Heavens said to favor McCain

Times Herald-Record

STONE RIDGE — He's losing ground in almost every poll every day. Increasingly, the world's most sophisticated polling and demographic reviews are spewing out reams of up-to-the-minute bad news for Republican John McCain.

But McCain can take comfort from one all-but-forgotten predictive realm: the heavens. A small group of folks who practice the world's oldest form of forecasting decided this past week that the heavens favor John McCain for president.

Nearly a dozen predictive astrologers, members of the local chapter of the National Council for Geocosmic Research, spent more than two hours challenging and discussing each other's predictive assessments of both candidates' chances come November.

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But you didn't need a natal chart to determine that the conclusion the group reached was arrived at reluctantly; most of the astrologers were Barack Obama supporters. But the heavens, they said, are as immune to the vagaries of human opinion and preference as they are immutable in their movements. Divining their meaning, however, isn't always perfectly obvious even to the trained eye, one trained eye said.

Still, group moderator Ira Rubin cautioned that the accuracy of the information used to make the assessment — the candidates' birth charts — was under dispute. Several versions of both candidates' charts have surfaced because both men were born outside the continental United States and challenges have been launched to their constitutional right to serve as president.

"There's so much conflicting data, it's difficult to reach a conclusion," Rubin said. But, he added, he'd seen the group's reluctant assessment in McCain's favor echoed in several other similar meetings at other similar gatherings, including a total of about 50 astrologers.