Washington State has held nonpartisan top 2 open primaries since 2008 following the US Supreme Court decision (7 – 2) declaring that Washington’s Initiative 872 was constitutional. With three major election cycles complete, we can draw some conclusions based on primary and general election results.

When Kiera Wilmot and the ACLU claimed she was just exercising her scientific curiosity when she made a bottle bomb, a kind of improvised explosive, which got her expelled from school and nearly resulted in her being prosecuted for a felony, was what she did fairly excused as a science project?

According to the Ledger:

In a previous article, 5 arguments against the Common Core state standards were articulated. The standards were summarized as the following:

After the Illinois legislative session ended with relatively few gains, Governor Pat Quinn quickly called a special session which is set to meet on Wednesday. At the top of the agenda is the public pension reform that failed.

If you’ve seen Leonidas and his Spartans in the movie 300, then you have a pretty decent idea of how the ancient Greek phalanx worked. Line after line of men holding up their shields and pointing their spears forward to form a shield wall bristling with spear points.

 I hate, in Rome, a Grecian town to find;

To see the scum of Greece transplanted here,Received like gods, is what I cannot bear.Nor Greeks alone, but Syrians here abound;Obscene Orontes, diving under ground,Conveys his wealth to Tiber's hungry shores,And fattens Italy with foreign whores:--Juvenal, Third Satire, 118 A.D.

By laying down a “red line,” Pres. Obama probably set himself up to be pushed into taking the first steps to get the U.S. “involved” in what amounts to a civil war in Syria.  United States military support for Syrian rebels, we are told, will include small arms, ammunition and possibly anti-tank weapons.  The Senate’s uber war-hawks, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have been pressing this issue for a while, and I predict they will view the President’s action as a necessary, but insufficient, response.  Mark me down as a skeptic in the face of this decision.

The Obama administration has finally caved to the Syria hawks in arming the rebels and is now considering implementing a no-fly zone:

I saw a lot of accusations of racism in the incident where Kiera Wilmot got in trouble - appropriately so - for exploding a dangerous bottle bomb, containing ingredients that combine to create a thermite explosion.

From the FBI web site:

South Carolina's open primary electoral system (not to be confused with the nonpartisan top-two primary in California and Washington) is looking much safer following the withdrawal of the State Republican Party from an anti-open primary lawsuit. They have been challenging South Carolina's nonpartisan open primary election process since 2010 and have been unsuccessful in numerous attempts.