"We have always had these dense urban corridors that are extremely Democratic."

"It's kind of an urban fact, and you are looking at the extreme end of it in Philadelphia."

"Obama Mural in Philadelphia Polling Place."

Yeah, but he looks so down and out of it in that depiction, so first debate, that it might not help at all. The word "Change!" seems to be yelling into one ear, and the word "hope..." drifting out of the other.

Will rising sea levels affect the election?

Sandy's coming, and the waters may flow up into the low-lying East Coast cities. If coastal cities flood and the people there — who are disproportionately Democratic — get distracted by their personal difficulties or find it hard to get to the polls, then the upstate folks — who may be more Republican — will have greater power to tip the state's electoral votes to Romney.

I'm thinking in particular of Pennsylvania, a swing state with 20 electoral votes, where Obama's been polling ahead. Sandy may hit Philadelphia hard. Look at the county-by-county results from the 2008 election. You can see that upstate, Republicans had the majority. Sandy's waters could suppress the coastal vote and leverage upstate power.

It was 4 years ago that Obama gave that grandiose "this was the moment" speech where he said "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow...." What irony if the rise of the oceans thwarts his reelection!

***

Going with the flow, Venice-style.

Are you going to the "conservative Woodstock" — the "Showdown In Searchlight"?

"Searchlight is not a destination by any means. It's a tiny town. And the locals have told us this is already by far the biggest thing that's happened in their town's history. That's how we see it, a huge number of people coming to a unique place where the draw is, we are going to put on this show and this rally."

***

We're already in Boulder, so it's only about 800 more miles — beautiful, scenic miles. Meade's toying with the idea of us going. It would be great blogging. 

Anyone want to egg me on? (Egg salad me on?)

***

Searchlight is Harry Reid's little home town, so getting thousands of anti-Reidites to go there is pretty prankish. It got me thinking about those Philadelphia flash mobs that have been in the news these last few days:

[H]undreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property....

“It was like a tsunami of kids,” said Seth Kaufman, 20, a pizza deliveryman at Olympia II Pizza & Restaurant on South Street. He lifted his shirt to show gashes along his back and arm. He also had bruises on his forehead he said were from kicks and punches he suffered while trying to keep a rowdy crowd from entering the shop, where a fight was already under way.

“By the time you could hear them yelling, they were flooding the streets and the stores and the sidewalks,” Mr. Kaufman said.....

Most of the teenagers who have taken part in them are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts.

In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting “black boys” and “burn the city,” bystanders said....

[T]he mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could.

“It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said.

Tea Partiers need to maintain a strong culture of peaceful friendliness. Please don't rampage through the city. And don't chant anything racial this time. Just kidding. I don't believe anything racial was ever chanted by the Tea Partiers. But Tea Partiers do chant. They chanted "Kill the Bill," last weekend, and a crowd chanting anything with a violent word — like "kill" — is going to upset some people. Their opponents are keen to portray them as violently angry. Remember how a group of people from outside the neighborhood looks to the people who live and work there and keep the Conservative Woodstock true to the original Woodstock idea of peace and love.

Hey, everybody! Let's raze Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

The Obama administration is considering bulldozing parts of blighted, shrinking cities:

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said [Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, Michigan, where Flint is located]. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."...

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again."

Nobody will be forced to move? People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow?

First, I'm sure people will be forced to move if this thing gets going.

Second, you can't just return to nature by removing the streets and buildings. What will these non-urban buffer zones really look like? Even if it is something like a forest — made of very fast-growing trees? — or meadow, what sorts of animals — rodent and human — will run wild there?

I don't mean to be completely negative. Just asking a couple obvious questions.