I’m a geek. Here is a spreadsheet I am working on with some information about the Indiana House races. What I have done so far is to list each district, the Republican and Democrats in each district for 2008, the Republican and Democratic candidates in 2006, the vote totals in 2006, the margin of victory by totals and percentage in 2006. The districts are sorted by margin of victory (because of how I sorted, the high Democratic margins are listed first; the high Republican margins are listed last; and the closer districts are in the middle.) The districts where the margin was 10% or less are in bold. The districts with open seats are in italics.

This thing is definitely a work in progress. The great thing about local races like this are that they can rise and fall based on the people running as opposed to the major party brand name of the candidates. This spreadsheet won’t help identify those races. That said, it’s probably a fair assumption that districts that went heavily to one party or another won’t readily vote for the other party. (Of course, those districts where there was only one major party candidate fielded don’t really give a good sense of how readily the district will vote for the other party.)

My preliminary assessment is 38 safe Republican seats; 41 safe Democratic seats and 21 with some question about it. In all likelihood, there are more safe seats than that. In a couple of instances, where I noticed it, I indicated that Brian Howey had flagged the district as having some question, and a couple of times I noted the presence of a Libertarian candidate where it jumped out at me.

So, for what it’s worth – enjoy.

The Associated Press has a story entitled, “Mortgage Forgiven After Woman Shoots Herself.”

A 90 year old woman in Akron apparently owned her home outright in 1995. Then she took out a mortgage in 1997 and refinanced it a few times. Apparently she defaulted because a foreclosure action was brought by Countrywide and the home was sold at Sheriff’s sale to Fannie Mae which, in turn, sought to have her evicted when she refused to leave the house which was no longer hers.

When the Sheriff came to force the eviction, the woman shot herself in the chest. Fannie Mae has now decided to drop the eviction action and forgive the mortgage.

Call me cold-hearted, but it sounds like an ill-advised precedent to me.

Paraphrasing a line from Platoon: “He’s laughing at you. That’s the way the Robber Baron laughs.”

Days from becoming the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, Lehman Brothers steered millions to departing executives even while pleading for a federal rescue, Congress was told Monday.

As well, executives who feared for their bonuses in the company’s last months were told not to worry, according to documents cited at a congressional hearing. One executive said he was embarrassed when employees suggested that Lehman executives forgo bonuses, and cracked: “I’m not sure what’s in the water.”
. . .
Waxman read excerpts from Lehman documents in which a recommendation that top management should forgo bonuses was apparently brushed aside. He also cited a Sept. 11 request to Lehman’s compensation board that three executives leaving the company be given $20 million in “special payments.”

“In other words, even as Mr. Fuld was pleading with Secretary Paulson for a federal rescue, Lehman continued to squander millions on executive compensation,” Waxman said before Fuld appeared as a witness.

There just might be a class war going on after all.

Seems like something that could be confirmed or denied reasonably quickly by someone with a good knowledge of the State’s finances. I’m not that person. A writer to the Bilerico Project:

I have been told by high level Republicans in Indianapolis that the Daniels Administration took the Major Moves Funds, PERF, & Teachers Retirement Fund and combined those funds (billions of dollars together) and then invested them into the stock market. Word is that they have lost enormous value in the recent market ‘correction’ or as we call it in Southern Indiana (where we shoot straight and tell it like it is) the market ‘crash’.

The Republicans are very apparently and justifiably scared to death that this will get out, and with good reason. In their words, ‘If this is true, then this election is over and we’ll be lucky to win dog catcher at the polls this year.’

Update Just to be clear, even if the answer is that Indiana’s funds are taking a bath in the market, the next question is obviously to ask whether such investment was somehow less conservative than it ought to have been because of decisions made by the Daniels administration. Only if both questions are answered in the affirmative does this potentially become a significant political liability.

Apparently Sarah Palin is going around lying about Barack Obama, saying he’s “palling around with terrorists.” We’ve learned from campaigns past, that this sort of thing can’t be allowed to pass. So, if McCain is going to throw mud at Obama for being on a board with a guy who was a 60s radical while Obama was a kid; anything equal to or more significant to that is presumably fair game for McCain.

Obama is hitting back with an association of McCain’s that is both a whole lot closer and more relevant to the events of today. Keating Economics will apparently explore McCain’s association with Charles Keating, Jr. in the 80s and 90s. Keating was peddling influence in the Senate to get Senators to apply pressure to federal regulators to look the other way as he was running the Lincoln Savings & Loan into the ground during Savings & Loans crisis, requiring a bailout. Hmm, banks going after loose regulation requiring a bailout. Sounds familiar somehow.

So, in response to McCain’s kitchen sink attempts at smearing Obama and attempting to get people’s minds off the economy, Obama’s going to tag McCain with an association of his own that’s significant and topical. “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way!”

Now, I wonder if McCain has any interest in discussing the issues at hand today and how he plans to fix them and attempting to present an argument as to why his way is better. If not, maybe we could descend into the muck and discuss McCain’s association with Watergate felon and political murder conspirator, G. Gordon Liddy. Maybe traitorous associations of Sarah Palin’s husband who belonged to a political party that wanted Alaska to secede from the Union. And, I’ll bet that McCain has sat on all kinds of boards and spoken to all kinds of people during his decades in Washington.

Or, maybe this is a silly game after all, and we ought not play. But, there is kind of a prisoner’s dilemma going on. Everyone does the right thing, and everyone wins. One person does the right thing and one person does the wrong thing; and the guy who does the wrong thing wins. Both people do the wrong thing, and everyone loses equally. So, the rational thing to do is to act nicely, then if the other guy acts wrongly; you bonk him on the head and act wrongly yourself until he acts nice. Then you resume. Sen. McCain, this is your bonk on the head.

Wow, the Texans just choked that one away. They had the game won with a 17 point lead with like 4 minutes left to go. The Colts drove and cut the lead to 10. They tried an onside kick that failed.

But then, instead of just being happy running down the clock, the Texan’s QB, Rosenfels, decided to go for a heroic run with 3:50 left on the clock only to fumble, allowing Gary Brackett to run the fumble back for a touchdown.

Then on the next possession, the Rosenfels got the ball stripped with 2:42 left, and the Colts scored again.

It was something like 21 points in 2.5 minutes. Reminds me of that Tampa Bay game a few years back.

I don’t know how it will play at the ballot box, but my sense is that people are deeply pissed about the bailout. Over the past couple of days, I have overheard 3 or 4 random conversations about the bailout and, on each occasion, the people were discussing it in ominous tones. I think it has put the electorate in a nasty mood; though I don’t know precisely how this level of emotion will express itself.

I watched a chunk of Meet the Press for the first time since Russert died. I wasn’t a big fan of his, but Brokaw is worse. The round table I watched consisted of conservative speech writer and columnist Peggy Noonan who got the lion’s share of the air time along with a supporting cast of PBS broadcaster Gwen Ifill, NBC broadcaster David Gregory, and Des Moines Register journalist David Yepsen. Noonan annoys the crap out of me — I always feel like she’s smugly telling me to clean my room.

Just thought I’d share this insightful review.

Actually, the bit between Republican strategist Mike Murphy and Democratic strategist Paul Begala wasn’t bad. Murphy “broke character” and, while he supported McCain, acknowledged that McCain wasn’t the second coming and Obama wasn’t the antiChrist. (I’m paraphrasing.) That enhanced his credibility for me to some degree. Begala is kind of a putz.