John McCain and Barack Obama are perfectly tied in Ohio, according to the newest survey from Public Policy Polling (August 12-14, 2008 survey of 950 likely General Election voters)

Obama had led in PPP’s June and July polls of the state. It’s 45-45 with 10% undecided.

It seems that 17% of democrats are voting for McCain, and 8% are undecided. Most of them white and older in age. I guess Ohio would be a state that the Clintons need to go to to stump for Obama.

Here are the details.

I don't know about you, but this worries me...

Mark Ambinder of the Atlantic.com is reporting that Clinton's Name Likely To Be Placed In Nomination at the Democratic National Convention!

More after the jump...

I know, I'm not supposed to submit really short diaries, but this is just too significant...

This guy was just captured:

This is a short diary.

I wanted to bring people's attention to the fallacy promoted on the front page of the RealClearPolitics web site:

This is basically based on their calculation, Ickes' style, of the Michigan vote as follows:
1- Undecided votes are not counted for Obama;
2- Votes are counted as full votes; and
3- Caucuses at Iowa, Nevada, Washington & Maine were not counted, with the "fine print" explanation that these states have not released their vote totals.

This is an outrage in my humble opinion.

Update [2008-6-1 13:57:46 by yaddab]: I know: The popular vote does NOT count, but we should not allow any such false argument to be used to fool the uninformed. Also, many comments referred to RCP as a right-wing leaning web site. That may be the case, but it also happens to be one of the most quoted web sites in the MSM when it comes to elections stats. When there is a major fallacy there, it spreads very quickly. Here's an example of CNN quoting RCP.

OK, I'm not a philosopher. However, I do get into many intellectual discussions with friends, particularly when it comes to contemporary politics.

Recently a friend of mine argued that, when it comes to how politicians actually function, there is ultimately little difference between Democrats and Republicans. He got a bit excited and extended the argument to Progressives & Conservatives, and Leftists & Rightists. They all say they will do what they seldom end-up doing or may even do the opposite. They make promises that could get them elected to office but, once in office, routinely break their promises. He proceeded to say that based on this conclusion, people ought to vote on the basis of what their gut feeling is about the likelihood of truthfulness of the candidate, rather than the issues.

After the fold, I share my response to him, and I have tabulated 22 areas  where we differed, and basically set up two columns. Which column do you think you identify with?

Edit: With the all the brouhaha resulting from Hillary's atrocious remarks, I decided to post this now because I really needed a distraction from all that depressing stuff. I have always supported Obama, but to see Clinton fall the way she has was simply sad!

OK, what I really don't understand is how a slip of this significance does not get traction in the media. As far as I'm concerned, this one is really big. It ought to be the headline on every newspaper and lead story on every TV news segment.

Or maybe I do understand.

A statement that is brutally honest about the economy and voting patterns of rural Americans gets to be called "bitter-gate". The statement was not a "slip of the tongue". It was the same position Obama has always held, just badly phrased.

In contrast, on the 2nd of May, McCain's gaffe of the day probably "slipped" off of his tongue. Freud indicated over a hundred years ago that such slips reveal what the unconscious attempts to hide from the world.

So what does McCain get as a result? Not even a slap on the wrist, and possibly less than a few minutes of coverage mostly on cable news channels.

I'm sick and tired of all the negativity. I haven't been excited about Obama's campaign just to have to go through all this BS in the media and on the web.

I worry that both the MSM and the blogosphere have been so saturated with the other W (both Ws have similar approval rating, apparently) and all the Clinton below-the-belt blows, that the passion and enthusiasm that allowed Obama's campaign to be such a success is fading.

For whatever it's worth, this is my attempt to bring some passion back. I thought the bast way was to provide some new videos of Barack (or about him) being the intelligent, thoughtful presidential candidate that he is.

He is real, down to earth, and palpably concerned and connected. And I needed to see that again to get pumped up!

Many videos (eight, to be exact) after the fold...

The national debt has ballooned at an exponential rate.

It is now clear that not only does the US treasury owe China, Japan and the UK, but America actually owes Iraq and Iran. I break the figures down and show how much each taxpayer owes.

It is incredible that each American taxpayer owes more to foreign countries than would be enough for two or three years of an Ivy League college education, or a substantial portion of a mortgage.

Details, graphs and a poll after the fold.

That's right. It's official. The war in Iraq is now the more unpopular than Vietnam was.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that:

63% of Americans [say] the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq

More details after the fold.

To quote Hillary, to much "whoop dee doo" has been made out of her victory in PA last night. I could never understand why so many people seemed surprised. I certainly hoped that Obama would win, but I did know that for him to do so would have been a coup. Given how the tone of the race has turned in the last week or so, I was not at all surprised that the gap could not be made smaller than what it is now.

So I thought about this "surprise" factor a bit. I looked at the data and did some math. I came up with the following argument:

When it comes to performance in "home states", each candidtae won their states, but one of them performed much better than the other: Obama.

I explain this after the fold...

A new Zogby poll is out:

                                   4-15/16                     4-16/17

Clinton                       45%                             47%

Obama                       44%                             43%

Someone else            3%                               2%

Not sure                     9%                               8%

How many of us, and of the MSM reporters and pundits, made note of the fact that Iraqi deaths and Iraqi refugees where not highlighted in the recent congressional hearings?

What does it say about the USA that we were grilling Petraeus about the heroic 4000 Americans who perished in this needless war and the trillions of US dollars being spent or about to be spent in Iraq, when there are Iraqi body counts that range from 90,300 at the most conservative end, to such horrific estimates as 1,197,000?

What does it say about us when we neglect to emphasize that our so called "pursuit to free Iraq" has in fact led to nearly 5 million Iraqi refugees inside and outside Iraq?

Andrew J. Bacevich, a heavy-weight conservative intellectual, and professor of history and international relations at Boston University, writes this piece for The American Conservative and asserts that: It's the Iraq War, Stupid! (my paraphrasing, not his words).

Who?

Douglas W. Kmiec is Professor of Constitutional Law, Pepperdine University. He served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel (U.S. Assistant Attorney General) for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush..

Why is this important? Because he brought the issue of terrorism to the fore in his endorsement. An issue that will clearly be a focus of Republican attention, and has yet to receive much emphasis in Democratic rhetoric.