Heh. Even when Gray Davis was Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown’s deputy governor, he still looked like he’d been dead 2 weeks. I always liked Jerry. Too bad my old friends in Oakland say he really screwed it up as mayor.

Moral of the day: never date Linda Ronstadt.

Jackson Brown is still lookin’ pretty good!

Loo Hoo. @ 38

Don’t lets forget that Darrell Issa bankrolled the recall of Gray Davis thinking he could become governor…hee hee! Whatever happened to Gray? He could take a house seat maybe.

The same CA-GOP law firm was involved in that too…

And recall that both Arnold and Mayor Riordan were called up to Cheney’s closed meetings on the “Energy Strategy” just prior to the Energy Brokers from Texas (Enron, Pioneer, etc.) conspiring to shift energy from California at the Summer peak.

Just what was Arnold doing chatting secretly with Cheney…and why won’t he discuss this?

Seems pretty clear they were actually discussing how they were going to recall Davis…USING the deregulated Energy Brokers creating a State of Emergency in California.

ONE MORE reason Cheney refuses to reveal his records of the Energy Policy meetings.

GSD at 24

What are your predictions 20 years from now:
Will a repub or a dem be president?
Will this country be at war?
Will China threaten the world environment?
Will there be a cultural civil war in the U.S.?
Will GWB look good?
My answers to each question: yes

Your first question is not a yes or no question.

If China is a threat to the world twenty years from now…what did GWB do to dampen THAT threat? Recall that he has allowed the Chinese to invest billions in American financial assets, done nothing to slow the foreign debt with China, and his own family is heavily invested in Chinese corporations…do a bit of research on brothers Neil and Marvin, and Uncle Preston. Recall his wonderful face-down of the Chinese after they took down the US spy-plane…how the Chinese dismantled and studied its technology for months. And how Bush hads basically had to go to the Chinese to negotiate with North Korea.

There is already a “cultural civil war” in the US…and Bush has used this rather than unify the American people to be more tolerant of “freedom”. “They hate us for our freedoms” so he does everything he can to remove those freedoms. Young people today are far more tolerant of our differences…so the extremists on the right-wing will have to lord over the vast majority…those people will continue to regard Bush as something of a demi-God that spoke with “Jesus”.

And if there is a “civil war” then it will be by THAT MINORITY against the majority…and unless we are an unDemocratic society…then the right-wing zealots will be involved in an UnConstitutional INSURRECTION. Yes! Look up INSURRECTION in the Constitution…and find out what happens.

There is a backdoor that some states are working on, where they pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote… once the total number of electoral votes so pledged equals or exceeds 270.

This is a great plan… I heard a great talk about this on C-Span yesterday. It’s pure genius. I also heard several arguments that the small-state advantage is totally washed out by the elector distribution as of today. Although North and South Dakota get three each, it still doesn’t amount to anything against all-or-nothing California and New York. 99% of the the presidential campaign money goes to 16 states. I really like this plan.

Eli @ 84

I’m totally cool with eliminating it altogether, really.

Indeed. That’s nearly what their preferred National Popular Vote plan does:

…[S]tates will enter into an interstate agreement to award their Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. The agreement will come into effect as soon as enough states join it to make up 270 or more electoral votes.

The method will make presidential elections direct and national without a Constitutional amendment, since it preserves the office of the presidential elector. It is thoroughly constitutional because states have the power under the Constitution to decide how to award their electoral votes.

… [E]lecting the president in a single direct national election will satisfy all the criteria of a good electoral system. It will ensure majority rule, make elections nationally competitive, reduce partisan machinations, preclude contingent outcomes, and ensure that every vote counts equally.

This seems a reasonable expedient, given the difficulty of eliminating the electoral college outright. To do that would require a constitutional amendment, the proposal for which would probably never make it through Congress, given Republicans’ (in particular) strong desire to maintain a system they have a chance at successfully gaming. And the only alternative to the congressional route would be to get the states to call a constitutional convention, and God help us if that ever happened. The only precedent we have for that is 1787 when the convention threw its limited mandate out the window, scrapped the existing government and made a new one from scratch. I wouldn’t trust either party with their hands on something that powerful. The Republicans are too power-crazed authoritarian to do the right thing, and the Democrats are … well … as we’ve seen.

Yes, I mentioned that in the comments here somewhere, and wrote about it on my own blog a while back. I like the idea a lot, and it may be the only way to bypass the EC.