I can't look at what I can't find. Kindly provide a direct link. I see no "pro-choice" question on that page. Are you sure you linked to the page you thought you did?
I just want to add that, based strictly on my own personal experience, many of those who advocate easy access to abortion have a greatly exaggerated idea of how many abortions are performed each year because of risk to the mother's life or because the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. It would be an interesting survey to carry out, and it might explain some of the disparity here between numbers who feel that abortion should be only slightly restricted and the numbers who feel that non-health related abortions should be illegal.
I've found that everyone arguing abortion is extremely selective when they cite data.
That's no reason for you to do it. Anyway, this is a meta-argument on abortion. It's not about the morality of it as such, it's about public opinion about it.
That said, I stated exactly what the data on that page (representing a collection of the results of various different surveys, not a single survey, which may well explain the poor tracking - if the samples weren't normalized to each other, significant differences could be found) says: around 50% of women identify as pro-choice, and 80% of women support at least some form of legal abortion.
You cannot get that information from that page. Only the Gender category breaks the information down by sex. If you're calling 42% "around 50%"... I'm sorry, but that's not valid. You're deliberately trying to underplay the fact that according to one of those charts 57%, and the other 73%, of women favor at least some restrictions on the availability of abortion. That's a significantly different picture than the veritable even split your "around 50%" suggests.
The other surveys give some idea what the circumstances people in general (not broken out by sex) consider to be good reasons for an abortion. Significantly, look at the "Reasons" graph. 61% believe abortion should be illegal for merely economic reasons. It's not too much of a stretch that the all-too-common abortion for mere convenience or as a method of birth control would meet with even greater disapproval. It's a pity they didn't ask about those. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute only 6% of abortions are primarily because of health problems. 1% are because the pregnancy was due to rape or incest. The rest are situations where putting the child up for adoption would be a reasonable alternative. (This is a relatively recent chart, but the data's old. Still, I got the link to this place from Planned Parenthood's website, so it's clear that AGI's data aren't seen as embarrassing to PP. And no one's saying the situation has changed much since then as far as I can tell.)
In other words, that "Reasons" chart at Public Agenda had a bias built in to the underlying survey because they failed to ask about a common reason for abortion. The only non-medical reason they asked about was economic, when it's clear that there are several other non-economic reasons. But even then, most people believe abortion should be illegal in that situation.
So where abortion can be reasonably termed a choice -- where there's no medical reason for it, so it's genuinely elective surgery -- most people want it to be illegal. Since the "Gender" chart failed to turn up any kind of significant gender gap here, we can't assume that most of that 61% are men. It's more reasonable to assume that men and women are split evenly here as they are in other abortion-related matters and that about 61% of women feel elective abortions should be illegal.
So now your "around 50%" has dropped to just under 40%.
Again, the point here isn't that abortion is wrong, or even that most women think that most abortions should be illegal. (I believe that to be a reasonable inference from what we're seeing here, but that exact information just isn't there so it could also be an erroneous inference.) The point is that the data doesn't support your contention of "around 50%" of women self-identifying as pro-choice.
The fact that it holds true for men as well does not invalidate my point.
No, what invalidates your point is that you've been very selective in how you cited the data on that page. A better guide to whether most women are "pro-choice" would have been the other column. Totally free choice is represented only by the first graph there, and it was less than a majority of women. (And men.) All the rest are willing to subject abortion to *some* limitation. If abortion was to be allowed only (for example) when the life of the mother was endangered, that's not really a choice in any meaningful sense. It's interesting that the two columns don't appear to track very well. It's possible that some of the women who answered in the first column, "Legal, most" were laboring under the misapprehension that most abortions were now performed under just that circumstance.
The point of this being that there really isn't enough data here to justify your conclusion. The survey didn't ask sufficiently detailed questions.
And your point is...? That link made it very clear that there's no gender gap at all when it comes to opinions on abortion. It supports parent's implication that wanting to strike down Roe v. Wade isn't necessarily seen as oppressing women -- by women -- any more than it's seen that way by men. To suggest that it is, is nothing more than a PC stereotype.
As much to the point, it coincides with dense population areas where people drive lots of cars. If it was from industry you'd be seeing practically nothing from south NJ; there's no industry to speak of there.
Only in China, where there are very few cars relatively speaking, is the plume likely to be mostly due to heavy industry.
Except that Diebold's machines are pretty definitely not in favor right now. In California, the Governator has banned them along with any other e-voting machines that leave no paper trail, and Diebold is scrambling to prevent the same thing from happening everywhere else. (I don't recall if any other state has taken action similar to California's, so someone please say if any have.)
I can hardly believe they still might have, if they ever had, the kind of influence it would take to make these raids happen under some other pretense.
Rackspace has offices in the US and so is subject to US law. If they didn't comply with the order, contempt of court charges could be brought against US Rackspace management. It's probably true that UK personnel could have chosen to disregard US management's orders. I'm not sure what the consequences for that could be, especially if the management declined to take any disciplinary action for insubordination.
I work in the building next door to where this happened. We actually knew all this within days of the accident to a high degree of certainty. The only reason I can think of for the official report to have taken so long is that, given there was really no new information to discover, it was a low priority.
We switched systems several times between 1648 and now, and one historical observation that is obvious from our history is that the national debt was firmly under control only when we had a strong monarch.
And some snippage.
It sounds like a very sensible arrangement, but I clearly need to read more Contintental history.
You can say "kingdom" because you have one. In the case of the US where it doesn't exist, it seems more natural to speak in general terms.
You're right that the US Presidency is a rather strange hodgepodge of an office that perhaps resembles medieval kingship more than anything else. I'm thinking specifically here of England, where I'm most familiar with the details. Parliament always held the purse-strings, and it wasn't unusual for an English king to find himself wanting desperately to fight a war but without funds to pay for it.
The Clinton impeachment trial was a complex situation, but I don't really feel up to discussing the details at the moment; Four hours of sleep a night for the past week is starting to catch up with me. That's unfortunate, because it illustrates one of the serious problems with a particular Constitutional reform that was instituted almost 100 years ago that made our Congress more "democratic", but in so doing exposed the Senate to political influences from which it was supposed to be insulated. It was less a case of reluctance to unseat the "king" than it was pure partisan politics.
I don't necessarily have a problem with concentrating power at the top, and I suspect I'd favor a system with a stronger king than yours is under your system. Perhaps that's just closer to what I'm used to, but I can also point to periods in history where this has worked very well indeed. The trick is to devise some way of choosing successors to office that guarantees -- or at least gives you a very good chance -- of a well-qualified ruler. (For example, the Roman Emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius.) I will concede that this is hard to do.
The "first lady" phenomenon comes of our President being both the head of state and the chief executive. The king must have a queen, after all, and the "First Lady", who has no official status, perhaps corresponds much more closely with a king's consort than our President does with your king. (Queen now, but you know what I mean.)
Now that the furor has died down, I'm going to come out of the closet a little bit. I actually agree with much of what you've said here. American monarchists are as rare as hen's teeth, but we do exist and there are at least two more among my personal acquaintences. (Perhaps surprising given my nick here, but that's how it goes sometimes.) Part of my motivation for posting here was to get people to question their assumptions in a way they'd obviously never done, but another part was to test the depths of their indoctrination about democracy. The results were about what I expected. Some posters were very reasonable about it, some preferred to rest on their dogma and not apply much thought to the matter at all, and some like Minna Karai, were positively threatened by it. You know you're cutting close to the bone when simply asking some inconvenient questions evokes such a hostile response!
It was a little distressing to see how many posters appear to have never read the United States' foundational documents. (As you point out, loyalty to the Constitution is a stabilizing influence but that becomes problematic when few know what the Constitution actually says.) None of them are very lengthy, and although the language is extremely florid by modern standards none of them are particularly difficult. That many of them haven't read some of the standard commentaries is also distressing, albeit less so -- they are fairly lengthy and written in the same idiom which can be extremely tiresome if you're not used to it. But for those who have not read the documents, and for those who have but have not understood them, it seems they've missed the point entirely. The founders of our nation were clear on what they believed to be the main purpose of government. In order to achieve that purpose they didn't adopt the republican model automatically, they did so after considering what other systems might fulfill that purpose and concluded this one did it best. The system they devised was in fact a good deal less "democratic" than that currently in place. They thought democracy a bad idea for national politics, and in fact the only federal offices to be filled by direct popular vote were the seats of the lower house of the legislature. This being the larger house, each member has proportionately the least power. The founders thought it unsafe for more powerful offices to be filled the same way. Popular vote was restricted to a more local scale.
It appears that advancing the idea of monarchism in the US will be no more, and no less, difficult than I thought it would be. The challenge is twofold. First, Americans have been thoroughly propagandized that monarchy is an inherently inferior form of government. They believe this with remarkably little evidence to go on, but the idea has been hammered into them from a very early age and they're virtually incapable of questioning it. (It took me many years to notice that what I was reading in history didn't really support it at all.) The second point goes hand-in-hand with the first and is put in place by the same method: that "democracy" is an inherenly superior form of government. You've seen a natural corollary expressed here by many: the more democratic a system is, the better. What they have not been taught is this valuable lesson from history: that all democratic systems have been temporary, and have always reverted at some point to a monarchy, and that reversion is always accompanied by violence.
Part of what drove me to become an out-and-out monarchist was a perception, raised by President Clinton's abuse of the executive order, that we were headed in that direction. I'd hoped that with a change in administration the abuses would end, but I see no sign of that. My hope is that if we could take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and by Constitutional means institute a monarchy before the crisis point was reached, the violent transition period could be avoided. We may well be a hundred years away from that point, but it's clearly not too soon to begin making an
It's funny then, isn't it, that many of the same men who approved that statement also approved the system for electing the President. They must not have felt they contradicted.
The "consent of the governed" in this case isn't indicative of a democracy. In context it's clearly a statement about all governments whether democratic or not. This is the fundamental political theory which the Founders used to justify their revolt from their King, to clearly contrast with the prevailing Eurpoean theory of "The Divine Right of Kings". It has nothing to do with democracy as such, except for the fairly simple observation that in a democratic system it's possible for the people to withdraw their consent by means other than force of arms.
Live with the times and learn to reform your political and social systems.
Our Constitution is certainly open to criticism, but I'll not tolerate cirticism based on ignorance. It explicitly includes provisions for its reform. You'd have know that if you'd read the thing. (I invite you to do so. The original document is less than 4 pages long handwritten, followed by 27 relatively brief articles of amendment. It's a quick read and you might learn something.)
The American social system, being outside the scope of that document, cannot be altered by the same mechanism. You might think that the government is the proper organ for social reform, but not all Americans conflate the government with society.
The point is that the electoral college was instituted for a reason. There were very cogent arguments presented for it against a popular vote. I'm not hearing anyone taking on any of those arguments here. Rather, I'm getting a lot of unsupported dogma about how a direct popular vote, being more democratic, is automatically better. I'd like people to think about why they believe it to be better. I find most often, as here, that it's simply an unquestioned assumption. Like most unquestioned assumptions it may well be faulty. But if you don't question it, you'll never find out.
Similarly, I think that political systems should evolve and improve.
Of course they should. That's why the Constitution includes an amendement process. The authors didn't think they were infallible, and I certainly don't think they were either.
. Your post was actually insightful since it invited the reader to question his beliefs.
This is utterly untrue. Direct popular vote was considered and rejected for completely different reasons. It's a strictly modern habit of thought to insist on results on the very same day for a nationwide election, but that didn't even happen in the very common statewide elections of the time. They were more patient than that.
You're not offtopic at all. IMO, you cut to the heart of the problem.
The electors are appointed by the political parties to vote for the candidate whose name appears on the ballot. In some states they're legally bound to vote for that candidate, but in others they're not. (Some Southern Democrats refused to vote for a Roman Catholic in the 1960 election and cast their ballots for a different Democrat. Imagine if enough of them had done this to throw the election to Nixon.) You don't know who they are because, in a very real sense, who they are makes no difference at all. Nothing is done as the system was envisioned to work.
If you're going to insist that direct popular vote is better, you need to demonstrate why. You need to demonstrate why this would be a better system than the one in place. To do this you need to understand what the rationale was for the current system and demonstrate why that rationale no longer applies. That is has been largely subverted, and we have the kind of circus we get surrounding every Presidential election, is actually a good argument for returning to a more exact version of it. The authors of the Consitution were amazingly prescient in some ways.
Fewer than 6 words of the Federalist Papers have any bearing to the topic under discussion, and they are parenthetical. (They are in the 8th paragraph, by the way).
You cannot have read that paper thoroughly, or having read it you have not understood it. The entire thing was about the rationale for the indirect method of electing the President, from the beginning until the last two paragraphs which are devoted to the rationale for electing a Vice President. I know late 18th century prose can be a tad opaque, but if you're going to take as strident a tone as you're taking, you should really know better what you're talking about.
He's the representative of this country as a whole, not some groups more than others.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that the majority of the voters in this country be the ones to make the decision as to who that person is.
This is a non-sequitur, but let's pretend it isn't for a moment.
The system for electing the President has been subverted by the practise of not placing the electors' names on the ballot, but those of the Presidential candidates themselves. Many inattentive voters in the 2000 election were sincerely surprised to discover that a President can be elected without receiving the highest number of popular votes. Candidates bring their campaigns directly to the people, and so do nothing to promote understanding of the Constitutionally mandated system. In effect, although the President isn't chosen by popular vote, the pre-election activity is carried out almost exactly as if he were.
Dirty campaign tactics, dirty money, special interest groups, interference from foreign governments -- we have, or have had by now, all this as a result. It was all foreseen by the authors of the Constitution, and the Electoral College was instituted in an attempt to avoid it in the hopes they would, with some rationality, choose based on the merity of a candidate and not because of political affiliation or any like consideration. Even the fact that the Electors meet in their respective states and not all in the same place is to forestall any one group from exerting an undue amount of political influence over them, or politicking among them with some states banding together against others.
Seeing as how all the above describes most of what is wrong with the system as it exists today, how would going to a direct popular vote fix that? Would it not make more sense to go back to something closer to the Constitutional design? Might we then avoid the kind of media circus that now attends every Presidential campaign and distracts the electorate from the real issues and qualifications of the candidates? How could we possibly fix any of this with a direct popular vote? (Much of it is already illegal, but it happens anyway, so passing more laws won't fix matters. We can't pass laws much more restrictive and still preserve our 1st Amendment rights of free speech.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't look at what I can't find. Kindly provide a direct link. I see no "pro-choice" question on that page. Are you sure you linked to the page you thought you did?
I just want to add that, based strictly on my own personal experience, many of those who advocate easy access to abortion have a greatly exaggerated idea of how many abortions are performed each year because of risk to the mother's life or because the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. It would be an interesting survey to carry out, and it might explain some of the disparity here between numbers who feel that abortion should be only slightly restricted and the numbers who feel that non-health related abortions should be illegal.
That's no reason for you to do it. Anyway, this is a meta-argument on abortion. It's not about the morality of it as such, it's about public opinion about it.
That said, I stated exactly what the data on that page (representing a collection of the results of various different surveys, not a single survey, which may well explain the poor tracking - if the samples weren't normalized to each other, significant differences could be found) says: around 50% of women identify as pro-choice, and 80% of women support at least some form of legal abortion.
You cannot get that information from that page. Only the Gender category breaks the information down by sex. If you're calling 42% "around 50%"... I'm sorry, but that's not valid. You're deliberately trying to underplay the fact that according to one of those charts 57%, and the other 73%, of women favor at least some restrictions on the availability of abortion. That's a significantly different picture than the veritable even split your "around 50%" suggests.
The other surveys give some idea what the circumstances people in general (not broken out by sex) consider to be good reasons for an abortion. Significantly, look at the "Reasons" graph. 61% believe abortion should be illegal for merely economic reasons. It's not too much of a stretch that the all-too-common abortion for mere convenience or as a method of birth control would meet with even greater disapproval. It's a pity they didn't ask about those. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute only 6% of abortions are primarily because of health problems. 1% are because the pregnancy was due to rape or incest. The rest are situations where putting the child up for adoption would be a reasonable alternative. (This is a relatively recent chart, but the data's old. Still, I got the link to this place from Planned Parenthood's website, so it's clear that AGI's data aren't seen as embarrassing to PP. And no one's saying the situation has changed much since then as far as I can tell.)
In other words, that "Reasons" chart at Public Agenda had a bias built in to the underlying survey because they failed to ask about a common reason for abortion. The only non-medical reason they asked about was economic, when it's clear that there are several other non-economic reasons. But even then, most people believe abortion should be illegal in that situation.
So where abortion can be reasonably termed a choice -- where there's no medical reason for it, so it's genuinely elective surgery -- most people want it to be illegal. Since the "Gender" chart failed to turn up any kind of significant gender gap here, we can't assume that most of that 61% are men. It's more reasonable to assume that men and women are split evenly here as they are in other abortion-related matters and that about 61% of women feel elective abortions should be illegal.
So now your "around 50%" has dropped to just under 40%.
Again, the point here isn't that abortion is wrong, or even that most women think that most abortions should be illegal. (I believe that to be a reasonable inference from what we're seeing here, but that exact information just isn't there so it could also be an erroneous inference.) The point is that the data doesn't support your contention of "around 50%" of women self-identifying as pro-choice.
No, what invalidates your point is that you've been very selective in how you cited the data on that page. A better guide to whether most women are "pro-choice" would have been the other column. Totally free choice is represented only by the first graph there, and it was less than a majority of women. (And men.) All the rest are willing to subject abortion to *some* limitation. If abortion was to be allowed only (for example) when the life of the mother was endangered, that's not really a choice in any meaningful sense. It's interesting that the two columns don't appear to track very well. It's possible that some of the women who answered in the first column, "Legal, most" were laboring under the misapprehension that most abortions were now performed under just that circumstance.
The point of this being that there really isn't enough data here to justify your conclusion. The survey didn't ask sufficiently detailed questions.
And your point is...? That link made it very clear that there's no gender gap at all when it comes to opinions on abortion. It supports parent's implication that wanting to strike down Roe v. Wade isn't necessarily seen as oppressing women -- by women -- any more than it's seen that way by men. To suggest that it is, is nothing more than a PC stereotype.
You don't normally have the recovery subsystem active at launch time.
Only in China, where there are very few cars relatively speaking, is the plume likely to be mostly due to heavy industry.
There seems to be a clue in the readme included with the software. To save everyone the trouble of looking it up, it's from Habakkuk 2:3 in the KJV.
Why don't you go get a radio talk show or something where your trash talk will be welcome?
I can hardly believe they still might have, if they ever had, the kind of influence it would take to make these raids happen under some other pretense.
Rackspace has offices in the US and so is subject to US law. If they didn't comply with the order, contempt of court charges could be brought against US Rackspace management. It's probably true that UK personnel could have chosen to disregard US management's orders. I'm not sure what the consequences for that could be, especially if the management declined to take any disciplinary action for insubordination.
I work in the building next door to where this happened. We actually knew all this within days of the accident to a high degree of certainty. The only reason I can think of for the official report to have taken so long is that, given there was really no new information to discover, it was a low priority.
And some snippage.
It sounds like a very sensible arrangement, but I clearly need to read more Contintental history.
You're right that the US Presidency is a rather strange hodgepodge of an office that perhaps resembles medieval kingship more than anything else. I'm thinking specifically here of England, where I'm most familiar with the details. Parliament always held the purse-strings, and it wasn't unusual for an English king to find himself wanting desperately to fight a war but without funds to pay for it.
The Clinton impeachment trial was a complex situation, but I don't really feel up to discussing the details at the moment; Four hours of sleep a night for the past week is starting to catch up with me. That's unfortunate, because it illustrates one of the serious problems with a particular Constitutional reform that was instituted almost 100 years ago that made our Congress more "democratic", but in so doing exposed the Senate to political influences from which it was supposed to be insulated. It was less a case of reluctance to unseat the "king" than it was pure partisan politics.
I don't necessarily have a problem with concentrating power at the top, and I suspect I'd favor a system with a stronger king than yours is under your system. Perhaps that's just closer to what I'm used to, but I can also point to periods in history where this has worked very well indeed. The trick is to devise some way of choosing successors to office that guarantees -- or at least gives you a very good chance -- of a well-qualified ruler. (For example, the Roman Emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius.) I will concede that this is hard to do.
The "first lady" phenomenon comes of our President being both the head of state and the chief executive. The king must have a queen, after all, and the "First Lady", who has no official status, perhaps corresponds much more closely with a king's consort than our President does with your king. (Queen now, but you know what I mean.)
It was a little distressing to see how many posters appear to have never read the United States' foundational documents. (As you point out, loyalty to the Constitution is a stabilizing influence but that becomes problematic when few know what the Constitution actually says.) None of them are very lengthy, and although the language is extremely florid by modern standards none of them are particularly difficult. That many of them haven't read some of the standard commentaries is also distressing, albeit less so -- they are fairly lengthy and written in the same idiom which can be extremely tiresome if you're not used to it. But for those who have not read the documents, and for those who have but have not understood them, it seems they've missed the point entirely. The founders of our nation were clear on what they believed to be the main purpose of government. In order to achieve that purpose they didn't adopt the republican model automatically, they did so after considering what other systems might fulfill that purpose and concluded this one did it best. The system they devised was in fact a good deal less "democratic" than that currently in place. They thought democracy a bad idea for national politics, and in fact the only federal offices to be filled by direct popular vote were the seats of the lower house of the legislature. This being the larger house, each member has proportionately the least power. The founders thought it unsafe for more powerful offices to be filled the same way. Popular vote was restricted to a more local scale.
It appears that advancing the idea of monarchism in the US will be no more, and no less, difficult than I thought it would be. The challenge is twofold. First, Americans have been thoroughly propagandized that monarchy is an inherently inferior form of government. They believe this with remarkably little evidence to go on, but the idea has been hammered into them from a very early age and they're virtually incapable of questioning it. (It took me many years to notice that what I was reading in history didn't really support it at all.) The second point goes hand-in-hand with the first and is put in place by the same method: that "democracy" is an inherenly superior form of government. You've seen a natural corollary expressed here by many: the more democratic a system is, the better. What they have not been taught is this valuable lesson from history: that all democratic systems have been temporary, and have always reverted at some point to a monarchy, and that reversion is always accompanied by violence.
Part of what drove me to become an out-and-out monarchist was a perception, raised by President Clinton's abuse of the executive order, that we were headed in that direction. I'd hoped that with a change in administration the abuses would end, but I see no sign of that. My hope is that if we could take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and by Constitutional means institute a monarchy before the crisis point was reached, the violent transition period could be avoided. We may well be a hundred years away from that point, but it's clearly not too soon to begin making an
I did that, you silly person. You don't appear to have understood it. That's not my problem.
If you think I was suggesting anything in particular, you've missed the point.
The "consent of the governed" in this case isn't indicative of a democracy. In context it's clearly a statement about all governments whether democratic or not. This is the fundamental political theory which the Founders used to justify their revolt from their King, to clearly contrast with the prevailing Eurpoean theory of "The Divine Right of Kings". It has nothing to do with democracy as such, except for the fairly simple observation that in a democratic system it's possible for the people to withdraw their consent by means other than force of arms.
Our Constitution is certainly open to criticism, but I'll not tolerate cirticism based on ignorance. It explicitly includes provisions for its reform. You'd have know that if you'd read the thing. (I invite you to do so. The original document is less than 4 pages long handwritten, followed by 27 relatively brief articles of amendment. It's a quick read and you might learn something.)
The American social system, being outside the scope of that document, cannot be altered by the same mechanism. You might think that the government is the proper organ for social reform, but not all Americans conflate the government with society.
The point is that the electoral college was instituted for a reason. There were very cogent arguments presented for it against a popular vote. I'm not hearing anyone taking on any of those arguments here. Rather, I'm getting a lot of unsupported dogma about how a direct popular vote, being more democratic, is automatically better. I'd like people to think about why they believe it to be better. I find most often, as here, that it's simply an unquestioned assumption. Like most unquestioned assumptions it may well be faulty. But if you don't question it, you'll never find out.
Similarly, I think that political systems should evolve and improve.
Of course they should. That's why the Constitution includes an amendement process. The authors didn't think they were infallible, and I certainly don't think they were either.
. Your post was actually insightful since it invited the reader to question his beliefs.
And this, indeed, was the point.
This is utterly untrue. Direct popular vote was considered and rejected for completely different reasons. It's a strictly modern habit of thought to insist on results on the very same day for a nationwide election, but that didn't even happen in the very common statewide elections of the time. They were more patient than that.
The electors are appointed by the political parties to vote for the candidate whose name appears on the ballot. In some states they're legally bound to vote for that candidate, but in others they're not. (Some Southern Democrats refused to vote for a Roman Catholic in the 1960 election and cast their ballots for a different Democrat. Imagine if enough of them had done this to throw the election to Nixon.) You don't know who they are because, in a very real sense, who they are makes no difference at all. Nothing is done as the system was envisioned to work.
If you're going to insist that direct popular vote is better, you need to demonstrate why. You need to demonstrate why this would be a better system than the one in place. To do this you need to understand what the rationale was for the current system and demonstrate why that rationale no longer applies. That is has been largely subverted, and we have the kind of circus we get surrounding every Presidential election, is actually a good argument for returning to a more exact version of it. The authors of the Consitution were amazingly prescient in some ways.
You cannot have read that paper thoroughly, or having read it you have not understood it. The entire thing was about the rationale for the indirect method of electing the President, from the beginning until the last two paragraphs which are devoted to the rationale for electing a Vice President. I know late 18th century prose can be a tad opaque, but if you're going to take as strident a tone as you're taking, you should really know better what you're talking about.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that the majority of the voters in this country be the ones to make the decision as to who that person is.
This is a non-sequitur, but let's pretend it isn't for a moment.
The system for electing the President has been subverted by the practise of not placing the electors' names on the ballot, but those of the Presidential candidates themselves. Many inattentive voters in the 2000 election were sincerely surprised to discover that a President can be elected without receiving the highest number of popular votes. Candidates bring their campaigns directly to the people, and so do nothing to promote understanding of the Constitutionally mandated system. In effect, although the President isn't chosen by popular vote, the pre-election activity is carried out almost exactly as if he were.
Dirty campaign tactics, dirty money, special interest groups, interference from foreign governments -- we have, or have had by now, all this as a result. It was all foreseen by the authors of the Constitution, and the Electoral College was instituted in an attempt to avoid it in the hopes they would, with some rationality, choose based on the merity of a candidate and not because of political affiliation or any like consideration. Even the fact that the Electors meet in their respective states and not all in the same place is to forestall any one group from exerting an undue amount of political influence over them, or politicking among them with some states banding together against others.
Seeing as how all the above describes most of what is wrong with the system as it exists today, how would going to a direct popular vote fix that? Would it not make more sense to go back to something closer to the Constitutional design? Might we then avoid the kind of media circus that now attends every Presidential campaign and distracts the electorate from the real issues and qualifications of the candidates? How could we possibly fix any of this with a direct popular vote? (Much of it is already illegal, but it happens anyway, so passing more laws won't fix matters. We can't pass laws much more restrictive and still preserve our 1st Amendment rights of free speech.)