Let's suppose you have no opinion about whether the Electoral College is a good system or not. All you care about is this salient feature: it may provide a means of preventing Donald Trump from assuming the Presidency. So, should we try it? There are several distinct questions here, but I’ll first address the question of whether it is legitimate ( Read more... )

With yet another Presidential race yielding a victor who won the Electoral College but lost in the national popular vote, there is again talk about the need to abolish the Electoral College as the system the United States uses to elect its Presidents. There is a contradictory stance I’ve seen: on one hand, people are arguing that we should abolish ( Read more... )

A cautionary tale is in order for those who believe that Trump’s victory was a product of latent or even explicit racism and sexism among the voters who supported him. It concerns the very different modes of communication, cultural narratives, and the very different norms of speaking that apply among people of different cultural and socio-economic ( Read more... )

I haven't posted here since Christmas last year? A shame. I'll have to do something about that. Well, with the election mere hours away, and Dixville Notch already reporting its outcome, there's no time to spare. Without further ado, here are my predictions for the election to come. Maybe if I do a good job here, I can get to be this year's ( Read more... )

Every Christmas, we're plagued with the same basic set of Christmas songs that grow ever more intolerable every year. And they're inescapable. Even if, like me, you don't listen to music radio stations, you hear them in every store, and at many holiday gatherings. But this doesn't mean that no decent Christmas songs exist. You just have to sort ( Read more... )

This was the first of the Presidential debates I've managed to catch in full, although I had to watch it in bits and pieces before finally finishing this (Saturday) morning. Before, I've been content to get commentary after the fact, mainly because my current favorite, Gary Johnson, hasn't been invited to the previous debates. How did I think ( Read more... )

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Here's why this mash-up video works so well. You might think, initially, Slipknot and Justin Bieber? Could they not be more different? Such a mash-up could never succeed as anything other than a novelty! And you would be very wrong indeed ( Read more... )

MARCH 19, 2011 ( Read more... )

Earlier this week, I was thinking about posting a follow-up to my original post explaining the nature of the deadlock between in the Wisconsin Senate. One strategy that I had been thinking about was that the Republicans could put forward a Right-to-Work law - one that would be radical enough to lose the support of 3 or more Republicans. That ( Read more... )

I think the answer is something we'll see in Wisconsin, or perhaps, at least what we are seeing now. For various reasons, I don't think there is any give for either side ( Read more... )