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Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

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Jowie Chen, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford, obtained the records of 2.6 million applications for FEMA disaster assistance in Florida in 2004. (This happened not because the Bush administration made them available voluntarily, but because four Florida newspapers won a Freedom of Information Act suit.) Chen then mapped these applications and the subsequent FEMA grants into counties and precincts, added data on actual weather conditions in these locations, their demographic characteristics, and finally local voting patterns in recent Federal elections. The paper can be found here. The following map shows part of his results.

The above map shows the 26 Florida counties whose residents were eligible to apply for individual FEMA aid after Hurricane Charley. Dixie and Levy counties were declared eligible by Bush, even though both counties were far away from the storm and had calm weather.

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During the primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton had to back away from claims she “ducked sniper fire” in Bosnia in 1996. Mitt Romney found himself having to explain how he “saw my father march with Martin Luther King,” when it turned out his father never marched with the Rev. Mr. King.

The latest embellishments come from the McCain camp. Cindy McCain has repeatedly referred to herself as an “only child.” This week came news that she actually has two half sisters, although apparently she had very little contact with them.

The McCain campaign had also put out the story that Mother Teresa “convinced” Cindy to bring home two orphans from Bangladesh in 1991.

Mrs. McCain, it turns out, never met Mother Teresa on that trip. (Once contacted by the Monitor, the campaign revised the story on its website.)

Such exaggerations may simply be the product of a faulty memory or a desire to be “better” than one is in a political culture that requires larger-than-life idols. But with the advent of the fact-checking obsessed blogosphere – and a media racing to keep up – such self-aggrandizement doesn’t last as long as it once did.

Remember this post from just before I went on vacation?

Well, here’s another production:

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As part of the research process for an academic paper on wine awards, Robin Goldstein submitted an application for Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence using a fake restaurant and a subpar wine list.

I named the restaurant “Osteria L’Intrepido” (a play on the name of a restaurant guide series that I founded, Fearless Critic). I submitted the fee ($250), a cover letter, a copy of the restaurant’s menu (a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes), and a wine list. Osteria L’Intrepido won the Award of Excellence, as published in print in the August 2008 issue of Wine Spectator.

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If everything in our lives were afforded the design attention that my toothbrush has, we would sit in chairs that floated while tickling our troubled backs, have tables that yielded at our aching elbows while remaining firm on top, walk on floors that tingled like active sand, and sleep on pillows that would never allow our ears to flatten against our heads.

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Presidential candidate John McCain appeared at a town hall meeting in New Mexico today. And, for some reason, tacitly endorsed the draft.

It all went down when an audience member turned the topic toward veteran’s rights and said, quite astoundingly, “If we don’t reenact the draft I don’t think we will have anyone to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell.”

To this McCain replied, “Ma’am let me say that I don’t disagree with anything you said and thank you and I am grateful for your support of all of our veterans.”

I guess he’s not really counting on the youth vote anyway….