Take the state of Alaska, for example.

“Hey, indictment isn’t conviction.”

“84 is the new 50.”

“People have been voting for Ted for 40 years and their inclination is to keep doing it,” Dave Cuddy, a former state lawmaker who finished a distant second to Mr. Stevens, said in a phone interview several hours before the polls closed.

We’ve all been there.

I used to LOVE John McCain. The heroic, principled maverick who did what he wanted to because he thought it was the right thing at the risk of losing personal power.

Right?

Well, maybe it was all a figment of my imagination. That image dissolved when I read that one of McCain’s primary differentiators to Bush – his fiscal policies – had eroded.

So I was forced with a painful, wrenching decision:

OPTION #1: Stay embroiled in the past….the facade…the delusion…that he would do the right thing, regardless of partisan power plays. That reality felt SO good. It let me believe what he said. It enabled me to vote with conviction. Gave me a glimmer of hope in the human race.

OPTION #2: Receive the new data. Recreate the model. Rewrite history.

Sigh. Yeah….

Find/Replace!

The U.S.’ sudden interest in Polish security is the latest illustration of the earlier-cited study about the pscyhology of risk…

That was an obvious reference to the force and ferocity with which Russia rolled into Georgia in recent days, taking the key city of Gori and apparently burning and destroying Georgian military outposts and airfields.