I guess I’m not surprised that, after seeing Barack Obama’s speech last night, that some enterprising folks registered “obama2008.com” and “obama2012.com.”

Damn, he was impressive. The guy could be the first black President, or at least the first serious contender. And obviously I’m not the only one to think so.

Oh, and he wrote the speech himself.

Once again, we see clear, direct, unequivocal evidence that pure e-voting — that is, without a paper trail — is vulnerable. To quote the lede of the CNN article, “A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County’s first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines….”

We have to have a physical record of every vote cast. We cannot rely on the internal workings of these machines to store our democracy. What will it take to convince people, a burning bush? a star in the east?

Sheesh.

According to Naval Technology, the Italian Navy has a new aircraft carrier being built. Its name: Andrea Doria. No kidding.

If you listen to the evening news, or read your local paper, you get the impression that the 2004 Presidential race is statistically a dead heat. About 51 percent of people polled say they’ll vote for Kerry, and about 49 percent for Bush — with the margin of error, that’s equal.

But that’s not a good indicator at all. We don’t have a straight majority-vote system here, as we saw in 1912 (where Woodrow Wilson got the Electoral College majority with only 42 percent of the popular vote) and again in 2000.

So a nationwide poll showing Bush or Kerry in the lead is meaningless.

Instead, we need to look at the state-by-state polls, and figure out how many electoral votes each candidate is winning.

In other words, Bush has a huge lead in Alabama and Alabama has 9 electoral votes. Kerry has a huge lead in California, and California has 55 votes.

Continue down the line and you find that, as of today, Kerry has a significant lead (i.e., more than just a few points) in states with a total of 229 electoral votes. Bush has a significant lead in states with 186 votes. (270 are needed to win the election).

That’s a heck of a lot different than “the candidates are in a dead heat.”

Two sites worth checking out for polling data are The Electoral Vote Predictor, which looks at the state-by-state numbers to designate each as “Strong,” “Weak,” or “Barely” for Bush or Kerry (it currently predicts Kerry getting 291 electoral votes to Bush’s 237); and RealClearPolitics, which shows the latest numbers from lots of polling companies.

I am very disappointed that, in reporting the ‘capture’ of Bobby Fischer, no newspaper used the headline “Search Over for Bobby Fischer.”

I just had to say that.