"I swear I just saw Smiff on TV celebrating in the clubhouse! But that can't be, can it?"

...no, it can't be. It was this guy:

Obama, Phillies, Smiff in 5

<p><strong>><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/electoral-college/">Electoral College Prediction Map</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the general election. Use the map to experiment with winning combinations of states. Save your prediction and send it to friends.</p>

Da Mare: bring it on

A permit request for the rally says more than 70,000 people will cram into the south end of Grant Park on Election Night.

Mayor Richard Daley on Thursday stoked the celebratory vibe, welcoming people downtown even if they don't have tickets and will have to gather outside the secure area.

Daley has estimated that the throng could reach 1 million. But he said Thursday he had no intention of discouraging attendance.

"You think I'm nuts? You think I'm not going to invite people down? This is a celebration," Daley said. "No way I'm going to tell people they should not come down and celebrate."

not ready to lead

It would be positively surreal to have people in power who seemed to have a glimmer of an idea about what the phokk they were doing...

Obama prepares for quick transition

The best-kept secret in Washington is that Barack Obama has the largest and most disciplined presidential transition team anyone can recall. Headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff in Bill Clinton's White House, it started work well before the financial meltdown hit in September but has been swamped by its implications ever since.
. . .

"The level of detail that the Obama transition team is getting into is extraordinary - they are leaving no stone unturned," said a senior former Clinton administration official who has been consulted. "I have been getting calls that you'd expect in previous transitions to get maybe in December or never at all."

1-in-10,000,000?

Nate Silver: "[W]hat kind of odds could you have gotten in 1908 that a black dude would get elected president before the Cubs won the Series again?"

H@LY PHOKK!NG S#IT

I sure hope the Big Ten is better at polling than football...

AM Polls Show Surprisingly Large Leads for Obama

New polling this morning from the Big Ten polling consortium and Quinnipiac University present a view of what the world might look like if Barack Obama wins in a landslide. The Big Ten polls have Obama ahead by double digits in ten Midwestern states: he leads by 10 in Indiana, 11 in Pennsylvania, 12 in Ohio, 13 in Wisconsin and Iowa, 19 in Minnesota, 22 in Michigan, and 29 in Illinois....

With that said, the trendlines in these polls are interesting. Quinnipiac has had a slight (1-2 point) Democratic lean this election cycle, but only in the last month or so have they started to produce some of these "shock and awe" numbers for Obama. And when the first round of Big Ten polling was conducted in mid-September, it had not been particularly favorable to Obama.
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