Den Beste is back, and he’s spotted something odd in poll results in the past few weeks.

In my opinion, the polls were being deliberately gimmicked, in hopes of helping Kerry. In early August it looks as if there was an attempt to engineer a “post-convention bounce”, but it failed and was abandoned after about two weeks. But I’m not absolutely certain about that.
The data for September, however, is clearly an anomaly. The data is much too consistent. Compare the amount of jitter present before September to the data during that month. There’s no period before that of comparable length where the data was so stable.
The September data is also drastically outside of previous trends, with distinct stairsteps both at the beginning and at the end. And the data before the anomaly and after it for both Kerry and Bush matches the long term trendlines.
If I saw something like that in scientific or engineering data, I’d be asking a lot of very tough questions. My first suspicion would be that the test equipment was broken, but in the case of opinion polls there is no such thing. My second suspicion would be fraud.
In September, I think there was a deliberate attempt to depress Kerry’s numbers, so as to set up an “October comeback”. Of course, the goal was to engineer a bandwagon.

Via Powerline where there is oodles of other good stuff.
Watching CNN Inside Politics at the moment, Bill Schneider busy spinning an overwhelmingly postive Bush poll of the military into [paraphrasing] “just something the military is expected to do, but they really don’t agree with the way the war is being fought”.
Oh, and they’re against the draft, too. We also learned that George Bush and John Kerry are against the draft, college students are against the draft, middle class Americans are against the draft, the elderly are against the draft, political analysts are against the draft, Europeans are against the draft and a poll of chimpanzees trained in sign language also indicated they are firmly against the draft get CoCo banana.

Judging by the saturation level of Thune and Daschle ads here in South Dakota, things are pretty competitive. Amusingly, Dashle advertising steers way clear of criticizing Bush (one even goes so far as to align Dashle with the president) while some of the Thune ads use footage of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Daschle doing just that.
Apparently, everyone running for the South Dakota senate seat is a Republican.

Charles Krauthammer;

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word “plan” 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry’s pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan — nay, a promise — to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

Mr. Krauthammer proceeds to take young John Edwards out to the woodshed. Go read it all, if for no other reason than to find out the truth about the “ban” on stem cell research and the hype surrounding the issue.

“I voted for the 87 Billion before I voted against it” is about to be officially retired. John Kerry has handed the Bush campaign something better. His “nuance” has morphed into “nuisance”.
From New York Times magazine:

“We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,”

And if the choice of the word “nuisance” wasn’t bad enough –

“As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

That’s right – finding out that your children are being held hostage in a school rigged with explosives is right up there with opening your telephone book and finding suggestive escort agency ads.
Volokh examines this bizarre analogy more thoroughly.
Wretchard sums it up.

Bai’s article reminds me of one of those products which are described on the packaging as being a new space age, high-technology, portable illumination aid which on closer inspection turns out to be a flashlight. When the newfangled description of terrorism as a “blended threat” is subtracted, the entire program consists of the policies of the late 1990s. Bilateral talks with North Korea. Oslo. G-8. The United Nations. Warrants of arrest. Extradition requests. Not a single new element in the entire package, except the fancy rationale. There is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is anything objectionable about a flashlight, but a more candid characterization of Kerry’s proposals is not a voyage into uncharted waters so much as return to the world of September 10; in Kerry’s words “back to the place we were”. It has the virtue of producing known results, and suffers only from the defect that those results do not include being able to prevent massive attacks on the American mainland.

Martin takes the measure of a minority

Crises are always revealing. Last week’s brush with the brink and flirtation with defeat for the government displayed the strengths and weaknesses of the party leaders, and provided some fascinating insights into how they operate.
Martin, as he did at the health-care talks with the premiers, started with an opening position that conceded very little to the opposition parties’ agendas, apparently assuming that they were bluffing. When it became clear that they weren’t, there was a frantic burst of energy and improvisation: late- night emergency strategy meetings of senior cabinet ministers, phone calls to premiers to mobilize them against the opposition, and a final minutes-from-the-edge negotiation.
When a deal was struck, Martin’s strategists were beaming with self-congratulation, as they did after the election and the health-care meeting. The Martin Method had worked again. Sort of.
But the near-miss occurred because the Liberals had under-consulted and under-estimated the opposition, blithely assuming that they would not dare force a confrontation so early. Wrong.
Stephen Harper emerged stronger, playing his cards well. He built a strong relationship with Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, and helped push for a key concession, telling Martin that he didn’t want his government to fall over the phraseology of a sub-amendment.
Duceppe was also strengthened by the last-minute deal that averted the government’s defeat. ) He had shrewdly set the bar very low, seeking changes to the Speech from the Throne based on what Quebec Premier Jean Charest wants, not a sovereignty agenda, and on priorities he stated in June. He proved to Harper that he could be trusted; his years of experience as a union negotiator showed.
But the NDP’s Jack Layton lost ground and lost face. He appeared desperate to keep the Liberals in power, at almost any price. He showed his fellow-opposition leaders that he can’t be relied on in a common front to extract concessions from the government, even when he has written the concessions himself. He dealt himself out of the play, revealed his weakness, and is now taken less seriously by all three of his fellow party leaders.