An intelligent man is capable of overcoming problems and difficulties a wise man would have avoided in the first place.
There is only one China
A new level of religious tolerance
Which is worth more, living or just staying alive?
Washington learns from...Florida!
Sniperphobia spreads
Glenn Reynolds on Mars
Make smoking unconstitutional
Pregnant Pigs
Wednesday, October 02, 2002Just learned the Sentinel is publishing my piece on classroom size reductions this Friday.
The only other thing that has made me this angry since 9/11 was Daniel Pearl's murder.
I'm back, now. Did anybody miss me? Thought not.
I like the way Lileks sums up his feelings about Toricelli, democracy and the Senate:
I fear at the end of it all I’ll just wish they put on togas and went back to stabbing each other on the steps. If they’re going to call themselves the Senate, they might as well act like their namesake.
There used to be an interesting way to run elections without worrying about ballot qualification periods, hanging chads and the like. It went something like this:
Each political party chose its candidate by caucuses, smoke-filled rooms, whatever worked best for them. Then on election day, voters who showed up at the polls would get piece of paper listing the offices to be filled and would write in the names of their choices. You could vote for anyone you wanted, as long as you could write their name. Notice, too, the states didn't hold expensive, and often confusing, playoffs primaries on behalf of the parties.
It's great that technology has made elections so much better more entertaining.
Of course, the Toricelli thing wouldn't have been a problem then, anyway, since few senators were chosen by popular election, representing states rather than the people. Once we understood that states don't matter, we fixed that with the seventeenth amendment.