I searched numerous tags, search feature, etc; and I've seen a dearth of general election polls lately, so I searched around elsewhere and found this.

http://www.surveyusa.com/...

I'd seen polls with all Democrats close or ahead in Kentucky before, but found them hard to believe; I guess they're still close to accurate.

Even considering Kerry blew off the state (allowing Bunning to get re-elected,) the turnaround from a 20-point loss is impressive.

As a caveat, the crosstabs show a 47% Democrat, 36% Republican sampling, but party self-identification is around +10% nationwide anyway, isn't it?  And Kentucky has a lot of conservative Dems (the gap was actually 44-40 in FAVOR of Dems in 2004 despite Kerry's large loss.  So even if we spot the polls 7%, we see an enormous swing that could project nationally.)

Sorry if this has been posted in the last 2 weeks, but I did a google search and found nothing.  Always liked this site, in spite of all the potential weaknesses.

http://voteview.com/...

http://voteview.com/...

On a side note, an interesting quiz I found while searching to see if this'd been discussed.  Has some problems, the links should go directly to the congressional bills rather than google so that I can see what I'm looking at directly and how Senators voted; and there are way too many double posts.

http://www.senateseeker.com/...

I did search for Strickland and Ohio tags and didn't find this; I've heard of this before, but I'm surprised that Suddes used the words "done deal;" however, he is usually well ahead of the curve on state political news so I don't find it laughable or anything.

http://www.cleveland.com/...

What do you all think?  Putting aside any opinion I have of Hillary (and I don't share the negative view of her that many have on here, but I'm aware of her and the other candidates' strengths and weaknesses, and undecided as to any particular favorites) I don't think this would be the greatest move.

That's simply because Strickland has done a fine job as governor so far and it'd be hard to rock the boat after only 2 years.  Lee Fisher would take over, and I'm fine with him as a person, although he hasn't made enough of a name for himself for me to be 100% comfortable with taking the reins.

Ran out of my 1150 intro characters so I copied some stuff over to the flip...

A tangentially related story to the titular Supreme Court note which a lot of Ohio prep sports fans may be familiar with had me thinking about finally writing up a diary on this.

The tangentially related story is about Ray Williams, the former Ohio high school football star who won a Mr. Football award and a state championship, and FINALLY had the long arm of the law completely catch up to him after being a lowlife at least since the championship and probably before (the string of incidents he'd been in are probably only the few he'd been caught in, out of many.)  The reason it comes up is that there are reports that the Cleveland judge, Shirley Strickland Saffold, may be seeking the state Supreme Court nomination.  (This is also reported in a few other googles.)  

More over the flip...

http://www.citizenlink.org/... (warning: Focus on the Family affiliate.)  I don't think this has been diaried (I checked Georgia tags.)

I do not see any specifics about rape/incest/health/life exceptions; I am doing a little searching around and found this  saying there were no exceptions.  Interesting to see a pro-life, seemingly conservative blogger, arguing against this as wasting legislative time and money, i.e. a fiscal responsibility issue.

More over the flip.

http://voteview.com/...

http://voteview.com/...

Some thoughts over the flip:

http://www.harrisburgbuzz.blogspot.com/

Closest lead I've heard of in a very long time, and one of the highest raw percents I've seen Man-on-Dog at.  (Of course, when Casey internal polls had the State Treasurer up double digits the above-mentioned right-wing site complained about how the poll was "biased" and "a sign of desparation by the Casey campaign."  We can only hope this one is conservative-leaning the way the Ford-Corker internal was.)  Did the debate really hurt Casey that much?

I can't think of too much else in the way of opinions but do want this to be of full diary length.  I don't mean to suggest an opinion either way in saying this, but I guess I'll leave the usual "failure of Chuck Schumer/DLC/hand-picking of our candidates," "we should've had Chuck Pennachio," and "Casey is too moderate/pro-life/etc." to the other posters...

The author's liberal views provide a nice counterbalance to "Blogging Caesar's" conservative (but now reasonably disciplined) rhetoric at electionprojection.  I remember following this site in conjunction with EP back in 2004, and liked some of the extra features like the trend lines.  (They did provide some questionable results, i.e. at one point Kerry was projected to win Oklahoma once and Bush was projected to win CT, although the lines weren't intended to be taken seriously in the first place.)

The only real difference between the Senate predictions on EP and this is that they counted Lieberman as a D hold instead of an I, Sanders as a D gain, and the latest Kean/Menendez poll as an R gain.  So in effect the NJ poll makes his results more pro-Republican than the more right-leaning EP...it's funny how that also frequently worked in 2004.

There are some entertaining things elsewhere on the site...Should hit the sack now, but as an engineer I always liked the statistical and other numerical parts of politics.

More stuff about Blackwell and Petro...I wish I could have both the most "beatable" R candidate and the one who would cause the least damage if one-party-rule continued here, so not sure what to make of this.

BTW, Taft considers '05 a success?  Wow...he has been awful since day one and it's gotten to the point where most Republicans would agree: http://www.cleveland.com/...

Sorry if this has already been posted; I've been so busy with work that I have not even logged in the past month (although I have read sometimes.)

More over the flip...

I normally like the Plain Dealer, but this did not deserve to be a front-pager by any stretch of the imagination.  Politicians don't have 24/7 control of their aides by any stretch of their imagination, and this is like trying to blame Santorum for his top aide Robert Traynham being gay.

I know he isn't a popular figure here anymore, but this is just another effort to paint Kerry as a hypocritical humanitarian, like saying his having an SUV was anti-environmental and having a lot of other "rich people's stuff" made him anti-populist.  And of course Dean is loved on here, and rightly so...

Anyway, keep this in mind because it's likely to come up in the future...

Other policies and bills like this include Roberts (Republicans cried that it "should've been unanimous" due to his exemplary qualifications, and ironically the roll call total was similar for both--dissent is unpartiotic?!) for one; many social issues, spending bills, etc.  One of the biggest that stuck out in light of Katrina was "Why do Democrats who voted up Brownie share any less blame for him than Bush?" Do you honestly think they could've voted him down without being called on "OMG 0BSTRUCT10N1SM!!!11!!!11!"?

Read on...

I nearly halved it to $219.85 billion.

It happens that I remember seeing one of those charts a few days ago about how big military expenditures were, and how it was so interconnected with other spending in both good and bad ways.  Also, Social Security is enormous.

Is anyone more familiar with Nate Newman's work and can comment on how correct his economic theory, etc. are, by the way?

Not only are they insanely funny just by themselves, but they have a lot of great commentary.  MacFarlane is a Democrat (I really think he should consider some elected office once he [God forbid] gets tired of cartoons,) and both created American Dad as a satire of neocons and uses Brian on Family Guy (and probably Hayley on AD) as a satire of his own beliefs.

The two episodes tonight were among the sharpest daggers he's ever thrown at the morally uptight wing of the Republicans...

It's not really a "read start to finish" book as much as a book where you should open up to the chapter that interests you, or look something up in the index and turn to the right page.

I found myself agreeing with most of the stuff in the book, and already knew a lot of it.  I had to especially agree with the statement about how not all Republicans hate the poor and not all Democrats support the poor.  I also especially liked all the efforts to reconcile the "moral values issue."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/02/ap/business/mainD8CC5DJG8.shtml

I still don't really buy the "motoring along and creating more than a decent number of jobs..." I miss the Clinton years in that regard.

Anyone have the "inside numbers" that take into account participation rate, population adjustment, etc?  I always like how adding those things sparks debate. The article shown does have some interesting figures of its own, like weekly earnings and time and job divisions. Numbers aren't as good as expected (190,000 was forecasted) and the usual trends of services, business and finance going up and factories going down is continuing.