This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
|
New poll in PA and my rolling average once again flips which side of the “leaning” fence it is on. This time PA goes from Leaning Obama back to Leaning McCain. PA is just a close state. If this keeps up, it could be the Florida of 2008.
Anyway, Pennsylvania flipping changes the lead, and McCain is once again ahead if you give everybody their leaning states.
Current Summary:
McCain Best Case – McCain 357, Obama 181
Obama Best Case – Obama 330, McCain 208
And if everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – McCain 278, Obama 260
Have I mentioned this is still insanely close?
About eight hours ago, while we were delivering Amy to sing at a fundraising thing at a convention center about 30 minutes north of home, I decided it would be a fun thing to do to completely lose my footing on a staircase at said convention center. The soles of my shoes were wet from the sleet rain mix outside. As I started down the stairs my feet just completely slipped out from under me. From witness reports (Brandy) I flailed about a bit as I fell as I fell and I bounced a couple of times as I slid down several steps making nice “clunk clunk clunk” noises before coming to a rest face down on the stairs. Brandy says it was quite amusing to see, as I landed in a position completely reversed from the direction I had been walking.
No permanent injuries or anything, but my left leg was quite bruised and scraped up… as was my ego since a decent number of people saw me do it. I rapidly limped back to the car while Brandy finished getting Amy settled.
Anyway, as I write it still hurts and such. I’m sure it will be nicely black and blue in the morning, at least the parts that aren’t red from the scrapes.
But as mentioned, nothing serious. Just a nice fun tumble down the stairs. They should make an amusement park ride out of it or something. :-)
It can’t decide between hail and snow, so it keeps switching back and forth. But whatever it is, someone needs to tell it that it is April 19th and it is time to stop.
For anybody who might be curious, they found… absolutely nothing. Well, nothing of significance. He made note of a few things, but nothing that would be contributing to any problems. Which I suppose is good in that it eliminates various things that might have been possible that could have been problematic.
He did note that based on my last scans (a couple months ago) I only have one kidney stone left in me at the moment, down from around 10 in a scan several years ago. I’ve been slowly getting rid of them and not making any new ones.
Also, a blood test from earlier showed elevated levels of some hormone that relates to how the body processes calcium, so he’s going to have me see another specialist to look into that, but he thinks that is not going to be an issue, as my actual levels of calcium are just fine.
And he mentioned that the recurring UTIs probably ARE directly related to the stones, with the stones giving bacteria places to hide essentially.
All of the above though are related to non-invasive tests from earlier though. From today he just determined that everything up in there looks fine.
Which, as I mentioned, is good.
As for the test itself… I don’t want to be doing anything like that again for a good long time.
SurveyUSA released 15 new state by state polls today. Of those, 4 caused status changes in my rolling averages. In order of electoral votes:
- Ohio (20 ev) moved from weak McCain to leaning McCain
- Virginia (13 ev) moved from weak McCain to leaning McCain
- Missouri (11 ev) moved from leaning McCain to weak McCain
- New Mexico (5 ev) moved from weak Obama to leaning Obama
The end result of all that is 27 more electoral votes are now in the “leaning” categories, meaning the number of states and electoral votes that really could very easily go either way is increased dramatically over yesterday. The range between McCain’s best case and Obama’s best case is widening again reversing a narrowing trend from the last few weeks.
Current Summary:
McCain Best Case – McCain 357, Obama 181
Obama Best Case – Obama 330, McCain 208
And if everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 281, McCain 257
Don’t know how, don’t know why, but CNN just added some delegates to their totals for McCain. 6 delegates total. All were from Ohio. 3 pledged delegates, 3 “Unpledged RNC” (which is the Republican equivalent of a superdelegate).
Obviously this changes absolutely nothing about the state of the Republican race.
But hey, six more for McCain. Woo! Go McCain!
I’m taking Friday off from work because just over 17 hours from now I’m going to be doing this. Or perhaps I should say I’ll be having it done to me. I am not looking forward to it at all. In fact, quite the opposite. And while theoretically after it is done I could come back in to work for the afternoon, I have a feeling that I will just want to go home and curl up in a ball.
I told the doctor I wanted to be more agressive about figuring out the underlying cause to the recurring kidney stones and UTIs I’ve had periodically (and with increasing frequency) since 1996 rather than just treating the symptoms when it happens.
But now I’m thinking maybe dealing with a little discomfort for a week or so once every few months isn’t actually that bad, and maybe I was a little hasty.
Gulp.
More bad state by state poll news for Obama. Colorado slips from “Weak Obama” to “Lean Obama” putting it in that “could really go either way” category. This improves McCain’s best case numbers.
Current Summary:
McCain Best Case – McCain 352, Obama 186
Obama Best Case – Obama 308, McCain 230
And if everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 281, McCain 257
Notice how much better McCain’s best case is than Obama’s best case. Even though the “every body gets their leans” number is in Obama’s favor at the moment, the range of possible outcomes here gives many more ways for McCain to win than Obama has.
If you were forced to pick a winner today based on current polls, it would almost certainly be McCain. Of course, we have many months to go, and a “bounce” is expected whenever the Democrats finally pick a nominee. But still…
CNN’s intern has apparently been asleep at the switch in recent days/weeks, because all of a sudden they do a big update on their delegate counts, presumably just catching up with developments they missed when they actually happened because they figured people weren’t paying attention or some such. The way they display their data makes it impossible to completely dissect the changes, but there were updates in the delegate counts in at least seven states, plus there were some new superdelegate revisions.
All together, Obama gets 4 new pledged delegates and 8 new superdelegates while Clinton gets 7 new pledged delegates and 2 more superdelegates. Net is Obama gains 12 while Clinton gains 9. Turns out this ratio is pretty close to the ratio of delegates they already had, so this has very little effect on the percent of delegates each candidate has.
Since I haven’t mentioned the actual numbers in awhile, here they are.
Right now Obama has 52.0% of the delegates, Clinton has 47.4% and Edwards has 0.6%.
More importantly though, there are 888 delegates left that have not been allocated or who have not declared a preference.
To win Clinton needs 527 of them (59.3%).
To win Obama needs 381 of them (42.9%).
To win Edwards needs… well, Edwards can’t win. :-)
Caught up on my news feeds. Looks like almost all the Democratic leaning blogs agree with my comments on the questions being horrible, while some right leaning blogs really liked them. Most people all around though seem to think that Clinton did much better than Obama. When I was grading them question by question, I gave both Clinton and Obama six questions, and thought four were ties. So I really didn’t see that. Although in my count Obama only caught up near the end, for most of the debate I had Clinton ahead. And I can certainly see looking back that Clinton was a bit more energized, and Obama was on the defensive a LOT. In the end though, I’ll stick by my conclusion that this debate won’t make much difference one way or another… well… at least I’ll stick by that for now.
|
|