Gallup Still Has Romney Up, 51 to 45

The survey has a seven-day polling cycle so there's continued volatility in the numbers.

That said, no doubt Nate Silver's still freakin' out over his super sophisticated razzmatazz polling predictions.

See Gallup: "Election 2012 Likely Voters Trial Heat: Obama vs. Romney."

BONUS: At Rasmussen, "Daily Swing State Tracking Poll: Swing State Tracking: Romney 49%, Obama 47%."

And from A.B. Stoddard at The Hill, "Obama spinning toward a loss":

President Obama is losing. So says the latest Gallup poll, and so do those swelling numbers in key states like Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia and Ohio.

Democrats say wait, he won the second debate. They are holding their breath, hoping polls next week will show that this week's debate brought the herky-jerk of the campaign back full swing, with Obama back to his September lead in the swing states and poised to win. But with two weeks to go, a sudden surge in voter support for a president as unpopular as this one, in an economy this weak, is simply hard to believe. Conservatives like Karl Rove note that this late in October, no candidate with support higher than 50 percent (see Mitt Romney: Gallup) has ever gone on to lose.

Perhaps Obama lost the presidency weeks ago, on Oct. 3, when he sleepwalked and scribbled through the first debate and helped make Romney a new candidate overnight. It was Obama's night to finish Romney off; behind in the polls, even Romney likely woke up that morning thinking it was over. But Obama underestimated the task, the challenger and the electorate — all in 90 minutes. So a win this week was critical but perhaps not decisive. There is no obvious reason for Obama's performance to reverse the course of the campaign and blunt Romney now. And though there is one final debate next week, a back-and-forth on national security and foreign policy isn't likely to make the sale for anyone who still cannot make up his or her mind.

Bob Schieffer to Moderate Final Debate on Foreign Policy

At the Los Angeles Times, "As final debate moderator, Bob Schieffer could throw more curves."

I hope Schieffer takes the Candy Crowley clusterf-k into consideration on Monday. The guy needs to be more even-handed than any moderator in history.

More at the Washington Post, "Questions for the candidates at the final presidential debate."

Silvio Berlusconi Denies Having Sex With Karima el-Marough

Right.

Because you know he'd never do something like that.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Berlusconi denies sleeping with teen, says parties weren't sexual":

ROME -- Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told a Milan court Friday that he had never had sex with an underage Moroccan girl and that the so-called "bunga bunga" parties with sexy games and stripteases at his home were instead lively dinners followed by amusing shows in his private theater.

Berlusconi, 76, also told the court that he had never pressured police to release Karima el-Marough, the Moroccan teenager also known as “Ruby Heart-Stealer,” when she was arrested in May 2010 on suspicion of theft.

The former leader is accused of paying for sex with el-Mahroug, a sometime nightclub dancer, when she was 17, and of abuse of power for allegedly asking police to release her to one of his aides rather than to foster care where she might divulge details about his parties. El-Mahroug has also denied having sex with Berlusconi.

In what the Italian trial system allows as “spontaneous” remarks, Berlusconi spoke uninterrupted for more than an hour to say that his dinner parties were convivial occasions where guests spoke about politics, sports, told some jokes and listened to music.

“I can say with absolute tranquillity that there was never anything of a sexual nature” during the now-legendary evenings, he said, which often ended with entertainment that was “never vulgar or scandalous.”

Continue reading.

'Not Optimal'

He's just an asshole.

An asshole who's in over his head.

At London's Daily Mail, "'If four Americans get killed, it's not OPTIMAL': Obama's extraordinary response to Comedy Central question about shifting story after Benghazi attack."

ALSO: "The Spring Break Presidency: Time to Put the Adults Back in Charge." And at Memeorandum.

More at Daily Mail, "'My son is not very optimal - he is very dead': Mother of diplomat killed in Benghazi attack slams Obama's comment on raid" (via Memeorandum):

The mother of an American diplomat killed during a terrorist raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has hit out at Barack Obama for describing the attack as 'not optimal', saying: 'My son is not very optimal - he is also very dead.'

During an interview shown on Comedy Central, Obama responded to a question about his administration's confused communication after the assault by saying: 'If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.'

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline today, Pat Smith, whose son Sean died in the raid, said: 'It was a disrespectful thing to say and I don't think it's right.

'How can you say somebody being killed is not very optimal? I don't think the President has the right idea of the English language.'

Well, like I said, Obama's an epic asshole. A callous motherf-king asshole.

Ground Game in Battleground Nevada

At USA Today, "A fierce ground war for votes":

Nevada has just 2.7 million residents and only six of the 270 electoral votes needed to win presidency. But Obama, Romney and their allies are fighting hard for each vote in a state that has sided with the White House victor in every election since 1980.

"When you are in a presidential race potentially decided by one or two electoral votes, six is a lot," says Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report. "This election could come down to one state."

Obama spent three days in the state preparing for the first presidential debate. Romney has visited six times. Former president Bill Clinton stumped for Obama in Las Vegas this month, and Vice President Biden was in Reno on Wednesday.

Celebrities pop up, too. Grey's Anatomy star Jesse Williams makes a surprise visit to an Obama campaign office one morning to rally volunteers. He was filming in neighboring California until 2 a.m. and hopped a flight at 5 a.m., he told USA TODAY. "I try to get to battleground states whenever I can."

The state also offers a test of the candidates' ability to recruit volunteers, register voters and get them to the polls in an election so close that turnout could well determine the winner. Obama, who won Nevada by a landslide four years ago, has held a narrow lead in recent polls — as his campaign capitalized on his early fundraising advantage to build a substantial ground organization in the state. The president swamped the GOP nominee on the airwaves by more than 2 to 1 between April 1 and the first week of September, according to SMG/Delta, a Republican media-buying firm.

Romney has ramped up his TV advertising in the state, and last week outspent Obama in Nevada, according to National Journal.

Obama also has opened 27 offices in the state to Romney's 12. Obama's campaign has tapped into an experienced Democratic political operation that helped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid win easy re-election in 2010 — a year when Republicans made big gains in Congress. And Obama has the backing of labor unions, who have unleashed their workers to turn out the vote for him and other Democrats in Clark County, where most Nevadans live.

For their part, Republicans say they have launched an ambitious election effort to catch up to Obama. Republicans have knocked on nearly 370,000 doors and made more than 1.3 million calls to Nevada voters. A key goal: persuading non-partisan voters, who make up roughly 17% of the electorate, to go with Romney.

Romney, aided by the cash-flush Republican National Committee, "has a better ground game than the state party ever has," says Bob List, a former Nevada governor and ex-RNC national committeeman.

And note that Survey USA has Romney leading among independents by 18 points, 52 percent to 34 percent.

Tom Hanks Drops F-Bomb on 'Good Morning America'

No bleeping way!

At TMZ.

The Spring Break Presidency: Time to Put the Adults Back in Charge

President Clusterf-k spends too much time trying to be a cool kid.

And it's also time to retire those golf clubs, sheesh.

A brutal ad from the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama.

'It Was the Video'

A devastating new clip from American Crossroads, via Instapundit:

PREVIOUSLY: "Nate Silver Blows Gasket as Gallup Shows Romney Pulling Away in the Presidential Horse Race."

Nate Silver Blows Gasket as Gallup Shows Romney Pulling Away in the Presidential Horse Race

Gallup's not the highest ranked public opinion poll for predictive accuracy, but as the nation's original polling organization the firm's got enormous credibility and prestige. No doubt that helps explain why wonder boy Nate Silver's practically blown a gasket over the latest Gallup tracking numbers that find Mitt Romney pulling out a large lead in the presidential horse race, 52 to 45 among likely voters in the latest daily tracking.

Here's Silver's piece, which is especially noteworthy for its passive attack on Gallup for frankly ruining the guy's day, "Gallup vs. the World":

Our database contains records from 136 distinct pollsters that have released at least one state or national survey at some point in this election cycle. Of those, 53 are active enough to have issued at least one survey since Oct. 1.

With so much data to sort through, it will usually be a counterproductive use of one’s time to get overly attached to the results of any one particular poll. Whether you look at the relatively simple averaging methods used by Web sites like Real Clear Politics, or the more involved techniques in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, the Gallup national tracking poll constitutes a relatively small part of the polling landscape...

Er, okay...

"A relatively small part of the polling landscape," which of means of course that it would be "counterproductive" to spend much time attempting to explain away such a horribly unrepresentative survey, right?

Well, no.

Little Boy Nate's pissed that Gallup's messing up Obama's mojo and he's going to use his perch at NYT's progressive propaganda shop to set the record straight for the right-thinking political cognoscenti. He continues, for example:

Over all, the Gallup daily tracking poll accounts for only about 3 percent of the weight in this stage of the calculation. The national tracking polls collectively, including Gallup, account for only about 10 percent of it. Most of the weight, instead, is given to the state polls.

This is, obviously, a rather detailed answer to the seemingly simple question of how much information is provided by the Gallup national tracking poll, as opposed to all the other state and national surveys.
Nevertheless, any rigorous attempt to consider the value of the Gallup poll would probably get you to something of the same answer. Perhaps the Gallup poll accounts for 5 or 10 percent of the information that an election analyst should evaluate on a given day.

The Gallup poll’s influence on the subjective perception about where the presidential race stands seems to be proportionately much greater than that, however — especially when the poll seems to diverge from the consensus.

This simply isn’t rational, in my view. As I discuss in my book, our first instincts are often quite poor when it comes to weighing information. We tend to put too much emphasis on the newest, most widely reported and most dramatic pieces of data — more than is usually warranted.

Poor Nate.

If Romney pulls out an upset on November 6th Pinch Sulzberger Jr.'s going to have to the wonder boy on suicide watch. Seriously. Anyone's who's pegging Obama at a 64.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College at this point's obviously running a couple of quarts low already. An upset going to put that guy over the edge.

It's not helping that other major polls are also not cooperating with the wonder boy's super sophisticated shuck-and-jive razzmatazz rabitt-out-of-a-hat statistical polling shakedown model of progressive Democrat Orwellian truth generation. Here's a report from this morning, for example, at Reuters, "Romney gains on Obama on foreign policy issues: poll":

Republican challenger Mitt Romney has gained substantial ground on Democratic President Barack Obama on foreign policy issues but Obama still holds a narrow lead, a poll showed on Thursday.

Ahead of Monday's foreign policy debate between Obama and Romney, 47 percent of voters favor Obama and 43 percent back Romney when asked who could do a better job on foreign policy, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

"This represents a substantial gain for Romney, who trailed Obama by 15 points on foreign policy issues in September," Pew said.

The October 4-7 poll was carried out about three weeks after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which the U.S. ambassador was killed. Romney has seized on the issue to accuse Obama of failed leadership.

The poll involved 1,511 adults, including 1,201 registered voters. It has a margin of error of 2.9 percent for adults and 3.3 percent for voters.

A 15 point pick-up since September 15th. Impossible!

Actually, not. The public's seen this president's 3:00am moment and it's not impressed. Perhaps polls coming out next week might show a little improvement in Obama's numbers when factoring in the Candy Crowley handicap, but then again, Romney'll be playing for keeps on foreign policy on Monday, and the Republican challenger may well deliver the coup de grâce to the embattled incumbent.

I'll update on Nate Silver's psychiatric condition at that time.

UPDATE: The Lonely Conservative links, "Romney Surges In Polls, Nate Silver Hardest Hit":

Now, I’m not hoping that Silver will wind up on suicide watch. There’s no need, because he can always go back to baseball. Oh, wait, is he a Yankees fan? I don’t know, never mind.

And there's a Memeorandum thread now as well, the second thread I've gotten this week. Cool!

More from The Other McCain, "Nate Silver Asks: Whose Shark Is This, and Why Do I Feel a Need to Jump It?"

Still more. Linked at Larwyn's Linx. Thanks!

And Newser too!

Candy Crowley Slammed With Fat Jokes After Shilling for Obama at Hofstra

Hey, don't blame me: I think she's a hottie.

But see Bliss Tree, "Saddest Presidential Debate 2012 Trend: Fat-Shaming Candy Crowley."

And The Other McCain, "@CrowleyCNN Targeted by Fat Jokes, Legitimate Criticism, But Mainly …":

John Nolte at Breitbart.com called Crowley’s performance “a scandal; a total and complete media scandal . . . Absolutely disgraceful.” Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters said Crowley “disgraced herself . . . showing why many Americans were rightfully suspicious of her ability to moderate a presidential debate fairly.” Donald Douglas at American Power called it “the worst debate moderation in presidential debate history.”

Not one of them felt it necessary to point out that Candy Crowley is fat, and I’m happy for that, because too many people resort to such cheap insults when they’re angry, and it hurts the feelings of fat people everywhere. This kind of cruelty toward BBWs and plumpers also bothers “chubby chasers” like Dan Collins, whose appreciation of Rubenesque ladies is so often misunderstood.

More at the link.

And don't miss the outstanding essay from Dan Collins, "About the Benghazi “Terror” Statement in the Second Debate."

Also cool was getting a Memeorandum thread yesterday.

More later...

Victoria Beckham Gets the Coco Treatment!

Wow!

That lady's got some legs!

At London's Daily Mail, "PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Ooh la la: c'est Madame Posh! Victoria Beckham is 'honoured' to pose at Coco Chanel's house."

'Sweet Home Alabama'

The video's from just last week, at Harrah's Rincon near San Diego, on October 7th. The hotel was holding tickets for my wife, but we weren't able to make it. Bummer too. Looks like an awesome gig.

And from yesterday's afternoon drive time at The Sound L.A.:

3:00 - I Still Haven't Found... by U2

3:05 - Daniel by Elton John

3:09 - La Grange by Zz Top

3:12 - Jack And Diane by John Cougar

3:17 - Fool In The Rain by Led Zeppelin

3:23 - Last Train To Clarksville by Monkees

3:32 - Come Sail Away by Styx

3:38 - I Need To Know by Tom Petty

3:40 - Take It To The Limit by Eagles

3:45 - Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd

3:50 - I Melt With You by Modern English

Kerry Ladka Slams Obama's Non-Response on Libya Attack

At London's Daily Mail, "'Obama didn't totally answer the question': Voter who probed about Libya attack during debate slams President's 'unsatisfactory' response."

Well, that's what you get from this bumbling egomaniac.

And watch this killer clip from Revealing Politics:

Holding President Obama Accountable

Via Carl in Jerusalem.

Syrian Rebels Get Missiles

At the Wall Street Journal, "Fears Rise That Portable Antiaircraft Weapons Could Wind Up With Terrorists":

ANTAKYA, Turkey—Some Syrian rebel factions have obtained advanced portable antiaircraft weapons, according to rebels and regional officials, a development that could alter the Syrian war's trajectory and fan U.S. concerns that such weapons could end up in the hands of anti-Western Islamist militias.

Video footage uploaded to the Internet earlier this week appears to show rebels in Aleppo using weapons that military experts and rebels say are heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles, the first documented instance in the conflict. Versions of the weapons—also known as man-portable air defense systems, or Manpads—have been smuggled into the country over the past two months through Turkey and to a lesser extent Lebanon, according to Syrian rebels and those who supply them arms through an "operations room" coordinated by regional governments.

"Northern Syria is awash with advanced antitank and antiaircraft weapons. The situation has changed very quickly," a Syrian involved in coordinating weapons procurement with regional states said. The Manpad transfers weren't sanctioned by the regional states that have armed and financed Syria's rebels since early this year, he added.

On Wednesday, fighters said they downed a military helicopter in the town of Maarat al-Nouman, in the northern Idlib province, one of at least four helicopters and jets they say they have brought down across Syria this week. It couldn't be determined how the craft were brought down. But the reported incidents, three of which are documented on videos but couldn't be independently verified, appear to mark an increased pace over the roughly weekly downings reported in Syria since the summer.

U.S. officials oppose the introduction of such weapons in Syria, citing long-standing fears that they could wind up in the hands of anti-Western militias that could eventually use them against the U.S. and its allies, or sell them to terrorists. "Obviously, we are concerned about the proliferation of Manpads," said a U.S. official.

The rebels in Aleppo who are depicted in the footage uploaded to the Internet this week are identified as members of the al-Salam and Hamza battalions, two of the relatively unknown divisions in a mushrooming insurgency. Rebels with the two largest fighting factions in Aleppo couldn't identify the battalions in the videos, though they confirmed that Manpads acquired over the past two weeks had made their way into the city.

Way to go Baracky!

See also the New York Times, "Rebel Arms Flow Is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria."

David Bowie Spotted in New York

He quit touring in 2004 after having a heart attack during his final performance of the Ziggy Stardust encore. I saw him perform in Irvine for that tour. I'm glad he's taking it easy nowadays.

See Telegraph UK, "Reclusive David Bowie spotted on rare public outing":

The reclusive singer David Bowie has been pictured in New York on a rare public outing dressed in cap, shades and hooded top, bearing little resemblance to the fashion icon of the 1970s.

The reclusive singer David Bowie has been pictured in New York on a rare public outing dressed in cap, shades and hooded top, bearing little resemblance to the fashion icon of the 1970s.

Bowie lives in a large Lower-Manhattan apartment with his ex-model wife Iman and daughter Lexi and has been almost invisible since suffering a major heart attack during a jinxed 2004 tour.

Michelle Malkin Slams Anti-Woman Obama Administration

I noted previously the left's ultra-pathetic "binder" attacks on Mitt Romney. I forgot the epic hypocrisy, however --- a major omission, considering how everything's pure hypocrisy on the left.

Hawkeye Voters Apologize for Backing Obama in 2008: 'An Open Letter to Our Fellow Iowans'

This is awesome.

See the Des Moines Register, "In full-page newspaper ad, 13 Iowa voters apologize for supporting Obama in 2008."

Read it: "An Open Letter to Our Fellow Iowans."

Change! Violent Crime Up 17 Percent in 2011, Survey Finds

Hey, thank a Democrat!

At the Los Angeles Times, "Violent crimes up 17% in 2011."

The Times' suggests it "could be a fluke." Yeah, like Obama's election was a fluke.

The crime stats will improve when the economy improves, and that's not going to happen under a second term of President Clusterf-k.

Wild Kayla Fitz

She's lovely.

And who doesn't love Sweet Cheeks bikini?