That should put him over the top

Ridge to Endorse Huntsman - By Katrina Trinko - The Corner - National Review Online: "Tom Ridge, former head of the Department of Homeland Security and Pennsylvania governor, will endorse Jon Huntsman today, reports the New Hampshire Union Leader."

'via Blog this'

Federalism is for chumps

That's the case I make in this week's Scripps Howard column, written in the wake of the Pennsylvania GOP's proposal to change the way the state casts its electoral votes:

When it comes to presidential voting, anybody with a democratic bone in his body knows that the Electoral College is a patently unfair way of electing a president. Eleven years later, the elevation of George W. Bush to the presidency -- even though he lost the popular vote -- rankles mightily.

A pure popular vote would be great, but is unlikely. The Congressional district scheme proposed by Pennsylvania Republicans might actually be the next best thing -- though, oddly, experts calculate it would've given Bush a wider margin of Electoral College victory in 2000 had it been used nationally -- since it somewhat mitigates the abilities of big states to dominate voting: Each district has roughly the same amount of voters, and just the one electoral vote.

But presidential voting rules should be uniform, the same law adopted by all 50 states. That won't happen. Each state gets to decide how it casts its Electoral College votes -- and now we see, thanks to Pennsylvania, that the system lets politicians game the presidential campaign system in favor of their party. The motive here is transparent political hackery.

And it reveals federalism to be a chump's game. To some extent, federalism -- with its emphasis on the states as a counterpart to the national government -- treats the states like quasi-independent nations who govern themselves and just happened to be in alliance, like NATO or the United Nations. That hasn't been functionally true since at least the Civil War. The president is the chief executive of a single big country, not 50 little nations. There's no reason a candidate should face 50 different sets of rules in order to be elected.

We are one country. We have one president. We should have one clear, democratic set of rules for electing that president. We don't. That makes the system vulnerable to corruption and the un-democratic desires of party elites. It's a lousy way to run a country.

Ben starts his take: "On this question, the Constitution is clear: With certain specified exceptions, the states get to say how they run their elections." And that's factually true. But on this question, the Constitution is incorrect to do so.

Joe McGinniss sexually demeans Sarah Palin. Again.

Joe McGinniss is back in the news now that his long-promised book about Sarah Palin is coming out. It apparently contains a revelation—which I'm not linking to—involving Palin's pre-marital sex life, from all the way back in 1987. It's unnecessary and disgusting.

 This, of course, is in keeping with McGinniss' overall leering tone about Palin. It seems he takes every opportunity to cast her in a purely sexual light, a literary-political form of slut-shaming that really has no bearing on our political discourse. I can hear people right now responding with shouts of "hypocrisy!" Since Palin has staked her public persona as being a righteous pro-life Christian, it's only fair to point out that she's got a thing for black guys, right? (Don't think that race isn't part of the titilation here.) I don't think so. There's lots of stuff I did—or didn't do—when I was an unmarried 23-year-old that I wouldn't really want to use in shaping public policy debates. People are complicated, and it's a rare person who always acts in accordance with their publicly stated values. And the truth is, we only rarely hear about the pre-marriage, pre-politics randiness of male politicians—and let's be honest, lots of them were dogs. But Sarah Palin is deserving of more salacious treatment ... why?

 I don't like Sarah Palin. I don't like her politics. But as I've said before: Sarah Palin isn't bad for America because she's a woman or because she's an attractive woman—or even because she was once a sexually active woman. Demeaning her on those counts isn't just sexist and mean-spirited, it also misses the point.

Say, who is backing Yemen's government?

A United Nations report published Tuesday says the Yemeni government has used excessive and deadly force against peaceful demonstrators, killing hundreds and wounding thousands since the beginning of the year.

The report, published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged immediate international action to alleviate a humanitarian crisis and prevent the country from falling into further chaos.

A delegation sent by the office visited Yemen’s three main cities at the end of June, according to the report, and found “an overall situation where many Yemenis peacefully calling for greater freedoms, an end to corruption and respect for rule of law were met with excessive and disproportionate use of lethal force by the state.”

via nytimes.com

The Times goes on to note: "Initially peaceful protests against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is in Saudi Arabia recovering from injuries he sustained in a bombing of his palace, have been overtaken by an increasingly violent power struggle among government forces, tribal militias and other armed groups, including Islamic militants affiliated with Al Qaeda. The government had lost effective control of sizable areas of the country, including parts of major cities, the United Nations report said."

What the Times doesn't note is that the Yemeni government has had major support from the United States in its battle with the rivals. I don't know that there's direct link between US support and the civilian deaths, but America—in the name of fighting terrorism—is helping prop up a regime that kills civilians. That, of course, is the kind of thing that...creates terrorists.

Whatever you do, do NOT raise taxes on the wealthy

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

via nytimes.com

I'm not sure Pennsylvania is a swing state

After all, we haven't actually given our electoral votes to a Republican since 1988. And that was to George HW Bush—who, everybody knows, wasn't really a Republican. If we really were a swing state, I'm pretty sure the state GOP wouldn't be pushing this plan: 

In 2012, after redistricting, Pennsylvania will have 20 electoral votes and 18 congressional districts. Under Pileggi's proposal, each of the districts would elect one presidential elector; the other two would be apportioned on the basis of the popular vote.

Only two other states allocate electoral votes by congressional district, Maine and Nebraska.

Pileggi and other GOP leaders in the legislature, all of whom are expressing support for the effort, argue the proposed new system will more closely reflect the popular will of voters.

And it would! And that's a good thing! Only problem is this is a transparent ploy by Republicans to take electoral votes away from Democrats and give them to Republicans. I can't imagine that the Republican Party in my home state of Kansas, say, would ever back a similar effort in a state that hasn't voted Dem since 1964. Why take the chance of losing one electoral vote for a Republican president?

So I like the idea—a more democratic, "small d" way of allocating electoral votes. But I don't like that it's just happening in Pennsylvania, in a manner designed to disempower Democrats. So do it. But do it nationally. Doing it or not doing it state-by-state is just political hackery under the guise of federalism.

That testosterone study

In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone - NYTimes.com: "Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops."

'via Blog this'

Well. Maybe for those other guys.