Took a break from Iraq reporting to launch a long attack on the electoral college over at Mother Jones online. A point that's overlooked far too often, I think, is that we already have all sorts of direct elections in the United States, and they work just fine. No one ever talks about "protecting district interests" in state gubernatorial races, or about giving a governor an "electoral mandate," and there's nothing so fundamentally different about a presidential election that we need an entirely different system.