Making Election Day a holiday sounds like a good idea if you have a nice salaried office job and you're super politically active. But that also puts you in the demographic least in need of extra incentives to vote.

Have you ever noticed that most business are still open on national holidays? Stores don't run themselves, fruit doesn't pick itself, hotels will be extra-full and have extra loads of laundry to wash. The voters who are most in need of an election day holiday are exactly the kind of workers who would never get that day off.

Furthermore, people who do get the day off aren't going to spend the entire day voting and doing GOTV canvassing (except the ones who already do that). They're going to take the 3-day weekend up at the lake, and be less likely to vote. We had a special election in my area that fell on a Tuesday during the local K-12 schools' Spring break. The campaign I was volunteering for (the Democrat), saw this as a major disadvantage in our get-out-the-vote efforts. We were in a mad rush to sign everyone up as absentee before the deadline, then work our tails off calling them to remind them to send in their absentee ballots before taking off on vacation.

From the excerpt at TPM:

One of these parties started at the Capital Grille with Cunningham ordering his usual filet mignon -- very well done -- with iceberg lettuce salad and White Oak.

Well done filet? With iceberg? Oh the humanity!!

Then why do they all look so happy??

The main character in A Wrinkle in Time's mother was a scientist. And a mother. She cooked food on the Bunsen burner in their home's basement lab. I don't remember much of the book, but I remember this. Very much so. How a throw-away few lines in just one book managed to counteract every societal message about women and science that I'd been internalizing, I don't know. I sit typing my doctoral thesis, pausing to look up from the laptop and say "wow!! you made a sandcastle!" and "grrr! I'm a tiger" to my 2-year-old twins. Madeline L'Engle made this possible.

(The lawsuits, not the bad parenting.) Multiple birth, especially more than 2, should absolutely be considered malpractice. Children have a vastly increased chance of birth defects, permanent learning delays, etc. Not to mention physical effects for the mother, and emotional impact on the family. Maybe if more parents start suing, we'll finally get the multiple-birth rates for IVF and other assisted reproduction under control. (Aside: does Australia have better regulation of the industry than the US? Europe does, and their multiple rates are much more under control than here.)

What nonsense! Listen, condors don't go around using those enormous bills to pick up little round metal balls off the ground and eat them. What they DO do is eat carrion, including animals that were killed using lead shot.

What is wrong with hunting with non-lead shot? Sounds like hunters are kind of doing condors a favor in providing piles of left-behind guts for them to eat. We just need to get rid of the lead. Why is this such a big deal??

What nonsense! Listen, condors don't go around using those enormous bills to pick up little round metal balls off the ground and eat them. What they DO do is eat carrion, including animals that were killed using lead shot.

What is wrong with hunting with non-lead shot? Sounds like hunters are kind of doing condors a favor in providing piles of left-behind guts for them to eat. We just need to get rid of the lead. Why is this such a big deal??

Oh, good heavens, is 'Anonymous' being so subtly ironic that it is undetectable? Comparing FGM with circumcision is absurd on its face. And I say this as someone who is strongly against circumcision.

But 'Anonymous' isn't actually too far off from what I suspected was going on here as I read the piece--that FGM is very common. If FGM is grounds for asylum, majorities of women in many countries would suddenly be eligible. More than the board wants to deal with.

As tantalizingly patriarchy-blaming as the reproduction = useful to society angle is, I'm going to go with Occam's razor on this one. I think it's purely a nativist don't-want-too-many numbers game.

Does anyone else think this has to be the same producer/script-writer/etc as the one Vernon Robinson for that odious "Twilight Zone" ad? Same kind of cadence in the voice too. Creepy all around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDTr6vHS5l8