I didn't get to watch the Veep Debate tonight, on account of there being a ballgame on, but apparently those who tuned in did get to hear someone in the GOP finally give some props to George Soros, billionaire philanthropist and do-gooder. Isn't that nice? My non-interest in tonight's face-off doesn't mean I can't authoritatively state that the clear winner was Edwards: after all, how can I conclude otherwise if someone as conservative as Andrew Sullivan has concluded that "[I]f last Thursday night's debate was an assisted suicide for president Bush, this debate - just concluded - was a car wreck. And Cheney was road-kill. There were times when it was so overwhelming a debate victory for Edwards that I had to look away." The next real debate takes place on Friday, a "townhall" meeting that I will, again, miss because it conflicts with baseball, but hopefully, Bush can explain why he disagrees with Thomas Jefferson on the "global test" issue [link via Jack O'Toole].

Thornton Melon, R.I.P.

Who is Tom Wilson? Well, it was nice while it lasted, but this afternoon was a sobering experience for those of us who have long looked forward to a Freeway Series. I figured Schilling v. J-Wash would be a mismatch; getting the automatic loss out of the way was probably the only reason Scioscia allowed that stiff to pitch. But Perez was probably the Dodgers best hope to win a game, and he got shelled early. The other starters (Lima and Weaver) don't exactly strike fear into the best offense in baseball. Dodgers and Angels see their seasons end Saturday.

Apparently, they're not having success with the "global test" spin. As new polls show that their candidate's lead has gone the way of the Bay Area's baseball fortunes, the newest attempt to breathe life back into the Bush Campaign focuses on whether Kerry "cheated" by bringing notes into the debate on Thursday. No word yet on whether his cheat sheet was in Times New Roman. What can I say; there's no rest for the wicked !!

...'cause I'm a ball,
and I go boo-bip-bip boo-bip-bip YEAH !!!

He may have lost the first debate, but President Bush hopes to regain some of his momentum after receiving the endorsement of former Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler. No word yet on whether Bush has picked up the all-important Earle Bruce endorsement, although football fans may remember the ideological contortions performed by Lou Holtz back in 1984, who may have been the only public figure in America to endorse both Walter Mondale and Jesse Helms.

And the conventional wisdom was supposed to be that having the first debate focus on foreign policy was to the President's benefit...Kerry started off nervous, but eventually took off, while Bush seemed ill-prepared, unable to improvise or think on his feet. More devastating for the President tonight was the fact that Kerry seemed more forceful, even, dare I say, tougher than his opponent. No obvious gaffes, for either candidate, but Kerry can't help but be pleased; foreign policy, and most importantly, Iraq, has been a drag on his campaign, but tonight went a long way towards neutralizing that Bush advantage.

On the way home from last night's Booze-and-Schmooze LA Press Club party in Beverly Hills, I drove by my old high school, Harvard (now Harvard-Westlake). There is now a gate surrounding much of the campus, an imposing castiron structure that, combined with the trees unnaturally planted along Coldwater Canyon Blvd., has seemingly cut the campus off from the rest of the planet. From the outside, it is almost impossible to see in (I can only imagine what it's like from the inside), so this beautiful school is now hidden away, its students shrouded more like convicts at San Quentin. Is this just a sign of the times, an attempt to keep out unwelcome visitors, or have the school trustees decided that their wards are best kept isolated from the rest of the world?

Read William Safire weeping about a "runaway prosecutor" trampling on the Constitution (including the "intrepid Judith Miller"), or Christopher Hitchens whining about "paranoid" October Surprise conspiracies, and try not to laugh...I guess we all just miss the day when the paranoid fantasies of pundits included the belief that the President of the United States was going after Al Qaeda in order to distract the public's attention from a semen-stained dress.

Another wacky poll from Gallup, this time showing Bush with an eight-point lead among "likely voters", but a thirteen-point lead with registered voters. There is no info provided about the partisan breakdown of whom they chose to interview, but since this is almost a reverse of their previous post-convention polls, which showed Bush with a larger lead among LV's than RV's, it stands to reason that in order to now give Bush a significant lead, Gallup has to find a sampling base where Republicans outnumber Democrats by close to a dozen points.

Or to put it another way, it is as if Gallup chose to poll only in the state of Montana, and use those results to extrapolate data for the entire nation. Now, it might well be that the national political landscape, post-9/11, now looks like Montana did four years ago, with a massive, historical partisan shift poised to give Bush a landslide victory reminiscent of FDR over Alf Landon, or Reagan over Mondale. Since Gallup's state polls (and other state polls, collected here by Donkey Rising) actually show a race similar to 2000, with Kerry comfortably ahead in California and New York, and swing states like Ohio and Florida within the margin of error, and since Gallup's national pre-election polling in 2000 also sucked, I'm going to stick my neck out just a little and predict that is not the case, and Kerry will probably pick up more than a dozen electoral votes.

Now, it may be easy to laugh off Gallup's quadrennial folly, but this poll (and others like it) have very serious tactical consequences. One of the ways in which polling data is used right now is to demoralize the side that's losing. If the punditocracy can convince enough people that Kerry is toast, or that he needs a miracle, perhaps in one of the debates, to turn around the election, the public perception that he can't win will set in. Through the use of rigged polling data, enthusiasm for the trailing candidate is diminished, his crowds dwindle, and his supporters marginalized and effectively silenced. And that is why the partisan breakdown of the polling sample is so important to know, and why any poll that doesn't provide that information be looked at with extreme skepticism.

In fact, the translation of the slogan on Hugh Hewitt's website is "The influence of Democrats must be destroyed". A bit fascistic, but not atypical for a conservative blog....

Bush Gets Swifted: Well, maybe correlation is causation, at least with respect to the recent focus on Bush's National Guard record: a new poll (by Fox, no less!!) shows that Bush's lead among veterans has been cut in half in the last month. By obsessing about Dan Rather for two weeks, it appears that conservative bloggers may have done the Kerry Campaign an invaluable favor by keeping the focus on a part of the Bush biography that does not redound to his credit. I guess that's just another example of the way the blogosphere is overturning the established order, challenging the hegemony of the Old Media in setting the terms for how the Law of Unintended Consequences can influence an election.

In perhaps the surest sign that the Presidential race is neck-and-neck, the latest Time poll shows Kerry cutting Bush's edge over in half, down to 6 points among likely voters. However, as with the Gallup poll published last week, the Time methodology includes a disproportionate percentage of Republicans; among both registered and likely voters, their sample has 6% more Republican respondents than Democratic, exactly matching the Bush lead, even though the actual party I.D. numbers in the electorate have slightly favored the Democrats over the years. Although it's entirely possible that the GOP suddenly has picked up ten percent in voter identification since the last election, in all likelihood their gains (if any) are far less than that, and the real state of the race shows a dead heat, or even a slight Kerry lead.

I know the adage about how correlation is not causation, but isn't it interesting how Bush's poll numbers have fallen since Col. Burkett "found" the Killian Papers three weeks ago. From a double-digit, post-convention lead to a dead heat: maybe the "fake but accurate" meme has caught on with the electorate. Or then again, maybe the polls several weeks ago showing the President with a suddenly commanding lead were a joke, taken too close to the convention to have any contextual connection with public opinion, and with too many Republicans sampled to reflect a true picture of the American Voter. I like the former suggestion better, since it shows how a determined set of bloggers, huddled around their terminals wearing their cotton jammies, fact-checking and document-scoping the asses of the lib'rul media, and thereby forcing the largely-irrelevant issue of Bush's service in the National Guard into the public limelight for three weeks. Advantage: Blogosphere !!!

One of the things striking about the ARG polling results is how low Bush's support is; the rule that any incumbent with below 50% in the polls is likely to lose applies not just nationally, but in each state as well. Even those states where Bush possesses a slight lead, such as Ohio, Colorado, West Virginia and Arkansas, as well as the Purple States won by Gore in 2000, such as Iowa and Minnesota, his numbers are under 50%, and falling ever-so-slightly.

For what it's worth, the latest poll from out here shows Kerry leading by 15 points in California, as clear a sign as any that he has the momentum (or rather, that Bush's post-convention bounce has gone the way of the LA Dodgers' NL West lead). Since Gore won the state by only 13 points last time, this bodes ill for the President.

Can you imagine being an airline passenger on a flight from London to D.C., no doubt having to fight exhaustion, boredom, the incessant whining of babies, and the discomfort of sitting in a seat designed for a person half your size, having waited for several hours at Heathrow to board your plane (United, btw, so you just know there was only a minimal delay taking off), then another six or so hours doing nothing on the plane except eating the gristle-and-gravy dinner with salad and watching an expurgated version of Catwoman, then having to delay being reunited with family and loved ones for another half the day after the plane gets diverted 1000 miles north to Bangor, Maine, because one of Ashcroft's weenies thought that Cat Stevens was a hijacker? If you want to punish the guy for "Morning Has Broken" or for his politically incorrect statements about Salman Rushdie, fine, but don't take it out on the commuters, to whom he wasn't a threat.

Three Debates: After weeks of negotiating, the campaigns have decided to do pretty much go along with what the presidential debate commission already decided, a series of debates between Bush and Kerry, with one debate slated to be "town hall" format before undecided voters. Considering that the undecided voters will be selected by Gallup, the polling outfit that just went out of its way to rig a poll to show Bush with a huge lead, don't be surprised if the President gets the same sort of soft ball questions he often gets at one of the potemkinesque "Meet the President" gatherings his campaign sets up.

In defense of CBS, it should be pointed out that it took them less time to conclude the obvious than it took the White House to acknowledge that there were no WMDs in Iraq, and which still claims, sans evidence, that the forged documents "detailing" Iraq's purchase of yellowcake from Niger were "fake but accurate". The whole debate about whether this story symbolizes the decline of "Big Media" and the rise of the blogosphere is unimportant to me, especially when one realizes that the same blogs that broke this story knowingly spread false stories from the "Swift Boat Vets" that were discredited after further review. What it should teach us is that anonymously-sourced stories should always be read with a jaundiced eye, but I think most of us already learned that moral from Judith Miller.

Europe 18 1/2, U.S. 9 1/2: Now that I've had further time to reflect, these guys aren't entitled to make the Iverson Speech. Never send rich white Republicans (and one Cablinasian) to do anything that entails representing the Stars and Stripes....

Here's another "hypothesis", from blogger Robert Musil, based on the assumption that the "disgruntled" ex-guardsman with an axe to grind against Bush was merely the "conduit" for the Killian Papers. He suggests that the actual creator was an insider with the DNC or Kerry campaign, which managed to bind Dan Rather into silence by a crafty non-disclosure agreement drafted by a "fancy lawyer". One problem: if the DNC or Kerry went to the trouble of drafting forged documents, wouldn't they also have taken the added burden of "pre-authenticating" them, let's say, with the assistance of their "fancy lawyer"? Putting these documents out into the public domain was an extremely risky move, especially if it could be traced back to them, so wouldn't it have been worth doing right? Assuming that whichever lawyer drafted the alleged agreement performed some sort of due diligence before sending them to their "conduit", wouldn't the same problems that made the Killian Papers so questionable from the outset have been spotted?

Musil also questions CBS' investigative zeal, defending the White House's initial response to the documents by suggesting that there was no way Dan Bartlett, the spokesman quoted by 60 Minutes II, could have vouched for the authenticity of documents. As I've mentioned previously, though, the White House can be excused for not immediately claiming that these documents were forgeries, but they could hardly be excused for not knowing if the contents of said papers were true or false. After all, these documents have been "proven" to be fake only to the same extent that the "Swift Boat Vets" stories about John Kerry's cowardice in battle have been proven to be "false"; there may be an overwhelming circumstantial case, but, theoretically, the Killian Papers could still be authentic.

However, Bush would know if he ever received an order to take a medical exam, and there was certainly plenty of time, in the twenty-four hours preceding the broadcast, for the White House to challenge the accuracy of those allegations. It is most telling that, unlike John Kerry's forceful denunciation of the "Swift Boat" charges, they did not do so.

Europe 11, U.S.A. 5: The stench emanating from Michigan grows worse. But we are doing better in singles this afternoon, so Tiger, Gagger, and the rest might not have to give the Iverson Speech (you know, where they say it's an honor just to play for your country, win or lose).