Variously...

Sorry for the light posting. Actually, there's a large-ish piece brewing about THAT movie, the one that caused so much turmoil in Islamic countries. But I am swamped and cannot put much thought into my writing. So here are some links to various reports worthy of your interest...

What they're not telling you about Iran. Iran agreed to halt uranium enrichment in exchange for an end to sanctions. Those who want war will denounce this offer as a ploy.

Skewed polls. This story is potentially important. Apparently, Romney is ahead by a wide margin, according to a website which "corrects" other polls...

Republicans have taken their complaints about media polls allegedly favoring Democrats a step further this morning, embracing an obscure new polling website that re-engineers public polls to add more Republicans to their samples, and which gives Republican Mitt Romney a wide lead.

Some Romney supporters have long complained that public polls suggest higher Democratic turnout, and lower Republican turnout, than they think is likely this year. Pollsters have replied that their samples are dictated by what poll respondents themselves say. (This exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Lee Miringoff is illustrative of the argument.)

Dean Chambers, a blogger on Examiner.com who writes from his home in Duffield, Virginia, took that complaint a step further — producing wide Romney leads far beyond what the Republican's campaign or Republican pollsters have suggested is the case.

He created the site unskewedpolls.com, retooling national polling data this July after reading an ABC News/Washington Post poll that "just didn't look right." Looking at the internal data, Chambers saw that the polling unit had sampled more Democrats than Republicans.

The real importance of this story, of course, is that it gives cover to Diebold shennanigans on election day.

Speaking of election machine rigging: Robert Reich thinks that this is one of four factors that could hand this election to Romney. The others:

1. Continuing rotten stats on the jobs front.

2. Terrific debate performances from Romney. (Reich admits that Obama wasn't "all that" during the 2008 primaries.)

3. The money factor. Yeah, I know that the GOP has been crying poor lately. Don't believe it.

Frum. I don't think I've ever found David Frum worth linking to in all the years of this blog's existence, but this deserves quotation...

The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.

Hucksters of all kinds have battened on this terror. They tell them that free enterprise is under attack; that Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, an anti-colonialist. Only by donating to my think tank, buying my book, watching my network, going to my movie, can you - can we - stop him before he seizes everything to give to his base of "bums," as Charles Murray memorably called them.

And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout.

Why is this so? In part, I think that the upper class has come to believe its own propagandists, who have been screaming for years that the big problem facing this country is the Bolshevik Menace.

Here's a bit more from Frum:

From the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, the rights and perquisites of wealth have emerged undiminished - and the central issue in this election is whether those rights and perquisites shall be enhanced still more, or whether they should be allowed to slip back to the level that prevailed during the dot.com boom.

Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.

It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam...

Akin for cash. Wow. I knew that this was how things worked in politics, but I never thought that any politician would be so bold about it. Todd Akin has said that any constituent who wants his attention should write him "a decent check."

I'm not sure that "decent" is an adjective I would use to describe any check heading in the general direction of Todd Akin. The Statue of Liberty wants to know if she should now consider herself legitimately or illegitimately raped.