economy that has dragged on President Barack Obama's reelection chances."
ABC News: "With concerns about hypothermia increasing -- and another storm forecast for next week -- nearly 64,000 utility workers are now working around the clock to turn the power back on in a dozen states."
Bloomberg News: "Manhattan, slowed by power outages, flooded subways and closed markets since Sandy struck Oct. 29, should have electricity fully restored by the end of today....