Arlitia Jones, which I discovered via the Writers Almanac.

Critical Section has a bit of a write-up bemoaning the two party system and suggest proportional representation. He later points out there may be some problems with this approach. I am not a fan of proportional representation, which I believe swings government away from a democratic republic to a more democratic-mob rule. I see this as problematic because it gives too much power to the fringes of political view and is to easily swayed by the issue of the day rather than a longer term strategy. I don’t think a direct democracy would be a better system.

However, there is another way to be able to get third party views more air time, it’s called Condercet voting. This would allow people rank their candidates as Nader, Gore, Bush, without them worrying that ranking Nader as their number one choice they would give the election to Bush. Another example of a ranking would be Perot, Bush Sr. (the first), Clinton. In this case the election in 1992 would have likely gone to Bush Sr. This kind of system would allow for a third party candidate to be successful enough to really install a third party into American politics. The system today encourages people to not “throw away their votes” almost enforces a two-party system.

One of the more interesting ideas I came across was in the trilogy, “Red Mars”, “Green Mars”, “Blue Mars”. There lower house was composed of people drafted from fairly small districts. You were drafted by random lottery and it was civic duty much like jury duty. Being just like jury duty it was an honor people tried to avoid. Now you might say this is lunacy to let people chosen at random govern. Well, in many states people chosen at random sit in judgement in capital criminal cases. If they can choose who lives and dies they certainly could passs a few laws. Perhaps our laws would be more readable.

I haven’t had many Iraq entries since the the Bush administration declared an end to major combat operations. Here are a few thoughts.

Still there have been no weapons of mass destruction found. This wouldn’t be an issue at this point if the Bush administration had not made WMD the centerpiece of it’s justification for going to war. Since weapons have not yet been found, I am left with three possible conclusions.

Weapons will be found. This would be the best case for the Bush administration and probably for the U.S. standing in the world community. I personally, don’t think this will happen at this point, but I didn’t think that they would get Saddam either.

Weapons will not be found. In this scenario, weapons are not found and the Bush administration knowingly lied about WMD. This is the worst case in my mind. Not only would this negatively affect our standing in the world, but it would be another example of the folks in government not trusting the governed enough to tell the truth, giving more reason for distrust and apathy towards government. (As one commenter noted, this could mean they were shipped to a third nation or hidden for a much later day.)

Weapons will not be found. In this scenario the Bush administration was misled by intelligence and genuinely thought they were there. In this scenario the intel was faulty or the intel was manipulated by Iraq expats. At this moment this seems the most likely scenario. The question that would remain is whether their was incompetence by any of the players.

As my High School history teacher used to say. “Time heals all wounds and time wounds all heels.” Eventually, we’ll know the truth. Unfortunately, I doubt we’ll know much before the 2004 election.

One other lingering question. Is the mess in Iraq a remnant of colonization or the cold war? Are we cleaning up from the British Empire or repairing the issues left in the cold wars proxy nations?