• Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, includes this tidbit:

  In the days after 9/11, when fears of another terrorist strike were at their peak, Vice President Dick Cheney was convinced that he had been subjected to a lethal dose of anthrax ...

  White House insiders from that white-knuckle time [said] the scare contributed to Cheney's insistence on hard-line tactics for fighting terror.

- brownsox
• Oil prices plunge on demand concerns. Reasons for the sell-off? Mostly "whines" about the economy. There was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saying that "numerous difficulties" are affecting the U.S. economy of the world's largest oil consumer, and rising prices for energy and food. The Labor Department reported that wholesale inflation jumped by 1.8 percent last month, with a year-to-year rise of 9.2 percent, the most since 1981. Meanwhile, GM announced more cuts, including health benefits for salaried retirees and several thousand more jobs. Truck production will be cut by 300,000 units, 150,000 more than approved last month. - brownsox/Meteor Blades
• From our Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry Department: Senator Joe Lieberman said today he won't accept a vice presidential offer if John McCain makes offers it this year. Nor would he take a Cabinet post in a McCain administration.

  "I'm where I was meant to be," said Lieberman, who won re-election to his Senate seat two years ago as an independent after losing the Democratic primary.

  -  brownsox

• Meanwhile, Charlie Cook at The National Journal warns that the political community has a lousy track record of predicting who will get vice presidential nods. But it doesn't stop anybody from trying.

  All of this is pretty pointless, and the more certain that folks around Washington and the political community are that they have figured out the pick, the more laughable it is.

  - Meteor Blades

• Bush Drops to 28% Approval. Just 28 percent of Americans approve of President Bush's job performance, a match for Jimmy Carter's career low. Only two presidents produced lower ratings: Richard Nixon, 24 percent in July and August 1974 just before he resigned in the face of impeachment; and Harry Truman, 22 percent in February 1952. - brownsox
• Several folks at the Center for American Progress via Alternet have taken on The Three Biggest Myths the Bush Administration Wants You to Believe About Offshore Drilling.

  No. 1 - Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. A Newt Gingrich group is promoting that theme. The truth: No significant impact on production or prices before 2030.

  No. 2 - China on Our Coasts. Rudy Guiliani, Dick Cheney and others claim the Chinese are drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba. They aren't.

  No. 3 - Not a Drop Was Spilled. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Mike Huckabee, George Will, and Bill O'Reilly have all claimed "not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita." BS piled deep. According to the Minerals Management Service, those hurricanes caused 124 offshore spills for a total of 743,700 gallons. - Meteor Blades

• New Mexico blogger Heath Haussamen interviewed John McCain yesterday on the "Straight Talk Express" in Albuquerque.  He talked about how he "philosophically" supports protecting the environment (whatever that means); in that context, he had a few words about the Udalls:

  I love and revere the Udall family. Mo was very good to me, and Mark (Tom's cousin) and Tom are good friends, McCain said. He added that he has a "great appreciation" for former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, Tom Udall's father and Mo Udall's brother.

  That doesn't mean McCain supports Tom Udall in his race against Republican Steve Pearce.

  "I want him elected," McCain said of Pearce. "It's just a matter of philosophy. We're both conservative Republicans."

  Sorry to disappoint you, Senator, but it's going to take a miracle to get Pearce elected. - Plutonium Page

This is a flood of delicious news. A flood.

Here are the Cook Political Report's latest race ranking changes.  

From "Solid Republican" to "Likely Republican":

AL-03, Mike Rogers
CA-46, Dana Rohrabacher
FL-09, Gus Bilirakis
FL-18, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
ID-01, Bill Sali
IN-03, Mark Souder
IA-04, Tom Latham
KY-02, Ron Lewis (open seat)
MN-02, John Kline
NE-02, Lee Terry
NV-02, Dean Heller
NJ-05, Scott Garrett
NC-10, Patrick McHenry
OH-07, Dave Hobson (open seat)
PA-05, John Peterson (open seat
PA-15, Charlie Dent
TX-07, John Culberson
TX-10, Michael McCaul
VA-05, Virgil Goode
VA-10, Frank Wolf
WY-AL, Barbara Cubin (open seat)

From Likely Republican to Lean Republican:

FL-08, Ric Keller
FL-21, Lincoln Diaz-Balart
PA-03, Phil English
WV-02, Shelley Moore Capito

From Toss Up to Lean Democratic:

NY-13, Vito Fossella (open seat)
NY-25, Jim Walsh (open seat)

From Likely Democratic to Lean Democratic:

PA-11, Paul Kanjorski

Wow.

That's an astonishing number of changes, first of all, but I'm equally amazed by the particular districts on this list. Most of the rating changes involve long-shot flanking races, the kind of races that would never be competitive in normal years, but happen to have unusually strong Democrats running this year, in an unusually favorable climate for Democrats. Some of these districts - like ID-01, IN-03, KY-02, NC-10, and TX-07 - are just wildly Republican, and many of them didn't even feature competitive races in 2006.

Many of those races added to the "Likely Republican" category won't be especially competitive this fall. But some of them will, and a few might even be Democratic pickups.

Even if it's just for this cycle, in the perfect storm of 2008, Democrats are making inroads into areas they have written off for years. The world is grown so good, it seems, that we are making prey where angels have long feared to tread.

Bi-partisan pollster Charlie Cook continues to be a great resource of fact based analysis of the state of the race:

Today he wrote:

"Despite the recent show of strength by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the odds against her winning the Democratic presidential nomination are as imposing as ever — and probably worse."

More after the jump....

A great article from pollster Charlie Cook today on the state of the race...

The good news for Hillary Rodham Clinton is that she’s winning a lot of battles. The bad news is that the war is pretty much lost...today, she is 133 delegates behind Obama, 1,728 to 1,595, according to NBC News. At this point last week, she trailed by 136 delegates. Since then Clinton has scored a net gain of 10 delegates in Pennsylvania, according to NBC, but has lost a few more superdelegates, so she has made little headway.

More after the jump...including the likely endgame he sketches out...

UPDATED: Blogger/Author Taegon Goddard makes exactly the same point and I'll add his quote to the bottom of the posting...

Friends, we have ridden the roller coaster of Rev. Wright and "Bittergate"and now polling is coming out that speaks volumes for Obama's electability. But the real siren song for Dem. Superdelegates is Charlie Cook, he of the famed "Cook Report", the Insider's Insider. Today MSNBC has posted his column stating that Hillary has about a 5% chance for the nomination. More after the jump, but here's the link to the MSNBC site: "Bittergate" Too Late to Save Clinton

I had a chance, at the last minute, to go to part of the National Jewish Democratic Council meeting & Democratic Presidential Candidate cattle call, in Washington, DC today.  I missed John Edwards last night.  Today Biden & Obama spoke, tomorrow H. Clinton & Richardson will address the group of a couple of hundred mostly Jewish Democratic activists, most of whom are old pro's in Dem. politics, even the young folks.
 

No matter how gatekeeper extraordinaire Charlie Cook chooses to coach is words, they mean the same thing: John Edwards is a bad father.

You can cheat on your wife, marry 3 times, even **** your cousin (like a certain NYC mayor), but don't dare run for president if you are a Democrat and your wife is sick. At least that is what he implies in his latest email newsletter "Off to the Races" where he also praises Katie Couric's attempt at charachter assassination.

If this has been diaried, I really don't care. I'm writing it more for myself and thank you for stopping by. I've grown to respect Charlie Cook quite a bit. His predictions were accurate but cautious and he was the first to come out with a solid, statistically based "Who the Hell are they kidding" column when the GOP's self-immolation in November 2006 was portrayed as "not that bad."

I like this column because it echoes something I wrote about a lot last year and applies this year: Politics is a game played under a clock.

I received two emails today from two of the better known political pundits, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia and Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report.  Both have had a fairly good record in recent elections and here were their predictions - Sabato's and Cook's - a few days before the 2006 Election.  Though these may not have been their final predictions, still, they came pretty close to proclaiming a Democratic takeover of both the US Senate and US House of Representatives.

Both pundits, however, were not as accurate as this prediction made two days before the 2006 Election.   ;)

Gee, I hate to bring this up again...

Blogger Chris Bowers at MyDD perhaps is the best example of how clueless some bloggers really are about politics.

Last summer, he penned a piece, "DCCC Not Aggressive Enough," in which he complained about his party's House campaign committee. Now, in a two-part series called "Taking Back the House," he insists "we need to attack everywhere."

"I want 80 serious challenges to GOP House incumbents every two years and a Democratic name on the ballot in all 435 districts," he demands. "I have had enough of just targeting the twenty or so top races - let's engage in a full-frontal assault. ... The first step is to identify eighty Republicans against who we could mount a serious challenge."

It is undeniably true that you can't defeat an incumbent if you don't run someone against him. So, yes, it's better for a party to field candidates in 435 districts, if possible.

But some Republicans didn't have Democratic opponents because they were unbeatable, and no Democrat wanted to waste his or her time (to say nothing about money) by running. You can't make a race competitive simply by putting a name on the ballot, and the Democrats would not hold even a single additional seat had they put a name on the ballot in every district during the past two cycles [...]

As for Bowers' assertion that he wants "80 serious challenges" to GOP incumbents next year, he might as well ask for 120 or 150. I want vacation houses in Napa Valley and Palm Beach, and I'd like to be 35 years old again. "If wishes were horses, beggars might ride," as the English proverb puts it.

But it's just too hard to resist, now that there's a new "clueless" kid in town:

"How’d we do? Not bad. Not bad at all," Rothenberg wrote in his Nov. 29 newsletter, the Rothenberg Political Report. He predicted that Democrats would gain six Senate seats, which they did, and 30 to 36 House seats (they won 29).  

But even legendary bookies are second-guessed. University of California-Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain and his students at Berkeley’s D.C.-based program argue in a new study that the top political seers’ claims of accuracy are a bit inflated.

The study has infuriated the small but elite community of election prognosticators — Cook, Rothenberg, University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato and the political team at Congressional Quarterly — who have cried foul, citing flawed methodology and a deep misunderstanding of their jobs. Cook even called Cain "clueless."

What's all the hubbub, bub?

Well, seems Cain took a closer look at the prognosticators' craft, but not just at the overall numbers. Cain took his glass to the individual races, and to the overall methodology, too. After evaluating the predictions made in races the various pundits actually called, he pointed at something that's apparently a bit of a sore spot, though I'm not sure why:

[I]t is Cain’s criticism that the forecasters inflate their claims of accuracy by not predicting races placed in the "toss up" category that created the biggest uproar. Cook put 20 of the 29 seats that flipped in the "pure toss up" category, where he offered no predictions. Rothenberg, Sabato and CQ placed 11, 13 and 12 seats, respectively, in a similar category and offered no predictions.

"[If] you are trying to predict the total number of seats that would swing from the Republicans to the Democrats, the flipped seat totals are the key statistic," Cain wrote.

Now, nobody's saying that the predictions business is an easy one. And both Cook and Rothenberg provide reasonable defenses for the way they do their jobs. They're not in the business, they say, of predicting precisely which races will come out which way. Rather, they're in the business of rating the competitiveness of each race.

Which is a valuable service, no doubt.

Valuable enough, in fact, that they probably shouldn't be as disturbed by the fact that they didn't absolutely, positively nail it, each and every time. That, as they correctly argue, wasn't the point.

(Still true, though. And therefore worth pointing out, regardless.)

But look again at Rothenberg's jab at Bowers. Chris is "clueless" because he wants to see more serious challenges mounted, and a Democrat on the ballot in every district. Stu replies:

You can't make a race competitive simply by putting a name on the ballot, and the Democrats would not hold even a single additional seat had they put a name on the ballot in every district during the past two cycles.

Now consider the "defense" Rothenberg and Cook offer to Cain's criticism: that they're in the business of evaluating what's happening, not making predictions about what might happen.

What, exactly, was the point of Bowers' strategy? Well, among other things, it was that if you can't predict exactly where things will happen, but think the conditions are right for something to happen, then it pays to be everywhere you can be. To be sure, there was more to it than just that, most notably the hard-to-deny reality that mounting challenges to Republican leaders keeps them close to home, and out of the fundraising business. And really, these two strategies go hand in hand. Investing in the latter creates more favorable conditions for the former.

But beyond the question of whether or not the Bowers-backed strategy was effective, there's another question.

If your job isn't to make predictions, but rather to evaluate the results of objective reality on the ground, then what business have you in evaluating strategies aimed at changing those realities?

Maybe Rothenberg was just talking out of school.

Not as firm as Sabato.  Not as bold as Rothenberg.  Nonetheless, fwiw:

The Senate still looks likely to see a net loss for Republicans of at least four seats, putting the best case scenario for the GOP at a 51-49 seat majority, but a five-seat gain that would result in a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie, or a six-seat gain that would give Democrats a 51-49 seat majority is most likely. There remains an outside chance of a seven-seat, 52-48 Democratic majority.

. . . .

In the House, it would take a miracle for the GOP to hold onto their majority. The losses look very likely to exceed 20 seats, and a 20- to 35-seat loss is most likely, but we would not be surprised for it to exceed 35 seats. The vulnerable GOP seats are there, the wave is there, maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't.

http://cookpolitical.com/

This afternoon's front-page entry on the Cook Report is already out-of-date. ;) Without comment, Charlie Cook changed a couple more races today:

* HOUSE RATINGS CHANGES:
TX-22 - Open - Lean Democratic to Toss Up
WV-02 - Capito - Solid Republican to Likely Republican

The full updated [PDF] is available here.

The TX-22 downgrade is probably due to recent polls showing generic Republican write-in strength in the district.

The WV-02 upgrade is probably due to recent DCCC placement of Mike Callaghan on Emerging Candidates list as well as WV Dem Party poll showing the race within single digits (and just within poll's MOE).

For more news see recent dKos diaries on the WV-02 and TX-22.

There's only a week left before voting ends... will every day bring more bad news to Republicans?

Cook:

With the election just eight days away, there are no signs that this wave is abating.   Barring a dramatic event, we are looking at the prospect of GOP losses in the House of at least 20 to 35 seats, possibly more, and at least four in the Senate, with five or six most likely.

If independents vote in fairly low numbers, as is customary in midterm elections, losses in the House will be on the lower end of that range. But if they turn out at a higher than normal level, their strong preference for Democrats in most races would likely push the GOP House losses to or above the upper levels.

His latest ratings (PDF) contain the following changes:

Cook changes the following seats to toss-ups: AZ 05 (Hayworth), CA 11 (Pombo), CO 04 (Musgrave), CO 05 (Open, KS 02 (Ryun), MN 01 (Gutknecht), NH 02 (Bass), OH O2 (Schmidt), WY Al (Cubin). CA 50 (Bilbray) and NE 03 (Open) have been downgraded to "Lean Republican." and IA 01 has been rated "Lean Democrat."

Interesting that of these 12 races, six are on our ActBlue page, while another four have gotten extensive coverage and support from the netroots. And to think they were all long-shots when we started writing about them.

Over at the Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook had one of his oh-so rare National Overviews (this was the first since May 6).  In it, he said what most people already know -- the GOP is on the ropes.

Hat tip to fellow NM blogger New Mexico Matters for the catch. Crossposted at FBIHOP.

More on the dark side of the moon.

Charlie Cook is now reporting that, because of current events and low GOP voter motivation, a seven seat pickup in the Senate is a distinct possibility:

It is no longer far-fetched to see how Democrats could win six Republican seats, or even seven -- which would be necessary for them to gain a majority if they lose one of their own seats...

Four weeks is a lifetime in politics and the tide still could shift. But for Republicans to salvage their majorities in the House and Senate, quite a bit would have to change.

More below the fold, including a house analysis.

The evenhanded Charlie Cook usually doesn't release his ratings changes more than once a week or two.  However, Foleygate forced old Charlie and his associate, Amy Walter, to reevaluate the political landscape.

The Democrats gained substantially.  On October 4, Cook had 18 Republican seats in the tossup category; today he's got 25 with no clear favorite.

The Hotline's Chuck Todd painted a realistic scenario yesterday under which the Democrats could regain control of the US Senate in next month's Congressional Elections.  

Another major political analyst, Charlie Cook of the National Journal, is increasingly pessimistic about the Republicans' chances of retaining their majority in both the US Senate and US House of Representatives.

Read on...

So...ever since 9/11, overconfident Republicans and jittery Democrats have been all atwitter about the "Bush Bounce" that was supposed to propel Dear Leader and his political party back to prominence, and restore all confidence in the maintenance of the Republican majority.

So, today comes word that two of America's leading political pundits have changed their assessments of a number of House, Senate and Gubernatorial Races. In total, there were eleven races that were updated.

What direction did these eleven races go, in this, the week of the great Republican surge? NINE of them went in the direction of the Democrats, and only TWO races are considered "more" likely to be Republican victories than before. The details below the fold........