ELECTORAL VOTE TALLY: BUSH 295, KERRY 243 — which, reportedly, represents a widening of the gap in Bush’s favor from last week. Go figure.

UPDATE: Hmm. Reader Daniel Cohen notes that the gap has widened since September 30, but narrowed since September 28. He also writes: “In addition, starting today, the site changed the way the state polls are used. instead of always using the latest polls, he is now using an average of the three most recent polls… so data starting today can’t be compared to the data from previous to today.”

True — here are the changes, which I hadn’t noticed. Meanwhile, though, this tally from Tripias seems to agree with the above state-by-state scoring. And so does this one. I have no idea how reliable this stuff is, but it’s interesting that it’s not really in accordance with the general sentiment regarding the polls.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s Larry Sabato’s page, which calls it Bush 284, Kerry 254. I have to say that I remain skeptical of all of this stuff, and think that Daniel Moore’s observation is on-target:

I suspect that polls are interesting and somewhat useful for us to follow the election by (though I tend to only put stock in them in that I can brag to friends), but I suspect that the best way to tell if Kerry picked anything up from the debate is if he starts spending money in any of those swing states that he had pulled ads from.

Good point. Anybody know how that’s going?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that Kerry is abandoning Virginia and putting the resources to work in Wisconsin and Minnesota, which I would have thought should have been fairly safe states for him.

MORE: Stephen Green calls it 295 Bush, 243 Kerry.

And there’s even a contest, for money.

I’M NOT A BIG ECONO-BLOGGER, but the Fannie Mae scandal seems to be falling through the cracks. At least, judging by this it’s not getting the attention it deserves:

For years, mortgage giant Fannie Mae has produced smoothly growing earnings. And for years, observers have wondered how Fannie could manage its inherently risky portfolio without a whiff of volatility. Now, thanks to Fannie’s regulator, we know the answer. The company was cooking the books. Big time.

We’ve looked closely at the 211-page report issued by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (Ofheo), and the details are more troubling than even the recent headlines. The magnitude of Fannie’s machinations is stunning, and in two key areas in particular they deserve to be better understood. By improperly delaying the recognition of income, it created a cookie jar of reserves. And by improperly classifying certain derivatives, it was able to spread out losses over many years instead of recognizing them immediately. . . .

Fannie Mae isn’t an ordinary company and this isn’t a run-of-the-mill accounting scandal. The U.S. government had no financial stake in the failure of Enron or WorldCom. But because of Fannie’s implicit subsidy from the federal government, taxpayers are on the hook if its capital cushion is insufficient to absorb big losses. Private profit, public risk.

Indeed.

UPDATE: More on problems with Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, here. Apparently people have been warning of this for a while.

GLOBAL TEST UPDATE: Tom Maguire has the score.

ALAN BOYLE HAS A REPORT on the successful X-Prize launch today. There’s video, too.

LAWYER sworn into the Iowa Bar while in Baghdad, via videoconference hookup. Kinda cool.

GUNS AND GAYS: It’s often struck me that opposition to gay rights, and opposition to gun ownership, have a lot in common. Most people opposed to each are concerned as much with symbolism as with practical effects (you often hear comments prefaced with “I don’t want to live in a country where people are allowed to do that”) and it seems more an aspect of culture war than anything else.

Personally, I’d be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons. The Nashville Tennessean feels otherwise.

But here’s a question. We’re often told that Congressional efforts to repeal the D.C. gun ban are an affront to D.C. citizens’ right to self-rule. (See this post by Andrew Sullivan.) But those efforts are in support of an explicit Constitutional right to keep and bear arms — and since D.C. isn’t a state, there’s none of the usual argument about whether the Second Amendment should apply to its efforts or not.

So would a Congressional effort to overturn state bans on gay marriage in support of an unenumerated right to marry constitute a similar affront to local autonomy? I’m just, you know, asking. . . .

UPDATE: A law student reader from Yale (or at least one with a Yale email address) emails:

I’m in the midst of a Criminal Law class and my professor is very much into the “expressive” theory of law. He makes the very same point you do in the guns and gays post, but brings up several other examples as well, including “hate-crimes” legislation (“we don’t want to live in a place where we don’t adequately protect oppressed minorities”), partial birth abortion bans they only affect some minuscule percentage of all abortions, so it’s unlikely that the motivation is to save lives), or any other example where people are rabidly for or against something despite evidence that laws will have very little effect on the behavior in question.

InstaPundit — enhancing law school experiences since 2001!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Gay gunblogger Jeff Soyer has thoughts here. I should note, for those who haven’t been reading InstaPundit long, that I have no problem with unenumerated rights. I do, however, find it odd that they so often seem to receive more judicial (and interest-group) solicitude than do rights explicitly enumerated in constitutions.

SPACESHIP ONE has reached the necessary altitude, and if it lands safely in a few minutes it will be the X-Prize winner, according to Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize foundation on Fox News just now. Diamandis: “We’re all the winners. . . . We’re all getting a chance to go.” Let’s hope so.

UPDATE: A successful landing! Reportedly, other teams in the competition plan to launch anyway — and the planned “X-Prize Cup” series of launches in New Mexico will encourage further efforts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Note that this is the Sputnik anniversary.

ALPHECCA’S weekly roundup of gun bias in the media is up.

RAND SIMBERG IS LIVEBLOGGING THE SPACESHIPONE X-PRIZE FLIGHT and correcting the TV talking-heads as he goes.

Why doesn’t someone put him on TV?

ECONO-BLOGGIVERSARY: The 52d weekly Carnival of the Capitalists is up, featuring business and economic blog posts from all over. If you’ve been skipping these links in the past, why not check it out? Diversity in blog-reading is good.

IN THE MAIL: Well, actually they were in my mailbox at the office when I went in on Sunday, but they probably came earlier. First, Scott Ott’s new book, Axis of Weasels, and second, the DVD of Fahrenhype 911, the documentary about Michael Moore’s rather loose approach to the truth.

A QUAGMIRE IN HAITI: “Peacekeepers won’t solve Haiti’s problems. A solution will have to go a lot deeper.”

SUCCESS IN SAMARRA: But see this earlier post for a cautionary note about follow-through.

MORE GOOD NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN, from the BBC’s John Simpson:

Under the Taliban, you used to be awakened just before dawn by the howling of wild dogs. Today it’s the racket of bulldozers. Kabul is undergoing a building boom, and in a city mostly composed of single-storey, flat-roof buildings it really shows.

Three years after the Taliban were chased out, Kabul has returned to the real world. The streets are jammed with cars, the shops are full of goods. Last year Afghanistan’s economy grew by 30 per cent. The weirdest thing about Kabul under the Taliban used to be its unnatural silence. Now it’s as noisy as anywhere on earth.

I thought it was supposed to be a hopeless quagmire. . . .

UPDATE: Historical perspective. Heh.

MORE ON DOUBLE STANDARDS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Sigh.

DARFUR UPDATE: More news here, plus talk of an international boycott of Chinese products.

BIG MEDIA CIRCLING THE WAGONS? Here’s a Washington Post puff piece on Mary Mapes, the RatherGate CBS producer who put together a story based on obviously forged documents in the hopes of swinging the election for Kerry. Only the Post piece is rather light on the political-manipulation angle, preferring to tell us that according to friends she’s “‘funny,’ ‘smart’ and ‘very talented.'”

You’ll have to go elsewhere to learn that the talent doesn’t seem to extend to journalism:

Former employees of KIRO, the CBS affiliate in Seattle where Ms. Mapes got her start in the 1980s, agree. Some told me that the seeds of CBS’s current troubles may have been planted more than 15 years ago when Ms. Mapes was a hard-charging producer at KIRO. Before she left Seattle to become a producer at Mr. Rather’s “CBS Evening News,” Ms. Mapes produced a sensational report on a killing of a drug suspect by police that rested on the shoulders of an unreliable source whose story collapsed under cross-examination. Sound familiar?

Former colleagues of Ms. Mapes agree that she was a passionate practitioner of advocacy journalism. “She went into journalism to change society,” says former KIRO anchorwoman Susan Hutchison. “She always was very, very cause-oriented.” Lou Guzzo, a former KIRO news commentator who served as counselor to the late Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, a Democrat, says advocates in journalism are fine, “but if you’re as liberal and activist as Mary and work on the news rather than the opinion side, it creates problems.”

Yes, it does.

UPDATE: Related thoughts on journalists as activists.