The commander-in-chief made a controversial move earlier this month by handing the reins of authority over military operations in Afghanistan back to the Pentagon.

Maine ranked choice voting survives. The bill to fully repeal the first-in-the-nation, voter-approved ranked choice voting initiative for state and non-presidential federal elections died in the legislature Wednesday.

The legislative session will end without any further action being taken, which means ranked choice voting (RCV) is still on the books.

Lost in the video news of the day, where a CNN producer stated Russia was a "mostly bulls***" narrative, was the fact that Time Warner, the company that owns CNN, is likely going to be bought out by AT&T.

No official timetable has been made public, but if the merger goes through, and all indications say yes, CNN's days, as it's currently formatted, could be numbered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOXzSqKR5OY

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson discussed the latest bombshell developments at CNN and the state of corporate media with Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson Tuesday night. She said, among other things, that Americans are getting "an artificial reality put out by people with narratives."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ei68aCWupY&t=0m27s

The efforts by a group of Senate Republicans to craft the repeal of Obamacare has come up woefully short, and it not acceptable. So say a group of bipartisan governors.

DC politics has gone mad.

Americans are now treated to a 24/7 freak show of government dysfunction, charges and countercharges, midnight tweets, and a myriad of other forms of dystopian political theatre.

Politics has become toxic.

The professional pundits and their assembled panelists profess their disgust at the toxicity — and then gleefully throw another log on the fire.

Is there any way for the American people to intervene?

Why are referendums ending up so different from how polls suggest?

From Brexit to the FARC peace deal, there have been some shockers in referendums: the polls have very much gone one way, and the results another.

So what the heck is going on? In this episode, Xander and Erik talk about how polling works, how it might be going so wrong, and what oddities are going on with direct democracy versus the representative stuff we're used to.

The Maine House passed an amended version of the full repeal bill Tuesday that would implement ranked choice voting for U.S. House and primary elections, where there is no state constitutional conflict. The bill would allow the legislature to address the need for a constitutional amendment for three state general elections at a later date.

We should have known this hysteria would come after election night.

All one needs to do is look at the District of Columbia voting results to understand that President's Trump's campaign promise to Drain The Swamp would rouse every sordid creature from the depths of D.C..

The backbone of the Russian hysteria story has been built exclusively on two sources, both of which have been debunked and characterized as false.

In January 2017, the Seattle minimum wage hike increased the city's minimum wage from $13 an hour to $15 for employees of large companies, the second such increase in less than a year. It pushed Seattle to having the highest-in-the-country minimum wage.