Empowering The Sensible Center; No One But Trump May 14, 2024May 13, 2024 TEN MINUTES . . . I’ve written about this before: Ultimately, the solution to our country’s toxic polarization is a combination of open primaries, ranked choice voting, and easy voting-by-mail. Candidates will no longer be able to win their party’s nomination by appealing to the most ardent on the right or left. Instead, they’ll have to appeal, also, to the broad, often-more-sensible center. Over time, compromise and comity could once again become the norm. Andrew Yang’s just-released 10-minute TED talk does a really good job of making the case. It worked in Alaska — with more states on the way. Watch! MEANWHILE . . . Many believe that the New York “business records” charges now playing out in in court would not have been brought against anyone but Trump. And that’s probably true. But there’s a reason. It’s that mischaracterizing a hush-money payment as a legal expense to spare embarrassment — or even to cheat on taxes — is not something of great consequence . . . whereas doing it to become President of the Unted States and change the course of history is — and something no one but Trump has ever done. Yes, it would have been better if Al Capone had been tried for murder instead of tax evasion. So, too, if Trump could be timely tried for lying to the FBI about documents he claimed not to have had and then worked to conceal. Better still, if he could be timely tried for attempting to overturn an American election. He seems clearly guilty of both. But given that he appointed judges (one in Florida, three to the Supreme Court) seemingly intent on dragging those cases out long enough for him to shut them down once reelected, we have to take what we can get — if we get anything at all. (It’s not easy to get all 12 jurors to agree; and not enough if only 11 do.)