Via Bo Cowgill of Google, via Foreign Policy, John McCain:

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They would do anything to sell politics, these days.

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Foreign Policy:

It&#8217-s a clever marketing ploy by team McCain, but why stop there? Why not have the candidate take positions in predictions markets such as Intrade? Wouldn&#8217-t we rather know how prescient Senator McCain is about the odds of bird flu striking the United States by the end of September, the chances Pervez Musharraf will step down as Pakistan&#8217-s president anytime soon, or the likelihood of a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians by January 2009? Put your money where your mouth is, senator.

InTrade-TradeSports and BetFair-TradeFair should let traders opt to make public their positions, and they should create dynamic prediction registries and leagues.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

• Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
• Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
• Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
• Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
• One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
• BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
• Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.