If you'd like to try out different electoral vote scenarios, here's a website that'll let you click and theorize. It starts you off with the 2004 vote totals and then you can change states from red to blue or vice-versa and see the running total. It's a lot more fun than that online casino where you just lost all the money Grandma asked you to invest for her.
I am told by half the known world that tonight on the TV show The Big Bang Theory, one of the characters made reference to stopping at Souplantation for the Creamy Tomato Soup. No, I don't know if the line was put there by a reader of this weblog or just someone with good taste in soup.
I was playing around with electoral vote totals this morning, trying to figure if there was some route via which John McCain could win. Assuming someone doesn't come up with proof that Barack Obama funded the 9/11 hijackers or something equally game-changing, he pretty much has a lock on states totalling 264 electoral votes. That's all the states John Kerry won plus Iowa and New Mexico (252 + 7 + 5). So he's six short of the big 270.
The "swing" states turn out to be Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Obama appears to be ahead in all these but in some cases, the lead is within the margin of error or is contradicted by occasional other polls that give McCain a slight lead. I'm not considering anyone "ahead" unless they're ahead by more than the margin of error through multiple polls conducted by multiple firms.
If McCain can win all seven of those states, he wins the White House. That sure doesn't look likely to me. Today's Public Policy Polling survey has Obama up seven points in North Carolina. Rasmussen has him ahead of McCain in Virginia by ten points. There are also polls that show closer numbers but it's hard to see how McCain could win all seven. But that's pretty much what it would take.
If Obama wins Nevada (5 electoral votes) and McCain wins the other six along with every other state where he's presently ahead, we wind up with a 269-269 tie and the election gets decided by the House of Representatives. Since the Democrats would dominate that vote, Obama would win.
And if Obama wins even one of the other six "swing" states, all of which have more than five electoral votes, he'd have the 270 necessary to win. Those states may be all we need to watch. Obama could also win with Indiana's 11 electoral votes or get partway to 270 with Montana (3) and/or West Virginia (5) — but those are all states where McCain presently has a small lead. Presumably, if Obama had enough of a landslide going to pick up those states, he wouldn't need them.
By the way: I said in this post that Kerry in '04 received 251 electoral votes so Obama needed 19 to get to 270. That's misleading. The combined electoral votes of the states won by the Kerry-Edwards ticket actually totalled 252. When the Electoral College convened and the votes were actually cast, one of the Kerry electors made a mistake on his ballot so his vote was voided and Kerry officially received 251. But the relevant number is that if/when Obama wins all the same states, he'll have the 252 noted above. I don't see any poll anywhere that thinks that's not going to happen.
As I've mentioned here a few times, I think most of what passes for Airport Security these days is just a show that's staged to make us think something is being done to catch 9/11-style hijackers before they get on the planes. When you come right down to it, there's no effective reason for us to take off our shoes, dump our bottled water, discard our nail clippers, etc. If someone was determined enough that they were prepared to fly a plane into a building, they could find a way to get a pair of cuticle scissors past the metal detectors.
Jeffrey Goldberg has the same theory and he's been testing it...with the expected result.
Mr. Blackwell, who was known for issuing his annual "Worst Dressed List" and for nothing else, has passed away at the age of 86. Born Richard Sylvan Selzer, he had a brief acting career before turning to fashion design. In 1960, he came up with the idea of his list and it proved to be a great publicity-getter...which, of course, was the whole point of it. Obits like this one tell us...
In 1992, he sued Johnny Carson for claiming that he had added Mother Teresa to his list, saying the comment exposed him to hatred and ridicule. NBC's response was that the "Tonight Show" host was obviously joking. "Did you see what he said about Mother Teresa? 'Miss Nerdy Nun is a fashion no-no,'" Carson had said. "Come on now, that's just too much."
Everyone, of course, noted the irony. Mr. Blackwell, whose only known function was to hold others up to ridicule for their wardrobe choices, was claiming outrage at being ridiculed. Around The Tonight Show, they assumed Blackwell instituted the lawsuit because he was hoping to settle for an appearance on the program...and abandoned it when it was clear that was not going to happen. He may also have been upset by one of Mr. Carson's monologue jokes: "I don't think it's fair of Mr. Blackwell to issue that list on the one day a year he looks at women."
Believe it or not, I actually have an anecdote about a personal encounter with Mr. Blackwell. He seems to have lived somewhere near me because every few months, I used to run into him in a little Italian cafeteria not far from my house. The first time it happened, we were side-by-side in the cafeteria line and I leaned over, nodded towards the ladies serving us and told him, "They'll give you an extra meatball if you don't critique their outfits." I have "recognized" many mid-level celebrities who were thrilled that someone — anyone! — knew who they were but none who were more pleased than Mr. Blackwell.
For obvious reasons, he always made me think of another public figure who was mentioned occasionally in Carson monologues and who even appeared several times with Johnny...a flamboyant gent named Jerome Criswell. Half-heartedly claiming some sort of psychic abilities (and not even convincing those eager to believe in such powers), Criswell wrote a column called "Criswell Predicts" and appeared on TV shows, including his own, to issue dramatic and usually-ridiculous predictions about the future. He had a little more than his allotted fifteen minutes of fame.
They were pretty much over by the seventies and he was rarely seen on television. Where he was seen was on the porch of a home he had on Las Palmas Avenue in Hollywood, about a block north of Sunset. It was where my friends and I often parked when we went to the comic book shops on Hollywood Boulevard and we'd see him there, unshaven and of course not in the tuxedo he wore when he appeared on TV. We'd yell, "Hey, Criswell! What do you predict?" And he'd grin and oblige us by calling back, "Gnats in New Mexico" or "Locusts in London," which were the kind of predictions he'd done on TV. One time, he told myself and my friend George, "I predict strap-on bikinis for you women and clamp-on bikinis for you men."
He seemed to enjoy putting on a little performance for us or for any who passed by and knew who he was. (To help the recognition along, there was a large brass plaque on the front of the building, not far from where he sat. It said, "CRISWELL PREDICTS.") It wasn't The Tonight Show but it was something.
Mr. Criswell passed away in '82, which was about the time I began running into Mr. Blackwell at the cafeteria. I don't know if they knew each other but it wouldn't have surprised me. I can well imagine them getting together and swapping tips on how to parlay a little gimmick into something resembling a career.
Here, from some time in the sixties, is another one of those commercials that I saw eighty thousand times. In fact, I even went out and bought the product — Great Shakes, which promised to turn milk into a milk shake. It came with a little plastic shaker cup and there were little envelopes of powder. You used the cup to mix an envelope of powder into the milk and when you did, you discovered that Great Shakes were no great shakes. Not a great invention...but the jingle was great.
I'm kinda sick of articles about Sarah Palin but Jane Mayer wrote one that's well worth reading.
By the way: I was serious a number of postings ago when I said that Palin is bucking for Ann Coulter's job. I don't think McCain's running mate has any future running for elected office, maybe not even in Alaska. But I think she can make a ton of money entertaining right-wing audiences.
October 21, 2008
