Today while I was at the gym, the only thing on the 5 or so tv's in front of my stair stepper machine was news. Lots and lots of news. Usually I would be extraordinarily bored by it, but I thought, "Oh ok I'll just get my topic for my blog tonight." (Actually that was a lie. This is what I should have thought. But I payed attention even if I didn't think it could be research for my blog.) Unfortunately I guess today was a pretty light news day. Here's the few stories that were played over and over, with commentary:
1. Some politician wrote a book. I tended to switch the channel for my earphones whenever this news bit came on, so I don't remember much about it, but something about it was newsworthy. I think something do to with something he wrote about some other politician. I'm interested.
2. Gas prices are rising!!! Oh wait, we already knew that. Hitting $4 a gallon, the prices are causing some to modify their behavior. However, the only behavior modification that people interviewed at the pumps were doing appeared to be filling their tanks up 3/4 full ($75) as opposed to all the way ($100). Sounds like cheating a bit to me. Maybe a better option would be not driving as much?
3. The polygamist kids are all going back to their parents. Apparently there was no reason to take prepubescent kids as they weren't at risk to be child brides, etc. The state was claiming that they couldn't possibly return the kids to their parents because they don't know which ones go to which parents, but the parents say that's ridiculous because the state was allowing visitation between specific parents and children. The pundits want you to know that this isn't necessarily the end of it because Texas has 10 days to sort everything out.
4. Hillary Clinton just might possibly be hurting the Democratic Party by remaining in the race this far, when it is pretty much mathematically impossible for her to get the nomination. One pundit did come up with a way in which she might be able to claim that actually she might still make it, but I don't even remember it because it involved a lot of if's. And I mean a lot.
5. The DC policemen shot another dog. Seriously, guys, stop it.
And that's the news for today folks. I guess every day can't be newsworthy, though the stations still have space to fill. I wonder what happens on slow news days in the stations. "Alright, guys, now, talk really slow and make a lot of useless comments!" Maybe I should give them a break. But where's the fun in passively accepting the news? Isn't this what blogs are all about?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
When is it going to end?
So I was having trouble deciding what to write about for this first post, until my sister told me that Clinton won in Kentucky ("trounced" Obama, according to the Post), and Obama is fewer than 100 delegates away from winning the nomination. So I've decided I'm going to focus on this, as well as the Electoral College in general. Sorry if it becomes too much of a rant.
Here's what I think. The entire nation should vote on the same day. Novel idea, no? It makes no sense to me that some people should vote in January, and then people are still voting now, and the rest of the voting doesn't happen until June 3rd. The people at the end have no say in who their choices are because the multitude of candidates that were available to the early voters has slimmed down to two due to financial difficulties, lack of media attention, etc. I think Europe has a better idea. If I'm correct, the most of the European countries that have a system similar to ours do their elections in a much shorter time span. Less time spent campaigning means less money wasted and more time that politicians can spend doing their jobs. I remember reading an article a while ago about how Europeans think it's totally random that we spend so much time and money on campaigning and the election process. (By the way, "random" is just a word that I overuse, and use in contexts that don't necessarily fit the conventional definition. Don't be confused by it - I don't mean "by chance", just like..."stupid".) It's true that our country is very large and has a lot of people, but I think we can handle shortening our election process. It doesn't need to be oversized like 2/3 of our adults, or our waste production, or our relative percentage of resource consumption.
Also, I know it's all been said before, but the whole Electoral College is sooo out of date and not correct for our situation. I understand the reasons why the Founding Fathers established the setup (stupid Americans didn't really know what was going on and couldn't be trusted to elect a good president), and why the system has remained (it takes an amendment - no easy task, plus politicians don't like to change much and possibly it helps them as is? I'm forgetting...), but I still think something needs to be done about it. The American people as a whole are so much less ignorant than they were at the time of the creation of the Electoral College (you can say what you want, but people can't help but be better informed with all the technology and forms of communication available to them). People are getting much better educations now, and just generally should be trusted to elect a president.
Here's what I think. The entire nation should vote on the same day. Novel idea, no? It makes no sense to me that some people should vote in January, and then people are still voting now, and the rest of the voting doesn't happen until June 3rd. The people at the end have no say in who their choices are because the multitude of candidates that were available to the early voters has slimmed down to two due to financial difficulties, lack of media attention, etc. I think Europe has a better idea. If I'm correct, the most of the European countries that have a system similar to ours do their elections in a much shorter time span. Less time spent campaigning means less money wasted and more time that politicians can spend doing their jobs. I remember reading an article a while ago about how Europeans think it's totally random that we spend so much time and money on campaigning and the election process. (By the way, "random" is just a word that I overuse, and use in contexts that don't necessarily fit the conventional definition. Don't be confused by it - I don't mean "by chance", just like..."stupid".) It's true that our country is very large and has a lot of people, but I think we can handle shortening our election process. It doesn't need to be oversized like 2/3 of our adults, or our waste production, or our relative percentage of resource consumption.
Also, I know it's all been said before, but the whole Electoral College is sooo out of date and not correct for our situation. I understand the reasons why the Founding Fathers established the setup (stupid Americans didn't really know what was going on and couldn't be trusted to elect a good president), and why the system has remained (it takes an amendment - no easy task, plus politicians don't like to change much and possibly it helps them as is? I'm forgetting...), but I still think something needs to be done about it. The American people as a whole are so much less ignorant than they were at the time of the creation of the Electoral College (you can say what you want, but people can't help but be better informed with all the technology and forms of communication available to them). People are getting much better educations now, and just generally should be trusted to elect a president.
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