Daily Kos

Mission control reports Curiosity is safe on the surface of Mars!!! Images from Oddysey orbiter and rover coming in! Images will be posted here!

 

The moment of truth is close at hand. Curiosity will soon enter the Martian stratosphere. The Internet is abuzz with excitement and no small amount of anxiety. The seven minutes of terror are about to begin for real. There's a lot riding on it, both literally and figuratively. Some good links to keep tabs on are Mars Google Hangout (This has been a lot of fun tonight), NASA interactive event schedule, JPL TV, and NASA TV. And last but certainly not least, check out Palantir's live blog here.

To understand the importance of this mission – and Curiosity is about as important a science experiment as we’ve ever created – let’s take a quick peek at the fascinating history of our solar system’s most hospitable world, outside of the one we call home. Afterall, you have this much time to kill...

When I was a teenager I didn't feel pretty when I saw Natalie Wood prancing around as a Puerto Rican character in the 1961 film version of West Side Story. Marnie Nixon's vocals and strange accent had no relationship to the familiar (to my ear) sound of Nuyorrican Spanish.

Her predecessor on the Broadway stage in the role of Maria was Carol Lawrence (1957).  

Yes—they found Puerto Ricans to play Maria's sidekick Anita (Chita Rivera and Rita Moreno) but the star had to be a white woman.

Here is part of my sing-a-long lyrical response, which opens with:

"I feel pretty, pretty shitty
It's a pity how shitty I feel
a committee has been organized to whitewash me "

and I close with a rousing:
 
I feel angry. Very angry.
It's alarming how angry I feel
because Hollywood will never get real.

I was a teenager then. They didn't have a name for this all-too-frequent phenomena back in those days, though we were real clear about related issues like blackface. We have names for it now.

It's called whitewashing and racebending.

The casting of white actors in non-white roles, or whitewashing, is not new. It's a tradition, which was pointed out quite clearly recently by Aasif Mandvi in his recent Salon piece (see slide show).    

"Racebending" as defined at the activist website racebending.com:

[R]efers to situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character. This is a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of color.

More often than not, this practice has a resultant discriminatory impact on an underrepresented cultural community and actors from that community (reinforcement of glass ceilings, loss of opportunity, etc.) In the past, practices like blackface and yellowface were strategies used by Hollywood to deny jobs to actors of color. Communities of color were helpless to control how they would be represented in media. Because characters of color were played by white actors, people of color were hardly represented at all–and rarely in lead roles. While white actors were freely given jobs playing characters of color in make-up, actors of color struggled to find work.

Our society has yet to escape the legacy of these casting practices, which still continue in a subdued form today. Even today, although actors of color are disproportionately underrepresented in the media, films with lead characters of color are still cast with non-minority actors.

A friend sent me a link to this recent whitewashing controversy in California, a state that is certainly not bare of Asians.

California's Asian American population is estimated at 4.4 million, approximately one-third of the nation's 13.1 million Asian Americans.

Heated exchanges at La Jolla Playhouse over multicultural casting:

The casting of “The Nightingale,” written by Tony-winning “Spring Awakening” collaborators Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, has drawn sharp criticism. The musical, adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story and set in ancient China, features a multicultural cast of 12, with two actors of Asian descent in supporting roles. The show's lead role of a young Chinese emperor is played by a white actor.

The production has five male roles. All are played by white men.

Spoken word artist Jason Chu makes it clear when he says, "Colorblind is just another way to say we don't care."

A community forum was between audience members, activists and the creative staff:
La Jolla Playhouse: The Nightingale Panel Discussion.

Some had come from as far away as New York.  

I found one question to the staff quite thought provoking:

If this had been set in Africa would you have dared to cast a white male as the African King? Would you have considered casting a white male?

The answer was, "I’m not sure it’s productive to say what if," which to me was not an answer at all.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser After 10 years of teaching Advanced Placement American Government, I feel like I might owe about 600-700 students an apology.

You see, for years, when I get to the lesson about public opinion polling, internal polling—polls sponsored by a campaign or an interested outside group—gets seriously pooh-poohed. "Don't read too much into them," I have repeatedly cautioned.

It is then that the standard caveats are eagerly offered. A campaign may conduct a dozen polls, and only release the single one that is amenable to them. Plus, you can never be sure that things like question wording and the order of questions in the survey haven't mucked up the trial heat numbers. Plus, in the worst cases, the organizations or campaigns may be less than honest about how they arrived at those lofty trial heat numbers (think: the always sketchy "push poll").

Not that any of these caveats aren't legitimate—indeed, all of them are. What's more: It is accepted practice in the political press to examine any internal poll results and offer the immediate caution that these polls should be taken "with a grain of salt."

However, the time has come for me to atone for my sins, and offer some counterpoint. A little time, plus a not-so-little database of polls (over 6,000 in all, culled from the last three election cycles), offer legitimate evidence that internal polls can tell us a heck of a lot more than we might think about the state of play in an election. Indeed, by looking at larger lessons, and not necessarily individual horse-race results, there is a fair amount of predicting value hidden amidst all those data points encrusted in grains of salt.

Three lessons in particular warrant keeping an eye on, as what has already been a pretty laudable load of data (over 1,000 polls thus far, according to my own unofficial tally) will only grow exponentially by November.

And those three lessons await you just past the jump ...

When news first broke a couple of weeks ago that nearly all of Greenland's entire ice sheet had melted into slush, many who follow the daily grind of the polls and gaffes of the two men vying to occupy the White House for the next four years were given a brief moment of pause. Arguments about tax returns, marginal rates, and who built what business with exactly how much outside help begin to seem trivial when compared to questions about what will happen to New York City if all the ice in the Arctic dissolves into the deep blue sea.

These concepts are not new: Given the possibility for catastrophe associated with climate change, it's hard to understand why it hasn't been more of a focus. Now, given the glaring frequency with which extreme weather events are dotting the landscape and the admission of anthropogenic warming even by those who are paid to deny it, perhaps the situation will finally get the attention it warrants.

But even if it does, there will be those who stand in the way of anything resembling the type of action it would take to address the problem. Typically, the people who oppose climate change are thought to do so because of short-term financial considerations: There are obviously those in the fossil fuel industry and other businesses who profit directly from the very activities that are warming the climate. But as powerful as these industries are at dictating policy in the United States and throughout the world, both logic and emotion seem dictate that they would eventually be overwhelmed by a unification of opposing forces, even on the right wing, who value the preservation of society over shorter-term profit. Unfortunately, that assumes that the right wing is interested in preserving society as we know it, and this assumption could be gravely mistaken.

Both progressives and conservatives feel that they are ideologically superior to the other, but the rationale behind that superiority differs dramatically. The sense of progressive superiority arises from the belief that our political positions will give the greatest number of people the greatest chance at happiness and success, all while preserving our planet in the process. This is the spirit that underlies progressive political positions: tax justice, strong unions and investment in infrastructure will give our middle class a better chance to succeed, even if it costs the wealthy a little more. Environmental regulations will keep people healthier and preserve our world's legacy, even if it costs factory owners more to implement them. Women and the LGBT community deserve full equality by nature of being just as human as straight men. Many of us support further regulation of assault weapons because it gives people a better chance of staying alive. We tend to oppose wars of choice for the same reason.

In short, we recognize that while we have made many improvements, society is not just, and we seek, to paraphrase Dr. King, to bend the arc of the universe a bit further in that direction. For progressives, global warming is obviously a major bummer: The economy will be drastically affected, and there will be untold suffering for those who are displaced by rising sea levels without the wherewithal to relocate. We take it seriously, but still, not as seriously as we perhaps should.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Jarman

And so the whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states. [...] Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year. [...]

That's Democratic strategist Paul Begala writing for the Daily Beast, bemoaning the campaigns' quest for swing voters and the outrageous sums of money that will be spent on convincing those few persuadables in the few states that can tip the election. In fact, according to his math, the $2 billion that will be spent on the election—in his mind, all of which is spent purely to sway those fewer-than-one-million minds—works out to $2,181 per swing voter.

Recent polling suggests that Begala isn't exaggerating too much, though. Swing voters have always been a small segment of the population, but at first glance it seems like there are fewer and fewer of them than ever. Polling back in spring of 2012, a point in the campaign where you might reasonably expect a lot of people to still be undecided, showed the vast majority of votes already locked down. Pew found that only 7 percent were truly undecided and not leaning in one party's direction or the other, while the first day of Gallup's tracking poll this year still found Barack Obama and Mitt Romney already taking over 90 percent of each of their party bases.

While it may be interesting to speculate on why there are so few swing voters any more—certainly the sorting-out of the parties into much clearer ideological and regional camps in the last few decades (with the gradual disappearance of conservative southern Democrats and moderate northeastern Republicans) has helped clear up a lot of people's uncertainty about where they belong, while the growth in news outlets with transparent partisan agendas helps reinforce existing political leans—the more important question becomes whether it's worth spending all that money on them. While no campaign should simply pretend swing voters don't exist and ignore them, eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns when trying to reach them (a point that's got to be somewhat lower than the $2,181 per swing voter cited by Begala), especially when there are other potential sources of votes which are not only potentially more cost-effective to tap but also potentially larger.

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist from Emory University, is one of the most prominent swing-voter skeptics; he's come out with several articles in the last few months arguing that not only are swing voters are overrated as a voting bloc but that it's a better use of Democrats' time and money to focus on unregistered voters instead. We'll look at both of those arguments, starting with the idea that there are a lot fewer swing voters than we think there are (or at least than the news media encourage us to think there are).

To make this case, Abramowitz looks at a study from the 2008 election between Barack Obama and John McCain. The study, by American National Election Studies, followed a panel of voters for more than a year to see when and how they made up their minds. In the first survey the panel took, they were forced to choose between Obama and McCain; there was no "undecided" or "other" option, but they were asked to indicate whether they were extremely sure, very sure, moderately sure, slightly sure, or not sure at all about their choice. Seventy-five percent were extremely or very sure ... but 25 percent were either moderate or slightly sure or not sure at all. That's a lot of swing voters, right?

However, very few of the voters in that second pool—who you'd think were likely to switch, since their hand had been forced in having to choose someone in the first round—wound up changing their minds. All the mind-changing was basically reversion to the norm; Obama benefited slightly, gaining only an additional percentage point in support along the way. As Abramowitz puts it:

Only 8% of respondents switched candidates between June and November. These switches basically canceled each other out: 9% of McCain supporters switched to Obama while 7% of Obama supporters switched to McCain. Ninety-two percent of respondents ended up voting for the same candidate in November that they supported in June. [...] Nine percent of voters in the swing states switched candidates between June and November compared with 7% of voters in all other states.

The people who were likeliest to switch were, simply, those persons whose initial choice was out of whack with their own party identification. Only 1 percent of Democrats who supported Obama in June wound up voting for McCain, while 4 percent of Republicans who supported McCain in June wound up voting for Obama. On the other hand, 32 percent of Democrats who supported McCain in June wound up voting for Obama, while 39 percent of Republicans who supported Obama in June wound up voting for McCain. In other words, the people who in June seemed likeliest to swing, by the end, wound up not swinging at all, but just coming home to their usual party.

Abramowitz uses the data to break the electorate down into four groups: the stayers (who didn't change between June and November), who make up 92 percent of the electorate, returning partisans (voters who initially planned to swing but reverted to their usual party) at 5 percent, and departing partisans (voters who initially planned to stay loyal but then swung to the other party) at 2 percent. That leaves truly "swinging independents" (the group that the news media would have you believe hold the nation in the balance), who accounted for a total of 1 percent of the electorate. Most self-described "independents," Abramowitz points out, started out with a preference and stuck with it, consistent with many other studies' findings that "independents" actually are partisans, just ones who don't want to get saddled with a partisan label.

Over the fold, we'll talk more about the contention that Democrats should focus less on those few swing voters and more on voter registration and mobilization.

• The photo of the year is of gold winning Olympian Gabby Douglas! We're proud of you Gabby!
• Mitt Romney seems to have a problem using other people as human shields:
  

  “I’m following the precedent set by the last presidential candidate of our party, John McCain, putting out two years of income tax returns and putting out a financial disclosure statement, those as required by law, of course,” Romney said.

  This has become Romney's stock answer when the question about his tax returns is presented to him. I don't think anyone questions whether John McCain has given his country more than what is due. But for Mitt Romney to hide behind John McCain's sacrifices for his country is a level cowardice unsurpassed in modern presidential campaign history.
• Rick Perry, of all people, says something smart:
  

  ”There are great and talented people out there, but vice presidential candidates are interesting choices that will probably only make two or three days worth of news, unless they make some huge gaffe,” Perry told CNN.

  Perry's observation is correct. If Romney thinks he can changed the direction of the campaign with a VP selection, he's deluding himself. This is the sort of thing that you can either get right and get no bump, or blow it completely. It certainly will not make questions about his tax returns go away. In fact, the press will want to know if he or she submitted tax returns to the Romney campaign. (chuckling)
• The midwestern drought is a ready made "ball hanging over the plate" moment for President Obama's campaign. It seems someone in the administration is starting to notice the prime opportunity here:
  

  The drought and the various types of aid available to farmers and ranchers were among the concerns Vilsack discussed with producers Friday while visiting the Ohio State Fair.

  "The president has instructed us to do everything we can to help. Our tools are going to be used, but they're limited," Vilsack told The Associated Press by phone afterward. "We need quick passage of the farm bill by the House of Representatives."

  Drought relief is just too easy. A Midwestern, multistate winner if there ever was one. You make a big speech, boom. You get a bill quickly through (that's going to pass anyway), boom. You make a big show out of signing it in the middle of a corn field, boom. Boom boom boom. Total electoral gold for an incumbent. No downside. The White House could also make more noise about what they're already doing.
• Social networking gives way to old-fashioned socializing:
  

  Not long after Katherine Losse left her Silicon Valley career and moved to this West Texas town for its artsy vibe and crisp desert air, she decided to make friends the old-fashioned way, in person. So she went to her Facebook page and, with a series of keystrokes, shut it off.

  The move carried extra import because Losse had been the social network’s 51st employee and rose to become founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal ghostwriter.

• The monetarists have failed. Isn't it time we start to create a new economics for the 21st Century?
• The Mars rover is closing in on its target.
• Some enterprising investigative reporter needs to look into the working conditions of the people who work at Yankee Stadium. You know, the security guards, vendors, and other underlings who aren't paid millions of dollars to play ball. There is a HUGE story in there.
• BlackBerry CEO looked at Android, but decided to stick with their own OS.
• "When you're rich, you want a Republican in office." So says rich porn star Jenna Jameson who is over qualified beyond all doubt to speak on such matters.

Via the Journal Sentinel:

At least four people were shot just after 10 a.m. Sunday at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, and a police SWAT team entered the building before noon and brought uninjured people out of the building at 7512 S. Howell Ave. [...]

There were reports that children were taken to the building's basement after shots were fired.

Someone who sent a text message to a Journal Sentinel reporter shortly before noon said that there were two shooters with children possibly as hostages.

You can watch a livestream of local coverage here.

Mitt Romney's views on the federal production tax credit for wind power—he thinks it should be ended—clash with views of people across the spectrum in the swing state of Iowa, including Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. His views on the credit also clash with some of his own energy advisers although he is lockstep with them on just about everything else related to energy. Even though his energy advisory team is dominated by leftovers from the Bush administration, lobbyists for the fossil-fuel industry or men who have been made unspeakably wealthy by fossil fuel, some of them do not go so far as to reject green energy out of hand.

Romney's views in this matter also clash with common sense. For those who want to know, I'll get to the details in a minute. But for now, the important thing about the production tax credit is that it works. However, for months now, it's been in limbo. It sunsets on Dec. 31. This has happened three times previously. Each time the credit is revived. But each hiatus causes havoc within the industry and its suppliers. That's what we're beginning to see again. Since wind farms typically take 18 months to complete from the time a permit is received until the turbines are up and spinning, investors already are shying away from new projects because of the iffy nature of the credit's future. Fewer investors means fewer wind farms, fewer technological innovations, fewer jobs and more dependence on the fuels that nature is informing us every day we must stop burning.

There was, finally, one bit of good news last week. The Senate Finance Committee managed to stick a one-year extension on the production tax credit in legislation it sent to the whole Senate. But while that item may pass the upper chamber, in the House a determined, climate-change-denying crew of know-nothings and fossil-fuel fans will do what they can to scuttle it. And they'll have Mitt Romney on their side.

He spoke against the production tax credit while he was in Iowa last week. But this isn't the first time he's expressed opposition. This time, after he did, Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher had this to say:

By opposing an extension to the wind production tax credit, Mitt Romney has come out against growth of the wind industry to support 100,000 jobs by 2016 and 500,000 jobs by 2030. Meanwhile, he supports $4 billion in oil and gas subsidies for companies that have rarely been more profitable.

Half a million jobs down the chute. No big deal to the Bain buccaneer. For a guy who likes to fire people, this would be the cherry topper.

Too bad the Obama campaign must maintain a sense of decorum. It would be good to hear Fetcher or others just say flat out what this stance on energy means. Either: 1) Romney is a numbskull; or 2) Romney is up to his eyebrows with his fossil fuel buddies and will kill jobs and continue wrecking the planet just so they all, and he, can profit.

There is a good reason Iowans love wind power. Their state not only gets 19 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, the second highest percentage in the nation, but the wind industry also provides as many as 7,000 jobs in the state. Some 85 percent of Iowans think wind power is beneficial, according to a poll commissioned by the American Wind Energy Association, an industry group. Even 41 percent of Iowa Republicans told pollsters they are less likely to support a presidential candidate who doesn't favor expanding wind power.  

Iowa isn't the only state getting a high proportion of its electricity from the wind. South Dakota is first, with 22 percent. North Dakota, Minnesota and Wyoming all get at least 10 percent of theirs that way. All told, wind has an installed generating capacity of 49 gigawatts in the U.S., about 4.3 percent of the nation's total. Wind generated slightly more than 3 percent of total U.S. electricity in the United States during the 12-month period ending in May this year.

That may not seem like much. But a decade ago, it was one-tenth that. Phenomenal growth.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

Inexperienced.
Inconsistent.
Insecure.
Not focused.
Unsteady.
Lacks confidence.
Can't handle the pressure.
Not ready.
Not ready.
Not ready.

A new survey of American suburban and swing voters by Hofstra University's National Center for Suburban Studies demonstrates just how mainstream the progressive vision for the country on the role of government really is. On issues of income inequality, the social contract, government regulation of industry for health and safety of the public, these swing voters demonstrate that, while they don't like these concepts in the abstract, they support the specific programs at issue, and want to keep them strong. This plays into the larger narrative that's at the heart of this campaign and the competing visions for what the role of government in our daily lives should be, and how Democrats and progressives should be presenting that vision.

The survey was designed and executed by Princeton, and was conducted in mid-June with telephone interviews in English and Spanish with 1,532 adults age 18 or older. It oversampled surburban voters, including 1,005 of them. At the core of this discussion, shaping all other opinions in it, is the fact that this is a group of Americans that has been hit particularly hard by the recession.

The personal experience with the economic carnage has not abated in the suburbs where more than seven in ten residents (73%) have lost their job or know someone who has, down a bit from 79 percent in 2011. Almost as many (68%) have seen layoffs or forced retirements at their workplace, just about the same as the 70 percent in 2011.

Experience with losing a home to foreclosure or because of skyrocketing mortgage payments has continued to rise. More than two in five suburbanites (43%) say they or someone they know has lost their home, up five percentage points since 2011.

That colors much of what this group of voters believes as you drill down into issues, and that's where you see complexity in these voters' beliefs. For example, 56 percent support "reducing personal income taxes on all Americans," but 60 percent also support "raising personal income taxes on wealthier Americans." When it comes to government spending, the same contradictions emerge.

More than seven in ten suburban residents (72%) say they favor cutting federal spending in general and only 21 percent oppose such trims. But ask about cutting defense spending and a majority is opposed, 34 percent to 56 percent. And almost no one wants to cut spending on Social Security and Medicare, two of the largest items in the federal budget. Only 10 percent of suburban residents support such cuts, while 87 percent oppose such moves.

Turning the issue around, there is majority support for increasing some government spending. Nearly two-thirds of suburban dwellers (65%) support increasing spending on roads, bridges, and other public works projects, while 30 percent oppose it. [emphasis added]

Here's the Democrats' huge opening. It comes to them courtesy Paul Ryan and complete Republican embrace—including from Mitt Romney—of his extreme budget, his extreme vision for America in which government disappears in everything but the military, and we all fend for ourselves. What the Ryan/Romney plan would do to Medicare has been well covered: Seniors would see their benefits drastically reduced and shrinking over time, until Medicare as it was created and as we know it would shrivel up and die.

But less discussed, since Ryan avoided directly addressing it in his budget, is what it would do to Social Security. Just because the cuts aren't spelled out in the budget doesn't mean they're not there, Social Security experts Nancy Altman, Eric Kingson and Benjamin W. Veghte explain.

What changes do Representative Ryan and his colleagues have in mind? In each of the past two years, Ryan has issued documents about the GOP’s long-term budget plans. Neither has the force of law yet, but the preferred changes in Social Security are clear:

• Along the lines of a proposal former President George W. Bush unsuccessfully advocated in 2005, Ryan would move toward giving all Social Security beneficiaries a basic pension set at a low level and largely unrelated to each person’s prior wages. Beyond that, people would have to fend for themselves, supplementing their modest benefits from savings or paid work.
• Ryan praises the idea of increasing Social Security’s early and normal retirement ages to ages 64 and 69 respectively—and he would also further lift these ages in the future based on how much longer an average American lives. [...] A “retirement age” of 69 translates into approximately a 13% cut for everyone, even for workers who work until age 70 or beyond (and that cut would be in addition to the 13 percent cut that all Americans younger than 52 will experience because the retirement age is already scheduled to move to age 67 for them).

Remember the recent focus group by Priorities USA, the Super PAC supporting President Obama? When they were informed about what the Romney-endorsed Ryan budget would do to Medicare, the focus group participants flatly refused to believe that any politician would be stupid enough to sign on to that plan.

Here's the first thing Democrats need to do. They need to make sure that voters everywhere—urban, suburban, rural—know that Mitt Romney and all the Republicans are just that stupid, that they are just the extreme, that they absolutely intend to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare, and that they mean to do it so that they can keep taxes on the richest Americans low.

Here's the second thing Democrats need to do. They need to defend these programs at least as strenuously as they are defending extending the middle class tax cuts. That means ending any and all threats from Democrats about sacrificing these essential programs to the austerity hysteria (I'm looking directly at you, Rep. Rob Andrews). That means taking a strong and solemn vow now, before any votes are cast on Nov. 6, to hold Social Security and Medicare benefits safe from any "grand bargain" in the lame-duck session.

Voters aren't going to think Democrats are being irresponsible spendthrifts, they're going to think Democrats are living up to all their talk about standing up for the little guy, about caring first and foremost about middle-class America. Just do it, Democrats, protect these programs and tax the rich to do it. It's not just a popular policy to follow, it's the responsible one.

With an n=small number, the pundits pontificate about their interpretation of history.

Chris Cillizza:

Amid the back and forth about Friday’s jobs report, one thing is abundantly clear: To win a second term on November 6, President Obama is going to have to defy history.

Unemployment! Reagan! Simple narrative!

Jonathan Bernstein:

With the new jobs numbers out today, it’s more clear than ever what the economy will probably look like to voters this November. It’s a very slow recovery, but it’s not a double-dip recession, either. There’s been, however, a fair amount of misunderstanding about what that signals for Barack Obama’s chances of a second term.

In particular, there’s a strain of punditry that theorizes that Obama will have to “defy history” to get reelected. This line holds that presidents don’t get re-elected when unemployment is over eight percent, or when “right track/wrong track” numbers are badly depressed, or when the president’s job approval on the economy is negative.

In fact, the election models political scientists and economists have developed suggest — when you plug in the fundamentals of this election cycle — that this will be a close race, and not one that Obama will have to defy history to win.

I'm with Bernstein. So is this guy:

SF Gate:

“This sort of slow-growth region puts it in the too-close- to-call category,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta and developer of the forecasting model, which also factors in presidential job approval. Abramowitz said today that his model projects Obama will get 50.5 percent of the popular vote and has a two-thirds probability of winning.

Fun prediction sites here. See also Intrade and IEM. The markets (including in the UK) have Obama winning as a higher % than the economic models, but less than Nate's forecast (economics + polls).

More Alan Abramowitz:

These results also suggest that the impact of field organization can be just as great as that of spending on TV ads. The Obama campaign enjoyed an even larger advantage in field organization than in advertising dollars in 2008, and the findings presented here indicate that this advantage played a major role in Obama’s victories in Indiana and North Carolina and almost turned Missouri blue for the first time since 1996. Given the relative costs of field offices and TV ads, investing in field organization in the battleground states may be a more efficient use of campaign resources than spending on television advertising.

Read the above, then read the NY Times:

Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have burned through millions of dollars to find and register voters. They have spent almost $50 million subsidizing Democratic state parties to hire workers, pay for cellphones and update voter lists. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on polling, online advertising and software development to turn Mr. Obama’s fallow volunteers corps into a grass-roots army.

Oh. My. God! Romney wil have so much money to spend advertising a guy no one likes. We're doomed!

The Hill:

While the good news was coupled with an uptick in the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent, analysts predicted that if the job numbers—however murky—are maintained over the next several months, Obama is likely to win reelection in November against his opponent Mitt Romney.

Nate Silver:

Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the Electoral College increased slightly on the economic news, to 71.1 percent from 70.2 percent.

Mr. Obama’s lead in the popular vote is quite narrow: the forecast projects him to win 50.7 percent of the vote, against 48.3 percent for Mitt Romney. (Interestingly, this is the exact margin by which George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004.)

Michael Tomasky:

There’s a secret lurking behind everything you’re reading about the upcoming election, a secret that all political insiders know—or should—but few are talking about, most likely because it takes the drama out of the whole business. The secret is the electoral college, and the fact is that the more you look at it, the more you come to conclude that Mitt Romney has to draw an inside straight like you’ve never ever seen in a movie to win this thing. This is especially true now that it seems as if Pennsylvania isn’t really up for grabs. Romney’s paths to 270 are few.

The polling data forces Dan Balz to conclude that Obama is currently ahead and Romney trails:

The head-to-head polls have largely remained static in that time. But in looking at the numbers nationally and in the battleground states, the consistency of Obama’s lead is striking. More than two dozen national polls have been conducted since the beginning of June. Obama has led in the overwhelming number of them.

Polls in the most contested states show a similar pattern. In three of the most important — Ohio, Florida and Virginia — there have been roughly three dozen polls total since April, about the time that Romney’s GOP rivals were exiting the nomination race. In Ohio and Virginia, Obama has led in all but a few. In Florida, Romney has done better, but overall, Obama has led about twice as often.

Those polls are not definitive predictors of the November outcome, by any means. A movement in the national numbers, which could easily occur in the final weeks, will change the look of many of those states. But at this point, the available evidence suggests that the advantage, however small, is with Obama. If this were truly a dead even race, Romney should be ahead in these polls almost as often as he is behind.

So the consensus is that if the election were held now, Obama would win because Romney, by a small amount, trails. There's time yet, and there's conventions, there's the VP candidate, there are the speeches. But the models and odds are all in Obama's favor, even if by a small amount. Don't get suckered into thinking this is a dead heat, because it's not. But Tomasky's point about this being a potential electoral rout remains just that—potential, not actual, at least at this time. Most predictors say the race will be a lot closer than that.

In the end, in a close election, campaigns matter. So far, Obama's has been demonstrably better, and their decision to "burn" through the money on field costs and ad dollars to define Romney before he can define himself appears to be a very good bet.

Mitt Romney returned from his overseas photo opportunity this week, having failed to start a nuclear war in the Middle East, but with much success on the cultural front.

All too predictably, the animals in the traveling press corps chose to focus on Romney's (alleged) struggles, while totally ignoring the strong relationships and momentum that he built without any government assistance.

Maybe if they'd bothered to read a few history books, instead of relying on what someone told them, they would've known that kissing ass is a time-honored Polish tradition, and understood how heroic it is.