From Dana Milbank’s
article
about the final days of the McCain campaign:
About 2,000 had come to a high school gym in Wallingford to hear from the candidate — a good crowd for high school basketball, if not quite the size a candidate hopes for in the final hours of a campaign. The audience stirred when McCain entered to the theme from “Rocky.” “Momentum is here,” he announced. “We’re going to win,” he went on. “I feel it. I know it.”
(No, not Tom DeLay. <rimshot>)
GovTrack has a
page
that shows congressional districts as a Google Maps layer. This means
that unlike the maps at
NationalAtlas.gov
you can easily zoom in to see the
crinkly bits
that make gerrymandered
districts to much fun to study. I could’ve used this during a
discussion on the subject with a friend today.
AZ-2
is nice, especially the part where it follows down the middle of the
Colorado river without touching the banks. But in the end, I have to
support the local team and go with
MD-3.
Floor’s open for discussion. What are your favorite congressional districts?
Have you always dreamt of redistricting a state to disenfranchise a large minority party, or prevent those pesky ethnic minorities from having an effective voice in politics, while obeying the letter of the law? Then maybe you should play the Redistricting Game (Flash warning) and find out why some districts have the shapes they do.
Right now, Five Thirty-Eight
gives McCain’s win percentage as 3.3%. Or, to put it in gamer terms,
he has to roll a natural 20, and then he has to roll 5 or 6
on 1d6 (or 3 on 1d3).
As for Palin, from her interview and debate performances, she reminds
me of nothing so much as a verbose
Eliza:
you ask her a question, her internal
regexp
parser picks out a few keywords, and she spits out a string of
preprogrammed phrases, with possibly a few pattern substitutions.
Of course, the original Eliza was designed to be terse so as to hide
the simplicity of the algorithm. Palin goes on for minutes, making her
more of a cross between Eliza and
Dissociated Press.
I’ve just chipped in to two more races:
Because when a woman who knows how to use a whip and handcuffs
tells me to,
I must obey.
The idea behind election finance reform is a noble one: elections tend
to go to whichever candidate wields the most money and can buy the
most votes; so let’s even out the playing field, and give less-rich
candidates a chance.
There are a number of problems with actually achieving any change,
though. For one, campaign finance reform has to be enacted by
politicians whose own reelection campaigns are likely to be hampered
by it.
Another is that any reform is unlikely to address the core problem.
John Gilmore is
quoted as
saying that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around
it.” In other words, let’s say you’re trying to move pr0n from point A
to point B. But some site in the middle doesn’t like pr0n, so it
intercepts your data packets and drops them on the floor. From your
point of view, it looks as if that site has a broken cable or a power
outage or something. But the Internet is failure-resistant, so your
data packets find a different path, avoiding the affected site
altogether.
And so it is with campaign contributions.
Remember the 2004 election, when partisans from both major parties
were arguing that Osama bin Laden wanted the other guy to win? Well,
this time around,
wonder no more:
“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.
The Web commentary was one of several posted by Taliban or al-Qaeda-allied groups in recent days that trumpeted the global financial crisis and predicted further decline for the United States and other Western powers.
One race that I’ll be interested in on election night, even though it
doesn’t affect me directly, is that of
Sean Tevis,
who’s running for State Representative in Kansas’s 15th district
(Olathe, just outside Kansas City). You may have seen his
XKCD-style webcomic asking for donations.
He was recently
endorsed
by the Kansas City Star. Good luck to him. Let’s hope this helps.
K-Lo at NRO
relays
a bit from the Katie Couric/Sarah Palin interview:
Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.
I can understand a politician trying to dodge a question like “Did you
have sex with that person?”, “What happened to the missing funds?”,
“What’s your plan for getting us out of this mess?” and the like.
But “Which newspapers were you reading two months ago?”?! FFSMS,
woman, even if you’re a terminally oblivious clothhead who pays no
attention to anything in the news that isn’t about you, you can still
make up something plausible: “Well, I get the Wasilla Journal and
Juneau Times delivered at home [if true; subscription lists can be
checked], but I also subscribe to the NY Times, WaPo, and dozen other
news sources in my RSS reader. And of course I’m always adding Google
News alerts.” See? Simple, plausible, and hard to disprove.
But speaking of newspapers, the LA Times
passes on
the story of a Wasilla resident who asked Palin about her religious
beliefs:
Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the
Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about
prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin
said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the
tracks,”
It sounds like she’s talking about the
Paluxy River tracks,
about which young-earth creationist organization Answers In Genesis
wrote:
Some prominent creationist promoters of these tracks
have long since withdrawn their support. Some of the allegedly human
tracks may be artifacts of erosion of dinosaur tracks obscuring the
claw marks. There is a need for properly documented research on the
tracks before we would use them to argue the coexistence of humans and
dinosaurs.
Caribou Flintstones Barbie: more ignorant than AiG. That’s impressive.
