The economic ship in this country has sailed long ago. As far as the rats go, they have left just enough food crumbs, swepted from the table of plenty, to keep the masses fighting between themselves over the few remaining morsels.

Susan Collins could be called obtuse,to be kind.

Yeah, Thom I've seen similar in the animal kingdom too, though I have to admit that in my experience it was more of an Alpha Cat expressing his dominance in the pride. I'm guessing that in the animal kingdom, there is no real gray zone between heterosexuality and homosexuality, it just is.

To Mrs Haggard: "De Nile ain't just a river in Egypt, honey!"

lol Mrs Haggard stayed for the dough - those wretched people are such HYPOCRITES!

Thanks Nels. I have always been especially fond of the Irish. Fun, generous, and creative and often retarded! (In this new and laudable meaning)

BTW DDay, if you do look them over and find any of those useful, feel free to present them to your RATPAC.

Fine. I can't include a link to it, so I'll just copy my entire blog post in:

There are two major ways of electing legislators. In America, we have the single-member district (SMD), a winner-takes-all election in which a candidate with 50.1% of the votes gets all the power and a candidate with 49.9% gets none. And it can be worse if there are more than 2 candidates. In many other countries, they use the proportional representation (PR) system, in which the people vote only for a party, and the party decides which of its members get to hold office.

SMD means that a large part of a district's population--possibly even a majority--has a "representative" that, while representing them geographically, doesn't represent them ideologically. This may be worse in their opinion than having an empty seat in the legislature, because their representative knows their issues and can propose legislation to do exactly the wrong thing about those issues. And there's no guarantee that the ideological proportions in the legislature as a whole will reflect the populace as a whole.

PR means that while everyone gets an ideological representative, there is no requirement for a fair geographical distribution of the seated legislators. So while a voter's favorite party may reflect his values, they may never understand his issues. And it provides incentive for the politicians to toe the party line to get higher on the party list. They can't act as individuals. You may as well just give the party the votes and not bother seating any humans. Let the majority party (or coalition) decide what it wants and then let them have it without debate.

There is a third way. Keep the districting for the geographical representation, but let the candidates be given proportional power. In each district, give out a minimum of 5 votes to the candidates, proportionately to the percentage of the popular vote each receives. Then the Democrats get a Democrat and the Republicans get a Republican, both from where they live. And there's room for other parties without the "divide and conquer" effect of vote stealing. And because it's proportional, the politicians get only as much power as the people choose to give them. Especially if abstentions of registered voters count as "none of the above".

The biggest possible drawback with the multi-member district system (MMD) is that, as hard as it is now to unseat a legislator, it would be much more difficult when he needs only one fifth as many votes to stay in office. MMD begs for term limits. Normally, I'm against term limits for two reasons. One is that we have de facto term limits in the form of elections, but, as I said, that would no longer be effective. The other is the great loss of expertise caused by instituting term limits. If legislators are limited to, say, 6 terms, you're looking at a turnover of over 16% with every election. But when the limit is instituted, it forces a much bigger turnover somewhere along the line as those who were elected before the limits were enacted--those who know how to run the place--get booted out.

With MMD, there is the opportunity to make instituting term limits less disruptive. By basing each member's limit on his number of votes in the legislature, even the old guard would get booted out in phases, with the less popular leaving sooner. Now for the math: Given 5 votes per district, I would say that the point at which a legislator becomes ineligible for reelection should be when the number of terms he has served (including the current one) is greater than 2 times the number of votes he currently has. Thus someone that can't get more than one vote cannot last more than 3 terms; two votes, 5 terms; etc. Very few politicians could get more than three votes consistently, and therefore, there would be few legislators that last more than 7 terms. And those few should be the good ones, given their popularity with the people.

Giving the votes to the candidates according to the Sainte-Lague Method is the way to make sure the process is proportional and fair (avoiding the Alabama Paradox).

mathboy, I've had the same problem from time to time, its as though this blog won't allow some words through... the strange thing is, as far as I can tell the words are innocuous though. I've found if I just re-worded my comment it would go through.

Sure, now it works, but I can't get the comment I want to make to show up.

"Better a Retard, than a Rahmtard" :-)