Skip to content

That Third Party Option

  • by

Third parties have not fared well in American politics over the last century or so, either having no impact on the Presidential race results though in a few cases potentially moving the winner from one party to the other (though not electing the third-party candidate). One example of the latter was when Teddy Roosevelt ran on the Bull-Moose party ticket in 1912 electing Woodrow Wilson and helping to elect a Democrat Congress.

Having said that since I tend to support the non-Trump wing of the Republican party, I have noticed a bunch of like-minded individuals making noises about supporting a third-party Presidential candidate.

The thought is that Trump has  no chance of gaining 270 electoral votes.  The hope is that with a serious third-party candidate, Hillary Clinton also would not get 270 electoral votes throwing the election into the House.

I decided to take a quick look at how that possibility would play out.

The method for electing the President is covered in Section 1 of Article 2 of the Constitution.

That Third Party Option

My Political Theory Class

This semester I am not only teaching classes, two IT related classes at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), but also taking graduate classes, two Government and Politics graduate classes at the University of Maryland College Park.

So every Tuesday afternoon and evening I attend two almost three hour classes, the first focusing on Political Institutions (which I will talk about in a later post), and the second focusing on Political Theory, specifically about human rights. These are both seminars associated with getting a PhD, so in large part I am surrounded by young people, almost all of whom are younger than my two daughters, who are extremely bright and already know the difference between positive and negative rights, natural law, the implications of the Enlightenment, and so on, all of which I had to look up to understand when I came across all of these terms in the weekly readings.

My Political Theory Class

My Second Mention in the Washington Post

  • by

One of my now favorite sports writers for the Washington Post, Tracee Hamilton, wrote a column today, Olympic hockey rules for overtime and shootouts, 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/olympics/wp/2014/02/15/olympic-hockey-rules-for-overtime-and-shootouts/.

This followed the dramatic eight round shoot-out, technically in International Hockey referred to as Game Winning Shots (GWS), where the U.S. beat Russia in a preliminary round game in hockey 3-2.

My Second Mention in the Washington Post

Obamacare Will Reduce Employment By Two Million Jobs

  • by

In the Washington Post this morning, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/cbo-botched-health-care-law-rollout-will-reduce-signups-by-1-million-people/2014/02/04/c78577d0-8dac-11e3-98ab-fe5228217bd1_story.html. The column was based on a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study, http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45010, that also indicated that healthcare enrollment will be initially reduced by about 1 million (the headline but not… Obamacare Will Reduce Employment By Two Million Jobs

Defining Genius

There is an interesting article in the current issue of Commentary Magazine, about the definition of genius, noting that the term is used pretty widely these days about many people, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/i-dream-of-genius/. There was on particular quote… Defining Genius