People who think about these things recognize that senators just don’t become president. The last two sitting senators were Warren Harding (1921) and JFK (1961). Maybe it’s the perceived lack of experience, or maybe it’s the easy access to voting records as fodder for attack ads. For whatever reason, senators don’t become president.

Oh, and neither do representatives; James Garfield (1881) is the only sitting member of the House to be elected president.

Who does? Governors and vice presidents.

So let’s look at the current crop of candidates. (Well, viable ones. The whole list is pretty long.)

On the Dems’ side:

Biden — sitting senator
Clinton — sitting senator
Dodd — sitting senator
Edwards — lawyer (former senator)
Gravel — lecturer
Kucinich — sitting representative
Obama — sitting senator
Richardson — governor (N.M.)

On the Repubs’ side:

Giuliani — lawyer (former mayor)
Huckabee — minister (former governor)
Hunter — sitting representative
Keyes — author
McCain — sitting senator
Paul — sitting representative
Romney — businessman (former governor)
Tancredo — sitting representative
Thompson — actor (former senator)

Which means that, if you’re concerned about the party winning more than the particular candidate, Bill Richardson is your best bet on the Democratic ticket, followed by Edwards and Gravel. On the GOP ticket, Romney is your best bet, followed by Giuliani, Thomson, Huckabee and Keyes.

This is good news for the GOP because there are more non-senators and -representatives on its side. On the other hand, if Richardson gets the Democrat’s nod, history hints he can beat anyone on the Repub ticket.

Thanks to a point-to by Gnomic to one of those choose-the-candidate quizzes, I took the two minutes to fill it out. It spat back the list of candidates ordered by intelligence.

The results are here.

Bottom line: Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd seem to be the smartest of the pack, while Fred Thompson and Tom Tancredo show themselves to be idiots.

My politics used to be middle of the road, but with America having become more polarized than ever thanks to Mr. Uniter-not-Divider, the candidates ended up sorted by party lines.

This isn’t entirely a surprise. The Repubs apparently have only two tools in their toolbox, thus their solution for everything boils down to A) use violence or the threat of it, or B) give tax money to a private corporation to deal with it. (Or C: ignore it.)

I’m smarter and more flexible than that.

Oh, and as for Iraq, I chose “Draw down the U.S. troops and decentralize Iraq by dividing it into regions of separate governments.” Apparently that’s not in anyone’s playbook.

So the Wall Street Journal has a story today, “Ethanol Craze Cools As Doubts Multiply.”

In the span of one growing season, ethanol has gone from panacea to pariah in the eyes of some. The critics, which include industries hurt when the price of corn rises, blame ethanol for pushing up food prices, question its environmental bona fides and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil.

Interesting. Even more so because I said many of these things in USA Today back in 2004. Did anyone listen?

Ethanol is a Bad Thing. It costs too much, environmentally, to produce (in terms of fertilizer and water, for starters). There’s not nearly enough arable land to grow the corn or sugar beets or whatever else would need to replace fossil fuels. And trying to grow a lot has jacked up the price of everything from tacos (hurting the Mexican economy and driving more people here) to beer, as the price of corn rises and pushes up the price of other crops. After all, why plant wheat if corn gets you more money?

I said once that electric cars weren’t a solution to our oil woes because of the dirty means of producing that electricity (coal, for the most part). I was wrong, at least partially.

If we’re going to get ourselves off oil, the way to do it is to move toward electric cars, but to produce that electricity using solar, wind, hydro, geothermal (perhaps my favorite), or some other clean way.

Gasoline was — is — great because it’s so portable; you can get energy into a moving vehicle simply. But we need to get our thinking out of the 19th century, where the only way to power a vehicle is via a liquid fuel in a tank. Those liquid fuels are becoming too costly in terms of cash and the environment.

Electricity is great because there are so many ways to produce it. If we can get ourselves away from burning coal to produce it, we can power our cars cleanly, end to end.

Sears stores’ policy for Web orders is to accept every order, even if the item is not in stock. I learned this a while ago.

The store also has a huge disconnect between its online and offline stores. Order something online that has to be delivered, and if there’s a problem both the local store and the online people will point to the other and claim it’s their problem.

Still, my wife ordered a new microwave oven from Sears. Free shipping. First of all, unless you join the store’s shopping club (whatever it’s called), you can’t track your order. How 1998.

Second, the oven arrived broken. Kaput. We called Sears and they told us to bring it in to the local store.

Hey, Einstein, the whole point of ordering online is to avoid the brick and mortar stores during the Christmas season. (And further, knowing that the offline and online stores have, er, trouble communicating, we’d likely end up billed for the thing even if we did return it.)

After a bit of an argument, they agreed to send a pick-up order in. Of course, they can’t tell us when UPS will actually arrive, so I guess I just leave the thing on the porch or something.

Come see the stupid side of Sears.

It’s via CNN, so you know she’s white.

(Via Fark)

“Sir, about the title of this kids’ cookbook…”

“I don’t have time for this, Jenkins. I’m sure it’s fine.”

“There’s strong, and then there’s Army strong.” So goes the Army’s commercial. It shows what you might expect: Soldiers in various garb in various situations. They climb walls, crawl through foliage, jump from helicopters, and so on.

But in the dozen or so scenes of soldiers in action, not one — not one — showed a desert. There were jungles and fields of grain and prairies, but never a desert scene.

Funny, huh?

“Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” — Rudy Giuliani, 1994

Blogging has been light lately because we decided to take our 1800-someodd square feet of stuff and move it from one perfectly good storage space to another.

In the meantime, thanks to the incomparable Eric Berlin, we have John Scalzi on the creationism museum:

Here’s how to understand the Creation Museum:

First, imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit.

Read it all.

From a scan of Munro Leaf’s My Book to Help America, and oddly apropos today:

Did you get that? Let’s obey. Cheerfully.

Obey.

Obey.

Obey.

The "sequel" to JPEG images — the worldwide standard for photographs — is a bit closer today, now that the Joint Photographic Experts Group has approved using Microsoft’s HD Photo format for the job. That means Microsoft gives up the rights to it, and Windows Media Photo, er, HD Photo JPEG XR becomes the new standard for images.

The new format supports a greater range of colors (CNET has a good article explaining it) and can show more detail in an image. Oh, and it’s supposed to do that with smaller files.

Other image standards, notably JPEG2000 and PNG, have essentially flopped, so it’ll be a while before we’ll see whether JPEG XR catches on.