Saturday Morning Pick-and-Choose

• Nate Silver says, "President Obama is now better than a 4-in-5 favorite to win the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. His chances of winning it increased to 83.7 percent on Friday, his highest figure since the Denver debate and improved from 80.8 percent on Thursday. ... Friday’s polling should make it easy to discern why Mr. Obama has the Electoral College advantage. There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida."

• Chicago Ted pointed me to a good video that explains why Obama supporters should be hopeful about winning this thing.

•  Rick Perlstein has a longish article about right wing money-raising organizations. The good news: most of the money goes into the money-raisers pockets.

• Nate Cohn envisions an election night nightmare.  "In most eastern states, the overwhelming majority of votes are counted by the end of Election Night, since only a small share of absentee or overseas ballots arrive after the election. But elections in Washington and Oregon are now conducted entirely by mail and 41 percent of California voters voted by mail in 2008. In some states, ballots only need to be postmarked by Election Day and it can take days before all of the votes arrive and weeks before they get counted, usually in modest batches once or twice a day."

• I laughed: Ed Kilgore recalls that someone tweeted that Romney's new efforts in Pennsylvania, which he had ignored until this week, amounted to an "onside kick."

• Is anyone concerned about the effect of Hurricane Sandy on the reliability of New York as an Obama state? New York City is heavily democratic; Upstate New York, not so much. If the city can't or doesn't get to the polls, could 29 electoral votes go to Romney?

• A good friend writes:  

I'm so worried that Jim Oberweis will finally be able to buy his very own state election that I have been walking door to door in my own neighborhood, asking people to vote for Corinne Pierog.  This is a hard sell in the land of zygotes=humans.  But, to my surprise, I have underestimated my neighbors' innate civility.  Almost everyone, in fact, everyone has been quite polite to me. 

Except there was Mike, who told me I was worrying about all the wrong stuff and dared me to google "UN Agenda 21".  Mike is the embodiment of an oxymoron.  He's a handicapped, disgruntled engineer who works for the EPA, with a seething dislike for all government.  I responded that he might like to read "What's the Matter with Kansas?".   To which, he carefully wrote down the title, author and the estimated download price of $9.99.

I get around.

You go, girl! 

• Chip sends an article about Obama's wild spending. NOT! As hard as it is for some people to believe, Obama is the moderate in this race.

• Speaking of which, the argument for Romney's election that is most popular with Republicans who are not actually foaming at the mouth seems to be this:  

The Republicans in the House of Represenatives are absolute lunatics. If Obama is reelected, it will be like throwing meat to hyenas.  They would rather bring this country crashing down than cooperate with Obama. Only Romney has a chance of getting anything done.

You think I'm kidding? 

Here's David Frum:

"The congressional Republicans have shown themselves a destructive and irrational force in American politics. But we won't reform the congressional GOP by re-electing President Obama. If anything, an Obama re-election will not only aggravate the extremism of the congressional GOP, but also empower them: an Obama re-election raises the odds in favor of big sixth-year sweep for the congressional GOP — and very possibly a seventh-year impeachment."

Here's David Brooks, who sees advantage in Romney's "shape-shifting nature."

Even Romney.

Using this logic, we can only assume these guys would have supported John C. Breckinridge over  Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

• There is an incredible, embarrassing whine coming out of the Republican columnists that Obama has run a very negative campaign. This is hilarious coming from the party of Willie Horton and the Swift Boat Liars. It will make them feel better about being petulant, though, so they like it.