Governor Beverly Perdue of North Carolina is an idiot

She suggested suspending elections because of gridlock. Good grief! The official word is that she was not serious, though apparently she certainly sounded serious at the event. Way to give the Republicans ammunition, Bev. Obviously we can't simply suspend parts of the constitution, and there's no way to reinterpret the requirement for biennial elections. It's mundane, procedural, and highly specific.

If, on the other hand, you want to suggest extending the length of House terms, I'm very open to that. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to, say, making the House term variable length with a maximum of four years with new elections to be called after at least one year upon the command of the president. In exchange, the president would give up the veto, thus eliminating another element of gridlock, while the presidential ability to call a snap election would replace it as a check on the legislative branch. That's the way it works in Fifth Republic France.

Or you could just make them four-year fixed terms. If you want to maintain the check on the executive that midterms provide, straddle them so that the House is only elected on the midterms. That's the way the Virginia Senate works. I'm not entirely sure that would help with gridlock, though.

Finally! Firefox 7 delivers!

From using it for about 20 minutes, I can say the memory usage is down and the memory holes appear to be fixed. I can actually read articles at The Economist without crashing my computer (previously it would just keep chewing up more and more memory). My Chrome temptations are now purged (though Smooth Gestures turning out to be spyware was a prohibitive impediment; no other mouse gestures extension for Chrome works right).

What happens when you hold a shutdown and nobody comes?

That's what the latest showdown on capitol hill feels like. I think the House GOP has played out its leverage, at least when it comes to the usage of brinksmanship to get what they want. Their mistake was to blink the first time around and then try again with the debt limit, where the damage to the economy would have been much greater. I'm sure the wealthy backbone of the GOP was screaming in Boehner's ear. He had to come to terms much less than the Tea Party wanted, but they'd already been psyched up. Actually, I suspect if Obama had any balls he could have given them almost nothing if not nothing given that.

Business as Usual in Russia

Putin returns. Did anyone not see this coming? Ah, "Managed Democracy." Though, to be fair, this isn't necessarily that bad of a thing for the rest of a world. The Yeltsin government was a royal mess, which is unacceptable when a massive stockpile of nuclear missiles is on hand. Just don't look into the guy's soul and see a true Christian, okay?

Final Fantasy XIII-2 actually looks like an improvement on the original

If that pans out, it'll be quite a change from Final Fantasy X-2, which failed miserably (see this post, third paragraph). Though, to be fair, Final Fantasy X was a much higher standard to meet (I'd still rank it the best of the lot).

I live in hope that there will be a) towns and b) a user-controllable airship. The lack of the former wrecked the flow of the game; RPGs aren't first-person shooters, there's supposed to be time to go around talking to people and getting a feel for the plot. In FFXIII it was just a rush of ultra-linear* dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles that required way too much button-mashing for their near-automatic mechanics followed by a cutscene followed more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling followed by a cutscene followed by more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles followed by a cutscene... you get the idea. Come to think of it, if just strung the cutscenes together with new onces detailing the major battles, it would work better as a movie than a game.

The lack of an airship was just an unjustified breach of Final Fantasy tradition that further undermined the cohesion of the series. And in this game, unlike Final Fantasy XII, an airship would have actually been useful! Activating all the Cie'th teleport stones on Pulse is a huge pain in the ass! Getting an airship to fly between Orphan's Cradle, Edenhall, and Pulse instead of portals would have been easy as pie for the developers, would have made more sense, and would have been a boon to the players if it could drop you off at different points in Pulse. Or, God forbid, fly freely like in FF I-IX! And yes, you can do that in games without the ability to walk on an overworld map; see Secret of Mana I & II, or Lost Odyssey for that matter.

Back to the subject at hand, the trailers has gotten me looking forward to the game. Hopefully they'll improve the battle system. The plot looks more interesting than the original, though its hard to tell at this point (I'm sure one couldn't have predicted from the trailers that the heroes would do everything the gods Fal'cie wanted every step of the way while knowing they were doing it even to the point of killing Orphan and releasing a genocide only for said genocide to averted by a massive Deus ex Machina). Oh, and Kaias still reminds me of Cid Reines, though apparently he's unrelated. Also, his identity as a Time Agent Who Can Never Die sounds familiar.

*Final Fantasy X took linearity as far as it could go and pulled it off brilliantly. Final Fantasy XIII took it much further and didn't.

Revisiting Eureka's cancelation

Maybe it was the right time, after all. Allison and Jack have triggered Shipping Bed Death, after all. Oddly enough, everyone seems to be pairing off in this last half-season. After this, though, does Syfy even do science fiction anymore (Warehouse 13 is almost pure steampunk fantasy)?

*More* Facebook privacy problems

Go figure. Facebook seems to simply ooze information about you wherever you walk. It reminds me of my carpet after the hot water heater exploded a few days ago (it is finally dry now).

And here I was excited for a few minutes

There's going to be a new Suikoden game! Unfortunately, it looks very much like it's not going to be a Suikoden game, but a Suikoden Tierkreis game; in other words, no True Runes, no recurring characters, no familiar countries, and no Suikoden mythology (beyond the stars of destiny, and the multiverse concept suggested in passing in the main titles, but that's hardly original). In other words, it's not worth buying a PSP for me to play it.

But, I'm told on the linked thread, it really doesn't matter because virtually no one localizes games for the PSP anymore (which may or may not be due to piracy). I really can't see what they're thinking. Going back to Sony would have made a certain amount of sense if they were going to go back to the main Suikoden universe. It makes no sense at all if they're sticking with the Tierkreis multiverse, since it cuts off the Nintendo DS-owning Tierkreis fanbase. Is there some sort of franchise-wrecking fever going around in Japanese video game companies (cf. what's going on with Square-Enix and Final Fantasy)?

Bicameralism and the Direct Election of Senators

I've usually rolled my eyes and dismissed calls to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to state legislatures electing the U.S. Senate. I mean, considering that it's supporters are neo-Confederates and other cranks that want to turn the clock back to the 19th century (at least), and it is a move to make the government less democratic, it seems like a terrible idea. But just now it occurred to me that there's a strong argument in favor of doing that.

Bicameralism isn't that odd. What is odd is having two houses with equal powers and equal democratic legitimacy. That has led to all sorts of problems in our country. There's a genuine advantage to having the Senate lack the democratic legitimacy of the House. It would also mean that the Senators wouldn't be afraid of being primaried by Tea Party loons if they cut deals or rolled over. I doubt you'd see the sort of universal obstructionism you saw during Obama's first two years. Heck, I doubt the Democrats would have gone to such lengths to keep Bush's Federal judges from being confirmed.

Perhaps Obama's greatest asset...

is that his opposition is freaking bug nuts. See the comments over at the Wall Street Journal article on congress going through the latest ceremonial dance to implement the bizarre multi-step debt ceiling increase. Note the enormous amount of hate directed at Boehner, McConnell, and even Cantor. When you keep poking the beehive of crazy with a stick, don't be surprised if a bunch of the crazy bees turn around and sting you rather than sole focusing on the person you sicced them on.

Update: After I wrote this, I got the inkling that this particular article was linked to by Matt Drudge. Of course I was right (the link is below the picture of Harry Reid on the right-hand side). People who read the Drudge report and feel the need to comment on the linked articles are invariably the most unhinged people you'll find in America today.