Vandals target Obama supporters

Vandals hit the homes of five Obama supporters in south Torrance over the weekend, "spray-painting cars, walls, trees and campaign signs with swastikas and racial slurs," the Daily Breeze reports. Police are investigating the attacks as potential hate crimes.

From the Breeze:

One Hollywood Riviera resident awakened to find a large Nazi symbol on a tree, the N-word across her garage door and the phrase "Go back to Africa" scrawled across a front wall.

"They had painted a big swastika on my car and spray-painted out my bumper sticker," she said Monday. "It was pretty shocking. Immediately my heart began racing."

-snip-

Each of the targeted residences displayed Obama campaign signs in their front yards or bumper stickers on their cars. All of the victims were white.

One for each day of the year

Nebraska's 2nd congressional district went blue, giving Barack Obama his 365th electoral vote.

And John McCain will be on Leno on Tuesday.

It pays to win

Ever wonder what the Obama campaign is going to do with all that money leftover from it's fund-raising? So did Simon Owens and here's what he found:

An Obama staffer I’ve spoken to just received this email:

"our contributor’s incredible outpouring of support has allowed us to offer all full time salaried staff hired on or before September 6th four additional weeks of severance pay."

All states accounted for

AP has called the last of the hold-out states in the 2008 presidential election: North Carolina falls into the Obama column, giving him a final tally of 364 electoral votes to John McCain's 173*.

Why doesn't that add up to 538? Because one electoral vote in Nebraska remains outstanding (Nebraska and Maine both apportion electoral votes by congressional district rather than by state).

Meantime, Democrats have won 57 seats** in the Senate - three shy of a filibuster majority. There are three Senate seats yet to be decided - Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia - and Republicans hold small leads in all of them. The Georgia seat - Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) vs. Jim Martin (D) - is likely to head to a runoff; the Minnesota contest - Sen. Norm Coleman (R) vs. Al Franken (D) - faces an automatic recount, and in Alaska - convicted Sen. Ted Stevens (R) vs. Mark Begich (D) - all of the votes have yet to be counted.

*Only NBC has called Missouri for McCain. Other outlets have yet to assign the state.
**Two of those seats are held by independents who caucus with the Dems. One of those independents is Joe Lieberman, whom many Democrats consider a turncoat for his criticism of Obama during the campaign.

See the front pages

Peruse the front pages of America's newspapers this day after Election Day.

Maybe you've heard

Barack Obama has won the White House.

John McCain has called Obama to concede.

Election (cash) withdrawal

Something I've wondered about and Mark Lacter at LA Biz Observed writes about: What happens to struggling media companies - especially newspapers - when election season passes and the campaign ad buys dry up?

Poll watch

A few good places to get election results:

Pollster.com

New York Times' customizable electoral map

CNN.com let's you pick races to watch

Newsweek election map

Washington Post's election page

Mark Halperin's The Page

Politico's election map

Get info on California's elections here, get statewide results here, and local results here

And don't forget the KCRW elections page here

Votes, not bombs

Bill Ayers, perhaps the most famous person you'd never heard of before this election (with the exception maybe of Joe the Plumber...and Sarah Palin), voted this morning at a Chicago polling station just minutes before Barack Obama arrived. From the pool report, via Hotline On Call:

Pool Report, per Amy Chozick, The Wall Street Journal

As your pooler waited for Barack Obama to arrive at the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School, Bill Ayers showed up with his wife to cast his vote. Newsweek's Richard Wolffe first noticed Ayers. Your pooler confirmed his identity after yelling out "Mr. Ayers, who did you vote for?" He turned around but did not answer. An official from the Chicago elections board told your pooler sternly not to yell at the polling station.

Rationing the payoff

Any newspaper reporter who has covered an election knows that the only reward, other than getting the chance to file copy after midnight, is the cheap pizza the bosses buy for the hungry troops. At the News & Observer, the director of newsroom operations (whatever that is) instituted a two-slice limit.

In a move that proves America is still the land of plenty, no matter the economic meltdown or newspaper implosion, executive editor John Drescher nixed the limit and opened the pizza boxes to all.

This may be a teachable moment.

(h/t Romenesko)

Obama wins round one

Barack Obama won the vote in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire 15 to 6.

Where we get our news

The number of Americans turning to the Internet as a preferred source for news on the presidential campaigns is up 23 percent from four years ago - 33 percent in 2008 compared to 10 percent in 2004. The same poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, finds 29 percent of Americans read newspapers for campaigns information, up one percent from 2004 but still below the Internet number.

(Nevertheless, newspaper circulation continues to drop.)

As for the other media, television watching was down - though it continues to dominate as the top source for campaign news - and magazine reading and radio listening were up.

There is one clear weakness in the findings: One of the media sources is not like the others. The Internet is not a form of production but a delivery system. What exactly are people looking at online? A local newspaper? A national magazine? Are they listening to NPR podcasts or dowloading clips from the Daily Show? The footnote has a link that gives us some idea of how news consumers use the Internet, but not enough to disambiguate what proportion of the Internet audience is reading an online newspaper versus some alternative source.

Another interesting finding in the Pew survey is that cable news channels serve a much more partisan audience than other campaign news sources:

Among those who name the Fox News Channel as their main source for campaign news, 52% are Republicans and only 17% are Democrats. By contrast, among those who rely on MSNBC for their campaign news, 50% are Democrats and only 11% are Republicans. Similarly, CNN's campaign news audience is largely Democratic -- 45% are Democrats and 13% are Republicans

A plurality of newspaper readers are self-identified Democrats (41% Dem vs. 22% Rep vs. 34% independent). Fox News is by far the preferred source for Republicans while independents are almost evenly split between all of the news sources.

The politics of Halloween

Yet another effigy pops up (or hangs down) - this time its was an Obama doll fake bleeding from a fake hatchet wound and hanging from a Redondo Beach balcony. From the Daily Breeze:

The lynched effigy of Democratic candidate Barack Obama came down after police officers and a representative from John McCain's local campaign office paid a visit to Lisa Castaneda last night and convinced her to take it down, according to authorities.

Emotions stirred in a Redondo Beach neighborhood Wednesday when a resident hung an effigy of Sen. Barack Obama from her balcony with a meat cleaver slashed through his throat as a Halloween display.

Previous fun with effigies here and here.

Pimp the j

Ana Marie Cox is seeking donations to continue covering a losing presidential campaign.

(If anyone is looking to donate dollars for journalism, send it to me and I'll go cover some shit.)

Another effigy

This time it's an Obama effigy, hung from a tree on the University of Kentucky campus.

Antonovich: Palin effigy a hate crime*

L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, a staunch Republican, wants authorities to investigate the hanging of a Sarah Palin effigy outside a West Hollywood home as a hate crime. Here's the press release:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY — Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich raised concerns over a display depicting Governor Sarah Palin hung in effigy and a likeness of Senator John McCain emerging from a fiery chimney -- and directed County Counsel to work with the District Attorney to determine whether a hate crime was committed.I drive past the home on my way to work and didn't at first realize that was McCain crawling out of the faux burning chimney.

“This is a deliberate hate crime and should be condemned – had this stupid act been done to Senator Obama, there would appropriately have been a national outcry,” said Antonovich. “The definition of a hate crime includes insults, or offensive graffiti, images or letters targeting a person because of his or her membership in a certain social group including gender, sex, or political affiliation."

P.S. I drive by the house (it's on Fountain near Fairfax) on my way to work each morning. I remember first seeing the McCain effigy emerging from the chimney - although I didn't know it was supposed to be McCain. As of Oct. 29, the Palin effigy is still up.

*UPDATE: The Palin effigy came down this afternoon (10/29).

Fear

Fear + Anger = This

(warning: slow loading)

KCRW elections page

Get yer election on at the KCRW elections page, where you can listen to insightful pieces about the presidential race on "To The Point" and get to know more about the dozens of propositions on "Which Way, LA?". Links to ballot measures, polls, candidate statements and sundry official sites also included.

Let the fracturing begin

Politico reports that Sarah Palin wants to "go more rogue" as she kicks through the fence the McCain people used to corral her the moment she was selected as McCain's running mate.

It should be clear to everyone now that the Republican Party has been running two campaigns for president - campaigns that worked together only when they were ahead. As the clock runs out, they're now competing with one another to spin a probable election loss and take hold the reins of power as the party prepares to rebuild.

Palin represents an influential piece of the Republican base that McCain needed to win over to win on Nov. 4. He never really did. That piece of the base never truly respected McCain and McCain never truly respected it. The unhappy relationship has played itself out in a bizarre but memorable ritual dance across a dwindling number of battleground states. If McCain-Palin lose, watch the body politic try to cut off its own head.

Robocop

L.A. Police Chief William Bratton has recorded a robocall for the Obama campaign in response to a robocall from Rudy Giuliani, a McCain supporter, attacking Obama's record (via LA Observed). Bratton was police commissioner in New York while Giuliani was mayor; the two didn't see eye to eye.

More curious, however, is the article Bratton co-wrote in the New York Daily News warning of a potential terrorist attack from Osama bin Laden in the waning days of the campaign. Is this wholly speculative or based on intelligence?