Unpresidential Candidates.

I've been itching to write about the presidential race for a while, but I didn't have enough to say about any one candidate. So I'll put it all in one post. Each group is in alphabetical order.

Republicans:
Rudy Giuliani - This guy is a Republican? And since when can someone competent get elected?
John McCain - He learned his lesson in 2000: suck up to the right to get the nomination. That was proof that intra-party politics is still done in back rooms. One problem, the right is in a coma this time. So all he did was destroy his base of independents.
Ron Paul - Gets ALL the attention on the internet (among republicans), and still polls lower than Attila the Hun. I suspect that polling results are also decided in back rooms. Or less than 5% of voters use the internet.
Mitt Romney - 4 more years of stupid.
Fred Thompson - 4 more years of stupid.

Democrats:
Joe Biden - Started his campaign with a racist gaffe. If Obama is the first clean black candidate, which one was dirty? I've got news for you, the brown color is melanin, not dirt.
Hillary Clinton - Why do so many men have such a violent reaction to her? For the very same reason women in management are called ball busting bit**es. The women these men grew up with were submissive. A woman with a dominant personality emasculates them, and reminds them of other women who emasculated them. She will go all the way largely because she has mastered the most important skill for a president: teflon skin.
John Edwards - Typical old fashioned democrat. Panders to anyone with a hand out. Claims to have made a career of fighting insurance companies. So why does he want to force 40 million people to become customers of the insurance companies?
Barack Obama - The guy with the vision. Gets ALL the attention on the internet (among democrats). Proves that being right does not win debates. Hillary, if you do not choose him for your running mate, a lot of voters will be VERY angry with you.

Innocence

I assume you're familiar with the Innocence Project. That's the one where wrongly convicted prisoners are freed after many years because new DNA techniques become available. Many of these people were freed from death row. This, rightfully, makes a lot of people celebrate. But why does noone talk about the elephant in the room.

Let U be the number of cases where DNA evidence does not become available.
Let D be the number of cases where DNA evidence becomes available.
Let E be the number of cases among D where the new DNA evidence exonerates the suspect.

Then we might expect that U * E / D prisoners will serve their full sentences for crimes they didn't commit. If we apply this reasoning to the death penalty, we will find a virtual statistical certainty that we have executed some number of innocent people. We just don't know which ones they are.

In this way, the emergence of a revolutionary type of evidence provides a statistical window onto the health of the justice system in general. Unfortunately, it is a temporary window. 20 years from now, there will be no more cases where there is unanalyzed DNA evidence. And I would argue that a technique this revolutionary is a singular event, and will not be repeated anytime soon. And if the elephant continues to be ignored and the present system is not fixed, then there will be no longer be an easy way to demonstrate it is broken.