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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Egypt votes, freely and perhaps spectacularly

On Saturday Egypt will vote on constitutional amendments designed to pave the way for presidential and parliamentary elections, and then for a constituent assembly to write an all-new constitution. That’s five weeks after Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Everything I’ve seen leads me to believe this haste is genuinely a result of the ruling military council’s distaste with ruling, unconstitutionally and undemocratically, in the aftermath of a popular democratic uprising. They seem to want to hand off to more legitimate structures, processes and representatives.

Annals of Self-Binding

Sam Power’s husband Cass Sunstein has been offered a job as head of the Obama regime’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This should be interesting. A few years ago, Joe Heath said to me something like “hyperbolic discounting will be to the next decade what the collective action problem was for the nineties.”