Last Call

How bad are things in Staten Island, New York after Sandy?  Pretty miserable, as you can see in this Rock Center segment on NBC.



And that's the problem.  All the coverage and rescue efforts are being focused on posh Manhattan.  Staten Island?  They get to wait in line.

And that line is very, very long.  Hey Bloomberg?  You gotta problem, bro. A big one.

Another One For The Future Fire

Sure, picking on PJ Media's Bryan Preston is hitting low-hanging fruit with an orbital ion cannon, but the guy prefaces his election pick 5 days out with the tagline "reality check".

Nothing of course could be further from the truth.

More than any poll, it’s wise to watch the campaigns. Watch their body language and their travel and spending patterns. Looking at both campaigns from that point of view, it’s very clear that five days from the election the Obama campaign is in retreat. This morning, Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter accidentally admitted that they’re no longer competing in North Carolina, which Obama won four years ago.

That admission parallels David Axelrod’s mustache bet: He only wagered a shave if Obama lost all of three states that just a couple of weeks ago were supposedly in the bag for Obama. That’s hardly a courageous bet. At the same time, Romney is going up with ads in Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in addition to the swing states that he is already advertising in and campaigning in either directly or via surrogates. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two states Obama must have in order to win, are definitely in play.

Poll data (objective) is useless.  "Campaign body language" which is subjective, is all that matters.  Really?  Now I know why Nate Silver's dispassionate spreadsheets are such an existential threat to the eternal horse race/both sides do it crowd. 

Preston sums it up:

Five days out, the race for president is far from over, but once you get past the oversampling of Democrats in swing state polls, the fundamentals and the campaigns’ body language point toward a Romney victory on Tuesday. Tomorrow’s jobs numbers may be the president’s last chance to change the trajectory of the race.

Those jobs numbers were pretty good, Bryan.  And no, the "fundamentals" point towards a 4 in 5 chance or so of an Obama win.  Your wishful thinking doesn't change reality, wingnuts.

Guilty As Charged Up, Your Honor

Mitt Romney sure seems to think Tesla Motors is a loser of a green investment.

During [the first] presidential debate, GOP candidate Mitt Romney called Tesla Motors a "loser" company, lumping it in with bankrupt solar power company Solyndra, financially troubled green auto-maker Fisker Automotive and green car battery producer Ener1.

Co-established by billionaire PayPal and SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk, the thriving Tesla manufactures and sells electric vehicles, the most well-known being its luxury sports models. Writes Slate of the company, "In nine years, the startup has gone from a twinkle in Elon Musk's eye to taking over 13,000 orders for the Model S, a luxury sedan that has drawn raves from just about everyone lucky enough to test-drive it. I am one of them. Mitt Romney, clearly, is not."

Mitt might want to reconsider and revise his earlier statement.

For the first time ever, Automobile Magazine has named an all-electric vehicle as its “Car of the Year” for 2013.

Citing its sleek design and high performance, Automobile Magazine said Tesla’s Model S luxury sedan beat out gasoline-powered cars like the Subaru BRZ and the Porsche Boxster.

“It’s the performance that won us over,” Editor-in-Chief Jean Jennings said in the magazine’s January 2013 issue. “The crazy speed builds silently and then pulls back the edges of your face. It had all of us endangering our licenses.”

The Model S can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds, making it as fast as the gas-guzzling 470-horsepower Dodge Charger. In a drag race with the 560-horsepower BMW M5, the Model S won. The editors were equally wowed by the sporty suspension and handling of the Model S.

Seems like Tesla's doing just fine, Mr. Romney.   You'd think a businessman would know these things.  Alas, that businessman is Mitt Romney.

And It Begins...The 2014 Tantrum

The post election spin is already gearing up as evidenced by this Politico piece full of emoprogs complaining that President Obama will surely destroy Social Security any time now.

Progressive activists say they’re reasonably confident that the president won’t compromise on ending the upper-income tax cuts. It’s the entitlements that worry them. They want him to stick more closely to the deficit-reduction plan he released in September 2011 that didn’t go as aggressively after savings from beneficiaries.

But Obama signaled last week that he could revive the offer he made to Boehner, which was a mix of new revenues, reduced federal spending and entitlement benefit cuts such as raising the Medicare eligibility age and lowering the cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients.

“It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant,” Obama told The Des Moines Register editorial board. “But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in [taxes], and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.”

Administration officials say the range of options that Obama has considered in the past are well known, so it shouldn’t be a surprise if they are resurrected.

But progressive leaders don’t want Obama to go back there. Privately, they use words like “debacle” and “betrayal” to describe the backlash that would ensue. They are far more measured in their public statements ahead of the election.

And people wonder why Democrats lost the House 2 years ago.  The people who thought Obama was a debacle and a betrayal stayed home in 2010 and got us this awesome House with Speaker John Boehner we have now, not to mention put GOP governors and legislatures in place in state after state just in time for redistricting, making it even more impossible to dislodge the little carbuncle this year.

All this article show me is the fact that nobody on our side of the field learned a damn thing from liberals not voting in 2010...the real debacle and betrayal.

We're setting it up for 2014.  There's a goal worth striving for.  Maybe we can give the Republicans another 60 seats and control of the Senate then.  That will surely help with more progressive legislation, right?

All About Winning

Throwing Todd Akin under the bus for his awful "legitimate rape" comments was fashionable when Republicans still thought they had a shot at the Senate two months ago without him.  That ship has sailed.

Now or Never PAC, the conservative, Missouri-based super PAC supporting Todd Akin, has upped it's ad buy in the final week of the Missouri Senate race from $800,000 to $1 million, the group's spokesman, Tyler Harber, told TPM Thursday.

The ad, which TPM first reported on Wednesday, argues that Todd Akin is needed in the Senate -- even if he's not a perfect candidate -- in order to help Republicans take control of the Senate.

Gosh, I'm betting there are women in Missouri who would like to know who the donors are to Now or Never PAC, but of course you can buy anonymity when you have that much money.  Free speech, if you can afford it.

Also helps when publicly you're a Republican who has disavowed Akin in the past, too.  Funny how that works.

Jobapalooza

The final jobs report before the election finds October gained 171,000 new jobs, with the jobless rate ticking up to 7.9%.

U-6 was down both adjusted and non-adjusted.  In other words, this was a good jobs report, and one must closer to the 200K+ new jobs level we need to be at.

Republicans are furious, of course.

An Offensive Display

Mitt Romney is pretending to remain on offense going into the final weekend of the campaign as he makes a desperate effort to make headway in Pennsylvania.

In a late campaign push to change the battleground map, Mitt Romney will travel to Pennsylvania on Sunday in the hopes of capturing the traditionally Democratic-leaning state. A Romney campaign official confirmed to CNN the GOP nominee will stop in the Philadelphia area Sunday afternoon. The Pennsylvania event falls into the Romney campaign's newly adopted strategy of expanding the battleground map in the final week of the race.

Top strategists to the GOP nominee targeted Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota this week for potential gains, pointing to polls in the states that show Romney gaining on the President.

Sure they are, guys.   McCain made similar flailing moves in the last week of the campaign only to lose enough ground in Florida to give the state to Obama in 2008.  This is the act of a guy playing the last cards in his hand when there's nothing left in the deck and he's down big.  Nate Silver's giving 95% odds of Obama winning those three states.  But Romney says "they're in play."

Sure they are.

StupidiNews!

• Day 5 after Sandy finds 3.5 million in parts of New York and New Jersey still without power and facing gas and food shortages as a result.
• California's Proposition 34 seeks to put a permanent moratorium on the death penalty into the state's constitution, and voters will take it up on Tuesday.
• The US is refuting the latest claims of the right on Benghazi, with the CIA saying a team was dispatched after the attack within 25 minutes.
• NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has endorsed President Obama for re-election, making his case based on experience and efforts to combat the effects of climate change.
• Japanese electronics giant Sharp is facing an uncertain future after a $3 billion quarterly loss amid a monitor market increasingly dominated by Chinese companies.