Day: December 9, 2011

270 to Win

270towin.com is an interesting website that I just found. They feature an interactive electoral map in which you can try out various combinations of states to see who might win the 2012 election. They include past voting data for each state and you can look at the electoral maps for every previous election.

I’ve haven’t followed the elections nearly closely enough to make any guesses myself, though I think Indiana will go Republican next year. We usually go red with only two recent exceptions, 1964 and 2008. Ohio should be interesting to watch. They have voted for the winner in every election since 1960 and can go either way. I think that it would be fair to say that if Obama can’t win Ohio, he won’t win at all. Florida is another state to watch since it could go either way.

Looking over the map, I think that Obama will have some trouble holding on to some of the states he won in 2008. Indiana is lost. Maybe also North Carolina and Virginia. It looks like an uphill battle for any Republican candidate though. I suppose a lot depends on the economy next year. Obviously if it improves Obama will have a better chance, but it takes time for any improvement to make itself felt and it may come too late for him. Just ask George H W Bush about that. The GDP started growing just in time for the election, so he lost and Clinton was lucky enough to take credit for the recovering economy.

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Obama Celebrates Hanukkah Early

Here is some more silliness from AP and Drudge.

President Barack Obama is marking Hanukkah as a story of “faith over doubt.”

Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden convened a Hanukkah celebration at the White House Thursday in an early celebration of the Jewish Festival of Lights.

Obama said the Hanukkah story was about “right over might, faith over doubt.” In the Hanukkah story, a small band of Jews rededicating a Jerusalem temple found that a one-day supply of oil kindled a flame instead for eight.

The president noted “our unshakeable support and commitment to the security of the nation of Israel.”

Hanukkah begins at sunset on Dec. 20. Obama joked that everyone needs to be “careful that your kids don’t start thinking Hanukkah lasts 20 nights instead of eight.”

I wouldn’t bother mentioning this, except that if he were a Republican we would never hear the end of this. The MSM would spin this as proof of the President’s stupidity. I know that being president, he has a lot on his mind, but isn’t someone on his staff responsible for making sure he celebrates holidays on the correct dates?

I had better get to work on my Hanukkah post, since it is arriving earlier than I expected.

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Hottest Woman of All Time

Here is a bit of fluff from Yahoo News.

Jennifer Aniston beat every single famous lady (past and present) out there in a recent MensHealth.com poll, which anointed her the Hottest Woman of All Time.

At the very top of the list of 100 ladies, the 42-year-old Horrible Bosses star bested Raquel Welch (#2), Marilyn Monroe (#3), Britney Spears (#4) and Madonna (#5). Angelina Jolie — love to Aniston’s ex-husband Brad Pitt — landed at number 10.

I notice that the choices seem to be American celebrities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What about the billions of women all over the world who aren’t famous? Surely some of them are hotter that these choices? And what about all of the women who lived before the invention of photography. Unless they were rich enough to have their portraits painted, we have no idea who was hot. I understand that Helen of Troy was hot. Is she on this list? What about Cleopatra?

I know I’m being silly, but whenever I see a list of greatest inventions, or historical events, they always seem to be biased for the recent past. There was a world before the twentieth century.