Jeff Licquia has a pretty insightful look at the news that the rapid improvement of Mozilla Firefox has shamed Microsoft into start developing Internet Explorer again.

Of course, the fact that IE’s pathological problems with modern CSS are being fixed by one guy using JavaScript ought to be pretty embarrassing to begin with.

I hate to directly contradict Ryan of the Dead Parrots, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the widespread condescension displayed by the self-annointed music cognoscenti toward popular music. It’s the same order of pretentious twaddle advanced by NPR listeners, independent bookstore owners, peddlers of concern about low levels of political knowledge among the American public, and film-school graduates—faux bourgeois superiority, nothing more, nothing less.

You know what? I couldn’t care less that every Nickelback song sounds alike, that Jewel’s music is now the soundtrack for marketing womens’ razors, or that record companies—in their efforts to produce sufficient content consistent with Canadian domestic artist quota rules—have foisted a succession of Alanis Morrissette-wannabes on the North American listening audience. I refuse to care what poor, long-suffering garage band has been pushed aside for Linkin Park, or what nameless-but-nonetheless-vastly-superior Little Rock bands toil in obscurity while Evanescence’s Amy Lee rockets up the charts, or how Kenny G killed the market for Herbie Hancock CDs.

So, if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to listening to Avril while the bourgeois piety police go back to diving into the remainder bins full of obscure, but doubtless vastly more “artistic,” artists in their endless search for art that meets their own exacting standards.

Kate of Small Dead Animals has visual evidence of the Saskatchewan NDP’s hostility to the United States.

Radley Balko is keeping an eye on the state-level activities of the increasingly prohibitionist (and increasingly misnamed) MADD and their pet state legislators. It’s not a very pretty picture.

Dean Jens explicates the original purpose of the Electoral College:

[T]he electoral college as originally conceived was expected to elect George Washington as many times as he could be talked into it, and then to very rarely actually give a majority of the votes to any candidate. It was viewed largely as a nominating committee, giving the House of Representatives a short list of candidates from which to select a president. It didn’t work out the way they envisioned, and, if it had, it may not have worked out the way they envisioned; regularly having the legislative branch elect the chief executive may or may not have proved to be a good idea. But it’s my understanding that that was the idea.

Alexander Hamilton’s explanation of the selected procedure is in Federalist 68. Funnily enough, one of the changes to the procedure made in the 12th Amendment reduced the “short list” of candidates from an indecisive vote of the Electoral College from five to three.