End of the road near for the electoral college?

As close followers of US politics know, the US does not elect its president by direct popular vote. Instead it has an institution called the Electoral College whose members vote for the president. The electoral college consist of 538 votes apportioned among the states corresponding exactly to the total of their members of the House of Representatives (that varies with the population) and comes to 435 total plus two each for the Senate, that gives 100 more. The extra three votes consist of two for Puerto Rico and one are for Washington DC. This means that the winner has to get 270 electoral college votes.
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Knowledge is power

In a speech given to the SXSW meeting, Julian Assange makes the point of how information is used to accrue wealth.

Assange also described what he sees as an “unprecedented theft of wealth from the majority of the population to those people who already have a lot of power … doing that in part by stealing information from all of us. Knowledge is power, and as a result they’re getting more power.”
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Living hand-to-mouth while being well off

Many people live in a state of economic insecurity from paycheck to paycheck, where any sudden financial hit (illness, loss of job, major car or home repair) can cause serious hardship. Such people are nowhere close to meeting the rule of thumb of having at least eight month’s living expenses available in the form of liquid assets to meet such emergencies.
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Martin Freeman

The actor who plays Dr. Watson in the Sherlock, Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbitt was interviewed at the premiere of the last one and reveals a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor that is very much like the character of Watson and his first role in the BBC TV series The Office which is where I first became aware of him.
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Atheists denied notary services

The idea that people can deny services to those who views they disagree with is a menace to the smooth working of society. The people who are the latest victims of this are David Silverman and Amanda Knief of American Atheists who went to a local bank to get a document notarized. This is a routine service that banks provide but to their surprise, the notary refused to sign it, though they had had no problems in the past with this bank.
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Obama’s hypocrisy and petulance on display again

The Ukraine situation has once again shown that when president Obama is faced with an international situation where the sheer brute force of the US cannot be used to get his way, he resorts to childish language and taunts. This happened last year when Edward Snowden took refuge in Russia to escape from the clutches of the US security apparatus and president Putin ignored US calls to hand him over. Then Obama gave a press conference where he made the extraordinary comment that Putin looked like “he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom”, hardly the way to speak about a foreign leader.
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Humorists take aim at TV coverage of missing plane

It looks like there is a long line of comedians who are taking shots at the cable news networks and CNN particularly for obsessively and ridiculously covering the Malaysian Airlines plane disappearance. The bad news is that CNN almost doubled its ratings during this period among the much-coveted 25-54 age group, making Fox News jealous. So next time around, you can be sure that the coverage will be even worse.
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