Maybe it's because I'm still short one hour of sleep, but I have quite the case of Grumpy Old Man going on today. To that end, I propose that, in addition to all you kids getting off my lawn, America gets rid of some useless, dumb things that, for some reason, we foolishly hold on to.

1. Daylight Saving Time

Again, it might be the missing hour talking, but isn't it time to do away with this idiocy? At this point, the only thing Daylight Saving Time is good for is reminding you to change the batteries in your smoke detectors – which is important, sure, but not worth the hassle and challenges of changing the clocks.

We are not now, and have not been for a long time, an agrarian society whose daily needs are driven by the sun. We are perfectly capable of waking and sleeping and working absent cues from sunlight.

And the recent justification for keeping DST – that we'll save electricity because people will have their lights on less – turns out to be bunkum too. When DST was extended here in the U.S. in 2007, energy costs nationwide decreased a whopping 0.03 per cent, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study. We've saved hundreds of times more energy phasing out the old-school incandescent light bulbs than changing the clocks each spring.

The best plan is simply to eliminate Standard Time. Given that Standard Time is already not the standard – we use it only a third of the year – we probably won't miss it. This November, when we're supposed to set the clocks back, just don't. Easy-peasy.

Economist Allison Schrager argued a couple of years back that we should go further and eliminate two US time zones, too. We Central Timers might regret losing our individuality, sure, but we might also want to consider her plan.

2. Presidential nominating caucuses

Over the weekend, Marco Rubio earned 10 delegates in the Republican "nominating convention" in Washington, DC. It's a kind of caucus, like we've seen already this year in Iowa, Nevada, Colorado and other states. In DC, according to the Associated Press, 1,059 people supported Rubio, a ratio of one delegate for every 106 convention-goers.

Two weeks earlier, Rubio earned almost the same number of delegates, nine of them, in the Arkansas primary after 101,235 people voted for him. That's a ratio of about one delegate for every 11,250 voters. The folks coming out to support Rubio in DC had less than one percent of the delegate-selecting power of those in Arkansas.

You can run that math for just about anyone else in this season's primaries, on either side. What you will find is, time after time, turnout is higher in primaries for, in general, no more delegates than caucuses offer, which just seems wrong.

Further, voting, with ballots and counting machines and fast-reported results, is so much easier and small-d democratic compared to the chaos we've seen in caucuses. Just by their timing and locations and sometimes rules, caucuses limit who can even participate, leaving out tens of thousands of potential voters because of work or family obligations or just because they couldn't get close to the caucus location because of the traffic of so many people in so small a space at the same time – as happened to a friend of mine in Minnesota last month.

Wisconsin's Progressive Party pioneered the primary election a century ago, and without question, what we do here is a billion times more efficient and inclusive than the mess that is almost any caucus. The rest of country must follow our model.

There is also a good argument to be made that the current primary calendar – stretching over so many months and starting with such non-representative states as Iowa and New Hampshire – should be done away with altogether, but one step at a time.

3. Superdelegates

While we're fixing America's primary system in general, let's not forget the very specific problem that is the so-called "superdelegates" in the Democratic half of that primary.

The logic behind superdelegates is not completely crazy: They are elected officials and other party leaders who are, in one way or another, accountable to voters within the party, either through election to Congress or elections within state Democratic Party conventions. These people have a stake in both local and state elections as well as in what happens at the top of the ticket, and they all have shown some success at reaching and persuading a constituency.

Since their inception in 1984, superdelegates have never swayed an election in the opposite direction of what voters and pledged delegates wanted. Collectively, they're less than 15 per cent of the total possible delegates and ultimately couldn't override an overwhelming majority of pledged delegates if they wanted to.

And as I write this, which is before the "mega-Tuesday" primary results are available from states like Florida and Illinois, the superdelegates are not why Bernie Sanders is losing the Democratic primary so far despite some Sanders supporters' protests of "fraud."

Clinton is ahead in both the popular vote (thanks to many of Sanders' wins coming from caucuses – see above) and pledged delegates by about the same percentage. She holds about 58 percent of the pledged delegates and about 60 percent of the votes, according to Real Clear Politics. Eliminating the superdelegates won't win this for Sanders unless he can start winning more states and more pledged delegates.

Still, the fact that, in 2008 and this year, the existence of superdelegates is both a surprise and an aggravation to a lot of Democrats participating in the primary process for the first time, suggests that perhaps they're more trouble than they're worth. Time to rewrite that rule, Democrats.

4. Judicial elections at all levels

As much as the last couple of items might suggest that I'm super-stoked about democracy and elections, here's one place where I think continuing to rely on a vote is dumb: the judiciary.

Not every state elects its state supreme court justices the way Wisconsin does, but most states have elections for at least some judicial races, according to the website Ballotpedia. Unlike legislators and executive branch members, who need to know the quote-unquote will of the people and the policy desires of their principal constituents, judges at any level should not care about such things.

The whole purpose of having a judiciary is to act a check on the other branches of government. If the third branch is just as beholden to the changing winds of public opinion and potentially corrupting influence of money in elections as the first two branches are, then what's the point of even having judges?

This past week has seen a lot of news related to Wisconsin's Supreme Court elections, including news that both the current incumbent Rebecca Bradley and last year's incumbent Ann Walsh Bradley left oral arguments at the court in order to campaign or fundraise or otherwise suck up to their constituencies.

Plus there's all that stuff about Rebecca Bradley's old writings and alleged adultery, things that would be better addressed – I believe – in a legislative hearing on her appointment to the court rather than become the stuff of campaign ads and mudslinging.

I don't have any illusion that current Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker would nominate a flaming liberal (or flaming moderate like JoAnne Kloppenburg) to the court, or that the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature would confirm one, but forcing legislators to address Bradley's qualifications in a hearing is important. Not only do we need to get the potential justice on the record about how and why her beliefs of 25 years ago may have changed, we need to get the legislators on record too. Tell me, Mr. Senator-man, why do you think someone who believes women share blame for date rape deserves to sit on the highest state court?

And I'd like to think – though this may be wishful – that the kind of public scrutiny over someone whose past may well disqualify her from the bench would be more effective if levied against the governor who nominates and the legislators who consider her than in a low-turnout spring election as will happen next month. Harriet Miers didn't make it to Senate Judiciary Committee hearings after all, but might well have ridden a raft of special-interest advertising to election here in Wisconsin, given the current state of our election laws.

Which also ought to be changed, but that's a whole other column's worth of ranting, and I'll save it for another day. Now, though, I think I need a nap. Could you turn down that music? Thanks.