While having lunch in a restaurant today, I realized that

Indeed, I was having lunch with 8 co-workers, 8 normally constituted adults, 8 people with 2 functioning arms, and we were served 9 glasses of water with 9 plastics straws. Coming from a country where eating has been elevated to an art, such ungracious habit could only raise my curiosity.

Plenty of attention has been cast on Paul Ryan since word leaked on Twitter that he would be the next President of the United States, ugh next Vice President of the United States. IVN contributors and journalists everywhere have peeled through his voting record, evaluated his positions, and speculated on the impacts of his budget proposal.

In Part One of IVN's Fantasy Administration Series, we asked our Facebook Fans: If you could choose ANYONE to be President of the United States, who would it be?

With 18% of the vote, Ron Paul came in first, followed by Gary Johnson and Hillary Clinton.

Some honorable mentions:

While half of America has not heard of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's VP pick, far fewer know the name Rob Zerban. Zerban is running as a Democratic challenger to Ryan for his Congressional seat in Wisconsin's First Congressional district.

These dark money groups do not have to disclose who their donors are. In this particular case, the dark money groups are conservative. But it would be just as poisonous to democracy if they were liberal. These sums of money sloshing around to politicians, with no accountability whatsoever, is anti-ethical to open and clean government.

Smart drones are coming, able to communicate with each other and accomplish tasks, with little intervention from the ground. Drones are still in their infancy too. Imagine what they will be able to do in 5-10 years. The privacy concerns are obvious, as are concerns about Orwellian governments.

In 2008 candidates exploded onto the social media scene with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs. The election became an event which involved and interacted with voters, instead of a story they watch passively on the news. The 2012 election promises to continue the social media trend.

Political polarization is the highest it's been in the last 25 years, Pew Research Center pointed out yesterday, with Americans increasingly divided on key election issues going into the November election. In 1987, the partisan gap was at 10 percentage points, and has now nearly doubled, hovering at 18 percentage points, according to a new study on American values.

A City of Los Angeles bankruptcy could be nearing, with the city a victim of the same unfunded public pension liabilities that are crippling municipalities like Stockton and San Bernardino across California, and elsewhere as well.