MUDGE’S Musings
Short attention span blogging: Item 1:
Mike Garibaldi Frick: Elect the U.S. President with the Popular Vote – Politics on The Huffington Post
It’s time to elect the President and Vice President of the United States by direct, popular vote.
In addition to being given greater proportionate representation in the Senate, individuals living in states with smaller populations are given more political influence than those people living in larger states. That’s simply undemocratic. Electing the President by popular vote might also increase voter turnout and most certainly would extend the power of third party campaigns.
We’ve looked at this topic previously several times; it won’t go away… Take a look at the full post, and the comments.
[Please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]
MUDGE is beginning to think that the Electoral College can be characterized in the manner that Winston Churchill characterized democracy:
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
The Electoral College is a lousy system, whose latest inadequacies have led this country to an abysmal seven years and counting, but I fear that it may be better than any other system for this country.
Short attention span blogging: Item 2:
Space Race Turns 50 With Sputnik Anniversary
MOSCOW (AP) — When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.
But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age.
And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket, according to Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program.
MUDGE was a kid when Sputnik launched the world into the space age. It’s been a long time, but I dimly remember stepping outside to peer at the city-light polluted sky for something winking up there.
Eerie.
[Please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]
Reflecting years later, one can’t help remember that, not mentioned in this story, in the end the Soviet Union’s captured German World War II rocket scientists (those wonderful folks who brought London the destructive power of the V-1 and V-2) beat the U.S.’s captured German rocket scientists into space. At least the first couple of steps.
It took a visionary John F. Kennedy to define an inspiring goal for our Germans and their mentored U.S. colleagues to focus on, and the U.S. won the war of which Sputnik was the first overt battle.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
They don’t build presidents like that any more.
Speaking of which…
Short attention span blogging: Item 3:
If Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, will he run for president?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Sept. 24, 2007, at 12:00 PM ETI am occasionally asked why it is that so many Europeans display reflexive anti-Americanism, and I force myself to choose from a salad of possible answers. One of these is the resentment that I can remember feeling myself when I lived in England in the 1970s: the sheer brute fact that American voters who knew nothing about Europe (and cared less) could pick a president who had more clout than any of our elected prime ministers could exert. America could change our economic climate by means of the Federal Reserve, could use bases in Britain to forward its policies in Asia or the Middle East, and all the rest of it. Americans could also choose a complete crook like Richard Nixon, or a complete moron like Jimmy Carter, and we still had to watch our local politicians genuflect to the so-called Atlantic alliance.
Love him, hate him, respect him as one (somewhat reluctantly) might, Christopher Hitchens is always interesting.
[Please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]
In this very, very long presidential election season, most anything can happen.
And most anything probably will.
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
Posted by mudge 
Left-handed Complement 