October 16, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH




IMPEACH CHENEY


POPULAR VOTE FOR PRESIDENT

The 2000 presidential election was ample proof that the Electoral College system designed by the Founding Fathers should be discarded. The Electoral College allows the candidate with fewer votes to win the presidency, which is an outrage in a democracy. The Electoral College has its defenders, such as conservative columnist George Will, but we're in the twenty-first century and we should bring our presidential elections into contemporary times. This column by Jonathan Chait is at www.latimes.com:

Most people instinctively, and correctly, believe that the candidate who gets the most votes should win the election. The majoritarian principle may not be so strong that it overrides any other consideration imaginable, but it's pretty strong. If you're going to have a system that allows the candidate who finishes second in the voting to win the election, you ought to have some pretty strong reasons for doing it.

So why should we occasionally let the second-place vote-getter win? Speaking against the popular-vote bill last month, California Senate Minority Leader Dick Ackerman (R-Irvine) warned that if we had a popular vote, "every candidate would be camped in L.A. and New York City, and they'd forget about the rest of the country."

BUSH IGNORED NORTH KOREA

When George W. Bush started his "axis of evil" rhetoric he put particular emphasis on Iraq. Saddam Hussein was dangerous, you see, because he had or was going to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That was the major rationale for attacking Iraq. We know now that the intelligence was fixed and Iraq never presented a threat to the United States. But North Korea, threatened by Bush, has proceeded with development of a nuclear weapons program. In this column Cenk Uygur argues that North Korea is damning proof that weapons of mass destruction was never an issue. The column is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

North Korea is proof positive that the Bush administration never cared about weapons of mass destruction. If that was really their main concern, clearly North Korea would have been their top priority. As it was, North Korea was so low on the priority list that we paid almost no attention to them for six years while they built and tested nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, we invaded a country that had no biological or chemical weapons, let alone even a hint of a nuclear weapons program. Cheney and the rest of the administration looked so far and so wide to find any evidence, questionable or otherwise, to link Iraq to WMD. If they were so concerned about WMD, why didn't they obsess about far, far clearer evidence of WMD in North Korea?