Follow The Bouncing Ball

One thing spending a lot of time on the blogs can do is make the connections between events much easier to recognize.

For example, this:

Palin may not have been able to smell it in the Reno-Sparks Convention Center or the beautiful Henderson Pavilion, but that scent in the Nevada air for the GOP is desperation. You can see it in the numbers, on the airwaves, in the mailboxes.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the Republican straw-grasping occurring came from one of the warm-up speakers for Palin, state Sen. Bob Beers, who can play more tricks with numbers than most magicians can with rabbits and hats. Beers urged the crowd to go out and vote because Democrats are beating Republicans in the early vote, but told them to take heart that fewer Democrats had voted each day and more Republicans were going to the polls each day.

Forget accuracy for a moment — more than 15,000 Democrats voted the first day, then about 12,000 the second and 13,000 the third. More important, for Beers and the GOP, everything is relative — 5,700 Republicans voted Saturday, a little more than 5,000 on Sunday and about 6,000 on Monday. If that pathetic pace continues — though it seems unlikely — by the end of the 14-day early voting period, Republicans will be far enough behind to make Nov. 4 an afterthought.

Begets this.

The GOP effort to suppress the vote has reared its head in Nevada.

Yesterday, Sue Lowden, the state Republican chair, sent a letter to Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller, asking him to prevent some from voting, because their registrations are incomplete.

How may peope are we talking about? Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun reports: "I understand that 2,300 forms have been identified in urban counties."

"Urban" counties. How droll.

And this:

It looks like one of the numerous tricks pulled by Republicans to make it harder for black people to vote isn't going to work.

A judge in Lake County, Indiana ruled today against a GOP effort to shut down early voting centers set up in predominantly low-income African-American areas of the county.

Begets this.

13 days before the election, the McCain campaign has decided to spend several hundred thousands dollars on a last-minute television buy in the state of Indiana.

This is the first time in a month that the campaign has spent its own money on television in the Hoosier state.

It happens quite a lot. The information is open enough that you can just follow along.