Image text: Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.

Senator Grayton is a fictional name, made up for this comic, which is a bit surprising to me as the names used in xkcd are usually references to something.

I'll see if I can do a line on each of the issues that Grayton fictionally supports:

Tax Breaks to Drunk Drivers - Grayton proposed to give money back on their taxes for people who have been convicted of a DUI or DWI.  Driving Under the Influence or Driving While Intoxicated

Predator Drones and the War on Christmas - The War on Christmas is a not a real war, it is simply Christians who believe that non-Christians are trying to get rid of Christmas trees, Christmas music and the endless barrage of Christmas-themed nonsense we get from Thanksgiving to Christmas.  I don't know how his support would go down if he supported unmanned Predator Drones to destroy people who hate Christmas, knowing America.  (Jokes!)

College Scholarships to Sexually Active Teens - Not sure how they would test for this on the scholarship application, but it is funny none the less.

Illegal Immigrants Who Murder - This is an argument for immigration, but only if they make "room" and possibly an open job for themselves by getting rid of another person.  This one is pretty evil.

Income Tax Based on Penis Size - Wow, this one would never pass!

On To the Names:

Tracy Morgan is an actor in the TV Show 30 Rock, who plays Tracy Jordan, he is known for his outlandish statements on politics and everything else in the world.  He has been reprimanded for controversial comments on homosexuals and Sarah Palin (in separate incidents).

Josh Wilkes Booth is the person who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  He was a sympathizer with the Confederate cause and was for slavery and all its trappings.

Time Cube Guy is Gene Ray, also known as Otis E. Ray.  He has a website known as Time Cube (Thanks Wikipedia) where he sets out his personal model of reality, which he calls Time Cube. He suggests that all of modern physics is wrong, in addition to claiming religion to be evil, specifically Christianity, and the idea of family is poisoning children.

Ok, finally to the numbers:

If his polling is at 20% and drops by 19%, without specifying percentage points, that means that his support has only dropped 1% (EDIT: I'm bad at math.  Thanks commentors, it is 3.8% percentage points), because 19% of 20% is only 1% 3.8%.  That would mean after all his outrageous statements, his support dropped from 20% to 16.2%.  However, if they had said his 20% polling dropped 19% (removed percentage sign for redundancy, thanks again commentors) percentage points, that would mean his support has dropped to 1%.  Therefore, the distinction is important.

Image text: The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.

Missed Connections is a page on Craigslist in which people who saw each other briefly and want to reconnect attempt to find each other again.  If I was to hazard a guess, I would imagine it works .0001% of the time.  In the case of missed connections, one person describes themselves "Me" and describes the other person "You" in order to try to reconnect.

The first one is a goofy joke as far as I can tell.

The second one is not a reference to anything I can find, anyone know?

The third one is a reference to networking.  UDP stands for User Datagram Protcol.  UDP packets don't use handshaking to verify they have contacted the correct host, so they can get lost or confused.  The Cisco router location is just a reference to a block of IP addresses.  Cisco is a company that makes networking equipment.  This is a play on a missed connection for someone who was lost and asked for directions.

The fourth one seems to be a joke as well.  For those outside of the US (or those inside as well), Nancy Pelosi is a member of the US House of Representatives.  The (D-CA) is a common notation for politicians which notates party (D for Democrat) and state (CA for California).

The fifth seems to be a reference to Randall's upcoming nuptials?

The sixth is a reference to how the Google Street view van was not only recording photos of the street in 360 degrees, it was also collecting data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.  The comic takes this to the next level, that the Google Street View van also scans what we have in our pockets and does a retinal scan.  In this case, the social security number referenced is the most used SSN of all time.

The last suggested the Babe Ruth, the American baseball slugger of 1914-1935 is actually a Time Lord.  Time Lord is a reference to the popular sci-fi series "Doctor Who" in which The Doctor, who is a Time Lord, uses a TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space to travel through time.

Image text: Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

This comic is a very funny one and needs very little explanation.  Joe Biden is the current Vice President of the USA.  The comic is saying that experiencing anything for a long period of time would make anyone a snobby connoisseur, even pictures of the Vice President eating a sandwich.

Image text: Also in the right quadrant are NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Sharing the top with the internet libertarians are Nate Silver and several politically-active kite designers.

The Nolan Chart (from nolanchart.com) is a visual representation of the political spectrum that measures not only liberal vs conservative tendencies but also libertarian and statist tendencies.  In this comic, it is taken to a different end.  One one side are both Democrats and Republicans and on the other side is baseball fans.  In the typical Nolan Chart, Libertarians are in the top quadrant, but in this one "Internet Libertarians" take the spot because they love the Nolan Charts (that are found online) and have a lot of political opinions.

In the image text, NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers are mentioned because of this diamond-shaped diagram:

Sir Charles Wheatstone was the inventor of the Wheatstone bridge, which is also diamond-shaped.

And lastly, the image text references Nate Silver, who previously worked for Baseball Prospectus and now writes a data-driven political blog called Five Thirty Eight for the New York Times.  He is both a lover of diamond-shaped diagrams and has political opinions.

Image text: Also, if you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars.

Not much to explain here.

Here's the full text of the speech to Rice.

Here's the full text of the 1961 speech to Congress.

Image text: To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

This comic is about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is leaking from one of BP's oil rigs.   Just in case you have been under a rock for weeks or are reading this from the past.

Michael Bay is the director of the Transformers series amongst other movies that are famous for explosions, explosions and even bigger explosions and of course impossible and improbable situations.  Bay has been featured in xkcd before for his potential remake of Harriet the Spy.

James Carville is a CNN political commentator and Louisiana native.  He has already said that the govermental response to the oil spill was "too lax and too slow".

Here's Jeff Masters' blog on Weather Underground and Bruce Schneier's blog.

Image text:  He says this is the year of Linux on the desktop! The world of Windows will fade any moment now!

The image text is a continuation of the comic and an excerpt from Howard Dean's Friendster from 2003.

In the comic, when he says that he is cleaning viruses, the other characters in the comic list off other things from 2003, including Kazaa a P2P filesharing app that was the number 1 source of viruses because of the questionable sources of all of the files on Kazaa.  Additionally, Howard Dean, was popular in 2003 when he was running for president in the Democratic primary before his unfortunate screaming speech which drove him down in the poles and out of the race.  Lastly, there is Friendster, which was extremely popular in 2003 and is still around today, but I'm not sure anyone uses it.

If viruses are so 2003, spyware is so 2010.

Image text: I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

This comic is taking a typical internet argument that the two party system is ruining American politics and taking it to a class president election in a school.

Approval voting is the type of voting in which the voter can vote for as many candidates as you would like. In a way, any candidate you "approve" of.

IRV or Instant - runoff voting is the type of voting in which the voter ranks their choices from 1 on down.

The Bull Moose Party is also known as the Progressive Party and it was formed when Teddy Roosevelt lost the nomination to William Taft.

The idea of the image text is that with the ability to vote for more than one person, that would develop more chances for additional political parties.

Image meta text: My biology grad student friends tell me that different types of alcohol don't actually have different effects. I trust their expertise, not because of the 'biology' part, but because of the 'grad student'.

This comic is a reference to the situation that happened in Cambridge, MA between Harvard professor Henry Gates and a Cambridge police officer.  The officer thought that Gates was breaking into a house, but it turned out that Gates was breaking into his own house.  Heated words were exchanged and President Obama invited both men to the White House to "have a beer" and talk about the incident.

This comic takes that one step further and asks what if there was no beer in the White House that night and instead just tequilla.  Instead of talking about the situation, all the men would end up having a wild night and all end up in jail.  Anecdotal evidence points to the fact that tequilla makes someone wilder than just beers. However, the writer's friends say the opposite of what the cartoon presents.