Bush Asserts Increased Confidence in Gonzales - washingtonpost.com

I seems that lying in the Bush administration is pervasive and pathological. How are we supposed to believe Bush when he professes confidence in Gonzalez? He professed confidence in Rumsfeld, said that he would keep his job, right up to the day he let him go. Gonzalez himself is in trouble because of lying, or being extraordinarily forgetful, just as Scooter Libby was before him. There is a culture of lying, of stretching the limits of "plausible deniability", in Washington, but the Bush administration has taken it to new heights. When steeped in the current political environment, it's hard not to see everyone as liars. I think Floyd Landis is lying, not because I have looked into the cycling scandal very closely, but just because it seems like everyone is lying these days. I can't help thinking that young people awakening to the political world for the first time will look at recent headlines and figure that lying is just the way things get done in Washington, and they will either follow suit or distance themselves from the process as much as possible. As we start looking for a new president, the quality I'm looking for most is credibility. Just give me someone I can believe.

E. J. Dionne Jr. - Bypassing the Electoral College - washingtonpost.com

This is yet another article using the 2000 election results to rationalize abandoning the electoral college system. While I agree that there are problems with the electoral college system, we should be realistic and remember that it is very, very unusual for a candidate to win the popular vote and lose the election. Is it right that it should ever happen? Maybe not, but it is not the biggest problem with our electoral system.

Look again at the 2000 election:
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2000

Ralph Nader got nearly 3 million votes. It's pretty safe to assume that most of the people that voted for Ralph Nader would have preferred Gore to Bush, and that if Nader was not in the election is it likely that Gore would have won the electoral college. Is Nader to blame? No! The problem is that there is no way for someone to vote for a 3rd party candidate while also registering their preference between the major candidates. In fact, there are probably millions more people who would have voted for Nader had they not been forced by our electoral system to forget their first choice and instead choose one of the major candidates. That is an anti-democratic system, and it is a problem in all elections, not just the really close ones.

Before we worry about the electoral college, we need a system that allows people to vote for a 3rd party candidate while still registering their preference between the major candidates. The best way to do that, in my opionion, is to use a preferential voting system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting

Without getting into the muck of run-off elections, that don't really solve the problem anyway, preferential voting systems allow voters to rank candidates in order of preference. So a Nader voter might have ranked Nader #1 and Gore #2. When the votes are counted it is plain to see that the voter prefers Gore to Bush and yet it has also allowed them to select Nader as their first choice.

Instituting preferential voting would not only result in more fair electoral outcomes, but would give 3rd party candidates more of a voice in politics. It is time that we break the stranglehold that the major parties have on politics in this country, and I say that as a member of the Democratic party.

Two competing op-ed articles in the Washington Post today got me thinking. One is for the idea that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays, and one is against:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/16/AR2007031602692.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/16/AR2007031602690.html

Of course this is the epitome of an academic argument, and I shouldn't get too worked up about it. But I have to say that the idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written the Merchant of Venice without having been to Italy is absurd. If the play was bout daily life in Venice, it would be different, but it isn't. It's not hard to imagine that the playwright chose Venice for the local of his play because it would be seen as an exotic and enticing locale to his audience. And remember that a play, especially in Elizabethan times, was not a movie. The sets were sparse and relied heavily on the viewer's imagination. Verisimilitude was not important.

Anyway, this battle of the op-eds pretty much convinced me that there was no cover-up, that Shakespeare's plays were written by none other than the Shakespeare of Stratford. The reason I am so convinced, and the reason that it seems important, is that this invented controversy highlights the tendency of people to see controversy where there is none. I am thinking especially about the scientific non-controversies du jour of evolution and global warming. Those controversies were invented for political reasons as, perhaps, the controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was. The idea that a little known commoner with sparse experience of the high society and far-flung lands of which he wrote could not only write about them, but write more beautifully about them than any other speaker of English may be offensive to some and may prompt them to look for a different, more elaborate explanation. They have a perfect right to do so. But they shouldn't cry foul when others choose to ignore them and look at the facts.

Mainstream Media Is Tuning In to 'Podcasting'

It seems only a matter of time that the technology behind podcasting will replace cable TV. The way people intereact with podcasts is essentially the same as they interact with Tivo -- people like them because they can watch/listen to what they want when they want it. (With portable music players they can also listen wherever they want -- I suspect portable video players will become ubiquitous soon too.) Video podcasting would really be the holy grail of video on-demand technology, giving people access to a huge and ever-widening variety of content. Am I the first to think of this? Of course not! Anyway, speculations that podcasting may be a fad seem strange when the technology has so many great and commercially viable applications.