Intrade — Obama solidifying lead

Although I cautioned yesterday that Democratic analysts might not want to count their chickens before they hatch, nonetheless, Electoral-Vote.com has good news for the Obama camp.

Unlike FiveThirtyEight, Electoral-Vote uses three levels of campaign breakout, strong/weak/barely vs. just strong/weak in terms of Republican or Democratic chances. (On Electoral-Vote, “strong” means a support difference of 10 percent or more; “weak” means 5-9 percent difference; and “barely” means less than 5 percent. The states marked barely are statistical ties.

Anyway, Obama is over the 270-electoral vote mark just counting “strong” and “weak” states, there, without the “barelies” needed.

As of Friday, throwing out “barelies” on both sides, Obama held a 282-158 advantage; his base is a lot firmer, it seems.

Fannie and Freddie told to double bad mortgage buys

Separate from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the Housing Finance Agency wants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to start buying $40 billion a month of tanking mortgage securities. That was after the two agencies told bond traders last month they would start upping their buys to $20 bil a month.

This seems like a good news, bad news story.

On the bad side, when Fannie and Freddie were taken into conservatorship Sept. 7, they were limited in how much they could grow their portfolio. And now, they’re being told to balloon it. So, it seems like Paulson et al are throwing in everything but the kitchen sink.

On the good side, they’re throwing in everything but the kitchen sink.

Rezko singing – who’s in trouble?

prosecutors about Barack Obama, even though Rezko said the feds are pushing him for Obama dirt. Several months ago, Rezko wrote the judge in his case:

“Your Honor, the prosecutors have been overzealous in pursuing a crime that never happened,: he wrote. “They are pressuring me to tell them the wrong things that I supposedly know about Gov. (Rod) Blagojevich and Sen. Barack Obama.”

It’s unclear from the story whether that was before or his conviction, but Rezko stands by that story vis-à-vis Obama, and Illinois Republicans tend to agree.

Gov. Blagojevich? Different story. Rezko is reportedly singing like a canary.

ABC in the pocket of Big Oil?

Why else is it refusing to run Al Gore’s latest global warming infomercial?

Fish at 20,000 feet under the sea?

Or even near 30,000 feet, and quite active fish at that. Oceanographers and marine biologists expected extreme water pressures in the deep sea to put constraints on the activity level.

Visit the story for more, including video

Reading between the G7 lines

It’s true, indeed, that Henry Paulson didn’t originally like the “Swedish model” for dealing with the U.S. financial institution crisis. But, it looked like emergency meetings yesterday, along with EU sentiment, forced him in that direction:

"There are two competing models. The American model, which no one wishes to draw inspiration from, and the British model. This is what everyone is talking about," the source close to the French presidency said, on condition of anonymity.

In the George W. Bush presidency, America first squandered its standing as the moral arsenal of democracy. We’ve now frittered away being the intellectual grounding of capitalism, too.

Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has Eurozone leaders, plus Britain, meeting in Paris tomorrow.