greggerypeccary wrote on Dec 16^th, 2016 at 8:38pm:


Quack Quack Quack.

Quote:


yeah thats right you whiny little beaches... stop being cry baby pissy pants or scowarzenegger is going to rip you a new ass... 

Johnnie wrote on Dec 16^th, 2016 at 8:58pm:


If it looks like a child rapist, talks like a child rapist, and is accused of being a child rapist ... you know the rest.

Why do you love alleged child rapists so much?

I'm curious.

I remember Karnal having a cry when Abbott and Hockey handed down their budget. Now he's all about good credit ratings. Poor Karnal. What a mixed up clown.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Dec 16^th, 2016 at 10:06pm:


Oh God, that was a hoot. We all had a chuckle over that.

The deficit was doubled.

greggerypeccary wrote on Dec 16^th, 2016 at 9:15pm:



Be curious no more.





Now that everybody has discovered that we have an Electoral College and that the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, let's take a quick look at why we have what on the surface appears to be a quirky method of choosing our executive head.

We all remember the Great Compromise, right? That was when at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 two plans of representation were proposed, each with a legitimate argument in favor of it. Virginia, the most populous state, naturally thought a legislature in which states were represented by population was fair. After all, why should the clear majority of the people be effectively thwarted by a small state? The New Jersey delegates, needless to say, saw it differently. Each state should be represented equally. After all, why should a small state be rendered irrelevant by a domineering large state?

So, what to do? A Connecticut delegate, Roger Sherman, seeing the justice of both positions, proposed that both could be done. He wasn't the first to conceive of the idea, but he did manage to persuade the Constitutional Convention to buy into the idea. Thus was born a bicameral (two house) legislature in which there would be a House of Representatives in which states would be represented by population, and a Senate in which states would be represented equally. For a bill to become law requires the approval of both houses.

The Electoral College is an extension of the Great Compromise. As James Madison put it in Federalist # 39, "The votes allotted to them are in a compound ratio, which considers them partly as distinct and coequal societies, partly as unequal members of the same society." This is why each state has a number of electors determined by a simple formula: # of representatives + # of senators = # of electors. This allows for a larger voice for the more populous states, but also prevents the less populous states from being rendered voiceless in choosing a president.

But why a group of electors? Alexander Hamilton put it this way in Federalist # 68, "They [the delegates to the Convention] have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment." In the context of hampering a foreign power from influencing our elections (The Russians! The Russians!), the electors are to be temporarily assigned the task of choosing the president and going home. That they are not in public office nor a permanent institution means they are less likely to be subject to corrupting influences.

In one of my Government classes, we discussed hopeful Oregonians wanting to secede from the Union and perhaps join with California, Washington, and British Columbia to form the new country of Cascadia (apparently they presume Canadians will have the same fervor for secession), and henceforth choose their president strictly by popular vote. One of my students, a freshman, pointed out that if they did, California would dominate all the presidential elections making the votes of the other regions irrelevant. Precisely.