Um, WAPO and AP can't both be right.  Here's WAPO front page from Tuesday:

Democrats backed off after the House failed, on a vote of 222 to 203, to override the president's veto of a $124 billion measure that would have required U.S. forces to begin withdrawing as early as July.

Here's AP today:

WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats have signaled they're not ready to back down in their confrontation with President Bush on Iraq, spurring Republicans to accuse them of causing political gridlock.

They can't both be right-- can they?

Let's rewind a few weeks, shall we?

    Robert Siegel: I'm looking at all the same polls you're looking at--
    Karl Rove: No you're not!  No you're not!  I'm looking at 68 polls a week; you may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally but that do not impact the outcome of these races....  Yeah, look, I'm looking at all these Robert, and adding them up, and I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House.  You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math and I'm entitled to the math.
    --NPR interview, Oct. 24

Hat tip:
    http://www.blueoregon.com/...

I found myself more outraged than usual at Dick Cheney's latest effort (i.e., calling Chuck Hagel and all who question administration policy "armchair quarterbacks"), and I couldn't figure out why.  It was typical Dick-ness, and not even one of his most objectionable statements, so why was I so pissed about it?

I realized what really gets my goat this time is the bizarro spectacle of the Vice President calling a U.S. Senator an "armchair quarterback".  Someone needs to remind Cheney that having the "vice" in front doesn't make you more important-- it means that you are only "vicariously" President, that you're in the back seat and it's annoying when you try to drive.

Can we please stop allowing the notion that "9/11 Changed Everything" to go unchallenged?  

Isn't it a capitulation to terrorists to even use the phrase?  Aren't we supposed to be showing how little 9/11 affected us and our core values?  Isn't it an implicit endorsement of terrorism to admit that a single act of terrorism "changed everything"?

Beyond the fact that 9/11 "exceptionalism" gives the Bush Administration license to suspend all the normal rules in its "War on Terror", it is a bad strategy to give terrorists job satisfaction by admitting that you have been fully terrorized by the efforts.

Imagine how much worse it would have been if the British response to the Blitz had been to start acting like Nazis-- that's how disappointed I am in my compatriots.

I am convinced that the Supreme Being in his/her/its infinite wisdom is sending us messages in the form of miracles in an attempt to prevent us foolish, falliable mortals from repeating a terrible and tragic mistake.  

Let it not be only our ideological opposites who may impute Holy Motives from mundane events, but let us read the obvious signs that spell out V-I-C-T-O-R-Y for the latte-sipping, Volvo-driving Crusaders of Truth, Justice and Affordable Health Care.

Ye Doubters!  Witness the Clear and Distinct Testament of Indisputable Facts and Anomalous Occurrences:

Last night's media buy thread (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/13/05854/550) left me with serious questions as to what is really going on in the race.  I believe all the polls in the media are less informative than the tidbits of info from the campaigns themselves so the the questions I had about the campaigns' media buys troubled me.

Thinking it over, however, I realized something that convinced me that Bush is toast.

While John Edwards scored many hits on the current administration's record on jobs, health care and the war on terror, Dick Cheney had no rejoinder to his point that there are 60 nations with Al Qaeda cells, and we can't invade them all.

I imagine Armando was jumping up and down on that line-- it got me thinking, why don't KE'04 just follow mine the Wesley Clark vein on Iraq?  His explanations were always the most salient and persuasive.  Now that we've separated Saddam and Osama, let's attack the entire statist strategy!

The message all of us should be trumpeting today is this:

Kerry WAXED Bush.  Bush was in MELTDOWN.  Never have I seen a president perform so HORRIBLY in a debate.  It's amazing how terrible he does when his HANDLERS aren't there to help.  Kerry was the guy who ACTUALLY seemed presidential.  UNBELIEVABLE-- you should see it for yourself.

Presidential Interrogator: Senator Kerry, you voted against Gulf War I and for Gulf War II-- please explain.

JK: Well, I guess you could say that in the second Iraq war vote, I thought that Mr. Bush would conduct the operation more like his father did, and in the first one I feared that his father would conduct the operation more like Mr. Bush actually has.  

George Bush I earned my trust and that of the American people as a reliable steward of foreign policy,  but George Bush II abused it.  We need strong, sober and competent leadership to restore our credibility in the eyes of the world and we need it now.  Can we really afford to fail again?

Fahrenheit 9/11 has crossed into six digits for domestic box office gross.  Not bad for a $6M movie.

Our caucus drew at least three times as many as expected (69).  Dean won 2 delegates (30 votes) to 1 delegate for Kerry and 1 for Kucinich.  I'm one of the Dean delegates who will go to the district convention in May.

Bad news for Bush: the turnout was over TEN times more than the last precinct caucus in 1992 (which drew 6 people).  People clearly want W gone with an intensity unseen in a LONG time.

So totally underwhelmed.  I literally cannot believe that is what I've been hearing about for the past four days.

What a letdown-- I was expecting something so much more interesting.  What's interesting is how different it is from what I imagined after hearing about it from secondary and tertiary sources.  

Sheesh-- even Gore didn't get unjustifiably reamed so bad as this!

I believe we are witnessing a seismic shift in the Democratic party's center of gravity.  

A Gore-Dean alliance puts a lot of people on the outside that were heretofore considered pre-eminent.  Likewise, Dean's people and supporters have been drawn from the outskirts of the party, and they will be asked to show the party some direction.

The question becomes-- who wins and who loses when the Dean campaign becomes the vanguard of the DNC?

Oy.  Noone is running the circus under the Dem tent-- check out this one for some depressing analysis:
   Democrats get a wake-up call

What will it take for Democrats to get their act together?

I think a lot of pissed-off Democrat regulars speaking with one voice is the only thing that can fix this party.

Mike S gave me an intriguing idea for something a bunch of lefty activists (e.g., Deaniacs) could do as a sort of activist project: crashing talk radio shows.  

Think of it as a political denial of service attack.

Electability is often bandied about as a term of comparison among presidential candidates in the blogosphere with an air of certainty and not much else to back it up in terms of empirical evidence.  Polls are referred to vaguely, if at all-- with little regard for who polled how many people when-- in forming arguments of relative electability.  

In that spirit of statistical munging, I decided to see what would happen if I simply added together the results (weighted by sample size) from several different pollsters taken since, say, October 1st and arrived at averaged matchups for the major candidates vis a vis the president.