If Romney becomes leader of the republican party?

[_sock puppet]

Can't imagine how articles like this will be good for the church.

http://www.westword.com/2011-11-03/news ... em-or-not/

Best line from the story:

But isn't Brigham Young a football team?

No. It's actually a college that saw fleeting fame after discovering that Samoans were good at football. Then the Samoans realized that Mormons don't drink, which meant that dorm parties were totally lame. They all transferred to USC.

So much for future recruitment efforts to BYU football. Thanks, Mitt!

[_honorentheos]

Religious beliefs, particularly the dominant Western varieties, take faith in the face of counter evidence - or else they wouldn't require faith, right?

Wrong. Again.

I suppose if a person is prone to consider unfounded confabulation as a solid basis for one's beliefs as opposed to accepting they are founded on something unseen or evidenced then maybe you'd have a point. That said, I can't recall you coming out on the winning side of anything we've discussed to date.

Anyway, it's a distraction from the broader post regarding the evangelical right's dislike of the Mormon Romney being more specific than the secular left's dislike of religion in politics in general.

[_moksha]

The group that holds the most antipathy towards Mormons is the seclular left. The Bill Maher types.

My guess is that despite how he regards Mormonism, Bill Maher recognizes that Romney has more of what we would hope for in the President of the United States, such as not being a lunk head and embarrassment-waiting-to-happen that seems to plague all the other Republican candidates (with the exception of Jon Huntsman). There is also less chance that the Mormon candidates would be tools of the Tea Party.

[_EAllusion]

Interesting that the PollyGraph linked shows the predictability of Obama's 2012 re-election having been 53% when it began in April, oscillating and reaching a high in early June just above 54%, and having taken a fairly steady downward trend since then to 50.2% today.

What that graph shows is a projection of the Republican/Democrat share of the two-party vote. Theoretically a 3rd party could alter odds of victory despite the graph itself being accurate. The closer and closer you get to election day, the more accurate that graph gets (to the point of frightening accuracy by the end.)

There are a variety of predictive techniques that this system melds. But, there's actually a pattern to how effective each technique is depending on where you are in an election cycle. They're all very accurate within a certain margin of error. Right now, index models are the most predictive. In a few months, econometric models will overtake them in that category (within a few points). That will be closely followed by market betting and finally sophisticated extrapolation from polling (what Nate Silver does at 538). By hedging these models in the right proportion against one another, you get the best political forecasting.

Right now, the model predicts a very narrow Obama victory of the two-party vote.