The numbers fluctuate back and forth to some degree but this is essentially where things have stood ever since the last debate.

 Take solace in the numbers, but then go out in vote.

Unless you already have of course, in which case just prepare for the Trump supporter freakout that is sure to come on November 9th.

New polls show Clinton surging past the 270 electoral votes she needs to win this election.

Courtesy of NBC:

After releasing our seven battleground-state polls last week -- and seeing several other state surveys -- we've updated our NBC battleground map. The states in Hillary Clinton's column now add up to 288 electoral votes, which exceeds the 270 needed to win the presidency. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is at 174 electoral votes, and an additional 76 are in the Tossup category. Our last map, back in July, showed Clinton with a 255-190 advantage — so Clinton's tally has gone up since the conventions, while Trump's has declined.

Among those polls is one from Siena College which shows that Hillary is going to destroy Trump in his home state of New York.

Courtesy of Syracuse.com:

Hillary Clinton has widened her lead to 30 points over Donald Trump among New York voters, dominating a state Trump has vowed to make competitive in the 2016 presidential race, according to a new poll published Monday. 

It was the first Siena College poll in New York since the Republican and Democratic national conventions last month, and mirrors a trend showing gains by Clinton in national polls over the past two weeks. 

Clinton has surged in the Empire State since a Siena College poll in June showed she had a 23-point lead over Trump, 54-31 percent. 

Clinton, the former two-term New York senator, now leads Trump in his home state by 57-27 percent in the new poll.

Damn! That's gonna leave a mark.

And don't forget, these are the people who know Trump the best.

As for those young Bernie supporters? Oh yeah,  she has their vote as well:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is consolidating the support of the Millennials who fueled Bernie Sanders' challenge during the primaries, a new USA TODAY/Rock the Vote Poll finds, as Republican Donald Trump heads toward the worst showing among younger voters in modern American history. 

The survey shows Clinton trouncing Trump 56%-20% among those under 35, though she has failed so far to generate the levels of enthusiasm Sanders did — and the high turn-out that can signal — among Millennials.

Once again remember, I share this information to help you to sleep at night and to give you hope.

But that in NO way means this election is in the bag and EVERY SINGLE one of us need to turn out and vote or none of this means a damn thing.

This is what it would look like if every woman in the country would refuse to vote for Donald Trump.

Courtesy of Daily Kos:

From Nate Silver: Exclusive @FiveThirtyEight projection on what the Electoral College would look like if women refuse to vote Trump.

Boy do I suddenly feel completely unnecessary. 

I swear that if the women actually did this, and even turned Alaska blue, that I would be their slave forever. 

Not that I haven't always been but still.

Things are looking good for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

If you took the average of every Trump v Clinton poll in the last 45 days, this is the electoral map. pic.twitter.com/VhaKRli509

— Benchmark Politics (@benchmarkpol) April 27, 2016

To be fair we know that Trump is going to throw everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, at Hillary Clinton in the run up to the November election.

I am fully prepared to hear about Monica Lewinski, email-gate, Benghazi, Hillary's support for trade deals, the Clinton Foundation, speech transcripts, and just about anything else you can imagine.

However I am pretty confident that most of that has been tried and it failed to make a dent, so yes this map might be quite reflective of what we can expect to see when the votes are all tallied.

And that my friends is good news indeed.

Presenting the Donald Trump interactive hate map.

Courtesy of America's Voice:

We’ve seen the proof over the past few weeks. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric hasn’t just pushed his fellow candidates to the right on immigration (in what has become known as the “Trump Effect”). It’s gone beyond the political world and injected itself into everyday life — and, in at least one instance, in a very violent way. 

This map shows documented instances where Donald Trump, his supporters, or his staff harassed or attacked Latinos and immigrants.

This is only the beginning.

By the time we get to November this will be a country ablaze with hatred. 

Self taught mapmaker creates the saddest map depicting the fate of the Native Americans ever.

Courtesy of NPR:

Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans. 

As a teenager, Carapella says he could never get his hands on a continental U.S. map like this, depicting more than 600 tribes — many now forgotten and lost to history. Now, the 34-year-old designs and sells maps as large as 3 by 4 feet with the names of tribes hovering over land they once occupied. 

"I think a lot of people get blown away by, 'Wow, there were a lot of tribes, and they covered the whole country!' You know, this is Indian land," says Carapella, who calls himself a "mixed-blood Cherokee" and lives in a ranch house within the jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation. 

For more than a decade, he consulted history books and library archives, called up tribal members and visited reservations as part of research for his map project, which began as pencil-marked poster boards on his bedroom wall. So far, he has designed maps of the continental U.S., Canada and Mexico. A map of Alaska is currently in the works.

These were proud people, living a subsistence lifestyle that was in harmony with the nature around them.

Just imagine how different America would look today if the white settlers had respected their sovereign right to the lands that they had lived on for thousands of years.

But sadly they were non-Christian heathens and were at the mercy of Manifest Destiny: 

The religious fervor spawned by the Second Great Awakening created another incentive for the drive west. Indeed, many settlers believed that God himself blessed the growth of the American nation. The Native Americans were considered heathens. By Christianizing the tribes, American missionaries believed they could save souls and they became among the first to cross the Mississippi River. 

At the heart of manifest destiny was the pervasive belief in American cultural and racial superiority. Native Americans had long been perceived as inferior, and efforts to "civilize" them had been widespread since the days of John Smith and MILES STANDISH. The Hispanics who ruled Texas and the lucrative ports of California were also seen as "backward."

Just another shameful chapter in the book of horrors visited upon those ethnically impure heathens who  dared to stand in the way of the Christian Caucasians who felt duty bound to destroy their cultures and bring them to Jesus whether they wanted it or not.

Just another reason why I no longer get my news from CNN.

A map of how those on the Right Wing see the world.

If image does not expand click here

You know this would be funnier if it were less true.

How right wingers see America.

It's funny cause it's true.

The march toward the progressive side in this country has not left Alaska behind.

A few days after the election a number of tweets came my way stating that the biggest swing toward Obama in this election cycle, as compared to last, was in my own deeply red state of Alaska.

And in fact that turned out to be true in that only 38% of the vote went to Obama in 2008, while McCain/Palin walked away with 59%, and this year Obama captured 41% to Romney's 55%.

While that may seem somewhat predictable, since last time Alaska had its own Governor, Sarah Palin, on the ticket, it was also revealed that in fact in THIS election the Democrats received the highest percentage of the vote since 1964, which was the only year Alaska's three electoral points went to the Democratic candidate. (Way to go President Johnson!)

I found THIS to be extremely satisfying, and gives me great hope for the future.

Just to illustrate how big of a change this is, take a look at a couple of maps put together over at the Daily Kos:

Here is the 2008 map. See how much red there is across the state?

Now compare that with this years map of the various voting districts.

Now you may ask how in the world Romney got our electoral votes with so much of the state covered in blue, but that is because no body in their right mind lives out there where it is blue.

In fact THAT is where the indigenous people of Alaska live.

You know the REAL Alaskans. The ones who were virtually abandoned by their Governor when they needed her help, and who are learning the hard way that the Republican party is very friendly when there is oil under their property, but when it comes to respecting their rights, or helping them in times of trouble, they cannot even get a return phone call.

Clearly Alaska has a long way to go before we can celebrate our return to the progress ideals of our past, but I have to say that the trend is certainly looking good.


(Alaska voting history, and this years election map, for reference.)

Well thank God there's no Global Warming or anything!

Today's heat index map.

You know it's days like this where I am glad I live in Alaska.

I mean holy crap, that kind of weather would kill me dead! Dead, I say!