What it is about science and the media?  Yahoo has a story with a headline along the lines of "Summers maybe right about sex differences."  The story features a bunch of scientists explaining that men and women have differences in their brains -- (duh).  It does not, however, begin to question Summers' obvious and egregious leap of faith: that those differences are the major factor in career choice decisions.  

I don't know how to provide a link to the "rating=1" as the more tech-savvy folks around here do (so help is encouraged), but here is clearly a story in need of some mass action.  Or counter-action, actually, since it currently has a rating of 4.17 (!)  So, at the risk of keeping the story alive with hit counts, the least one should do is go there (http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=US&cat=Education) and down-rate it.  In the name of science, please.

I was just perusing headlines on Yahoo, and I came across an article about the discovery of an additional "tray" of votes in King county, Washington.  (see http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=511&ncid=703&e=2&u=/ap/20041217/ap_o n_el_gu/washington_governor).

What struck me in the text of the article was the line: "The Republican Party went to court Friday to try to block, for the time being, the opening of those ballots."

We all know this has practically been the GOP mantra for the past six-and-a-half weeks (and a thousand and one different ways), but it amazes me how they just haven't paid the cost for saying it.  Is there anything less 'American' than baldly, actively trying to dis-enfranchise citizens?  (I ask that from a philosophical standpoint, not a historical one, naturally).

What can we do to make them pay the price for these outrages?

No, this isn't about doing away with the Electoral College.  I won't deny that the Federal nature of our republic is an indelible part of the fabric of this great nation (blah blah blah).

But our system should not paternalistically give electoral handouts to low population states.  
Sure, when we were primarily an agrian nation it might have made sense, but now agriculture accounts for 1.4 % (ONE POINT FOUR FRIGGIN' PERCENT!) of our national economy.  It's time for low-population states to ba allowed to stand on their own two feet in the Electoral College.

How?  The solution is simple.  Change the electoral college so that each state has one-vote per Congressional District -- so that it is truly a population-weighted institution, thereby duly reflecting the people that make this nation great.

Over the next two months, we're going to hear a lot about how now Bush has a 'mandate,' since he won, for now, with a 3.5 million margin.  This is pure, unadulterated bullsh--  propaganda.

Look:  last time Bush came in second, and acceded to office thanks only to a 5-4 vote on the Supreme Court.  Did he restrain himself because he did not have some kind of 'mandate'?

We have a system.  You win the election, you get to be president.  The role is constitutionally defined, and the constitution doesn't say you can do more things the more your victory margin is.  Bush knew that last time, so let's not let him get away with pretending its any different this time.  

The majority of the people in this country do not believe in evolution.  And the vast majority of that majority is the consituency of Bush's and Rove's party.   The Republican Party, once a party who projected strength in foreign affairs and sound fiscal management (albeit at the expense of the poor and working class), is now nothing more than reckless, policy-bankrupt electoral coalition dominated by those eschew rationality in their daily life.

As such, its time to start pegging the GOP with the label "The Creationist Party."

Ideally, the moniker serves as a trap.  First they'll embrace it, but in so doing they'll expose their extremism -- very much the mirror image of what the Democratic core's embrace of principles of tolerance, which unfortunately IS extreme in this country today, did to our party via the gay marriage debate.