Yes, you read that right.

Your first — and I’m guessing your last — vist to Rove.com takes you quickly to “Election 2008: State of the Race” and “the final Rove & Co. electoral map of the 2008 election”:

If When Obama wins, he certainly will owe a double debt of gratitude to Rove for

1. Helping to destroy the Republican brand through his myopic, megalomaniacal quest for … I have no friggin’ clue.
2. Training a next generation of less shrewd Rovians, like Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain’s campaign into the ground while destroying the Arizonan’s soul — hey, at least W got to be President for 8 years in return for an eternity in the underworld.

One of the two best polling analysis websites called the election for Obama at 5:09 pm Monday:

Tomorrow, Barack Obama will become the first Democratic Presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win an outright majority of the votes cast on Election Day — and with it a sizeable majority of electoral votes — making him the next President of the United States.

Actually, the other terrific polling analysis website seems to have called it for Obama at 4:47 (see here). But only Pollster.com offers a detailed rationale in their post for a 6% Obama win, one piece of which is:

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Of all the drinking games I have ever proposed [Note to self: Do I have a drinking game problem? Nah, I can quit anytime], the one for election day coverage this year is certainly the most likely to leave you unconscious on the floor for the longest period of time:

Take one shot every time you hear the word “historic.”

This can’t miss no matter who wins.

My main concern is that political junkies watching CNN or MSNBC starting in the morning may not make it out to vote at all. PJs, then, might subsitute in beer — unless you are doing GOTV or poll work, in which case start with Red Bull.

If you can really hold your liquor, add another shot every time somebody says “Bradley Effect” — unless of course they are using the term in a positive fashion, as in “McCain’s victory certainly confirms the Bradley effect.” In that case, finish off your bottle and put yourself out on the spot.

I think I will be live blogging the election from the afternoon on at HuffingtonPost.com — more on that tomorrow.

In a November 1st interview with Newsweek, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) was asked, “Obama said in one of the debates that Americans need to sacrifice and cut back their energy usage. How do you think that’ll fly as part of the solution?” [Note: Obama didn't actually say that.] Gingrich responded:

Just as well as it did with Jimmy Carter. People don’t elect presidents who tell them to sacrifice. They elect presidents who solve problems so they don’t have to sacrifice.

If Gingrich is right, it looks like we won’t have a president for the next four years.

On June 21, 2005, McCain said of his global warming legislation:

Does it involve some sacrifice on the part of the American people? Yes. I have to tell you, every time I talk to young Americans and say, Are you willing to make some sacrifice to prevent the occurrences that we see are happening now, these young Americans are more than willing to do so.

On August 8, 2005, McCain said of the American troops serving in the Iraq war:

We must win. We must prevail. And it may require additional service and sacrifice, tragically.

On April 11, 2007, McCain said of the American troops serving in the Iraq war:

In Iraq, hope is a fragile thing, but all the more admirable for the courage and sacrifice necessary to nurture it.

On July 27, 2008, McCain again said of the American troops involved in the Iraq “surge”:

When the crucial time came as to whether we were going to leave Iraq and lose, or stay and do the very unpopular thing of 30,000 additional troops — asking young Americans to make the sacrifice — he was wrong, I was right.

Gingrich is speaking flat nonsense. The American public are not children who require false coddling and empty promises, but are proud adults who elect people who lead by example. As John F. Kennedy concluded his inaugural address:

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

The right wing has gone ballistic over a newly leaked tape of Obama talking about the impacts of a mandatory cap on carbon emissions. The leading conservative website, the Drudge Report, had (somewhat surprisingly) downplayed the issue yesterday but now has three “above the fold” links in red:

Palin Unleashes New Attack Against Obama On Coal...
Audio: Obama Tells Paper He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry...
Official calls comments 'unbelievable'...

Let’s put aside for the moment how odd it is that this interview from January was leaked Sunday — far too late to have any impact whatsoever on the campaign. Obama’s remarks — and the reaction they have spawned — deserve attention because they tell you a lot about both candidates.

Let’s start with McCain’s amazing reponse in the Washington Post:

“My friends, you know what Senator Obama said about a year ago, he said he had not been a, quote, coal booster,” he said, as the crowd booed. “My friends, I’ve been a coal booster and it’s going to create jobs, and we’re going to export coal to other countries and we are going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That’s going to help restore the economy of the great state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

What a sad journey it has been for John McCain. Once a principled supporter of regulatory action on climate change, now he is the number one cheerleader for increasing the production and consumption of the two most carbon-intensive fossil fuels, coal and oil. No wonder he has progressively backed away from support for action (see “Palin shocker: McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions“).

In fact, the grand total of US coal mine employment is about 80,000. McCain must be confusing 2008 with the last time the coal industry had hundreds of thousands of jobs — the 1950s. Even the Post felt compelled to add, “In practice, coal exports amount to a tiny fraction the coal produced in the U.S. According to the Energy Information Administration, only 2 percent of overall U.S. coal production was exported in 2007.”

The coal mining industry has become astonishingly productive and has shed several times the number of jobs that any climate regulation would. And that brings me to Obama’s very blunt remarks and why they are much more interesting for what they tell us about his understanding of the impact of serious climate regulations than for any political impact they could have — the whole audiotape is here:

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Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, warned

Unchecked climate change will mean that some parts of the world will simply not have enough water to sustain settlements both small and large, because agriculture becomes untenable and industries relying on water can no longer compete or function effectively. This will trigger structural changes in economies right through to the displacement of people as environmental refugees.

While deniers continue trying to confuse the issue by arguing that we don’t know that our current climate is the ideal one, the drought and sea level rise issue render that argument tragically moot.

Humanity has developed around the climate of the last 10,000 years, a climate that has been remarkably stable (see “Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization” — and yes I will restart my “must-have PowerPoints” series after the election).

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