In my previous diary on this topic, I examined the background to the South Ossetian war. Today, I try to examine the current situation in the war.

Yesterday, most of us probably heard the news that Russia had taken the cityof Gori, only 40 miles or so from Tbilisi.

(I am aware that Setrak has already written a diary on this, but I've decided to try and flesh it out, since most people don't seem to understand the situation. My information comes mostly from Wikipedia and following the references there.)

As most of you probably know, Russia has ordered troops into the disputed region of South Ossetia after Georgia escalated the conflict by an offensive against the Ossetians. Georgia has withdrawn its 2000 soldiers from our Iraqi coalition, and although an actual declaration of war does not seem to have occurred, its clear that a war is indeed occurring.

My own take on the situation is that Georgia is somewhat at fault here for escalating the conflict, but Russia also seems to have had its moves planned out, and if its indeed escalating the conflict and moving against Georgia proper (rather than restricting its intervention to Ossetia) as Georgia claims, then its also at fault.

Credit for this goes completely to Pat Flatley of MyDD. He doesn't have an account here, and said that he would love for anyone to cross-post it on his behalf.

As we all know, McCain's electoral prospects in the November election depends on the support of independent voters; in a recent Rasmussen poll, only 42% of them believe that McCain's presidency will be a third Bush term. McCain himself has tried to wrap himself around Obama's message of change.

Below is the 54-second video from Meet the Press (June, 2005) that will solidify the view of McCain as nothing more than Bush v2.

It currently appears that Lake County could possibly swing Indiana over to Obama. Many people here have suspected fraud, and I unfortunately was one of them (for 10-20 minutes only!) But I've done some math, and it looks like the exit polls have predicted Obama to get around 64% of the vote in Lake, which corresponds to the numbers coming out of there right now. Calculations below:

According to a diary on the top of the Rec list right now, you should deduct 15% from Clinton's vote in IN because it is from Republicans who would not vote for her in the GE. However, the diary misread some of the exit polls, and acknowledged it. I posted the correct numbers in the diary, but nobody seems to have noticed it, so I'll redo them here.

(Cross-posted at MyDD)

I participated in the Day of Silence today at school, and wrote the following statement to explain my participation to others:

As you may know, today, April 25 2008, is the Day of Silence, a national movement calling attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who must endure bullying and other harassment. But my silence in specific is also to call attention to all the silent victims on this planet: the millions of victim in Darfur, Iraq, and other areas of crisis, the hundreds of millions who face malnutrition worldwide, the billions who live in poverty; all the forgotten people of the world in general, as well as all those who will suffer in the future from the problems we have forced ourselves to forget. For 365 days a year, we are silent on these problems. I can only regret that my own silence will be for but one day.

Yesterday, I wrote a diary examining how accurately polls predicted turnout. In many states such as Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, pre-election polling severely underestimated African-American turnout; the Hispanic vote was also underestimated to a lesser degree in many states. I was originally planning to repeat that analysis for age demographics, but that proved difficult because pollsters weren't consistent in how they broke down the different age groups. So instead, I attempted to predict racial turnout on my own by examining exit poll data from 2004.

Although I've been here for a few years now, this is my first diary.

I've noticed that its became a recent trend to single out specific poll results and not look at the whole picture. For example, when Obama tied Clinton in Rasmussen's daily tracking poll right after Super Tuesday, it made the Recommended list. The next day, Clinton 'surged' to a 3-point lead. These differences, of course, were most likely caused by the margin of error.

The same behavior is seen for state primary polls as well. Most of us would probably think that polls have a tendency to underestimate black turnout and their margins for Obama - but this definitely did not seem to be the case in states such as MA, where Clinton did significantly better than predicted in the black vote. This diary will try to analyze these patterns.