Some States to Drop Presidential Primaries

Yes, you read that right - the World's Greatest Democracy^TM is cancelling elections. The purported reason is because of cost (!), but strangely it's only Republican-controlled states who are doing it. The real reason seems to be an attempt to deny media coverage to democratic candidates or to Republican primary candidates who may criticise Bush.

I've always felt that the US primary system was silly (yeah, each party has an election before the election to determine their candidates), but that's the way they've chosen to do things, and they shouldn't be changing the rules in the middle of the game in an effort to benefit one side or the other.