My late father taught me that what defines a principle is the willingness to adhere to it even when that adherence hurts. Maybe that’s why the newfound appreciation of the Electoral College among many of my friends on the left has struck me as a weirdly compelling spectacle. After the 2000 election, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but (after the Florida debacle) won a majority of Electoral College votes, liberal commentators spent years calling for the direct election of the president.

The third presidential debate, concerned mainly with foreign policy, was frustrating for many commentators because it gave them little to chew on. What’s to debate when there’s so much agreement ― or the semblance of it, at least? Our frustration is quite the opposite: There is genuine agreement between Democrats and Republicans on some issues and yet that consensus fails to drive action. We see this playing out especially on immigration. The larger immigration picture certainly remains contenti

Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. is taking applications for early retirement ― the first since it started as the shipbuilding division of Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. in 1970. POSCO has dropped out of the vaunted club of corporate behemoths with 1 trillion won or more in quarterly operating profits.The two companies are among the top Korean business conglomerates that are taking a beating from the deepening global slump of European origin. But it appears that the worst is yet to come. Wi

President Lee Myung-bak’s son, Si-hyung, returned home Thursday night after 14 hours of questioning as a criminal suspect by investigators working for an independent counsel. In a new investigation into a property scandal involving the president and his family, the independent counsel is set to summon the president’s older brother, Lee Sang-eun, for questioning soon.The widening investigation is juxtaposed against an earlier decision by the prosecution to file criminal charges against none of th

After Monday night’s third presidential debate, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was a stand-in for Mitt Romney during President Obama’s prep sessions, said he never expected Romney to agree with President Obama’s timetable for leaving Afghanistan in 2014.For most of the campaign, after all, Romney has attacked Obama for setting any date at all for withdrawing combat troops from Afghanistan ― at 11 years, now the nation’s longest war. Yet the Republican did a reverse on Monday, promising that he to

Doubts are mounting over the appropriateness and efficiency of the measure to allow Koreans living abroad to cast ballots for presidential and parliamentary elections at home, as only a meager proportion of them have shown interest in exercising their voting rights.An additional amount of money can be justified to give the rising number of overseas Koreans more opportunities to express their political preference and thus increase the voter turnout to strengthen the representativeness of each ele

Independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo recently proposed reducing the number of parliamentary seats, now set at 300, preferably by 100. He said the money to be saved from the cut, which is estimated to reach up to 100 billion won ($90 million) per year, could be used to help alleviate youth unemployment and work out better policies.This suggestion, along with his other proposals to cut state subsidies for parties and abolish their central organizations, appears aimed at highlighting hi

In last week’s debate, President Barack Obama turned to Republican Mitt Romney and said, “Governor, you’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.”I hope Obama is right.The tougher-than-thou poses on China have become routine in presidential campaigns, but these threats, if carried out, could hit American consumers with higher prices and spark damaging tit-for-tat responses from Beijing.Obama, with his ties to organized labor, was always expected to be a reluctant free trader. He’s li

If a massive blackout occurs during a severely cold winter in Hokkaido, many people’s lives will be in danger.The government and Hokkaido Electric Power Co. must avert a potential electricity crisis by using every option at their disposal to ensure there is enough power to meet demand in cooperation with local communities.The nation’s electric utilities have forecast their power supply capacity will exceed demand this winter. This is probably because they made efforts to increase supply from the

It was inevitable that the U.S. would eventually initiate some form of military cooperation with Myanmar, but few expected that it would come so early. Washington’s invitation for Nay Pyi Taw to join the annual Cobra Gold U.S.-Thai military exercise is a reward for Myanmar’s rapid process of reform. It also demonstrates just how desperate the U.S. is to make trade inroads into a country that has been isolated from the international community for the past five decades. Given that nearly all trade

The decision by the management behind Newsweek magazine to go all-digital by next year has been hailed or mourned ― depending on which side of the digital divide the observer is shouting from or looking at ― as the end of an era. For readers of a certain age, who got their fill of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal or tantalizing reports on the Marcos dictatorship from the magazine, it certainly felt that way.For several decades, especially when it was published by the Washington Post, Ne