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Guy Branum is a funny, funny comic and writer. You might have seen him on Chelsea Lately a lot; and he worked at G4. He's a great comic. He also knows some seriously obscure facts about
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NOTES:
Dork Forest Tshirt that Bret Chamber’s Designed
Quenya
Yuba City
Ishi
Chumash
Oroville
Oroville Dam
To Read:
Joan Didion
On Self Respect
The Year of Magical Thinking
Punjabi Sikhs in Yuba City
Nunavut
Prairie Island Indian Casino
Krua Thai
Michael Everson EP of TDF
Byerly’s (owned by LUNDS! – I am vindaloo!)
A great article about Canada
1963 Canadian Flag Debate
First French-speaking Canadian prime minister
Guy’s fave Canada Song
Credits:
Audio leveling by Patrick Brady
Music is by Mike Ruekberg
Website design by Vilmos: who has his own podcast
Apps are available with the bonus contest: iPhone or Android
Definitely, the Perot Reform campaign was the most serious recent "third" party campaign, but we shouldn't forget the George Wallace, the John Anderson, nor certainly the splintering of the Democratic Party in 1948 or in 1860 (unless we want to see the Bell Constitutional Union effort as a last desperate remnant of the Whigs who wouldn't join with the abolitionists in the new Republican Party), nor the showing of the largely Republican Progressives in 1912 or 1924 (the latter in fusion with the Socialist Party, which could only warp Fox News's collective brainpan) or the Gilded Age Populists as indicative of how much resentment of our two-party default there is. Personally, my own resentment remains that the best candidate/platform of my lifetime, Sonia Johnson of the (Greenish) Citizens Party couldn't vote for herself any more than I could vote for her, since we both lived in Virginia at the time.
It looks as if your comment was somehow cut off...
That there's no provincial NDP in Quebec but they won a majority of Quebec seats in Federal Parliament is weird. That what started out as a protest party of the prairie provinces won a majority of Quebec's Federal seats is weird, because tension between the Prairies and Quebec has been one of the defining features of Canadian politics for the last 50 years.
And yeah, any time you have first past the post voting, you have ignored votes, but in a multi-party system, you are ending up with victors earning well under 50% a larger percent of the time. In the US, with a strong two-party system, this is limited. The margins by which winning candidates are under 50% is much, much lower. The US's biggest 3rd party challenge was in 1992, but Clinton still got 42% of the vote. Compare that with the 37% and 39% Harper pulled in his last two wins. Last election the Liberals pulled 19% of the vote, but only got 11% of the seats in the House of Commons. That's a big swing and one of the dangers of a multi-party first past the post system. The 93 election with the PCs getting 16 % of the vote but
Currently BC is Liberal/NDB with NO conservatives at all, Alberta is run by the Conservatives with some party I just learned about (the Wildrose Party) as official opposition, manitoba is NDP/Cons with one liberal, SK is run by the Saskatchewan party, which is an anti-NDP alliance of Cons and Libs, and Quebec is all PQ and liberal even though their federal delegation is mostly NDP. Point is, your federalized legislative structure, and the lack of a relationship between Provincial and Federal politics (like the German Bundesrat) makes for a CRAZY national partisan structure that leads to massive realignments of power, and huge portions of the vote being ignored.
Sad news on the job front...PARTNERS (CBS) has been cancelled.
As WIKIPEDIA currently notes:
"They currently govern the provinces of Manitoba and Nova Scotia, form the Official Opposition in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, and have sitting members in every provincial legislature except those of Quebec (where there is no provincial NDP), New Brunswick (although the New Brunswick NDP had an elected member until 2006) and Prince Edward Island."
Meanwhile, I enjoyed watching the election returns in 1994 where the Progressive Conservative Party, Mulroney's, completely collapsed...C-SPAN imported CBC coverage.
His view that we have the stupidest form of government in the world is shocking misinformed. Yes, the ruling party controls the government BUT only if they were elected with a MAJORITY of the seats, which usually doesn't happen. Usually the ruling party does not have a majority of the seats meaning that the ruling party is FORCED to work with opposition parties to generate buy-in for their policys, reforms, budgets.
Think about that for a minute, can you understand how that may not be the "stupidest form of government in the world"?