Flannel Shirt

They aren't serious

Republican politicians are good at whipping up their base into anger and fear and hate, but if they were serious they'd be addressing the issues. They aren't, and they're not.

In today’s column, I tried to emphasize a point that is weirdly absent from public discourse, at least among VSPs: the favorite VSP “solution” to the long-run budget deficit, raising the Medicare eligibility age, actually yields only minor savings. The point is that if you want to control Medicare costs, you can’t do it by kicking a small number of relatively young seniors off the program; to control costs, you have to, you know, control costs.

And the truth is that we know a lot about how to do that — after all, every other advanced country has much lower health costs than we do, and even within the US, the VHA and even Medicaid are much better at controlling costs than Medicare, and even more so relative to private insurance.

The key is having a health insurance system that can say no — no, we won’t pay premium prices for drugs that are little if any better, we won’t pay for medical procedures that yield little or no benefit

But even as Republicans demand “entitlement reform”, they are dead set against anything like that. Bargaining over drug prices? Horrors! The Independent Payment Advisory Board? Death panels! They refuse to contemplate using approaches that have worked around the world; the only solution they will countenance is the solution that has never worked anywhere, namely, converting Medicare into an underfunded voucher system.

So pay no attention when they talk about how much they hate deficits. If they were serious about deficits, they’d be willing to consider policies that might actually work; instead, they cling to free-market fantasies that have failed repeatedly in practice.

Boehner makes a counter offer

At first it appeared like Republicans weren't even going to make a counter offer, just complain about Obama's. So here's the counter offer. If you are a Republican who's not ultra-rich, please feel free to defend it.

Rejecting President Obama’s call to raise tax rates for the wealthy, House Republicans unveiled a counteroffer that would cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other federal programs while raising new revenue by overhauling the tax code.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and his GOP leadership team sent the White House the three-page offerMonday afternoon as the administration turned up the volume on their complaints that Republicans have been unwilling to put a serious proposal on the table.

“With the fiscal cliff nearing, our priority remains finding a reasonable solution that can pass both the House and Senate, and be signed into law in the next couple of weeks,” Boehner and the other leaders wrote in the letter to the president, describing a plan that draws from an earlier deficit-reduction proposal from Erskine Bowles, the Democratic former co-chairman of the president’s fiscal commission.

Please note that this fiscal cliff was created by the Republicans. Please also note that the best thing for a stalled economy is government spending, especially in a liquidity trap, not cutting government spending. 

And finally, please note where the cuts are coming from, and who gets to keep that tax cut that created the budget over the last decade.

And then feel free to defend it.

Lies. Again.

Lindsey Graham is lying again.

Senator Lindsay Graham, the same one being stupidly celebrated by some liberals for sticking it to Grover Norquist, makes a statement of breathtaking dishonesty:

“I think we’re going over the cliff. It’s pretty clear to me they made a political calculation. This offer doesn’t remotely deal with entitlement reform in a way to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from imminent bankruptcy. It raises $1.6 trillion on job creators that will destroy the economy and there are no spending controls,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

Let's see how many lies are nested in this neat little statement.

1) The White House has bent over backward to compromise with Republicans at every opportunity. The fact that we're even talking about deficits at all, to say nothing of cuts to basic social services at a time of multi-year recession and high unemployment is itself an extraordinary compromise. The fact that the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy haven't already been rescinded after two presidential elections in which the winning side made its position clear on them is itself a huge compromise already. If there's any political calculation at all, it's the Obama Administration's foolish calculation that voters will celebrate deficit reduction and the "adult in the room", rather than punish whatever political party is perceived to have cut Medicare in 2014 and 2016.

2) Social Security isn't broke. It's funded for 40 years even without raising the caps, which is the easy "fix." Bankruptcy for Social Security certainly isn't "imminent." To lump it in with Medicare is either madness or gross deceit. 

3) Medicaid isn't broke. There is no such thing as Medicaid going broke. Rising Medicaid costs may, like any other budgetary item, put a crimp in state and federal budgets. But since it's not a program funded by beneficiaries on a dollar-to-dollar level like Medicare and Social Security, Medicaid can't "go broke" unless the federal government itself goes broke. Which is impossible since we have a sovereign currency. The very worst that can happen is an inflationary spiral. But Medicaid can't go broke.

4) Medicare isn't broke, either. It's funded for eight years, which is quite a long time as projections go given rising healthcare costs. The best way to extend the life of Medicare in the short term is to create cost savings from providers in the program. The best way to do it long-term is to extend the Medicare pool to younger and healthier patients. Another good fix would be allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices. And even if Medicare did "go broke" at the end of eight years, all it would mean is a shortfall requiring some cuts to benefits. So in order to prevent the supposed disaster of benefit cuts eight years from now, we're proposing to cut them in advance?

To say nothing of the fact that it's insane to demand that Medicare "pay for itself," anyway, particularly as the population ages. We don't demand that our wars pay for themselves, or that oil subsidies do, or that farm subsidies do, or that tax cuts for the wealthy do. And those are the bad things. On the good side, we don't demand that NASA pay for itself or that AIDS prevention in Africa pay for itself. Some things are worth doing for their own sake, and funding from the federal treasury. Why in the world such health insurance for the elderly be any different?

5) Going back to the Clinton tax rates certainly wouldn't "destroy the economy." Forget the fact that rich people aren't actually job creators (consumers are, of course.) Most independent analysts believe it would have a minimal impact--especially the taxes on the wealthy. Recall that when we talk about going back to Clinton rates on the wealthy, we're talking about people who make $21,000 every month whining about paying a 4% higher rate on their last couple of thousand dollars. We're talking about people who rake in $50,000 every month paying a 4% higher rate on only the second half of that money. It's preposterous to believe that that would have much economic impact at all.

6) Spending controls? Is this a citizen initiative process? Senator Graham may not realize that he's a legislator in the U.S. Congress. Congress controls how the money is spent, with some minor input from the Executive Branch. That Senator Graham doesn't seem to understand that he and his fellow 534 fellow legislators on Capitol Hill are the spending controls, we're in bigger trouble he realizes.

The only part of Senator Graham's statement that isn't an obvious, easily refuted lie is the notion that we're actually going over the fiscal cliff. Good.

 

I am not alone

I'm glad to come across this, via Balloon Juice. For the last couple of days I thought I was the only one to notice the bizarre minuet of the media.

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.

The next fight is likely to involve the $200 billion worth of stimulus that Obama included in his recycled fiscal cliff plan that somehow didn’t exist before Election Day. I’ve taken a rather keen interest in the topic of stimulus, so I’ll be interested to see how this is covered. Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans  (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs.

I guess it’s finally true that we all are Keynesians now. Republicans don’t even seem to be arguing that more stimulus wouldn’t boost the economy; they’ve suggested that Obama needs to give up “goodies” like extending unemployment insurance (which benefits laid-off workers) and payroll tax cuts (which benefit everyone) to show that he’s negotiating in good faith. At the same time, though, they also want Obama to propose bigger Medicare cuts, even though they spent the last campaign slamming Obama’s Medicare cuts and denying their interest in Medicare cuts. I live in Florida, so I had the pleasure of hearing a radio ad from Allen West, hero of the Tea Party, vowing to protect Medicare.

Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/30/fiscal-cliff-fictions-lets-all-agree-to-pretend-the-gop-isnt-full-of-it/#ixzz2Dmde9N3y

Another lie

This is one of the old maxims on which the rich convince the low-information voters that they the rich are getting screwed. But it's, surprise, another lie.

Another Benghazi story

Here.

On Friday the Republican politicians who had so angrily demanded the testimony of  David Petraeus about Benghazi got what they wanted—and what they deserved—when the former CIA director set forth the facts proving that their conspiracy theories and witch-hunts are dead wrong.

Appearing behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, Gen. Petraeus, recently resigned from the spy agency over his illicit affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, answered questions from legislators concerning the tragic Sept. 11 assault that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomatic personnel dead.

When the session concluded, Petraeus was spirited away. And Senator John McCain (R-AZ), whose criticism of the Obama administration over Benghazi has verged on hysterical,  emerged from the hearing room with very little to say to the reporters waiting outside.

“General Petraeus’ briefing was comprehensive. I think it was important; it added to our ability to make judgments about what was clearly a failure of intelligence, and described his actions and that of his agency and their interactions with other agencies,” said McCain, adding, “I appreciate his service and his candor” before abruptly fleeing as reporters tried to question him.

McCain’s curt statement was in sharp contrast to his voluble remarks on Thursday, when he denounced UN Ambassador Susan Rice for what he and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described as her misleading description of the attack on Sunday television shows a few days after  it occurred. (It later emerged, embarrassingly, that his posturing before the cameras on Benghazi had prevented him from attending a scheduled hearing on that subject.He didn’t want to to discuss that either.)

Essentially, McCain and Graham, joined by Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), accused Rice on Thursday of lying and covering up the fact that the Benghazi consulate had been attacked by terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda. They vowed to prevent her confirmation as Secretary of State, should the president nominate her to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But with McCain departing so abruptly after the Petraeus hearing, it was left to others, including House Intelligence Committee chair Peter King (R-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) to reveal what their Arizona colleague didn’t care to discuss. In his testimony, Petraeus blew apart the half-baked theories offered by McCain and Graham—and left them looking foolish.

On earlier occasions, King had echoed the same complaints made by McCain and Graham, but after Friday’s hearing he reluctantly admitted the truth: Petraeus had confirmed that the CIA had approved the talking points used by Rice, tentatively blaming the incident on a notorious anti-Muslim video sparking demonstrations in Cairo and elsewhere at the time. Although Petraeus said he had believed that terrorists were responsible, that suggestion was removed from the talking points in order to protect the ongoing FBI investigation into Benghazi, which Rice also mentioned.

As King explained in response to reporters’ questions, Petraeus not only confirmed that any allusion to al Qaeda had been removed from the talking points given to Rice, but that his agency had consented to that decision:

 

Q: Did he say why it was taken out of the talking points that [the attack] was al Qaeda affiliated?

KING: He didn’t know.

Q: He didn’t know? What do you mean he didn’t know?

KING: They were not involved—it was done, the process was completed and they said, “OK, go with those talking points.” Again, it’s interagency—I got the impression that 7, 8, 9 different agencies.

Q: Did he give you the impression that he was upset it was taken out?

KING: No.

Q: You said the CIA said “OK” to the revised report –

KING: No, well, they said in that, after it goes through the process, they OK’d it to go. Yeah, they said “Okay for it to go.”

In short, Rice was using declassified talking points, developed and approved by the intelligence community, when she discussed the Benghazi attack. So McCain’s nasty personal denunciation of her , along with most of his claims about how the White House handled Benghazi, has been blown out of the water like so much naval scrap. The Arizona senator, his colleagues, and their loud enablers on Fox News and elsewhere in the wingnut media will never apologize to Rice. But that is what they owe her.

Let's end the Twinkie defense

No, folks, the greedy unions didn't kill Twinkies, except in the rightwing echo chamber.

Yesterday Hostess announced its intention to declare bankruptcy, close down all of its operations, and lay off approximately 18,500 workers. The news stunned many Americans, and sent shoppers to the local grocery store in an attempt to buy their last Twinkies and Ding Dongs. The commonly sold story by many media outlets (i.e. Fox News) is thatHostess went bankrupt because of a greedy and stubborn union which increased the company's labor costs beyond all reason. However, a deeper investigation of the facts shows that Hostess failed for a variety of reasons, many of them unrelated to unions.

Decreasing Demand

The number one culprit behind Hostess’ demise was a decrease in demand for many of their products. Hostess has blamed a union strike over the past week, but in reality Hostess has been struggling to make a profit for quite some time, and had already filed for bankruptcy once in 2004.

Hostess itself admitted to decreased demand in a recent statement it released to debtors. Here is a quote from that statement via Fortune,

"The Debtors have experienced a significant decline in the demand for their branded sweet goods and bread products. According to data from Information Resources Incorporated (the "IRI"), an independent market research concern that reports sales trends in most supermarkets (excluding mass merchandisers, club stores and discount stores), the Debtors' total unit volume of branded sweet goods declined by 4.3% during the latest 52 weeks ending September 5, 2012, and revenues from the Debtors' branded sweet good products declined 1.5% during the same period. The Debtors' total unit volume of branded bread products declined by 9.6% during the latest 52 weeks ending September 5, 2012. Revenues related to the Debtors' bread products declined 5.3% from the comparable period one year ago."

Furthermore, Hostess believed this trend would continue,

"The Debtors believe that they will continue to experience reduced demand for their products based on various factors, including some of the factors discussed in greater detail below."

Hostess primary products are Wonder Bread and “junk food” like Twinkies. Over the past decade carbohydrates and fatty foods have become less popular. Many supermarket chains sell their own brand of bread at cheaper costs, and also feature a bakery to sell freshly baked bread. Parents who used to put a Ding Dong in their child's lunch bag everyday now put an apple or orange in there instead. Many of the consumers rushing to buy Twinkies now have not bought Hostess products in many years, which tells you all you need to know about the company’s struggles.

A Mountain of Debt

In addition to decreasing demand, Hostess has also struggled because it was burdened with over $860 million in debt with just $1 billion in assets. The company has over 100,000 creditors, including the labor unions and pension funds which represent the employees, and will now undoubtedly lose out on some of their claims because of Hostess newest bankruptcy.

A debt-to-assets ratio like that ultimately limits how a company can operate. While Hostess' competitors spend money on advertising or technological improvements to increase sales or make their operations more efficient, Hostess was paying off interest on their debt. According to Outside the Beltway, Hostess was using an antiquated distribution which undoubtedly affected the bottom line of a company that relies on distribution so heavily (imagine all the places one can get a Twinkie). Eventually, the company finds itself in a position where it can no longer even pay the debt itself, hence the bankruptcy.

Poor Management

Finally, as noted by Think Progress, Hostess mysteriously tripled the pay of their CEO just months before asking union members to take a pay cut to “save the company.” One could understand how union members found it hard to believe the company was strapped for cash after raising the CEO’s salary from approximately $750,000 to $2,555,000. Nine other executives at the company also received massive pay raises earlier this year, which now appear to be part of a “golden parachute” package. Other CEO's, like the head of American Airlines, freezed or reduced their pay over the past four years when they asked unions to make similar sacrifices.

It is also worth remembering that Hostess executive agreed to pay the labor unions their high wages and generous pensions in an earlier contract. Much like NHL owners, the Hostess executives were trying to take back an earlier contractual promise made to the union.

Conclusion

It is easy to blame the death of Hostess on labor unions, but the reality is that the company was probably going down regardless. But take heart America, Hostess' popular brands like Twinkie surely will be sold off as part of the bankruptcy. The Twinkie will still be on American store shelves in the future, just made by a better run company.

Oh, and then there's the vulture capitalists. 

In 2004, the company entered bankruptcy with approximately $450 million in debt. It emerged after investment from Ripplewood Holdings. Today, it now stands at just shy of $1 billion in debt, despite additional investment by two more firms, Silver Point and Monarch. How did this happen?

These firms borrowed money to invest, which then they transferred that debt to the firm, simple. In effect, there never was any investment, only more debt added.

To emerge from bankruptcy, the companies unions agreed to large concessions which these vulture capitalists demanded, cutting thousands of jobs, transferring benefits or cutting benefits entirely. The companies also agreed to modernize the factories, which were running at a loss due to the age of the equipment, some of which dated to the 1930s. The investments from Silver Point and Monarch were to go towards this modernization. Instead the company found itself saddled with even more debt. To add to the company’s woes, the holding companies stopped supporting the retirement fund, raiding it for easy cash to extract from the firm. The current estimates put the liabilities of this fund at over $2 billion currently.

In order to “save” the firm, the operators of the company turned to the unions, which had already surrendered huge concessions just a few years back to turn the company around, and demanded an across the board slash, an additional 31%, along with eliminating the retirement and benefits entirely. It was a bridge too far. The union went on strike, and now the company has declared it will be liquidated.

Of course the right-wing media is quick to blame the unions, but in the end the union members would have lost more if they had capitulated to the vulture capitalists demands. By this move, they can hope to salvage the retirement plan, while if they’d given in they would have lost it all. $2 billion is a lot of money to just “give away” in negotiations. Of course the unions were expected to surrender despite the fact that the management company was asking the bankruptcy court to give their outgoing CEO up to $5.5 million. All of this was in addition to the 80% raises the executives were being treated to.

Then there were company payments to the Teamsters Union for managing the retirement funds, insurance, etc, agreed upon in the earlier bankruptcy proceedings. The company failed to pay for those either, adding an additional $100 million to the pile of bad debt the firm has all to extract as much wealth out of the firm as possible. This cost will, if not resolved during the liquidation, be spread to other companies the Teamsters operates with, as part of the contracts. The Hostess liquidation now will impact not only their direct employees, but hundreds of other firms.

But blaming unions sure makes low-information rightwingers feel good.

Sweet nothings to the last

Still lying to the finish line.

Hope someone does time for this

Theft. The only thing left for the Republicans.

Last week, Bob Fitrakis and Gerry Bello at FreePress.org reported an important story concerning what they described as “uncertified ‘experimental’ software patches” being installed at the last minute on electronic vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties.

The story included a copy of the contract [PDF] between Republican Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office and ES&S, the nation’s largest e-voting system manufacturer, for a new, last-minute piece of software created to the custom specifications of the secretary of state. The contract itself describes the software as “High-level enhancements to ES&S’ election reporting software that extend beyond the current features and functionality of the software to facilitate a custom-developed State Election Results Reporting File.”

A subsequent story at the Free Press the following day included text said to be from a Nov. 1 memo sent from the Ohio secretary of state’s Election Counsel Brandi Laser Seske to a number of state election officials confirming the use of the new, uncertified software on Ohio’s tabulator systems. The memo claims that “its function is to aid in the reporting of results” by converting them “into a format that can be read by the Secretary of State’s election night reporting system.”

On Friday evening, at Huffington Post, journalist Art Levine followed up with a piece that, among other things, advanced the story by breaking the news that Fitrakis and his attorney Cliff Arnebeck were filing a lawsuit for an immediate injunction against Husted and ES&S to “halt the use of secretly installed, unauthorized ‘experimental’ software in 39 counties’ tabulators.” Levine also reported that Arnebeck had referred the matter to the Cincinnati FBI for criminal investigation of what the Ohio attorney describes as “a flagrant violation of the law.”

“Before you add new software, you need approval of a state board,” says Arnebeck. “They are installing an uncertified, suspect software patch that interfaces between the county’s vote tabulation equipment and state tabulators.” Arnebeck’s alarm is understandable.

Since the story initially broke, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I could about what is actually going on here. During that time, a few in the mainstream media have gotten wind of the story as well, including NBC News and CNN, and have been able to press Husted and other officials in his office into finally responding to the concerns publicly. The Ohio officials have attempted to downplay the concerns, though in doing so they appear to have given misleading information which, at times, seems to conflict even with the contract itself.

I’ve also spoken to computer scientists and election integrity experts, in trying to make sense of all of this, though many of them seem to be scratching their heads as well. My own queries to the Secretary of State’s office have gone unanswered, as had Fitrakis’ and Bello’s before they published their initial story, begging the question as to why, if this software is as benign as Ohio officials are suggesting, they didn’t respond immediately to say as much. Furthermore, why did they keep the contract a secret? Why did they wait until just before the election to have this work done? And why did they feel it was appropriate to circumvent both federal and state testing and certification programs for the software in the bargain?

I’d like to have been able to learn much more before running anything on this at all, frankly. But the lack of time between now and Tuesday’s election — in which Ohio’s results are universally believed to be key to determining the next president of the United States — preclude that.

So, based on the information I’ve been able to glean so far, allow me to try to explain, in as simple terms as I can, what we currently know and what we don’t, and what the serious concerns are all about.

And, just to pre-respond to those supposed journalists who have shown a proclivity for reading comprehension issues, let me be clear: No, this does not mean I am charging that there is a conspiracy to rig or steal the Ohio election. While there certainly could be, if there is, I don’t know about it, nor am I charging there is any such conspiracy at this time. The secretive, seemingly extra-legal way in which Secretary of State Husted’s office is going about whatever it is they are trying to do, however, at the very last minute before the election, along with the explanations they’ve given for it to date, and concerns about similar cases in the past, in both Ohio and elsewhere, are certainly cause for any reasonable skeptic or journalist to be suspicious and investigate what could be going on. And so I am …

Read it all.

Thank you, Professor Krugman

Again, he gets it right. Unless we're being prepared for an election theft.

Today’s Financial Times bears a banner headline on p.1: “US election hangs on a knife edge”. Aside from everything else, surely this gets the cliche wrong: yourest on a knife edge, don’t you? If you try to hang on one, I think you just cut off your fingers.

More important, though, this headline deeply misleads readers about the state of the race — and in so doing, it echoes a lot of political reporting right now. Quite simply, many of the “analysis” articles being published in these final days leave readers worse informed than they were before reading.

As Nate Silver (who has lately attracted a remarkable amount of hate — welcome to my world, Nate!) clearly explains, state polling currently points overwhelmingly to an Obama victory. It’s possible that the polls are systematically biased — and this bias has to encompass almost all the polls, since even Rasmussen is now showing Ohio tied. So Romney might yet win. But a knife-edge this really isn’t, and any reporting suggesting that it is makes you stupider.

Worse yet, some reporting tells readers things the reporters have to know aren’t true. How many stories have you seen declaring that “both sides think they’re winning”? No, they don’t: the Romney campaign is visibly flailing, trying desperately to find new fronts on which to attack Obama. They clearly know that it will take a miracle — sorry, a last-minute surge — to prevail on Tuesday. It’s OK, I guess, to report campaign spin; but surely it’s not OK to report campaign spin as the truth, which is what these stories are doing.

Again, as Nate says, it’s definitely possible that the polls are systematically wrong. The obvious ways they could go wrong, cell phones and Latinos, favor Obama rather than Romney; but maybe pollsters are overcompensating for these factors, or maybe there’s a large Bradley effect distorting poll responses. Reporting about these possibilities would be interesting.

But reporting that suggests that this is a too-close-to-call race doesn’t get at any of this; it’s just lazy, and a disservice to readers.