Politics and Pucks

As someone who studies politics, I sometimes get discouraged by the system. However, there's a reason I like studying politics. There's a lot of times in American politics, where we see a lot of silliness and humor. We have the annual White House Correspondents Banquet where the whole press corps takes a few hours to make fun of itself and of elected officials. At the same time, the President and their cabinet get to have a chance to make fun of themselves and then listen to a comedian as well!

There's also elections and the crazy advertising and people who are involved, that the media generally does not cover. Sometimes, these people are running for irony, others because they're serious. Meet Vermin Supreme. He's a Democratic candidate running for President in New Hampshire. He was seen at a debate recently, and here's what he had to say:



Anyone whose closing statement is sung to the tune of "the chicken dance" has my vote.

The full debate can be seen here, but I think this highlight reel is pretty fantastic.

(Via Mediaite)

Today is the Iowa Caucus, the first primary event of the GOP 2012 Presidential race. If you have been keeping up with the polls, you can tell that the outcome is essentially a crap shoot. Predicting the outcome of the Iowa Caucus is crazy at this point, as the conventional logic has been thrown out the window. I'm suggesting that we just "roll initiative" with 20-sided dice to figure out who wins. (Edit 6:15PM) For those who aren't familiar with the concept of rolling initiative, it is essentially rolling the order of attacks in D&D. The highest initiative goes first, next highest goes second, and so on. In this case, we're determining the outcome of the Iowa Caucus.

So I just rolled one of my 20-sided dice and just uploaded them in the order I rolled them. I then assigned them alphabetically (1st roll to Bachmann, 2nd to Gingrich, etc.). None of them had bonuses, modifiers, or anything additional to take into consideration. This would be more accurate if I did a Monte Carlo simulation, but I don't have enough time today to do that. So here's my prediction of the caucus:

Michelle Bachmann rolls: