Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Signals and noise

RAND American Life Panel

Obama up to 71% in our forecast, his highest since Oct. 9, on favorable trendlines in nat'l trackers. http://t.co/...
' @fivethirtyeight via web

Charles Blow:

Paul Ryan gave a speech on poverty and economic mobility.

No, that's not the beginning of one of those a-man-walks-into-a-bar jokes. It actually happened.

Ryan delivered the speech Wednesday in Cleveland. 'In this war on poverty,' he said, 'poverty is winning.' What he didn't say is that he and his budget have taken sides in that war ' and not on the side of the poor.

This is just the latest of Mitt Romney's home-stretch attempts to kick up the dust of confusion, soften harsh rhetoric and policies, and slip into the White House.

Stick this Simon Jackman piece on polling "house effect" in your bookmarks:

The graph below shows point estimates of the survey house effects produced by my model (as of the evening of October 23, 2012). Negative house effects means that the pollster skews in a pro-Romney direction; positive house effects means that the pollster tends to overstate support for Obama.

Freakonomics:

As reported by ABC, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere, an Italian court has convicted seven earthquake experts of failing to appropriately sound the alarm bell for an earthquake that wound up killing more than 300 people in L'Aquila in 2009. The experts received long prison sentences and fines of more than $10 million. (Addenum: Roger Pielke Jr. discusses the 'mischaracterizations' of the verdict.)

There is of course the chance that the verdict will be thrown out upon appeal, discredited as an emotional response to a horrible tragedy.

But let's consider what the verdict represents as of today: scientists and government officials are being held personally accountable for the failure to adequately predict the scale of a natural disaster.

Nate Silver's new book, Signal and the Noise, is on my night table (still working on Victory Lab). Seems like a relevant read.

Speaking of signal and noise (Nate again):

So is FiveThirtyEight better than Intrade? I don't know about that as a general proposition.

But I'd be happy to bet on FiveThirtyEight relative to the price that Intrade offered on Mr. Obama on Tuesday, which was not characteristic of rational market behavior.

This, because Intrade went heavily Romney in the last 48 hours while the betting markets did not, though it's making an Obama comeback. A rogue trader? Manipulation? Coincidence? Enough questions to make using them for anything a tad suspect. Stick with the oddsmakers.

I just learned that @politico has no credibility--total phonies that don't report the truth. A puppet of Obama?
' @realDonaldTrump via web
Glad that's straightened out, Donald.

Donald Trump Refuses To Release His Own College And Passport Records http://t.co/...
' @businessinsider via Business Insider
Jon Ralston, Nevada's politics guru:

There are various theories as to why Romney is still campaigning here and why his team and outside groups are spending a fortune in the final two weeks. And some of it ' maybe a lot of it ' may have more to do with races below the top of the ticket.

I believe that some people in Romney's organization believe the state can be won. They are happy that Republicans are turning out better than in 2008, even though that is an awfully low bar because there really was no race here after John McCain all but gave up and it was a wave election.

I have been reliably told that Romney's internals in Nevada show him up a point ' but some of those folks are smart enough to give the margin of error to the Democratic machine. But that makes it a race, so they aren't going anywhere.

(Obama's polls here consistently have shown him up by 5-8 points. Mark Mellman, who consistently showed Harry Reid winning in 2010, is doing those surveys.)

GOP message on early/mail balloting in NV: We are destroying the Democrats by losing by much less than we did in '08: http://t.co/...
' @RalstonReports via TweetDeck
Howard Fineman demonstrates why most of us hate political reporting:

President Barack Obama leads, but by a dwindling and no longer comfortable margin, in the Electoral College, according to a consensus of the polls. His latest email message to his supporters, "Stick with Me," sounded more like a plea for mercy than a call to arms.

Pleas for mercy? Body language? Stick to the polls, folks. This is garbage, based on pre-existing narrative that polling does not support. See Markos:

President Barack Obama has regained the lead in the national polling and New Hampshire, while clawing back lost ground in five of the nine remaining battlegrounds. However, little-polled Colorado has flipped red thanks to a single Rasmussen poll. What was a 286-252 Obama victory last week is now a 281-257 advantage. Even if Romney won the next two closest states, New Hampshire and Iowa, he would still be short 271-267.

However, Obama has stretched out his lead in hyper-important Ohio, while Virginia and Florida are essentially tied. Those Florida numbers are particularly nice, given the five-point lead Romney had last Friday.

And there's this from TIME on their O +5 Ohio poll:

The poll makes clear that there are really two races underway in Ohio. On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger.

But Obama has clearly received a boost from Ohio's early voting period, which began on Oct. 2 and runs through November 5. Among respondents who say they have already voted, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Romney, 60% to 30%.

Color NV and OH blue for now. And if that holds, that makes Obama President, regardless of VA, FL, NC, CO, IA and NH.