Can we believe the polls?

Good question.  Especially as the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the election consists mostly of reading the latest poll over the air.  That's why newsies love elections, they are so easy to cover, you don't need to know anything, you don't have to get out of the office and talk to people, you just read the poll results over the air. 
   Longish piece in the Wall St Journal over the difficulties of the pollsters in this cell phone age.  The Journal says that a special law passed back in 1991 forbids the use of demon dialers on cell phone numbers.  For a pollster to call a cell phone number, he has to hand dial the number.  Which is slow.   So all the pollsters prefer to call real wired phones.  But, the Journal says that most of the people who answer the wired phones are over 65, which is not very representative.  I can believe this, none of my three grown children has a wired phone.  To add insult to injury, a large number of people just hang up the phone when they hear it is a pollster.  I can believe that too.  I have done a bit of political phone banking over the years.  Used to be, the voters were sort of pleased to receive a call from the party and would talk to you about politics and stuff.  Not any more.  Now a days, they just hang up as soon as they learn who you are.
   So the pollsters have trouble reaching a representative sample of voters.  They compensate by "weighting" the sample they do manage to get.  "Weighting" is adjusting the results based on past experience, or hunch, or voodoo.  Actually it is surprising that they do as well as they do.  And they have missed trends, like Brexit completely.
  So, it might be worthwhile watching the election results come in next Tuesday.  There might be a November Surprise for all of us. 

NH Senate debate on WMUR

We have Republican incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte going up against Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan.   First issue discussed was cyber security.  Both candidates managed to speak for several minutes on this issue without ever mentioning the name of the cyber security problem, namely Windows.  Any Windows computer connected to the internet can be secretly taken over, everything on its hard drive transferred to the attackers, malware emailed to every address in the victim's address book, keylogger installed to capture all the victim's passwords, and DDOS attack software installed.  Plus other bad stuff.
   Windows is so riddled with security holes as to be unfixable.  If you want any security at all, you must run something else, Linux or Apple. 
   Anyhow neither senatorial candidate seemed to be aware of this.

Obama is on TV trashing the Donald for not paying enough taxes

Obama, your IRS has audited the Donald every year of your administration.  They didn't find anything wrong with his tax returns.  If The Donald ain't paying enough taxes to suit you, your IRS was OK with it. 

Will this endless election actually end next week?

Lord I hope so.  But it might not.  The polls are very tight, the election could go either way, or worse,  deadlock.  That would throw the election into the US House of Representatives.  Where the current Republican majority ought to be able to elect Trump.  Even after they vote by states, one vote per state, as required by the 12th amendment, which was passed after the disputed Adams/Jefferson election of 1804.
  Or it goes to the Supremes.  Last time (2000) the Supremes had a 5 to 4 conservative majority.  This time, since the death of Justice Scalia, the court is split 4-4.  The Supremes are as partisan as all the other Washington pols, and so would be unable to reach a decision.  What happens after that is any one's guess. 
   The newsies like elections.  They are simple, horse races, and even the dimmest newsie can find things to saw that don't make him/her sound too dumb.  So they will do what they can to keep this one going.  That's essier for them than starting up the coverage of the 2020 election, which the newsies would otherwise do a couple of days after the polls close next week.  We will surely hear more about Hillary's email and the FBI, whether she wins or looses. If she wins, the constant harping on the emails won't help her.  If Trump wins, the newsies will settle down to harassing him for his entire term.
   And, the voters on the loosing side are going to be unhappy, and stay unhappy.  If you believe the polls, that's gonna be about half the country.  Can the winner find anything to do or say to ease that unhappiness?

WMUR (channel 9) TV NH governor's debate.

On one side we have Democrat Colin Van Ostern.  Colin is in favor of  building commuter rail, offering universal prekindergarten, funding alternate energy, signing up for Medicaid expansion.  He is against the Northern Pass power line project. When asked how he plans to pay for all this goodness Colin claimed that he could do cost savings in NH state government which would be enough.  Right. He did have enough political sense to say he would not put in a state income tax or state sales tax.  " He took the pledge" as we say up here.  Only smart thing he said all night.
   Chris Sununu talked about trying to bring more business into NH, something we need.  He is against commuter rail, pointing out that the $350 million for commuter rail would finish the widening of I93 and fix every worn out highway bridge in the state.  He said that "alternate energy" merely raises every one's electric bills. 
   They both agreed that NH needs better mental health and drug therapy facilities.
   None of the newsies on the panel had the stones to ask about right to work.  
  

Alley Cat Appreciation Month

We are in it.  Although "Alley cat" is non PC.  The PC word is feral cat.  Seen a couple of pieces in the Wall St Journal, lotta posts on the 'Net.  All saying nice things about alley cats.  I met my first real alley cats when youngest son went to college in Brooklyn.  They made me feel sorry for them.  Skinny, grubby, coats in poor condition, living outdoors in a New York winter, it was clear that house cats have a much better life than alley cats. 
   There was a piece in the Journal about keeping feral cats around the Jacob Javits center to keep the rats in check.  Nice color picture of a loading dock with a nice looking black and white cat on it.  Except, that cat looked more like a house cat than an alley cat.  It was well fed, it's coat was fine and glossy, it was sitting in the middle of the loading dock.  Alley cats remain in corners, under cars, outta sight, they don't plunk themselves down in the open to get their pictures taken. 
   Then a nice puff piece on alley cats made it onto my facebook page this morning. 

There has gotta be something wrong

With a national political party going thru TWO party chair women in just one election season.  First they had to dump Debbi Wasserman Schultz over her work against The Bern in the primaries.  Now they dump Donna Brazille for feeding debate questions to Hillary.  How do the Democrats select their chair persons?