This blog is under reconstruction… all posts since July 1 have been moved over to the “new” blog that is now displayed on the homepage… all the old stuff still exists, but it will take me a while to synchronize everything so the old archives are seamlessly connected to the more recent archives, and visible from the “new” homepage.

The categories are also completely screwed up at the moment; please bear with me. I would fix them now, but I have to get back to work.

The good news is, commenting (and posting) is now much faster, and much less likely to crash mid-stream. Which was the whole point of doing this.

Please let me know of any problems you encounter.

Incidentally, you can access the “old” homepage, including the old archives, here.

There was a significant Edwards bounce, writes Andrew Sullivan. It may have appeared very small in the popular vote, but it was enough to tip a few scales where it really counts, in the electoral vote. Kerry now leads, 291-247, or 322-205, or 322-216, depending on which poll-aggregation site you believe. But anywhere you look, he’s winning.

Significantly, by all accounts it appears that Kerry is winning Florida — narrowly, yes, but he’s winning it. He also appears to be winning New Hampshire — the second-closest 2000 “red state” — and holding onto Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, and New Mexico.

There is disagreement over who is winning red states Ohio and Missouri; those two states account for the difference between the website that has Kerry with 291 votes and the ones that have him with 322.

Two surprisingly close states are Nevada (Bush by 2%) and Maine (Kerry by 1%, with the possibility of a first-ever 3-1 Congressional district split).

Also surprisingly close is Virginia (Bush by 5%). Surprisingly not close, to me anyway, is West Virginia (Bush by 8%). Could the Old Dominion end up being more of a “battleground” than its neighbor to the west?

By some accounts, Tennessee is also really close — even tied. But others say it’s not so close.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I guess Nevada’s closeness isn’t really that surprising. Bush only won by 4% there in 2000. I guess I just sort of, um, forgot that it was a battleground state. :)

Also, upon further review, I guess the “Edwards bounce” thesis doesn’t really apply to the site that has Kerry leading 291-247. It’s the 322-205 and 322-216 sites where the alleged bounce can really be seen. (The difference between those sites, by the way, is that the 322-205 site has Tennessee listed as “exactly tied” — hence the 11 fewer electoral votes total.)

I’ve added a list of websites with state-by-state polling data in the left-hand column.

UPDATE UPDATE: There appears to have been a definite Edwards bounce in the state where he was born, South Carolina. Bush still leads, but only by 7 instead of 17.

No bounce at all in Edwards’s current home state, North Carolina, though, as has already been noted.

Education Secretary Rod Paige, who is African-American, to NAACP leaders who had said that some black groups are fronts for white conservatives: “You do not own, and you are not the arbiters of, African-American authenticity.”

Now that the Federal Marriage Amendment has resoundingly failed in the Senate, Republicans in the House are devising a new strategy to get their way. It involves stripping. Jurisdiction stripping, that is:

Realizing that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage faces little chance of passing soon, if ever, House Republicans yesterday discussed alternative approaches, including stripping federal courts of jurisdiction over the issue. …

Rep. John Hostettler’s (R-Ind.) “jurisdiction stripping” bill… would bar federal courts from hearing lawsuits related to gay sex and marriage. …

Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) told reporters yesterday that he plans to use “jurisdiction stripping” measures to achieve other social policy goals as well.

For example, he will push legislation to stop federal courts from hearing lawsuits related to the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

DeLay said the time is “not quite ripe” to apply the GOP’s new legislative tactics to the issue of abortion.

Let the comment-flaming begin…

The monsoon has begun.

Wednesday was the third straight day with an average dew point of 55° or above in Phoenix, according to the National Weather Service. That means Monday, July 12 — the first day of the streak — will go down as the official first day of Monsoon 2004.

July 12 is five days later than the average monsoon start date, July 7. But it’s nearly two weeks before the record late start, July 25.

The average end date is Sept. 13. So we’re in for about two months of this. (Well, Becky is, anyway. I’ll be leaving for Indiana about halfway through. :) But “the monsoon is not necessarily a permanent feature but may come and go, giving residents brief respites from the muggy weather,” the NWS explains. “On the average there are about 20 monsoon days in July, but there were as many as 31 days in 1984 and as few as seven days in 1987.”

The declaration that Wednesday was the third straight 55-plus day contradicts previous reports that Monday’s average dew point was 53°, and vindicates, to some extent, my Tuesday-morning post regarding the start of the monsoon. Weather Underground wasn’t wrong about Monday’s data, after all — they were only wrong about Saturday and Sunday being over 55°… but perhaps those days’ averages were really somewhere between 54.5° and 55.0°, which would round up to 55° for Weather Underground’s purposes, but which would not (I’m guessing) count toward the three-straight-55°-days rule.

Anyway, yeah, the monsoon is here. And it’s in L.A., too, according to Andrew.

(more…)

Attention all BrendanLoy.com users… a question for y’all… does anyone actually use the “category” archives? Do you ever click on the category links? Does anyone care about the damn categories? :)

I’m thinking about a possible way to speed up posting and commenting — specifically, moving all the old archives (all posts from, say, June 2004 and earlier) into a separate blog, and starting a new blog for fresh posts — but categories present a problem in terms of doing this. This is why I ask.

When you do a Google search for Dem Panic — a term that Mickey Kaus invented — my Insta-linked post on the topic is ranked #1; Kaus is #2! Heh!