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Obama’s lead in Wisconsin strengthens to more than 10%. Thus the state is now “Strong Obama” rather than “Weak Obama”. The summary stays the same though: McCain Best Case – McCain 277, Obama 261 If everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 306, McCain 232 Yeah, today is iPhone day. Well, it started yesterday overseas, but I could go get one right now at my local store if I wanted. But I am still waiting. Here are my current reasons:
I was going to try to figure out a few more reasons, but those are the main ones. But at the lower price point and higher speed, and with the app store and everything, it is getting harder and harder to resist. Edit seconds later: Oh yeah, I forgot another reason, I really would prefer to buy one online, have it delivered by mail, and activate it at home, and they have removed that option, which really ticks me off. The vet thinks it is PROBABLY just a sprain or strain. Roscoe is now on some pain killers that have basically knocked him out, and he is supposed to take it easy for the next few days. (No running around like a maniac in the back yard or long walks that is.) If he isn’t all better by the end of the weekend, we are to bring him back in for X-rays. But the vet thinks that is unlikely and he probably won’t need that. We don’t know how, but Roscoe hurt his leg. We noticed him limping a bit last night. This morning he was limping worse. So we have a vet appointment for this afternoon. I’ll have to leave work a little early for it. Hopefully it isn’t anything serious.
I screwed up yesterday transcribing the results from Zogby Interactive in Iowa. Oops. Sorry, there were 36 states yesterday, I was in a hurry and got a little sloppy. The end result is that while Obama’s lead in Iowa has indeed diminished based on the Zogby results, once I corrected the numbers while they got close (5.2%) they didn’t quite fall below the 5% threshold for me to switch the state from “Weak Obama” to “Lean Obama” and thus into the swing state category. So I’m correcting that today. Apologies for the error. Of course, this makes yesterday’s results even more glum for McCain. More on that in a bit. In the mean time, there was also a new poll in New Jersey showing tightening there. Obama’s lead in the state drops under 10%, moving it from “Strong Obama” to “Weak Obama”. New summary: McCain Best Case – McCain 277, Obama 261 If everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 306, McCain 232 OK, so now with Iowa back out of the swing state category, lets look at this again… McCain’s BEST CASE… McCain winning all the swing states… that is all the states where the leading candidate is ahead by less than 5%… he has 277 electoral votes. Of course, that is giving McCain DC since it (still) has no polls. That will never happen. So take DC away, and McCain has only 274. Ouch. Looking at this another way, without ANY swing states (but giving him DC) Obama already has 264 electoral votes. He only needs SIX electoral votes to win. All he has to do is manage to carry any ONE of Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado or South Carolina. If he managed none of those (or Montana or North Dakota) but did win Nevada, we’d have an electoral tie. But Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, South Carolina, and Nevada are now MUST WIN states for McCain. He needs to win ALL of those swing states in order to win. He is currently ahead in five of those states, but he is behind in three of them. And he needs ALL of them. Of course, that is where the polls stand today. They can and will change quite a bit between now and the election. That is assured. But really, when is McCain going to start making a race of this? The FISA revision passes as expected. Senate OK’s New Wiretapping Law
(via Talking Points Memo)
There are new polls in 36 states today. 34 of them are from a massive dump of new polls done by Zogby. Of those 36 states, 9 states changed status in the way I group states. Of those, 6 moved in or out of the leaning “swing state” status. None actually changed who was in the lead in my “last 5 polls” averages. Of the 9 states, 2 states (with 34 electoral votes) moved in McCain’s direction, 7 states (with 85 electoral votes) moved in Obama’s direction. On balance, this is a good result for Obama. The specifics follow. Good for McCain:
Good for Obama:
All of this leaves us with this new summary: McCain Best Case – McCain 284, Obama 254 If everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 306, McCain 232 Now, one interesting thing here. Obama’s total in the case where he gets NONE of the leaning swing states (McCain’s best case scenario) still gives Obama 254 electoral votes. Give him DC (a near certainty) and he has 257. That is only 13 electoral votes from winning. If either Ohio or Virginia… currently Lean Obama states… strengthen into Weak Obama states… then Obama would have enough states where he leads by more than 5% to win WITHOUT ANY SWING STATES. In my averages right now, Obama is ahead by 3.4% in Virginia and 4.6% in Ohio. It wouldn’t take all that much to push him over the 5% threshold. Leaving Ohio and Virginia as swing states for the moment, it leaves us with 11 swing states with 105 electoral votes. Obama only needs 13 of those electoral votes to win. Taking any of Ohio, North Carolina or Virginia alone would do it. Various combinations of the smaller states would also do. McCain’s lead in Florida climbing back up to 5% (exactly, barely putting it back in the Weak category instead of Lean) is good news for McCain. So is Iowa weakening for Obama and coming into play. But… McCain really needs to start doing something here. It has been a month now since Obama wrapped up the nomination. This has been a pretty huge bump. It may start to fade a bit, but McCain has to start actually DOING something if he wants to make a race out of this rather than just slowly going through the motions of a loss. At this point it almost looks like McCain just trying to prevent an Obama landslide, rather than McCain actually trying to win. Important – Added 10 Jul 2008 15:25 UTC – A correction. I’d made a transcription error on the Iowa poll numbers. The race there is closer than it was, but did not actually dip below the 5% threshold (although it is close). Iowa therefore remains a “Weak Obama” rather than a “Lean Obama” and should not have changed in the update above. It will be corrected on further updates. Playing with the 30 day free trial of JungleDisk at the moment. I’ve been getting increasingly ancy that while I have an onsite backup, I don’t have an offsite backup. I’ve of course known about JungleDisk since it’s first release, and S3 even before that, but never bothered to actually try it for anything until now. I’ve always done the math and determined that A) Backing up EVERYTHING at S3’s prices would be more than I really want to pay per month and B) With the volume that changes each day on my machine, I don’t have enough bandwidth with my pokey DSL connection to keep up with it. Those things aside, I am giving it a shot on just one folder… my pictures… and seeing how it goes. That is a lot less than “everything” that I would really want an offsite backup of, but having just started it about 5 minutes ago, it is estimating “6 days” to complete the initial backup of that folder (29 GB of images). And that is probably sucking bandwidth that the three of us in the house might want to be using for other things. And yes, I know I could switch to cable instead of DSL and get significantly more bandwidth. My upload and download speeds both suck, and faster DSL is not available at my address, but much faster cable is. Hmmm… I wonder if my neighbor’s unsecured WiFi is a faster connection than my own… :-) I just switched my default browser back to Safari. I’m not sure if it is a permanent decision. We’ll see if after a few days I miss any features enough to switch yet again. Sam and Ivan talk about:
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