The State of Play: The Numbers and My Opinions
By the GhostWhoVotes

Meanwhile the Conventions continue. Obama’s speech, which received praise from all but the most biased of judges, now places McCain under a very powerful spotlight. If McCain does not produce a speech that is at least somewhat comparable to Obama’s, then his last chance to win the election by himself (as opposed to requiring Obama to make multiple huge gaffes) is most likely gone.

However, back on the previous thread the inimitable Kirribilli Removals made the following comment …

This is the last call for Princess Hillary, and if she doesn’t pull a dastardly trick at the conference, it’s all over for her. Sure, the Republicans would be the only winners, but that’s never stopped her in the past. It must be hard having your earthly form inhabited by an Alien ego, just busting to burst out and terrify the adoring crowd.

You have to ask the question – “Will the Princess be wearing a blue dress?”

Bring it on – round one “The Federation Offensive”

UPDATE: 26-AUG-08 00:30

Last night, in a temporal euphoria induced by a cocktail of morphine and assorted amphetamines KR managed to punch out an email contributing to this post. It contained the following URL http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/08/22/republicans_dnc/index.html

UPDATE: 26-AUG-08 02:16

Calendar updated to include a gazillion speakers on Monday night.
Click on the following link for the full agenda which kicks off about 7.30 AM our time …
Democratic National Convention Calendar.

No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.

Source: NYT: The Candidate We Still Don’t Know

With the Democratic Party Convention between the 25th. to the 28th. August, the Republican Party Convention between the 1st. to 4th. September, only then will the stage be set with just two months between the end of the Republican convention the 4th November (a.k.a. election day).

As such, Obama spending money in North Dakota, North Carolina, Montana, Georgia, and Alaska seems a little bit of a waste. After all, even if we assume that he wins in North Dakota and Montana say, those six electoral votes will not get him the presidency. North Carolina is obviously a better place to attack, given its 15 electoral votes. But it would be a big ask for Obama to win North Carolina.

Instead, it would be far more useful to simply concentrate on Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. (I discount Florida, as the polls are going back to McCain there - I even tend to discount Indiana, but given that the polls tell us that it is close, and I go by the polls).  It is in those states that this election will be won or lost. The others are effectively irrelevant.

As such, I think that Obama is wasting time and money in those states. There are 90 days to go in this election campaign and at this point in time the momentum – according to the polls – is with McCain. Time to get back to political reality. A fifty-state strategy might be a nice little dream, but that is all it ever was. A five-state strategy is what is needed to win this thing.

This election is a referendum on Obama.

Give me a break! If this was a referendum on Obama it would be suggesting that all of those dumb white lazy Americans were actually thinking about voting for Obama instead of cleaning guns and beating the women folk with their bibles.

Reality is that white Americans are not dumb, the majority are not cleaning their guns, only a very small percentage are beating their womenfolk, and this election is not a referendum. However, looking at the situation from the media perspective, they do need a narrative that will last out the election season, and we have some of the ducks lined up. Obama is representing a substantially new series of policies and an attitudinal shift, he is popular, knows how to motivate an audience, knows how to construct sentences, and according to people who know him a lot better than we do, actually knows how to speak with a lot more depth than he chooses to deliver on the campaign trail. McCain in contrast is building on a familiar landscape, a national reverence for anything and anyone military, and an somewhat old-boy, beer on the balcony, best mate persona, his foreign affairs acumen established as a prisoner of war, and that ‘Rodger RamJet: Hero of our Nation’ thing.

Roger Ramjet is a patriotic and highly moral but not too bright superhero (kind of a jet age Dudley Do-Right), who is typically out to save the world, with help from his Proton Energy Pills (“PEP”), which give him “the strength of twenty atom bombs for a period of twenty seconds”. The World is invariably saved by dispensing violence towards the various recurring criminals who are traditional characters in this form of entertainment.

But, it gets worse … doesn’t the following quote sound a lot like General Petraeus, John McCain, and the McCain Campaign crew?

On government missions assigned by General G.I. Brassbottom, Ramjet encounters various nemeses during his missions. Typically he is caught, and must be rescued by his crew of sidekicks, the American Eagles (named Yank, Doodle, Dan and Dee – a play on “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.) Although his Eagles appear to be children, each of them, except for Dee, flies his own individual ramjet aircraft expertly, along with being obviously much more savvy than their leader.

I’m going out on a limb here and I’m suggesting that the media have already figured out that a ‘national referendum on Obama’ is just what is needed to create a multitude of interesting talking points, and justify a media bias to cover attention of the more interesting candidate. Think of the alternative – repeats of a kid’s TV animation series from the 1960s? After all, there are still 24 days to the Convention, 95 days (or 2,280 of those 24×7 media hours) to fill before this election is done and dusted (excluding recounts and associated supreme court rulings) and 173 days until the Inauguration.

Content referencing Roger RamJet courtesy of Wikipedia.

It is uncertain, there’s no question about it. Wall Street got drunk, it got drunk, (it’s one of the reasons I asked you to turn off your TV cameras.) It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up, and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments.

Bush at Pete Olson’s fundraiser, July 18th 2008

But who was mostly responsible for letting this fandango of ‘fancy financial instruments’ go into a wild frenzy?

Who else, but the Maestro, the Mr Magoo of Central Bankers? (“Bubble? I can’t see any bubble”). None other than the long time Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, a man who once famously assured the anxious souls in Washington that there was no need to worry, derivatives were just spreading the risk globally. This was, assured the Maestro, a good thing.

Working to a grand design, to give the US continual dominance in world markets by serving the interest of the “Money Trust” (the cabal of bankers who own the Federal Reserve), perhaps nobody had more influence on what is happening today in world markets, and for a concise summary, let’s see what F. William Engdahl wrote in January this year:

This is the true significance of the crisis today unfolding in US and global capital markets. Greenspan’s 18 year tenure can be described as rolling the financial markets from successive crises into ever larger ones, to accomplish the over-riding objectives of the Money Trust guiding the Greenspan agenda. Unanswered at this juncture is whether Greenspan’s securitization revolution was a “bridge too far,” spelling the end of the dollar and of dollar financial institutions’ global dominance for decades or more to come.

Greenspan’s adamant rejection of every attempt by Congress to impose some minimal regulation on OTC derivatives trading between banks; on margin requirements on buying stock on borrowed money; his repeated support for securitization of sub-prime low quality high-risk mortgage lending; his relentless decade-long push to weaken and finally repeal Glass-Steagall restrictions on banks owning investment banks and insurance companies; his support for the Bush radical tax cuts which exploded federal deficits after 2001; his support for the privatization of the Social Security Trust Fund in order to funnel those trillions of dollars cash flow into his cronies in Wall Street finance—all this was a well-planned execution of what some today call the securitization revolution, the creation of a world of New Finance where risk would be detached from banks and spread across the globe to the point no one could identify where real risk lay.

Ironic, when you consider that the Idiot Decider now thinks all these ‘fancy financial instruments’ may have something to do with the catastrophic state of their financial and credit markets, isn’t it?

Not only was Alan Greenspan allowing the pumping of Agent Orange by all and sundry, dispersing it far and wide with no checks on its usage, he was all the while singing its praises, even in the face of many who expressed their well founded concerns to him. Some years later, there are scorched earth losses hitting the US banks and investment houses and a lot of very sick borrowers who are pretty sure where they contracted their diseases. (Not to mention investors worldwide who are taking a severe haircut on vast tranches of this toxic subprime muck and anything else which has the label US mortgage in the fine print.)

Today, another 8,000 US householders got foreclosure notices. Yesterday there were 8,000 and tomorrow 8,000, and the day after that another lot. Pretty soon that adds up to millions and the cost to families and entire neighbourhoods is immeasurable. It’s estimated the final tally will be around 6.5 million foreclosures, but if this market really collapses, it could go much higher.

Currently there are worrying signs that the next level up from subprime, the Alt-A market, is starting to crack too. And this does not include the possible tens of millions of homes which will be ‘underwater’, with the value sinking under the level of debt being carried. People are now posting in their keys to the bank and simply walking away figuring it’s the cheaper way out. Throw the credit cards onto the bonfire as well.

“What bubble? I don’t see any bubble,” was always Greenspan’s answer.
Voters on the whole don’t know the details, but look at the polls that ask them about which way their country is headed. They point in one direction, and the mood is decidedly, well, un-American. The can-do nation is watching itself bobbing around in the can, and it’s not a national mood that sits well with them. They don’t do pessimism comfortably (they aren’t French or Russians, after all), but they’re not averse to revenge. Come November, they’ll unleash this, and it won’t be to vote for McSame…same policies, same incompetence, and same lies.

Obama set the national discourse with one word: ‘change’. And that word is getting amplified on so many levels, none more spectacular than his candidacy itself. A candidate who so defied the pundits’ paradigm of US politics that it almost universally took them by surprise. (It sure took Hillary Clinton by surprise!). How much change can he implement after nearly a generation of ‘regulatory debauchery’ is open to question, but maybe the voters will not be reading the fine print nor the arcane details, they’ll be going with their gut reaction, an aversion to what has gotten them into this mess.

Trillions of dollars of householders’ wealth is being torched in the bonfire of the inanities, and while none of this ‘had to be’, it was definitely ‘allowed’ to be.

If all of this financial meltdown wasn’t enough ballast for the good ship McCain, he’s still desperate to tell his story, and clutches the albatross he calls the ‘surge’, imploring anyone still listening, and tries to convince them it’s working. (He decided that telling voters the economy had made progress under Bush was not going to sail in the face of the shocking reality.) But it’s too late now because the voters hardly care anymore, they just want out, and so does Obama, and so does al Maliki, and nearly all the Iraqis who aren’t dead yet, or haven’t left the country (or what’s left of it). It’s a dead albatross, but it’s nearly the only thing he has, and he’ll go on wearing its bedraggled corpse until November, for all the good it will do him.

The death of the US dollar hegemony? Even the death of Reaganism?

Uncertain? Well, it’s quite possibly both.

But one thing IS for certain: that’s a very dead albatross that old guy is wearing.

“Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.”

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”)

For those with a Monty Python bent (and those terms go together so well!), perhaps they could try a variation on the famous Dead Parrot Sketch, with McCain as the storekeeper and the irate voter demanding a refund for his now very defunct albatross. Perhaps the bird was called Serge, and the confusion begins right there… over to you!

Looking back the first news breaking the US media was Obama’s visit to a US military base in Kuwait City and a basketball moment you could only wish for. That shot set the tone for the next couple of days as Obama headed over to Afghanistan for meetings Hamid Karzai. Meanwhile news was filtering out that President Bush was accepts concept of an Iraq Time Horizon but that what somewhat eclipsed by an article in the German press suggesting the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had expressed support for Obama’s take on US troop withdrawal policy.

Obama’s next stop was Iraq just as Gordon Brown announced details of planned troop withdrawals. As Obama gets into the process of reviewing conditions on the ground, the Whitehouse wades in discounting the Iraq troop withdrawl endorsement and gets itself into a muddle as the New York Times confirms the story and associated translation. Obama takes in a number of military based, talks with the Prime Minister and members of the Iraqi Cabinet and Sunni tribal elders in Ramadi (capital of Anbar Province) before leaving for Jordan.

Obama next stop was Jordan and a meeting with King Abdullah, a press conference, and dinner with the King and Queen Rania, before he was driven back to the airport by King Abdullah himself. At the airport the King and Obama paused for a number of photo-ops, after which Obama climbed on board the new campaign Boeing 757 – destination Israel and the Palestinian State for meetings with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem and President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Obama’s mission is to broadcast a message back home. At the same time there are a million and one local interest groups keen to leverage a moment in the sunshine, and therein lies part of the risk. For Europeans – Obama represent a historic moment in American history, and, the end of George W. Bush. It’s a feel good moment and Americans will enjoy feeling the love. Perhaps also, this is the moment where anti-American sentiment could turn in favor of the cousins.

18-JUL-08 Kuwait.
19-JUL-08 Kabul, Afghanistan.
21-JUL-08 Iraq.
22-JUL-08 Jordan.
23-JUL-08 Israel.
24-JUL-08 Berlin, Germany.
25-JUL-08 Paris, France.
26-JUL-08 London, England.

In the 2004 US Presidential Election G. W. Bush gained 286 Electoral College Votes (ECVs); John Kerry, 252. To become POTUS a Party’s Nominee must gain 270 ECVs. Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of its Senators and Representatives in the United States Congress which is proportional to the population as determined through a census taken every 10 years. CA for example has 55 ECVs, Nth Dakota, 3. Each State awards its ECVs on a winner take all basis of the popular vote except Maine and Nebraska which have minor idiosyncratic variations. To hardcore Bludgers, these things are “known knowns”.

State Governors have the executive power (which is an inordinate amount of clout) to determine how the popular vote is tallied in their States, eg, CO (Democratic Governor) now has all pencil and paper ballots, while FL (GOP Gov.) has widespread (ab)use of poorly scrutinised Diebold receiptless computer-touchscreen voting machines.

Diebold incidentally, make ATMs which produce receipts upon request but they just haven’t been able to employ that good ‘ol American know-how to manufacture a voting machine that would likewise supply a paper trail. Funny about that. Paper trails come in mighty handy in the event of disputed returns. As things stand, the word of the computer programmers is final. Verifiable democracy, it would seem, can take a hike! Diebold Corporation are major donors to the GOP, but that’s probably just a coincidence. Diebold computers tallied the vote in OHIO 2004 and the State was ruled by GOP Goveror, Bob Taft (ref. 20 Amazing Facts About Elections).

Had Kerry won OHIO’s 20 ECVs in 2004, he would have become POTUS.

Karl Rove has recently been subject to a surge of mentorial pride. Mr. Rove is former W.H. Deputy CoS and “architect” of President G.W. Bush’s electoral success. He presently is an artful dodger of Congressional subpoenas concerning the “letting go of” Federal Judges who, in Karl’s opinion, were not onside with his former master’s aims and objectives regarding the practicalities of maintaining the upper hand in matters of day to day rule.

Karl’s understudy, Steve “Schmuckens” Schmidt, has displayed prodigious talent already as a “draughtsman”. Mr.Schmidt has recently become prospective GOP Nominee John McCain’s chief campaign advisor. It would not be unreasonable to assume that Mr. Schmidt would be willing to employ all the wiles of his mentor in order to have Senator McCain “elected” POTUS.

Not unreasonably, with respect of the abovementioned developments, there are some amongst us who smell a rat and I am unabashedly one of those people. However, the political landscape has altered rather dramatically since 2004. Latest polling suggests that while the GOP is not likely to gain ANY States in Nov. 2008, Dems have excellent prospects in CO IN IA MT NM OH and VA (ref. electoral-vote.com). Of these States, all except Indiana have Democratic Governors, therefore the prospects of Schmidt & Co pulling an “OHIO 04” in those States are somewhat diminished (ref. Wikipedia: US Governors Map).

Despite the obvious fraud potential in Diebolds’ systems (ref. Lou Dobs on Dibold), the Democratic Leadership Council in its wisdom persisted in having the Dodgies from Diebold tally the N.H. primary which, contrary to all pre and exit polls, produced a stunning campaign-sustaining victory for “Beltway to her Bootstraps” HRC, and not the upstart Junior Senator from Illinois, BHO.

Just another coincidence, I guess.

There are many other methods of rorting US elections such as compulsory carrying of ID for voters in Indiana, and the methods addressed in the Wikipedia: 2004 US Presidential election controversy notes. In preparing this post I read literally scores of articles but had to stand in awe of the jounalistic and research skills of Maureen Farrell. For Bludgers interested in the subject, her work: “Another Rigged Election, The Elephant in the Booth”, is outstanding. Finally, despite the unfairness in our electoral system such as disproportionate Senate representation, our way of electing our representatives by the straightforward marking of paper ballots with a pencil seems to be comparatively tamper-proof.