Two weeks ago Fox News, in reference to Rachel Maddow's "teabagging" jokes, said her MSNBC show was like Beavis and Butthead. Last night she had number-wizard Nate Silver on. Maybe it's just us.

What gay activists say when they hope no one's listening: Winning same-sex marriage rights is just a matter of waiting for old people to die. Here's a map of which states will go gay next.

Uber-pollster Nate Silver is moving to New York, from Chicago, thus becoming even more like Malcolm Gladwell. But he's not relocating to become a guru to the masses. His precious statistics want the move.

Penélope Cruz's Oscar victory may have been a great moment for Spain, but it was a terrible tragedy for America because it has forced statistician Nate Silver to break up with his greatest love: numbers.

Penelope Cruz busts Nate Silver's picks in just 18 minutes

Superstar statistician Nate Silver has used data upon data to accurately forecast some of baseball's and politics' most complex developments. So how to follow up the election? How else: by being wrong at the Oscars.

Hey, America's #1 numbers whiz Nate Silver has already figured out who will win all the Oscars! Thanks for spoiling the "female Super Bowl," Nate, you misogynist. Click through to see the future of cinema:

Al Franken was just certified the winner of the Minnesota Senate recount! Of course that race will still never ever be decided, Nate Silver be damned.

Despite losing the support of the Lizard People, comedic glasses-adjuster Al Franken has suddenly taken a lead in the perpetual Minnesota Senate race. This recount is exciting!

FiveThirtyEight.com: "'We think when it's all said and done Martin will lose by around 10 points." Kaus: "The actual margin is looking more like 14 points."

Arianna Huffington's thick Greek accent is usually a social asset. It adds spice to a televised panel discussion, and on the party circuit encourages a conversation partner to lean in intimately to understand the former socialite's words. But give the internet publisher her own hourlong TV show, as with her guest-hosting stint tonight on the Rachel Maddow Show, and the accent becomes a liability, like a single seasoning taking over a dish. "You can't understand a word she says and she even makes my cat get irritated," one tipster wrote 20 minutes into the program.

Our friend Nate Silver is already making canny career moves! The baseball stat superfan-turned political pollster blew everybody's mind by calling the presidential election results down to a tenth of a percent. We advised him to pursue a career in corporate consulting in order to become a wealthy power player who works for the forces of good. Well he didn't start "Silver Consulting" just yet, but he is positioning himself to become the next Malcolm Gladwell-esque overpaid business idea guru. Just as good!: The Observer breaks the news that you will soon be able to buy Nate's book(s)!

♦ Peter Chernin, Rupert Murdoch's right-hand at News Corp., may be planning to depart the company in the near future. [LAT]
♦ 60 Minutes has snagged the first interview with Barack Obama. [THR]
♦ WWD has a roundup of how magazines will fare overall in 2008. Most of the news is depressing, yes, but there are a couple of bright spots: Elle and Men's Journal reported 3 percent increases in ad pages. [WWD]
♦ You knew this one was coming: Political statistics star Nate Silver is reportedly shopping a pair of books to publishers. [NYO]

The world belongs to Nate Silver! Briefly. Silver, the number-crunching baseball stat geek who decided to become a political poll-cruncher in his spare time and only turned out to be the most freakishly accurate election predictor ever, is now the toast of the media, Obamaphiles, and stat nerds alike. The Times has even weighed in now, several months behind the curve! Now is your chance to capitalize, Nate; screw this up and you'll soon return to the depths of nerd-only notoriety. After the jump, our professional advice to Nate about building his entire future in five easy steps—five being a number that statistics show gets a lot of page views!: 1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap. 2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too! 3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card. 4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich. 5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope. [Pic via Newsweek]

In case you didn't obsessively compare election results to his site in real time, it's worth noting that baseball stat whiz Nate Silver wholly justified his gushing press and nailed the popular vote. His prediction: 52.3 percent Obama, 46.3 percent McCain. Actuals: 52.4 percent Obama, 46.3 percent McCain. Within a tenth of a percent, bitches! Granted, there are a couple of million votes yet uncounted, but Silver has already extrapolated how those will play out, and he's still super-close. Unless you want to step to his stats?? Thought so. Silver may grow fabulously wealthy applying his battle-tested techniques to other realms, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Who will go down as one of the biggest winners of Election '08? (Not including Barack Obama, of course.) That would be Nate Silver, the obscure baseball statistician who is now the nerderrific numbers-man behind the polling data website FiveThirtyEight.com. If you can't watch a cable news show or read a newspaper or magazine without hearing or reading Silver's name, it's not your imagination. Silver was mentioned in the news 120 times during 2007. In the last seven days alone? His name has appeared in 267 major magazines, newspapers and websites. Now he just has to hope his methodology pans out—he's predicting 344 electoral votes for Obama and 193 for McCain—and he can look forward to many more hedge fund consulting gigs and a steady stream of cushy offers from cable networks.

Gawker's favorite political pollster Nate Silver has come up with the most likely way that the McCain campaign can win a majority of votes in the electoral college. This graphic from the Sunday's New York Post outlines McCain's tiny chance. Click through to hear the bad news. [FiveThirtyEight]

The "voting" bit of the endless 2008 election has not yet happened, but honestly the winner of that particular contest is of little concern to anyone but plumbers and unemployed auto workers and ladies who want their precious "abortions." No, from here, two weeks out from Election Day, with Obama suspending his campaign and John McCain abandoning swing states, we can already plainly see who's really come out on top over these last couple months. Media whores! And, you know, media people who we actually like and wouldn't therefore call "whores." After the jump, the five real winners of the 2008 elections.

Nate Silver is the crazy kid who invented PECOTA for Baseball Prospectus and now he's made good in the political prediction world! Can I get a "Woop woop?" Baseball fans? Anybody? Well look, Baseball Prospectus is like The Bible to stat geeks, and PECOTA is like a particularly important passage in that Bible (John 3:16, for example), so the fact that this 30-year-old guy who made it up is suddenly the hottest thing in political polling is unlikely and heartwarming to sports fans and political obsessives alike, to say the least! Nate Silver started writing about how wrong polls were in a little Daily Kos diary, and lo and behold, he ended up predicting the primaries better than anyone! Then all the pros were like, who is this kid? When he revealed himself as a Baseball Prospectus writer, a very thin slice of stat geeks were all like, "ZOMG unbelievably awesome!" Imagine if you found out that Richard Lawson had been selected as the new announcer on Monday Night Football. That's the level of thing that I'm talking about here, people. So of course New York did a big story on this kid, what with his acceptable level of quirk. He's basically the smartest pollster in America now, amazingly. And we'll cut through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and give it to you straight: