Steve Skojec

Not surprisingly, I’m calling it for Obama. I think we’ll see him get somewhere between 52-54% of the vote, which will give him a 6 to 8 point win. I wouldn’t be remotely shocked if he pulled of a 10 point win, because polling this year will, I think, prove to be more inaccurate than usual, with the benefit of error going to Obama’s appeal to non-likely voters. The lines at the polls here were VERY long this morning, and were long for absentee voting too. I expect we’ll hear a lot about the record turnout, and while it’s likely that Obama has energized the Republican base to turn out in larger numbers, the sense I’m getting is that the demographic will still skew heavily Democratic.

Third party candidates will have a negligible draw from either McCain or Obama. One exception, apparently, might be Montana, where Ron Paul is on the ballot and is expected to draw significant percentages (4-5%).

Virginia will go blue. So will Pennsylvania and Florida. McCain will get less than 200 electoral votes.

The Dems won’t get a full 60 seats in the Senate, but they will reach the high 50s - 56 or 57.

Tomorrow, get ready for the smug-a-thon.

Long live the Obamessiah:

Fundamentalism has many forms.

(h/t to Sarah)

Obama’s massive campaign contributions are starting to come under scrutiny. Put me down for “unsurprised” that there turns out to be something very fishy going on.

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won’t disclose.

And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate.

Obama has raised nearly twice that of John McCain’s campaign, according to new campaign finance report.

But because of Obama’s high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial advantage — at least, not yet.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee began September with $95 million in cash, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The McCain camp and the Republican National Committee had $94 million, because of an influx of $84 million in public money.

But Obama easily could outpace McCain by $50 million to $100 million or more in new donations before Election Day, thanks to a legion of small contributors whose names and addresses have been kept secret.

Unlike the McCain campaign, which has made its complete donor database available online, the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them once they go beyond the $200 mark.

Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.

“Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed,” said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. “They don’t appear anywhere, so there’s no way of knowing who they are.”

The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.

It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.

Biersack would not comment on whether the FEC was investigating the huge amount of cash that has come into Obama’s coffers with no public reporting.

[snip]

n a letter dated June 25, 2008, the FEC asked the Obama campaign to verify a series of $25 donations from a contributor identified as “Will, Good” from Austin, Texas.

Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You.”

A Newsmax analysis of the 1.4 million individual contributions in the latest master file for the Obama campaign discovered 1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25.

In total, Mr. Good Will gave $17,375.

Following this and subsequent FEC requests, campaign records show that 330 contributions from Mr. Good Will were credited back to a credit card. But the most recent report, filed on Sept. 20, showed a net cumulative balance of $8,950 — still well over the $4,600 limit.

There can be no doubt that the Obama campaign noticed these contributions, since Obama’s Sept. 20 report specified that Good Will’s cumulative contributions since the beginning of the campaign were $9,375.

In an e-mailed response to a query from Newsmax, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt pledged that the campaign would return the donations. But given the slowness with which the campaign has responded to earlier FEC queries, there’s no guarantee that the money will be returned before the Nov. 4 election.

Similarly, a donor identified as “Pro, Doodad,” from “Nando, NY,” gave $19,500 in 786 separate donations, most of them for $25. For most of these donations, Mr. Doodad Pro listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You,” just as Good Will had done.

But in some of them, he didn’t even go this far, apparently picking letters at random to fill in the blanks on the credit card donation form. In these cases, he said he was employed by “VCX” and that his profession was “VCVC.”

Following FEC requests, the Obama campaign began refunding money to Doodad Pro in February 2008. In all, about $8,425 was charged back to a credit card. But that still left a net total of $11,165 as of Sept. 20, way over the individual limit of $4,600.

[snip]

And then there are the overseas donations — at least, the ones that we know about.

The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.

I can’t possibly excerpt enough of the article to cover the breadth and scope of this. Go read it for yourself. While this has the potential to really blow up in Obama’s face, I wouldn’t bet on it. All the same, here’s to hoping this story gets some legs.

(h/t to Joe Marier)

So the big deal making the rounds in the political press today is that HRC-leaked photo of Obama dressing up as a Somali elder on a trip to Kenya.

The implication is that Barack Hussein Obama (his real middle name, BTW) is a closet Muslim. Or at least dresses like one. Or something like that.

What all of the political press and pundits seem to be overlooking is this - I think he bears a striking resemblance to Hadji from Johnny Quest:

Hadji recited the magic incantation “Sim, Sim, Salabim!” and was known for charming snakes. Obama’s speeches are apparently magical and he’s proficient at charming liberals. I think we may just be on to something here…