Amid the backdrop of soaring oil and gasoline prices, a sharply divided Senate on Wednesday voted to open the ecologically rich Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, delivering a major energy policy win for President Bush.

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I guess that petition I signed in Harvard Square didn’t help.

You can guess how I feel about this. Words cannot express my sadness and fear.

Maybe the government could do more to encourage us to use less oil instead of destroying everything beautiful to get more and more and more to feed us with.

One of the reasons our two-party system is limiting is that it assumes everyone is either socially and financially conservative, or socially and finacially liberal.

What about the socialists who hate gays? What about the big business moguls who are vehemently pro-choice? Why do they have to choose?

Personally, I’m about as liberal as you can get socially, but I’m still on the fence financially. I lean strongly toward the Democratic system, but I can’t say for sure how I feel because I’m not a real member of the country’s financial community. I don’t pay taxes, I’m young enough that social security isn’t even on the radar, and I’ve never had to support myself. Maybe after I get older money will become much more important to me, and I’ll be willing to give up civil rights in favor of lower taxes. HA!

When I was younger I was always confused when people said that the Republican party was for small government. In my experience, they were the ones who were always trying to censor people and legislate morality. That seemed pretty invasive to me. Then someone said the following to me, and it made more sense:

The Republicans won’t touch your money, but they want you to trust them with your soul. The Democrats will take your money and run, but they’ll let you do whatever the hell you want with your soul.

I’d rather be in charge of my soul than my money.

All of this is tongue-half-in-cheek idle speculation. Not to be taken too seriously.

Meet Margaret Spelling, new director of the Education Department. Spelling has told PBS - which produces and airs much of America’s children’s programming - not to air an episode of Postcards from Buster in which Buster the bunny visits Vermont to learn about how to make maple syrup, and meets a child whose parents are a lesbian couple. “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode,” she said. And furthermore, “Congress’s and the department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television.”

Read the full article at Democratic Underground.

Things like this make me so, so afraid.

I don’t want to raise children in a world that is afraid to show them gay couples on TV. I don’t want to have to tell them, over and over, that they have to be that much more tolerant and loving than the rest of the world. I want my children to look at same sex marriage the way I look at marriages between different ethnic groups. I don’t want them to grow up in a world full of hate, but I know they will. Society always needs a group to mock and make controversial legislation about.

I was listening to NPR on my way home from work today, as I often do, and there was a story about one of the funniest things I’ve heard of in a while. Apparently, Saddam Hussein is a romance novelist. No, really.

Today’s All Things Considered featured a story called Contemplating Saddam, the Romance Novelist (scroll down almost to the bottom, it’s there, and you can listen to it).

The woman reporting seems to condemn him for his vanity because he’s really playing out his own fantasies instead of writing good books. I would encourage it, though. In fact I would encourage any non-harmful creative outlet in someone whose only other outlet seems to be killing people.

So many dictators write books that there’s actually a name for it. Dic-lit.

Further research revels that amazon.com sells Zabiba and the King, the first on this books, in both English and what I think is French. You can get the English in digital for for only $10! The Amazon editor’s write-up talks a lot about allegory and the not-so-hidden political meaning in the book, but I’m much more intersted in the fact that it was turned into a musical stage production in Baghdad.

No matter how you feel about the story, you have to admit it’s hilarious to think of Saddam Hussein, cruel and ruthless former dictator of Iraq, sitting down and writing something like this:

“Oh yes!” she cried, “YES!” as he thrust his throbbing member into her velvety sheath. She writhed in pleasure on the pillows as he entered her again and again, thanking Allah that she has the priviledge of making love to the most powerful man on Earth.

This is the best thing that’s happened to me today.

“He talks about PAYGO. I‘ll tell you what PAYGO means, when you‘re a senator from Massachusetts, when you‘re a colleague of Ted Kennedy, pay go means: You pay, and he goes ahead and spends. ”

- George W. Bush on John Kerry’s tax policies

Newsflash, Georgie: THAT’S WHAT TAXES ARE FOR! People give the government their money, and the government spends it. Would you rather Kerry hoard our money so that we lose it and don’t gain anything in the way of government programs?

Remeber four years ago, when the presidential candidate supported by the majority of Americans lost the election? Remember how there was a lot of noise about electoral reform? Remember how the noise was just that, noise, and nothing ever got done? Here we are, four years later, with the same flawed system. The electoral college is outdated and bad for America. Here’s why.

Reason One: My vote doesn’t count.

In case you don’t know, here’s how the electoral college works.

Let’s pretend that I have my own state, and that my state has a population of 100,000 registered voters. Let’s also pretend that we have two senators and eight representatives. Okay, time for election day. My state is generally pretty liberal, so 60,000 people vote for the Democratic candidate. 30,000 more vote for the Republican candidate, and the other 10,000 vote for the candidates of various third parties. You can see that my state is chock full of civic responsibility. Everyone votes!

Because my state has two senators (as does every state) and eight representatives, we get to choose ten electors (8+2=10). Electors are the people whose votes technically elect the president. They vote according to the majority opinion in the state they represent. So, since 60% (a majority) of my state voted Democrat, my state’s ten electors all vote for the Democratic candidate. Only Maine and Nebraska (and possibly Colorado this year) have their electors vote proportionally. If I was using one of those states as an example, there would have been 6 Democratic, 3 Republican, and one third party vote from the electors in my state. Then I would have less to complain about and wouldn’t be writing this entry.

Anyway, my state’s ten electors vote for the Democratic candidate. The problem is that only 60% of my state’s opinion was represented in this election. There would be exactly identical results if 50,001 people voted Democrat, or 100,000. Obeying the will of the majority is democratic and correct, but the electoral college effectively ignores everyone else. That means that if you live in a state that traditionally favors one party (like my real-life state, Massachusetts) , your vote won’t count for much. Unless you vote with the majority, your vote is thrown away. It just doesn’t matter, except in abstract ways, like how other people knowing you voted a certain way may make them more likely to do the same, and so on, until enough people are voting that way that it may change the majority.

So, in essence, the electoral college is bad for America because it disregards a large percentage of votes.

Reason Two: Ignorance is empowered

Originally, the electoral college system was put into place so that educated people were responsible for selecting the president, instead of the task being placed in the hands of the mostly ignorant American people. Though I don’t agree with the idea, it had its merits. Before the days of television and radio, it was difficult for the average citizen to be informed about the presidential candidiates. It made sense, to a point, to choose educated people who would vote for the president. They were guided by the opinions of the people in their state, but their votes were their own to do what they pleased with.

Now, however, the college serves the opposite purpose. Instead of placing the responsibility in the hands of a few learned, thoughtful people, we are surrendering our power to the majority. It seems to be a widely-held belief that the majority of Americans are fairly ignorant about the candidates and their positions. They fall for tricks like “Fuzzy math! Fuzzy math!” and let politicians lead them to whatever conclusion is best for their party. Most people don’t actually think about the candidates and issues, and try to do research on their own. It is these people that the candidates talk to when they make speeches- they appeal to the lowest common denominator of society. Because if they can get enough votes for a majority of a state, that’s all that matters. They don’t have to work to get the rest.

The electoral college is bad for America because it puts the decision-making in the hands of the ignorant majority.

Reason Three: There will be no third party. Ever.

If this country continues to use the electoral college system, we will never have more than two parties. As things stand, to even get a single electoral vote, a third party has to be supported by more than half of a state. Since third parties are usually seen as fringe groups whose ideas aren’t actually practical, this is very unlikely. The only way a third party could come into power is by gaining popularity a little at a time, and right now this is almost impossible. Voting for a third party is almost like throwing your vote away. Since there’s almost no chance that that party will get a majority of your state, your vote won’t count. If the president was elected directly, with every person getting a vote, there would be much more reason to vote for a third party. The votes from your state would combine with the votes from all the other states, and, gradually, a force would build up.

With a two party system, America will flounder. How many more years can we take with the same two parties, election after election? Eventually the two will be so scared of controversy that there’ll be no real difference between them. The two party system issue is a whole other entry, though, so I’ll stop here.

I’m interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Does anyone have arguments for the electoral college system?