I was going to say that it's the journalistic equivalent of retweeting,
Have you met the Associated Press? Members in an association pay dues/fees and then whenever one of them has a report of national significance it gets passed around to everyone. Drudge is just being more thorough, as he has found a way to dance around the associations and fees so that he can grab any story from anywhere.
Honestly, Drudge can be replaced by setting up Google Reader properly.
but then I remembered that our "news" providers often report on Tweets anyway.
This has been the big sports news in the US today.
Aaaand, back on topic.
As I watch this ridiculous process unfolding one more time, I've got to ask you guys (Americans), why you don't question whether there is something seriously wrong with your electoral system?
I have for a long time. I understand the reasoning behind the electoral college, and when there used to be some semblance of state sovereignty it made sense. But if we are going to give the federal government all power to do whatever and pretend like what is good in LA works in the bayou of Louisiana, then it may as well be a popular vote.
Or did you not mean the electoral college?
Why exactly do the voters of IA, NH & SC get to decide (to a large degree) who the GOP nominee is going to be?
They don't. But there is supposedly a historical pattern of these states picking what ultimately becomes the candidate of the challenging party (not just the GOP). That said, the bigger problem is with the media. They need to play up these early caucuses and primaries for ratings. They said Iowa would determine the nominee. Then it was on to New Hampshire who, for the last X elections predicted the nominee. And then after New Hampshire I actually heard one guy say, "Iowa and New Hampshire may have a historical record of choosing nominees, but South Carolina is where the decision is really made." It is all just a media show to justify a 24 hours news cycle.
Ron Paul will not (of course) win the GOP nomination. How can he in a party in which a majority is diametrically opposed to the kind of civil liberties & foreign policy positions that Paul espouses? Where does that leave the libertarians within the Republican party? How do you reconcile the "social conservatives" with the "fiscal conservatives"? Shouldn't there be a third (or more) party? How would that work in practice in the US?
Considering the two main parties ultimately achieve the same goal (larger government, more debt) many have argued that a third party would help. But there are many parties, only two are in power and thus control how things go down at election time, and the media is complacent in this to a degree by hosting debates without the other party candidates or covering their campaigns.
In the US there seems to be a complete impasse between the opposing views of what the US should be, an impasse that is actually materially damaging the social & economic life of the country.
It is possible that we are witnessing an ideological revolution that will end in a major adjustment to how the US government works. Or it is possible that Rome is burning. Or, like many times before, we have had a trend of progressive changes that finally hit a point where a large number of people put their foot down and begin fighting (Federalists, Civil war, The New Deal, Prohibition, Civil Rights movement, Hippies, etc). If it is the last one then we will eventually recover, and it will just be another footnote in history with the occasional person who pops up and thinks that the losing side didn't have a bad idea.
