Fog City Journal has this brief description of the Jill Stein-Roseanne Barr presidential debate that took place in San Francisco on the evening of May 12.
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On May 13, the most populous German state, North Rhine-Westphalia, held elections for its own state government. The Green Party polled 11.3%, the Free Democrats polled 8.6%, the Pirate Party polled 7.8%, and The Left polled 2.5%. The Social Democrats polled 39.1% and the Christian Democratic Union, which governs Germany, only polled 26.3%. Other parties polled the remainder of the vote. See this story.
Although thousands of articles and opinion pieces have been published about the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC, this article is noteworthy. It is by Jeffrey Toobin and appears in The New Yorker. As is traditional for that magazine, the article is very long (ten pages on a computer) and contains far more than opinion and analysis. It is lengthy because it gives the history of the case, filled with interesting details.
Michael Russnow is a California scriptwriter and recently an officer with the Writers Guild of America. He has worked on many well-known television series, and some films, and is a Democrat and a former congressional aide. He has this commentary on California’s top-two “open primary” system here.
He mentions the California June 2012 primary ballot, which lists 24 candidates for U.S. Senate. Having that many candidates in the primary season is not unusual in California. In 2010, there were 23 candidates on the various primary ballots for Governor. But, in 2010, no California ballot was crowded, because those 23 gubernatorial candidates were distributed on the separate primary ballots of six different political parties. The top-two system creates one large primary ballot for all seven of California’s qualified parties, so the system gives the appearance of lots of candidates.
California has fewer legislative candidates in 2012 than it did in 2010.
Doug Schoen, a pollster and also a columnist for Fox News, has this article, suggesting that Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, will be a big factor in the 2012 presidential general election.