Category: Politics

Posted on

Keep Your Religious Hands Off Our Legal Marriage

“The Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman,” people like to regurgitate when they are attacking the concept of same-sex marriage. I could spend my time going over some of the fucked-up shit people believed about marriage in biblical times, and how marriage in those days was basically a transfer of property from father to husband. I won’t bother, because it doesn’t matter what the Bible says about marriage, or what people believe the bible says.

Continue reading “Keep Your Religious Hands Off Our Legal Marriage”
Posted on

The National Popular Vote is the Bad Idea We Need Right Now

For those of you who are not aware of it, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a campaign that means to render the Electoral College impotent and irrelevant. The idea is that states agree to change their election laws with regards to how their electoral votes are awarded during a presidential election. Each state awards its electoral votes to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, regardless of the vote totals for that specific state. For example, if the Republican candidate were to have the most popular votes nationwide, then that candidate would receive California’s electoral votes, even if the Democrat won California. This system only goes into effect once there are enough states on board to give the popular vote winner 270 electoral votes and the election.

Don’t get me wrong, as I have said before, I think the Electoral College is the inflamed appendix of democracy, both useless and dangerous, so I absolutely sympathize with the NPV folks’ desire to short circuit it.

Unfortunately, I also think the National Popular Vote is a bad idea.

Continue reading “The National Popular Vote is the Bad Idea We Need Right Now”
Posted on

The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave?

On his HBO show, Real Time, comedian Bill Maher has repeatedly asked his interview guests about the possibility that, should he lose his bid for re-election in 2020, Donald Trump might refuse to step down as President. By and large, his guests have tended to pooh-pooh the idea as alarmist or paranoid. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr assured Maher that there are institutions that would take care of such an eventuality and forcibly usher the vanquished former president out of the building.

I have to say, and this isn’t often the case, but I’m with Maher on this one, in that I don’t find such reassurances to be, well, reassuring. There may be institutions with that purpose, but exactly how much exercise have they gotten in the last 200-plus years? Is there really a playbook in case a defeated president refuses to relinquish power?

Continue reading “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave?”