This is one of the oddest moments of campaign coverage I’ve ever seen on television. Chuck Todd is a pollster for NBC-TV. He’s just attended a joint interview of McCain and Palin by Brian Williams. Everyone, including the campaign staff, is caught off guard by Gov. Palin saying she’ll reverse her previous stand and reveal her medical records, among other news in the interview. However, Todd goes off on this “vibe” he felt between the two GOP standard-bearers and begins speculating about what’s going on in their heads and … well, watch for yourself and see if you don’t think it odd.

After spouting a bunch of McCarthyite B.S. on Chris Matthews’ Hardball show, Democrats across the nation have now donated $1.3 million to Minnesota GOP U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachman’s opponent, El Tinklenberg, and the Democratic Party threw in another $1 million.

That’s not enough.

Not even for Republicans.

The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee has now withdrawn several hundred thousands of dollars it had previously pledged to the incumbent, according to Talking Points Memo.

Now, who’s Anti-American, Michelle?

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The Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch.com reports the DowJones Industrials down 514.45 points, a 5.7% drop, to 8,519.2. This was the 7th largest point drop for one day on record. Oil, a vital price commodity for Oklahoma, is down to $66/barrel. The Standard & Poors 500 index fell 6.1% to its lowest point since April, 2003, and the tech-heavy NASDAQ index dropped 4.8%.

Oh, well. When you’ve been smoking 2 packs of cigarets a day for 40 years, you can’t really expect to retire.

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RealClearPolitics.com average of polls shows Obama leading by 7.0 points, 49.9% to McCain’s 42.9%.

Pollster.com has very similar results, a 7.0% spread at 50.1 for Obama and 43.1 for McCain:

Both Pollster and RCP show Obama with sure leads in 286 electoral votes. RCP has McCain with 160 and Pollster shows the Arizonan with 157 EVs, the difference being that Pollster shows Montana as a “tossup” with McCain leading by 3.7% and RCP shows Montana as McCain’s by 5.6%. The two sites show the following states as undecided:

State RCP Pollster
FL O+1.5 O+2.3

MO O+2.7 O+1.6

Pollster also shows North Dakota as a tossup at O+3.6, but doesn’t seem to have adjusted the EV ratings because the polling seems “sparse” and they give the state a lean McCain rating based on previous voting history.

You can see more electoral vote tallies at:
electoral-vote.com and at my personal favorite polling site, fivethirtyeight.com, which is a site that uses polling — a “snapshot” of voters at the time the poll is taken — to try to predict the outcome using demographic patters, historical voting patterns, voter registration patterns, etc. 538’s present statistical modeling predicts 344.3 electoral votes for Obama, 193.7 for McCain; Obama wins presidency, 93.5% to McCain 6.5% out of 10,000 simulations; and, Obama with 51.8% of the popular votes and McCain with 46.8%.

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Ben Smith at Politico.com posts a story from an Evansville, Ind., medical student:

I squeaked in just before the 7pm deadline to find two very frustrated poll workers and a line of a couple dozen people, due to problems with the computerized voting system not accepting people’s driver’s licenses. It was taking about 7-10 minutes per person just to get the computer to accept them as valid and to print out their ballot, causing very long delays.

For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn’t in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president. Anyone who doesn’t think that African-American turnout will absolutely SHATTER every existing record is in for a very rude surprise.

There were about 20 people in front of me but remarkably not a single person left the room without voting over the 2 hours it took to get through the line.

I’m so involved in the political “inside baseball” of polls and “narrative” and electoral college votes that I sometimes lose sight of the fact that electing Sen. Obama really means something. I personally recall seeing signs saying “colored” over one water fountain while next to it was a nicer water cooler for whites only. I personally recall the sit ins and demonstrations of the mid 1960s, including one at Bishop’s restaurant in Oklahoma City. I have a personal recollection of a race riot in Jackson, MS, my mother and sisters and I drove through on our way to my mother’s home town one summer. I recall being a reporter here in Oklahoma City when a fight at an amusement park became a race riot near NE 36th and Springlake Drive. The fact that television was black and white at the time makes the film of fire hoses and German Shepherds at the Selma, Alabama, bridge seem quaint and antique now, but it didn’t seem so at the time.

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Sometime between Saturday, when he had nothing to report, and Tuesday, MCARP says on his 3:40 a.m. up again in the middle of the night blog that he got a little drunk and that he bought a new iPhone with bells and whistles. One wonders if one caused the other, but it really doesn’t say. Either or both seem to be preceded by a frustrating visit to a political discussion board, but I’m trying to remember that mere chronicity doesn’t guarantee causation.

Over on Flibbertigibbit, Nina falls in love with men who open doors, but doesn’t have time to buy her mother a birthday present because she’s too busy not having a boyfriend, as she tells her sister. Look, I can’t explain it and I don’t pretend to understand it, it’s just Nina and that’s the way she is.

On Karmic Ironies, Jaz is doing poster designs for some reason but maybe MCARP the graphic designer and Photoshop expert can tell you more about it than I can. Jaz hasn’t posted since the 10th of this month and I’m getting tired of reading the same posts day after day since I don’t understand them anyway.

Suddenly, tuesday night, the elliptical KO on longrydehome is getting attention from men when she’s awakened from her dreamlike state. She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, she’s extraordinarily talented and she’s all over the map, so if you understand what the hell it is she’s trying to say with only ellipses as punctuation, you’ll understand her conversation as well. (If you DO understand what she’s saying, please give me a call and explain it. I’ve known her 15 years or so and I mostly nod my head and smile.)

My sister at MindOverMary is, like me, slogging through this election. Guess what? She doesn’t like racism and sleaze. Who coulda guessed? She and I would like to work on our mother on this political season’s choices, but we both decided to just not talk to her about it any more since we weren’t getting anywhere but angry.

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The poll of polls at RealClearPolitics took a jump today with Obama +7.2 at 50.2% against McCain at 43%.

The less volatile Pollster.com today shows a lesser gap:

Meanwhile, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com gives a primer on pollsters, the quirks and reliability of the several tracking polls, a post I recommend if you have any interest in the field.

Finally, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo gives a video roundup of how all the national polling is playing out in the Electoral College:

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You can join more than 50,000 other Americans petitioning Congress for the censure of Rep. Michele Bachman HERE. Within 48 hours of Bachman’s interview with Chris Matthews, more than $650,000 was contributed by citizens nationwide to her Democratic Party opponent, El Tinklenberg, and the Democratic Party contributed even more; you can contribute to defeating her HERE. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing. I’m just sayin’.

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I am now in possession of a magic wand. It will not give fame or fortune, but it may give me something I want more than that. It’s powered by friendship and it’s something I’ve wanted for a very long time. If you want to know what this post is about, you’ll have to look up Dick Cavett’s essay about depression.

Thank you, friend!

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I can’t seem to embed the video, but you can watch my daughter’s video of the grandchildren and son in law on a biking adventure on her blog “Mom-A-Tron“. I’m so proud.