Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was the park in Arvada, CO where the body of Jessica Ridgeway was found.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

[HA Bible Study is on hiatus through the November election as we honor Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by studying his Mormon faith.]

Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 2:182-84
When the Constitution of the United States hangs, as it were, upon a single thread, they will have to call for the “Mormon” Elders to save it from utter destruction; and they will step forth and do it.

Discuss.

My previous analysis was completed early Friday morning, before most polls were released. The analysis showed President Barack Obama leading Governor Mitt Romney by 302 to 236 electoral votes (on average). In an election held yesterday, Obama would be expected to win with a 94.4% probability, and Romney with a 5.6% probability.

There have been 35 new polls released since then that cover 23 “states”. I put states in quotes, because we get polls for ME-1 and ME-2 this batch. Lots of swing states are included in this batch, and they largely come down on the side of Obama:

Both new Colorado polls offer Obama slim margins over Romney. With five current polls splitting 4 to 1 for Obama, the analysis gives Obama an 81% probability of taking the state.

We get one Florida poll for each candidate, but Romney gets the net benefit. The current polls split 3 to 2 in favor of Romney, giving the G.O.P. nominee about 2/3 probability of taking the state.

All three new Iowa polls go to Obama, who also takes 6 of 7 current polls.

Maine-2 was considered a swing “state”, but both new polls go to Obama. Together the suggest Obama has a 87% chance of taking ME-2’s single electoral vote.

Three new Michigan polls give modest leads to Obama. The President takes all five current polls, suggesting a very high probability of taking the state.

The new Minnesota poll is pretty solid for Obama, who ends up with a high probability of winning the state.

The new Nevada poll puts Obama over Romney by a modest +6%. As it happens, that’s the only poll that falls in the current poll window. It suggests Obama would win the state now with a 86% probability.

Obama leads in two new New Hampshire polls. One gives Obama a slim +1% and the other gives him a +5.1%. All four current polls go to Obama and he looks to have an 88% probability of taking the state now.

Four of five new Ohio polls go to Obama, the fifth is a tie. We now have eleven polls taken in the past week, and Obama leads in nine; Romney leads in one. If the election was held now, Obama would take the state with a 97% probabililty.

In Virginia, Obama squeaks out a +0.9% lead. It is the only current poll, so Obama comes away with a 58% probability of winning, based on this evidence.

Obama gets a modest +6.7% in the new Wisconsin poll. Now he leads in four of five current polls, with the fifth poll being a tie. In the analysis, Obama won just under 100% of the simulated elections.

After 100,000 simulated elections, Obama wins 98,915 times and Romney wins 1,085 times (including the 66 ties). Obama received (on average) 309 (+7) to Romney’s 229 (-7) electoral votes. In an election held now, Obama would have a 98.9% (+4.5%) probability of winning and Romney would have a 1.1% (-4.5%) probability of winning.

The long term trends in this race can be seen from a series of elections simulated every seven days using polls from 03 Nov 2011 to 03 Nov 2012, and including polls from the preceding seven days (FAQ).

Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations:

Washington Senators for Washington:

Young Turks: Republican’s War on Math.

Maddow: End of campaign bluster.

White House: West Wing Week.

Willard (and Friends):

• Liberal Viewer: Should Mr. Burns endorse Mitt Romney?
• SlateTV: Chrysler refutes Ohio Romney ad
• Young Paul Ryan.
• Ann Telnaes: Romney’s change.
• Mitt Romney is autistic:

SlateTV: Why don’t we get rid of the electoral college.

Schoolhouse Rock: Election Rock, with conspiracy theories.

Young Turks: debate audience laugh at Michele Bachmann.

Cock-block the Vote.

Roy Zimmerman: I’m in:

Politics of Disaster:

• Ann Telnaes: Romney’s all wet..
• Sam Seder: Occupy Sandy….
• Young Turks: Mitt v. Climate change.
• Sam Seder: Mitt Romney implies hurricane Sandy recovery just like cleaning up HS football celebration
• SlateTV: Chris Christie can’t stop praising Obama.
• Mark Fiore: The Emergency Private Sector Alert System.
• Sam Seder: FEMA + Romney Administration = Disaster
• Stephen: Hurricane Sandy nightmare

Political Kombat ‘12: Obama vs Romney.

Maddow: States with weird election laws.

Thom with the Good, the Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly.

Jon: Dystopian hellscape that Is Ohio.

Liberal Viewer: Romney stung by repeating a FAUX News lie in debate.

Letterman: VP Joe does the top-10 on voting early.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Mike O’Brien has the story of Seattle City Light helping out in the wake of Sandy.

Seattle City Light, our local publicly-owned utility, is sending 18 linemen, their trucks and all their gear out to Long Island, NY to help restore power in the aftermath of Sandy. I am incredibly proud of our utility for finding a way to help out.

Many utilities across the country are lending a hand. I am especially proud of City Light for not only sending staff, but also finding a way to send the critical equipment they need to be most effective in the relief effort. City Light has been working hard all week to find a way to help and it paid off. This weekend, City Light crews are catching a ride with the U.S. Air Force to the storm ravaged area where millions are without power and heat.

It’s not very efficient to send the trucks and workers to help, so I’m sure there are some run-everything-like-a-business-I-don’t-want-my-utility-bill-going-to-that people out there. But I’m glad they’re helping. And I’m proud that my utility bill is going to help pay for that.

Obama has made a big jump in his chances to be reelected with this new analysis.

A couple of things. This analysis only includes polls through early Friday morning. Also, I am using a 7-day “current poll” window at this point in the race. Third, after missing most of the week, I cannot go through the state-by-state polls today. And last, there are some older polls I’ve added but not included in this list. The list may also exclude one or two new polls. You can always see what polls are used for each state from the big state table below.

Here are (most of) the new polls I’ve included:

After 100,000 simulated elections, Obama wins 94,381 times and Romney wins 5,619 times (including the 384 ties). Obama received (on average) 302 to Romney’s 236 electoral votes. In an election held now, Obama would have a 94.4% probability of winning and Romney would have a 5.6% probability of winning.

The long term trends in this race can be seen from a series of elections simulated every seven days using polls from 02 Nov 2011 to 02 Nov 2012, and including polls from the preceding seven days (FAQ).

Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations:

- On our last blog, Lee and I used to make fun of right wingers. Matt Manweller was on the top of the list. And ick for ever to that guy.

- Melissa McEwan’s take on the John Koster story.

- Seattle’s plans for the storm season.

- Being wrong is the most important thing for conservative pundits.

- It’s a better world.

- I didn’t know anything about assassin bugs before reading this post.

I’m a pretty harsh critic of The Seattle Times. I think their coverage is more biased for a corporate status quo than they’ll care to admit and their editorials are sloppy and often off the mark. And with the ad for McKenna, they’ve put their partisanship on display.

But I don’t get any joy from their declining circulation numbers. For the best corrective to the Seattle Times’ sloppy efforts is better competition. When I read that they’d fallen off of the top 25 papers in the country, I thought of George Orwell’s lament at the end of World War Two that London only had 12 daily papers.

It is only when there are large numbers of newspapers, expressing all tendencies, that there is some chance of getting at the truth. Counting evenings, London has only twelve daily papers, and they cover the whole of the south of England and penetrate as far north as Glasgow. When they all decide to tell the same lie, there is no minority press to act as a check. In pre-war France the press was largely venal and scurrilous, but you could dig more news out of it than out of the British press, because every political faction had its paper and every viewpoint got a hearing.

Of course people get their news from the Internet now and from TV more than they did back then. But the biggest problem with TV news, with the Seattle Times, and most other daily papers in the region, is that they’re reporting from a similar perspective.

Well, it’s been something of a rough week for me. But I am mostly recovered now, I’ve been off narcotics for almost a day, and I’ll likely be discharged this evening.

With any luck, I’ll do a new poll analysis by late this evening or tomorrow morning. I’ve entered most of the polls up through yesterday, but since they were entered under the influence of morphine, I’ll have some error checking to do.

Oh…and sorry about Kentucky thing. That’s the kind of error I usually find before posting, typically while writing up the summary of polls. But I skipped all that to get up what I figured to be the last analysis for awhile.

Just looking at the polls that have come in, I see no big shake-ups. I expect Obama will still be above a 90% probability of winning and somewhere around a mean of 300 electoral votes.

I thought I might be all out of what the fucks this campaign season. Especially after the shitty hurricane coverage. But there’s still at least one more. What the fuck, John Koster?

Koster: “When a mother’s life in in danger. I’m not going to make that decision. You know, I know they go out and… incest is so rare, I mean, it’s so rare. But the rape thing…you know, I know a woman who was raped and kept her child, gave it up for adoption, she doesn’t regret it. In fact, she’s a big pro-life proponent. But on the rape thing, it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s a consequence of this crime, how does that make it better? You know what I mean?”

First off, if that story is true it doesn’t really change the facts for the women who get an abortion after being raped. If a woman decides to have a kid after being raped, I want to live in a society that respects that. But society should have just as much respect for a woman who doesn’t want to bring her rapist’s child into the world.

Now I think all women should be able to make that decision for themselves under any circumstances. But it’s tough to imagine that a person wouldn’t feel a little compassion sneak in when we’re talking about rape victims.

- Aside from the anti-bus one, I like these reasons to bike to work.

- I’m not an evangelical, and we live in a secular society is a better response on policy than to tell them what they should believe about religion. But the relatively recent change to opposition to abortion in the evangelical community is pretty fascinating.

- Good for Italy.

- Bogus photos, however, are a strange new form of popular expression attached to unfolding crises, hovering somewhere on the boundary between art and commentary.

- Obviously, it’s limited in geography and scope, but I think the MTA Flickr had the best pictures.

- When I was in England and people would ask me why people call it football, I would tell them it was because the ball was shaped like a foot. I like this answer better.

I don’t care how desperate you are for a local angle on the biggest story right now. If the story you’ve decided to write is What does Michael Brown think of Sandy (h/t) you’re writing the wrong goddamn story. I mean maybe if you preface it with, and do the opposite of what this fucker says.

Seriously, after his monumental fuckup in the wake of Katrina why the hell would you ask his opinion if you had a hangnail? Honestly.

Also, even if you didn’t know it was this fucker, that’s really terrible advice. Obama is being too prepared for a disaster and Something something Benghazi.

Seriously. It’s cheap enough to be like “storm good for candidate arrrgh” or “Storm Bad for candidate!” But to be both for no real reason other than to just have something to say? Boo.

And yes, I realize that if you’re a pundit, you have to keep doing punditry. But maybe take a breath or some shit. I don’t know.

Just to be clear, I’m not inherently opposed to tying Sandy to the presidential election. It’s a week away, and Sandy may have an impact. But when there is a disaster, maybe step up your game.

Please join us tonight for a special edition of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally, where we’ll all raise a pint in honor of Darryl’s aging pancreas.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm. Some people show up earlier for Dinner.

Our gatherings are informal. If you show up and don’t immediately recognize the pack of liberals, ask a bartender or server.

The previous analysis showed President Barack Obama leading Governor Mitt Romney with a 93.4% to a 6.6% probability of winning an election now. Obama led 294 to 244 electoral votes

Today’s polls through about noon were…

After 100,000 simulated elections, Obama wins 95,877 times and Romney wins 4,123 times (including the 363 ties). Obama received (on average) 303 to Romney’s 235 electoral votes. In an election held now, Obama would have a 95.9% probability of winning and Romney would have a 4.1% probability of winning.

The long term trends in this race can be seen from a series of elections simulated every seven days using polls from 29 Oct 2011 to 29 Oct 2012, and including polls from the preceding ten days (FAQ).

Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations:

Over lunch today, I was putting together a post with the latest election analysis. I started feeling bad. It got worse, and to make a long story short, I ended up in the ER.

The diagnosis is pancreatitis. So, I’ll be in the hospital for a couple of days, receiving morphine for the pain. I will try to finish an abbreviated poll analysis, but it will include only polls through this morning.

Morphine makes me tired.

- If you’ve got any money left over after campaign giving season, this kickstarter for Bezango, WA looks pretty good (h/t).

- Larry Stickney, as you can see, is super concerned with privacy.

- I’m still put off by Powell’s endorsement because of the war. But John McCain doesn’t really have a right to complain.

- And Barbara Guzzo, organizer of Catholics for Marriage, argued that the bishops have brought “anguish, division and sadness” to the faithful, “particularly those with a gay person in their families, the hurt that this has caused.”

- Still have to take some time to digest this XKCD on the partisan makeup of Congress

Who’da thunk it?

The home of such dreck as Pawn Stars, Ice Road Truckers, and Only in America with Larry The Cable Guy may have actually gotten something almost right, almost historically accurate:

That’s the trailer for an episode of “Mega Disasters” on The History Channel, ordinarily as misnamed a channel as there can be. What the environs of New York City are facing in the next few days may, in fact, be even more catastrophic than that program envisions. To wit:

• The storm depicted in the show comes up the coast, basically tracking toward the northeast. Hurricane Sandy is expected to travel in a northwesterly direction, churning into New York Harbor directly from the open ocean.
• The hypothetical storm moves very fast, with clear skies arriving within less than a day. Sandy, we’re told, will stall over Pennsylvania for days, deluging the entire Northeast under at least 6-12 inches of rain.
• Coming at the end of October, newly-fallen leaves will obstruct and clog storm drains, making for faster and deeper flooding than would happen in the September timeframe of the TV show’s storm.
• As a final kicker in the real scenario, Monday, October 29 is a full moon, when tides are always at their highest. High tides at the Battery will occur at 8:31am and 8:53pm Monday, 9:06am and 9:32pm Tuesday, and 9:40am and 10:13pm Wednesday.

Here’s hoping it isn’t nearly as serious as the dire predictions are telling us. I expect to hear reports from my nephew, who lives near Lincoln Center, once the worst passes … if there’s any electric power in the area, that is.

PS. This is Bruce’s Sandy:

Last week’s contest was unsolved as of Thursday night. It was in Yakima.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from October, good luck!

[HA Bible Study is on hiatus through the November election as we honor Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by studying the scriptures of his Mormon religion.]

Doctrine and Covenants 130:22
The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.

Discuss.