Reddest state?

I have grown weary of the MSM spreading around (like so much ripe manure) the meme that Oklahoma has taken over from Utah as the reddest state in the nation. My friends, this is simply not so.

By way of illustration, picture in your mind every McCain voter in a given state contributing a drop of red paint into a giant bucket, and each Obama voter contributing an equally-sized blue drop into the same bucket. On this theory, N. Carolina and Missouri come out as nearly perfectly purple, having almost equal numbers of blue and red voters. Washington D.C. is almost wholly blue, and the reddest state is…

WYOMING

That is right, Wyoming. For every Obama voter in Wyoming, there were two McCain voters. Oklahoma ran a close second, with a ratio of 1.91 McCain voters per Obama voter. Better luck next time, Okies. Now get back on your horses and ride herd to the nearest watering hole.

Happy Constitution Day!

For those of you hoping to ruminate on the Constitutional issues of our times with an eye to electoral politics, I would suggest taking in a few hours of Con Law from Professor Obama. I especially recommend his own model answers, if you want to see how constitutional law is really done. Enjoy!

p.s. If anyone can find anything remotely indicative of this level of thoughtfulness on such weighty matters of law and policy from the McCain-Palin ticket, please let me know.

Bible Belt Redux

UIUC’s electoral projections map fairly nicely onto my Bible Belt map from awhile back.  Coincidence? 

Modeling the Electoral College

With degrees in maths and some background in mod/sim, one might suppose that I would at some point get around to mathematically modeling to the upcoming presidential election.  I’ll spare you the gory details, but the upshot of this chart is that the odds of a McCain-Palin victory are hovering below 4% as of this morning’s state-by-state polling data.  These are roughly the same odds that Obama-Biden landslide into office with over 72% of the electoral college votes.  Naturally, I am hoping for an outcome somewhere within one sigma from the median, since elections which fall well within the tails seem to smack of systemic bias.

 

Crunch the numbers, ye conservatives, and despair.

 

p.s. The math geeks at UIUC have come to rather similar conclusions: http://election08.cs.uiuc.edu/

Mything in Action (II)

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A deeply principled man and eventual national hero is suffering horribly in a Communist prison camp, in which communication between prisoners and others is strongly discouraged.  When this particular prisoner’s spirits are at low ebb, an improbable expressionless figure appears and draws a cross in the sand, silently sharing the love of Christ.  At this point, the woeful prisoner experiences a spiritual renewal; an uplift of hope and faith which helps him to carry on until his eventual release.

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Does this brief yet relatively detailed summary encapsulate a series of events allegedly experienced by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or by John McCain?  Does a complete lack of firsthand documentary evidence in the quarter-century after these events allegedly transpired cast reasonable doubt on whether they actually occurred at all?  Does the unlikely level of similarity between the two stories suggest they are not biographical but mythical?  Was this wonderfully uplifting story (like so many others) nothing more than a collection of free-floating pious fictions spread from one pulpit to the next?

 

I’d really like to believe that John McCain is a truthful fellow, but then I would have to wonder whether he has trouble sorting out his own experiences from those he has heard from some long-forgotten pulpit.

 

 

McCain - 21st century mythmaker?

Here is a screenshot (thanks be unto YouTube) of a message which John McCain personally voiced over and approved, wherein he is seen gazing ever so serenely upon a cross scratched in the dirt by an unknown Brother in Christ – improbably enough – a prison guard in a Communist POW camp.

Andrew Sullivan has been deconstructing this story: here and there, hither and thither and yonder, and yet again. I’ve no doubt that he will continue running this to ground (like a terrier set loose upon a wounded rat) until finally the MSM decides to “break” the story that McCain is, in point of fact, creating pious fictions out of whole cloth.

Money quote:

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If McCain has fabricated a religious epiphany for political purposes, it is about as deep a betrayal of core integrity as one can imagine, and the latest example of how pernicious the religious domination of political life in America has become.

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My money is on this story being a pious fiction of relatively recent vintage, cooked up in a crock pot to serve to credulous evangelical voters who believe Obama was born a Muslim and see not a hint of irony in a certain controversial magazine cover.