Conservative Donnybrook

Anyone notice Wyoming selects its delegates tomorrow? Not only that, but they send as many delegates to the National Convention as does New Hampshire. But, as John McCormack points out, it may not be the number of delegates that results in Wyoming being ignored, but rather the way they select them.

Tomorrow, 12 of the state’s counties will independently elect one national delegate each at their county conventions. These county conventions range in size from about fifty county delegates in Teton county (pop. 19,288) to a hundred county delegates in Laramie county (pop. 515,004). In most counties, about two-thirds to three-fourths of the county delegates are committeemen and women who were elected back in 2006, while the remaining county delegates were elected at presidential caucuses held in December 2007 or appointed by the county chairmen in case of vacancies.

So who is favored? Well, it’s anyone’s guess. There have not been any major polls conducted. With all the suspense, I can hardly stand it. I guess we’ll all know tomorrow.

UPDATE: I just checked and the odds makers don’t even have a line on the Wyoming caucus. For those who are interested, John McCain is listed as a 4/11 favorite in New Hampshire, followed by Romney (5/2), Paul (16/1), Huckabee (16/1), Giuliani (25/1) and Thompson (66/1).

This was just too good to pass up!  Please take a look, Dodger fan or not, and vote!

The National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine have published a report on why public schools ought to be required to teach evolution to students.  The debate over creationism and evolution has raged in the United States for many years now.  While there is no end in sight, this report serves as yet another salvo in heated debate. 

Proponents of evolution are split into two main camps: Those that believe evolution demonstrates the lack of a god and those that believe evolution is all part of the mysterious plan God put in place from the beginning of time.  Proponents of creationism believe that God created everything as it is.  Some go as far as to claim that the world is much younger than science demonstrates, that dinosaurs are a fiction and that evolution is impossible if not an outright lie.  A middle road is the “Intelligent Design” camp.  This philosophy holds that the vastness and complexity of the universe and all its treasures demonstrate that an intelligence of one sort or another provided a guiding hand to creation. 

I, for one, believe in evolution.  It seems clear that animals, plants, fungus and bacteria evolve and change over time.  I also believe that God intended it this way.  I therefore, believe that evolution ought to be taught to our youngsters.  Whether the hand of God controls or implemented the process is best left to Sunday school teachers and parents. 

For those of you living in a cave former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee finished first in the Iowa Republican Caucus as did Senator Barack Obama on the Democratic side. This really came as no surprise as most major polls leading up to the caucus were predicting the same outcome. For now I leave it up to another of my esteemed contributors to discern the tea leaves as to what Governor Huckabee’s victory means for the conservative movement. Rather I will simply say that if these two mean end up being their respective party’s nomination, conservatives better take cover.

To me there were two things that were more interesting to me about last night (in a way seeing a car accident is interesting) than the outcome. First, the idiotic way the Iowa Democrats actually caucus and second the inordinate amount of coverage that took place over a caucus of less than 500,000 Americans.

You can read how the Iowa Democrats caucus here, sparing me the pain of having to go through it in detail. Suffice to say it involves standing around in a room and trying to poach individual voters from candidates who are not deemed viable (at least they are able to deem their own kind inviable too, eh?). Unlike the Republican caucus, which is essentially a straw poll, the Democratic method is not anonymous and relies more on peer pressure than individual voting preferences. Going even further, individual votes are not counted, rather the percentages of victory are all that matter. So in all the years of caucusing in Iowa there is no record of just how many votes any individual candidate has gotten.

The caucus always gets substantial coverage since it is the first real test of candidate for the Presidency. However, it seemed to me this year news outlets went way overboard with coverage of an event that has little to say by way of who the rest of the country will choose as their candidates. Take a look at this clip of CNN coverage last night and see if you get the same vibe, almost that they were trying to sell democracy to us, I got.

Entrance polls? Give me a break. Entrance polls for the Iowa Caucus? Unbelievable.