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If the Electoral College Were Abolished

The original formation of the Electoral College for the purpose of selecting the President and Vice President of the United States once every four years had very solid reasoning behind it. There was a fear that people had poor access to information and that they would perhaps be biased to vote for whomever was running for the office from their state, and so there would be a number of people representing each state and no real decision made about who should be the next president. That may have been fine for that time period, but we are living in an age of information that is readily available — even if that information is about what the housemates of Big Brother are doing at any given time.

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The Face of Medicare Fraud

I have heard over the last couple of years a number of ideas about why the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, affectionately known as Obamacare by its enemies (side note — if you hear someone refer to it as this, you can be assured that their arguments will be heavily one-sided and based more on talking points than reality) is a bad idea. Some of them include the notion that people will, out of greed, opt to pay a penalty for not having insurance and then get it when they absolutely need to do so based on knowing they will not be denied due to a pre-existing condition. Another is the argument that since Medicare is bloated and not functioning as is, introducing reform will do nothing to help it.

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Where is Education on the Campaign Trail?

The United States is not doing so well when it comes to the state of education — in terms of world ranking, it is absolutely abysmal — barely scoring 500 out of 1000 points in such crucial subjects as math, reading, and science. You would therefore think that in this election year, candidates and the current President up for re-election would have at least some focus on education, stressing what they are planning on doing to fix our badly ailing school systems and to bring the students in the United States to a higher level of educational accomplishment.

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Banning the Veil: Show Me Your Face or Go To Jail

In France, the fight for the right to stay a completely secular state has just taken an interesting turn. I remember in 2004 when head coverings were banned in public schools thinking that I was glad that I was not a student in France as being a Jew as I am involves wearing a head covering.  Covering your face is now prohibited in public places in France, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily a step in the right direction for France. In addition to banning the niqab, the full face veil that Muslim women wear, the ban also includes masks, hooded jackets as well as anything else that covers the face.

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Let's Pretend You Did Not Write that Book: Ten Sentence Story #138

This is a story about a man named Rick Perry who has decided that the past should stay in the past and that things that he may have written in the past should have no bearing on his campaign for being president in the future.

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Do Republicans Want to Create Jobs or Destroy Workers?

In the months leading up to the elections last November, many Republicans ran on Tea Party based platforms, their campaigns centering on the theme that they, unlike their Democrat opponents, were seeking to create jobs — something that would surely be good for the people electing them. The nation went pretty wild for this campaigning as many Republicans were swept into office. One would have to assume that since they campaigned on the promise of creating jobs, their first plans upon entry into office would have something to do with creating jobs.

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Tax Advice: Don’t Do Two Things and Expect One Result

It can always be a struggle for Americans to try to decipher the tax law every year to try to figure out how much we owe to pay our way without losing any of the reasonable deductions we are allowed to take.

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Kelley Williams-Bolar and the Stolen Better School District

When I was in grade school I attended West Windsor Plainsboro Middle School based on the fact that I lived in the West Windsor area. My parents relocated in 1990 to Princeton, partly due to the fact that the public schools in the area were supposed to be a lot better. Of course, I ended up attending The Peddie School, a private school that was not at all tied to where I lived as people came to the school from all over the world.

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Will Bloggers Spread Egyptian News?

A government exists to serve the people it represents, not to oppress that people and to stifle any kind of information exchange that might benefit said people in any way. So it has been in Egypt where, after protesters got together and started angrily demanding that their president step down, the government started shutting down communication with the outside world — from making use of their own internet ‘kill’ switch, blocking access to the internet to normal citizens to completely shutting down mobile cell phone service.

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An Unhealthy Fixation With Databases?

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

The Database State report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, written by the UK authors Anderson et al and published in March 2009 gives a sweeping – and damning – overview of databases, IT frameworks and general ‘e-governance’ initiatives concerned with managing (and hopefully improving) public health in the UK.

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