Reshared post from +Farhad Manjoo

I'm thinking about voting for Mitt Romney in 2012.

Not because I like Mitt Romney, but rather because I don't. And because it seems that the most effective way to prevent a party's policies from going into effect, these days, is to have that party control the White House.

I'm only half joking, and I'm only half meaning this as a criticism of Obama. This seems like a structural problem: Holding one half of Congress, rather than the White House, seems to be a more effective place from which to effect your policy goals.

Given the undemocratic nature of the Senate and gerrymandering in the House, we're virtually assured that however crazily extreme your party gets, you'll never get so unpopular that you'll get below the threshold of being able to shut down many vital functions of government. This is a pretty big stick — it means that when you're in the minority, you can demand whatever you want and not have to worry about losing anything. In practice Republicans are better at this game than Democrats, but there's no reason Democrats can't do this too.

I'm not saying the presidency isn't powerful. I'm saying a determined Congressional minority can be much more effective at demanding big things than can a determined president can be. It also seems we have to choose: No party, these days, is going to control all the levers of government for long. Either party has to decide whether it wants the White House or one (or two) branches of Congress. Given this choice, it seems like you can get a lot more of your big agenda items passed by being a hard-line minority than you can by holding the White House.

So if you're a liberal and you want liberal policies enacted, why not give up the White House and work from a position of strength? In other words, Liberals for Romney!

Tell me why this is wrong.

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It's a paradise

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Frankly I've never been a blackberry fan. I've been supplied with blackberries by my last two employers and hated both phones. Always ended up with workarounds that let me re-route my mail first to my Treo and then later my OG Droid.

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Inside RIM: An exclusive look at the rise and fall of the company that made smartphones smart
Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition in every sense of the word. Publicly, the company is portraying a very defensive image — one t

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A very nasty storm whipped through Detroit a few minutes ago.

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Some images from my trip to China in April 2010

In album great wall (20 photos)

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An amazing collection of cars racing into the night during the waning hours of the 2010 Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta

In album plm night (33 photos)

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When I'm in gmail or google reader, notifications appear in the bar and I can read them including new comments without leaving my current browser tab.

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Why do I have a feeling that this is not the only TSA agent getting away with this?

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TSA Agent Caught With Passenger's iPad in His Pants; Allegedly Took $50,000 in Other Goods, Cops Say – Broward/Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp
Update: TSA agent Nelson Santiago is not the first agency employee to be arrested on theft charges. ?While most Transportation…

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The shuttle Atlantis lifted off for the final time today heralding the final phase of an era of manned US space flight that has spanned my lifetime so far. I was born while the Gemini program was still going on but my first really solid memory of space travel was the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1974. The era of sending Americans into space then took a pause while the Shuttles were prepared.

I was also a tech nerd and I can recall the images of the Enterprise lifting off from the back of a 747 and gliding back to earth and then watching Challenger blast off into space. By the time Challenger blew up, I was in college but actually working a co-op term at GM in St Catherines. I remember working in the office when someone came in and said that the shuttle had exploded and many of us engineers crowded into a conference room to watch the TV and find out what had happened in those pre-web, pre-Twitter days.

Eventually the shuttle program got back on track but for reasons having to do with too many cooks and only one vat of broth, it never did meet the expectations set for it. While it was clearly a triumph of engineering brute force that this kludged up system ever worked at all, the shuttle system never had any of the optimized design elegance that could have made a true success story. The amount of time and work required to turn around a shuttle and get it ready for flight again was simply insane for what was supposed to be a "space-plane"

Following the 2003 Columbia disintegration, the program probably should have been retired but with the ISS only partly finished, the shuttle was needed to get the job done. Now that the ISS is essentially complete, the orbiters will finally be laid to rest at various museums.

I only visited the Kennedy Space Center once, last November for the aborted STS-133 mission of Discovery and thus never got to see a lift off live. Fortunately I did get a tour of the orbiter preparation facility and the insanely huge vehicle assembly building where the shuttles and the Apollo craft before them came together.

While I remain a lover of science and technology, I agree that at this point in time we need to scale back manned space flight. The technology is simply not there for us to safely and affordably send humans beyond the moon and benefits of doing so remain dubious. Besides there is still far too much we don't yet understand about ourselves and the pale blue dot that we live on. We need to explore and understand our own oceans before we head to Mars and beyond. I'm glad we did what we did in space and continue to do on the ISS, but it's time for a new direction wherever that may lead us.

In album Kennedy Space Center Nov 2010 (101 photos)

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As America celebrates the anniversary of the birth of a nation, it's long past time for a new constitutional amendment that would correct the fundamentally flawed premise that corporations should have the rights of persons. No legal entity should have those rights without also taking on the same responsibilities. A new movement is starting that would enshrine the idea that Humans not corporations are persons entitled to the rights such as participation in the political process.

It's time to put the people back in charge!

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"We the corporations" | Move to Amend
"We the corporations". On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the US Const…

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