Congratulations, it's a bounce, baby, bounce.

Update: Two new polls Wednesday: a Fox poll shows President Obama got a 5 point bounce, with an 11 point bounce among independents.  Their likely voter model shows him ahead 48-43.

An Economist poll also shows President Obama getting a bounce and pulling ahead and it notes what other polls have noted: a big increase in Dem enthusiasm.  According to Pew, it's now higher than GOPer enthusiasm.  (All of this should not be too much of a surprise to readers of this blog.)


It's showing up in most polls, with several--including the Gallup tracking--showing Obama 50 Romney 44.  That 50% threshold again--the first time since April in Gallup.  More meaningful now of course, this close to the election.

And as the LA Times points out, Romney has lost his last categorical advantage--in recent polls President Obama has drawn even with him on who can best handle the economy.  President Obama's advantage on foreign policy is just waiting to be capitalized, for as Rachel demonstrated with a raft of survey results, Americans of both parties overwhelmingly agree with Obama's policies, as opposed to the BushCheney policies that Romneyryan less that secretly would reinstate.  (A sample: 82% support withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014, 67% Iraq war not worth fighting for, 71% be more cautious about use of force. Only 27% support military confrontation with Iran, 32% say should not cut military spending, and two-thirds say U.S. should act militarily only with the UN or NATO.  The survey found no significant difference between Ds and Rs on these issues.)

So another day of the Rabid Right turning their rabidness on Romney and his campaign.  Now all the political commentators can say is Romney's Last Stand is the first debate on October 3.  The Romney people are raising expectations of their guy, noddingly called a good debater (which is exactly what they said about Nixon in 1960).  But close to 60% of the public expects President Obama to do better.  Romney has to live up to his own hype and exceed expectations to have much of a chance.

Others are suggesting that the ad carpet bombing is reaching the point of diminishing returns, especially if Romneyryanrove can't come up with a new line of attack that's effective--and attack is about all they will be doing.  Andrew Sullivan believes that more attacks will benefit President Obama. (The poll chart above also comes from that post.)

Although August was the first month that the Obama campaign raised more than Romney, Mother Jones thinks the Obama campaign will end up raising more for the campaign as a whole.  There's also the suspicion (which I admit I had when I started hearing the Romney panic talk) that with Republicans trashing the Romney campaign, at least some of his big donors are going to turn off the spigot, or at least hedge their bets with some cash for the Dems.

So their leading tactic, apart from increasingly silly lying and hyperbole, is voter suppression.  All eyes move to Pennsylvania, where the state supreme court takes up the appeal on their voter suppression law on Thursday.  It's a six judge panel, 3 of each.  A party-line tie upholds the law.

The initial decision was revealed to be even more dubious by a review of the PA law that the judge referenced, made by a University of Pittsburgh law professor in a piece in (one of) my old stomping grounds: the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.  It was an 1869 decision based on blatant prejudice and racism, giving judicial voice to the silent intent of the current law: to keep "undesirable" citizens from voting.

The law that the decision upheld in 1869 once again was designed to make it harder for citizens of Philadelphia to vote than the rest of the Commonwealth.  The judge's reason for upholding it was that rural voters were virtuous while urban voters included "rogues" and "strumpets."  To allow Philadelphia to vote with the same freedom as elsewhere “would be to place the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar hordes of our large cities, on a level with the virtuous and good man.” (All this also quoted on Think Progress, which had the Catch of the Day in flagging this article.)

I'm not sure what the supreme court can consider in this appeal, but if they can examine actual reality they would also find that the current law is being applied capriciously and arbitrarily.  One instance became news Tuesday when cable stock market screamer and very rich guy Jim Cramer tweeted that his father couldn't get a PA ID to vote because he didn't drive and couldn't prove his citizenship.

Half a million people read Cramer's tweets apparently, and within hours, lo and behold, his father was found eligible for special consideration and got his ID. Other sad sack Pennsylvanians have had to spend weeks, many hours in lines and spend lots of cash (one figured it cost him more than $65) in the hopes of getting their right to vote back.   The 1869 decision and the celebrity shortcut are enough to demonstrate the rank injustice of this law all by themselves.