Month: July 2008

After nine months’ dating, he gets married to a woman. I wonder if that was a condition for the vice-presidency. His parents, by the way, are "ecstatic." I’d say the odds of his becoming the veep – and McCain’s heir apparent – just increased exponentially. As a Crist fan, I’m happy – he’d be great for the GOP. But if I were McCain, I’d worry that if this is a marriage of political convenience and if it opens up questions about his past, we could be in a Michael Portillo situation. And no one will want that in a general election campaign.

Put this piece of news with the Obama Iraq adjustment, and you see the contours of the fall election coming into view.

A computer program can predict, with 92 percent accuracy, which prisoners on death row will be executed:

According to the system, the death row inmates most likely to be executed are those with the lowest levels of education. The researchers, from Texas A&M University–Texarkana and Loyola University New Orleans, report in the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, that neither the severity of the crime nor race—the latter of which is often cited as a key factor in convictions—are reliable forecasters of a prisoner’s fate.

Wilkinson summarizes:

The new World Values Survey is out and these dismal United States comes in 16th in the world in the WVS happiness rankings, just between such Scandinavian hellholes as Sweden and Norway. You’ll see the usual Latin American bonus in the data, with Puerto Rico, Colombia, and El Salvador populating the upper reaches of the rankings. However, the U.S. has now pulled ahead of Mexico. Maybe it’s because all the Mexicans who moved to the U.S. Denmark retains its happiness crown.

Tyler Cowen on the Munich-based company that supplies Zimbabwe with bank notes being pressured to stop dealing with Mugabe:

The deeper question is why any tyrannical government would find such a high inflation rate to be seigniorage-maximizing.  At some point people simply abandon the currency or prices end up rising as fast or faster than the government spends the newly printed money.  (Related query: When the number "quadrillion" is in play, are the "anti-forgery" features of the paper really needed?  Isn’t the value of the bill higher as paper in any case?)  Under one hypothesis, the time horizon is very short and the mass printing of bills maximizes seigniorage on a week-to-week basis but not overall.  Under another hypothesis, seigniorage is declining (given price expectations), but without the stream of new bills it would be declining even more rapidly.

A gay couple just got married in Virginia, because the younger spouse disguised himself as a woman:

The near-nuptials began when the couple arrived at Newport News Circuit Court on March 24 to apply for a marriage license. McCain, who court employees said appeared to be a woman, presented a Virginia driver’s license and filled out the section of the application labeled "bride." Court employees commented on "what pretty skin" McCain had, a court official said.

It was subsequently exposed and undone. There’s a famous case of a lesbian version of this in 1731 when one Mary East became "James How" in order to marry her beloved in Philadelphia. Their marriage lasted thirty-four years before it was discovered. The story is one of many in my anthology on marriage equality, which you can buy here.

It just got overthrown by a troubling court ruling.

"Say what you want about Obama, he’s no radical. Yes, he has an unusual name, but once upon a time, all of our names — whether Irish, Italian, or Hungarian — were considered uncommon. Despite his unfamiliar persona, his is a charming and conventional American success story — he grew up in a broken home, was raised by a relative, became chief editor of the Harvard Law Review (hardly the house organ for a bastion of bomb-throwers), and then spent most of his political career in the bowels of that well-known cauldron of Marxism: the Illinois state legislature.

Along the way, Obama clearly made the acquaintances of all kinds of folk — including Ayres and Wright, the latter of whom became one of his many spiritual mentors and has already damaged Obama’s candidacy all that he’s going to.

But the pattern throughout his career indicates that Obama apparently cultivated these gentlemen — and undoubtedly many others — more for what they could do for him and his political career than for what he could do for them. And he has already disassociated himself from both Wright and Ayres, albeit clumsily. Does that make him very ambitious? Yup. But if that were a disqualification, we could eliminate virtually every presidential hopeful in history, including John McCain," – Steve Stark, RealClearPolitics.

Introducing the AirPiano:

The Pray At The Pump Movement is auditioning as some kind of perfect representation of Bush conservatism, no?