Every four years, we get the civics lesson that we’re not really voting for President; we’re merely voting for electors pledged to cast electoral votes for that particular Presidential candidate. The Secretary of State has a list of the electors.

Pledged to Barack Obama are Jeffrey L. Chidester, of Valparaiso; Owen “Butch” Morgan, of South Bend; Michelle Boxell, of Warsaw; Charlotte Martin, of Indianapolis; Jerry J. Lux, of Shelbyville; Connie Southworth, of Salamonia; Alan P. Hogan, of Indianapolis; Myrna E. Brown, of Vincennes; Clarence Benjamin Leatherbury, of Salem; Daniel J. Parker, of Indianapolis; and Cordelia Lewis Burks, of Indianapolis.

Pledged to John McCain are Chuck Williams, of Valparaiso; Edward Smith, of Galveston; Barbara Krisher, of Fort Wayne; Daniel Bortner, of Bedford; Virginia Marner, of Kokomo; Susan Lightle, of Greenfield; Pearl Swanigan, of Indianapolis; William Springer, of Sullivan; David Buskill, of Jeffersonville Samuel Wayne Goodman, of Greenwood; and Juana Watson, of Columbus.

Pledged to Bob Barr are Jeff Duensing, of Lowell; K. P. Nfr, of Michigan City; Jonathan Bartels, of Fort Wayne;Todd Singer, of Plainfield; John Rutherford, of Carmel; Gayle Bond, of Hagerstown; Jame Goldstein, of Indianapolis; Andrew Horning, of Freedom; Margaret Fette, of Bloomington; Melanie Hughes, of New Albany; and Mike Kole, of Fishers.

There are also electors designated for the Green Party, the Socialist Party, Chuck Baldwin, Kevin Mottus, and Ralph Nader. (I tried getting information about Kevin Mottus since he was the other one I hadn’t heard of, but a quick Google search didn’t turn up much, and I’m not interested in working that hard.)

It was the summer of 2000, I had slightly more hair, was recently wed, had moved into a new house, was about 8 months into my new job, and the country was fiscally pretty sound. And there was a Presidential election going on. Back in 2000 and again in 2004, I ran a mailing list with people across the political spectrum where we discussed politics generally and the Presidential campaign specifically.

In 2000, one of my main concerns was Bush’s proposed tax cuts. Most folks seemed to be doing pretty well financially — certainly I didn’t see a lot of people staggering under the tax burden of the Clinton years — and, after the better part of two decades of deficit spending (probably more like four decades), we were finally starting to head the other direction ever so slightly on the national debt. Based on this, Bush’s tax cuts seemed like a remarkably stupid idea to me. On the discussion list, some of the folks on the right started warning me about the dangers of paying the debt off too fast. Under Bush, we’d still go on paying down the debt as fast as was prudent. The tax cuts were a good idea because times were good. I was skeptical.

Of course, Bush immediately began following in the foot steps of his dad and Ronald Reagan by presiding over huge deficit spending. The economy sputtered a bit with the collapse of Enron and the like. And the wars came. The tax cuts remained in place. Times were too tough to raise taxes. Government spending continued unabated; got even larger. The deficits got bigger. The perils of paying down the debt too fast were forgotten.

Come to think of it, those guys kind of looted the joint. It was like a party that wasn’t much fun but still leaves you with a cheap wine hangover and a huge mess to clean up.

Lawrence Husick’s top 25 innovations of all time. (H/t Opening Arguments) A lot more elaboration in the article, but here is the list:

25. Relativity/Quantum mechanics
24. Electromagnetism
23. Evolution/Natural Selection
22. Steam power
21. Water power
20. Concept of science (natural philosophy) /Scientific method
19. Moveable type
18. Fossil fuels
17. Specialization of labor
16. Paper
15. Wheel
14. Formal legal codes
13. Concept of money
12. Gods & religions as social institutions
11. Writing
10. Food preservation
9. Metallurgy
8. Ceramics & pottery
7. Farming
6. Clothing
5. Symbolic communication
4. Lever – simple machine
3. Inclined plane – simple machine
2. Fire
1. Speech

Here is a handy visual guide to the federal budget. You can zoom around and see how our tax dollars are being spent (or, in many cases, how our kids’ future tax dollars are being pledged.)

Devilstower on Greenspan and the death of Randian Objectivism:

There’s something in Ayn Rand’s works that appeals to everyone at some point in their lives. Everyone wants to identify with the specialness of Dagny Taggart or Howard Roark or John Galt. Everyone feels, at some point in their lives, as if they are the true hub of the universe.

Then rational people grow the hell up and get over it. There’s no more substance to Rand’s objectivist view than there is in a child fantasizing about being a fairy princess, and even less to admire.

John Galt is dead. We can only hope he stays buried.

Yup. For me, my Rand phase was during the early 90s — coincided with the Gingrichian Republican Revolution, I suppose. It didn’t last very long, probably died by the time of the Clinton impeachment. By way of reference, my capital “L” Libertarian phase started earlier and ended later — maybe from 1990 to 2000.

Neither Libertarianism or Objectivism deal very well with externalities or market distortions that accompany large concentrations of wealth. (As to the latter, someone I know recently suggested an analogy to gravity, where chunks of it here and there lead to elegant, creative systems but a huge mass of it leads to a system-destroying black hole. I’ll have to think about that.)

John Dunbar of the Associated Press has an article entitled Bailout-money uses continue to shift. The massive bailout bill stampeded through Congress was originally about buying devalued mortgage-backed securities from tottering banks to unclog frozen credit markets. Then it was about using some of the money to buy stakes in banks.

But reports surfaced that bankers might instead use the money to buy other banks, pay dividends, give employees a raise and executives a bonus, or just sit on it. Insurance companies now want a piece; maybe automakers, too, even though Congress has approved $25 billion in low-interest loans for them.

Officials are even getting around to talking about helping a few mortgage-strapped homeowners. And, this passage makes me laugh:

As the crisis worsens, the government’s reaction keeps changing. Lawmakers in both parties are starting to gripe that the bailout is turning out to be far different from what the Bush administration sold to Congress.

As if this is the first go-round with the Bush administration. As Bush himself once said, “Fool me once shame on . . . . you? Fool me . . . . you can’t get fooled again.” Or, more appropriately, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Near as I can figure, the Bush administration has lied about anything it has ever done. If they gave me the time, I’d check my watch.

To make matters worse, the Bush administration is redacting copies of bailout contracts it releases to the public, hiding key information such as how much various firms are being compensated for providing bailout related services to the government. This feeds suspicion that the bailout is being used to transfer truckloads of cash to favored cronies.

Just an idle thought, and perhaps such a resource is readily available. But, it occurs to me that it might be useful if the State or some other entity made a target household budget with “reasonable” expenditures for common categories, perhaps based on income. What should a family of x people spend on groceries in a given week? What portion of income is reasonable to allot to transportation? Health care? Heating? Clothing? Entertainment? Etc.

It might provide a useful planning tool that would let people know generally whether their expenditures are way out of line and will likely be able to find savings in that category or whether their expenditures are unremarkable for that category.

Cracked.com has a fine article driving home the point that politics these days really aren’t much stupider than they always have been. Five Presidential Elections Even Dumber Than This One. The abbreviated list:

#5 Jefferson v. Adams (1800): Jefferson will bring prostitutes into the White House and wants murder and robbery taught in the schools. Adams will attack France.

#4 J.Q. Adams v. Jackson (1828): Jackson executed soldiers for no reason, his mom was a prostitute and his dad was a mulatto, and his wife is a bigamist.

#3 William Henry Harrison v. Van Buren (1840): Van Buren is an elitist who likes to bathe in the White House. Harrison, despite the mansion and whatnot, was a log cabin and hard cider kind of guy.

#2 Hayes v. Tilden (1876): Screw campaigning, we’ll just steal the damn thing. Hayes elected in the most corrupt election to date.

#1 James G. Blaine, “Continental Liar from the State of Maine” v. Grover “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Going to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha” Cleveland. The campaign slogans pretty much say it all.

Here is a little advice – not even legal advice, just common sense, I would think. Let’s say you are a Republican county election clerk. And, let’s say you have two employees who voted for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. Now, here’s my advice: don’t leave letters on their desks referring to Obama as the “black Adolph Hitler.” If only I’d written this earlier, perhaps Jill Jackson, Johnson County election clerk, wouldn’t have made exactly that mistake. Could happen to anyone, I guess.