Slashdot Mirror
Gore Vidal Savages Electronic Voting
gribbly writes "aging author and social critic Gore Vidal savaged electronic voting in an interview with the LA Weekly. The interview deals mainly with (what's wrong with) the Bush Administration, but halfway down he says: 'We don't want an election without a paper trail...all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."
Given that much of the media is similarly controlled?
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
They just let us know there was cheating, but no one in power will look at them. Look at the presidential election in Florida 2000!
Of course not...now if Jello Biafra mysteriously is elected president next year, that'll be a different story.
Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.
Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?
Why do people need to believe this is some conspriracy. Bad Code /= a vast conspiracy to steal the election. Bad Code = Bad Code.
Lets get upset at that.
Bad code on a voting machine = potential to steal the election, but until you have proof please keep your fingerpointing to yourself. Both sides of the political debate here in the States and abroad would love to steal an election.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
because he has somehow convinced the press that they are to be his lapdogs. large-scale terrorist activity didn't hurt his powers of persuasion. clinton didn't get so lucky.
Sign the HR 2239 petition. It requires electronic machines to produce a receipt which is deposited in a lock box in case of a recount and mandates .5% of districts at random do a recount to verify accuracy of the machines.
Keep the freedom to vote.
On the idea of rebelling against a clearly problematic system, is there a way for voters to 'inadvertantly' do something along the lines of, say, mistaking an evote machine for an unhammered nail, metaphorically speaking...
From that point the ballots should be counted in the traditional manner and used to audit the eletronic reports. If there is any significiant discrepency the paper ballots should take precedence. This procedure should continue until the eletronic voting process is as reliably accurate as the ballot method for a period of years.
After that point we can take the electronic method as the primary method, witht he printed results being automaticly placed into a ballot box connected to these machines.
If there is ever a time the printed ballot form should cease to exist i cannot for-see it right now. If there isnt physical evidence of the voting process somewhere, i feel highly dubious as to the integrity of the entire system.
--vision
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
The only corruption here is the horrible corruption of the English language that somehow lead to CmdrTaco thinking "to savage" meant "to ravage."
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
from the author of 'caligula', the motion picture.
take it or leave it.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Stop bitching and moaning and get out there and DO something about it. Jeez...
That's the last political statement I will make on /.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
led away to his Guantanamo relocation center, he was quoted as saying ...oh, wait. The Official Information Minister has informed me that reporting Vidal's final statement would make me an enemy combatant, and would mean that the terrorists had won. And that would be doubleplusungood.
Another example of bitter young men growing up to be bitter old men.
Oh, and no solutions are provided in the article either, other than to replace the current swag of corrupt politicians with a new swag of corrupt politicians.
Even if activity is legal, it is the image or sense of impropriety which gets people's ire up. That seems to be the case with electronic voting, like the case with Haliburton.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?
:)
Because we shudder to think what would have happened had Gore become president.
"..all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."
---------
I can see it now
---------
"Sir, the votes came in. You have a unanimous vote."
"hrm. couldnt this be a bug?"
Nono sir, its not a bug, its a feature!
~Just keep eating, porky. Fat people are harder to kidnap.
Why do I care what a popular salon owner says about this issue?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
No, I'm sad to say, it's the American way.
There is no spoon or sig.
I am so sick of hearing Gore bitch about Bush and about how elections don't work or whatever. Newsflash, you lost, now shut up.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
One possibility is something similar to DVD-ROM hardware region locks, in which chips are 'burnt out' every time a signal is transmitted.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Slashdot hasn't been producing enough subtle leftist spin while michael has been out. Guess CT is trying to make up for it...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
One thing i will say about even traditional paper based voting is that
A. we know how it works,
and B. it doesnt have to be rebooted and have its hardware and software swapped out and replaced with unverified components (see Diebold). How the hell are we supposed to trust an electoral system thats going to allow this?
----
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
We need these things to be built upon Open and Inspectable Source and on machines that the public can trust as giving valid results. Otherwise - it is all BS. I have been calling for a Corporation for Public Software to do just this. I continue to do so.
This simply is too important to allow hacked machines to spit out as answer that somebody pre-determined in a back-room deal.
We can do something about it now, or we can pay the consequences of an untrusted election system come next year. The choices are few, the ooportunities many. Write me off as stupid if you just don't give a rat's, but you will sooner or later.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Bad code on a voting machine = potential to steal the election, but until you have proof please keep your fingerpointing to yourself.
Proof? No, but what looks like frightening bugs in one of the most critical tasks of a democracy, from companies whose owners are heavily involved in politic. Now, that does not necessarily mean that election-rigging is under way, but IMHO it is cause enough for public scrutiny.
Both sides of the political debate here in the States and abroad would love to steal an election.
So what? Should we let them do it, trusting that some sort of balance will be kept by the rigging on both side?
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
How Luddite. We've just got to have a paper trail, eh? Let me see, does "hanging chad" mean anything to you? Sheesh....
Hah! Did it matter in the 2000 election in Florida?
The trail is still there -- is someone doing anything about it?
Bah crap! The precedent is already there. It could be the Dem party which does that the next time...
Its all the same in the end.
And if Clinton was president odds are they would be donating to Clinton. It may be corruption, but at least it's universal.
A one-time pad isn't what you seem to think of. For example, I could have a cd-rw with a 100,000 1,024kbyte keys, all different. You have the same cd-rw. I send you a message encrypted with one of the keys - then I overwrite that key w. the burner. You decrypt w. the same key, and overwrite the key w. the burner. So long as we are the only 2 people w. the physical CD-RW, the "one-time" pad is good for 100,000 messages.
So you think Vidal is an idiot (debatable). What is your position then on Bush's assault on the Constitution? Do you support the wholesale destruction of our freedoms that Bush is presiding over? Stand up and be counted if you really think this is better for the republic.
sulli
RTFJ.
OK, Gore Vidal is an idiot, and I'd pay no more attention to him than I would a Frenchman trying to "educate" me about how the U.S. ought to work.
But despite my Republican affiliation and support for Bush, I agree that current electronic voting systems are shamefully flawed. The lack of a paper, human-readable ballot receipt prevents any sort of independent audit of the results to confirm their accuracy. And the various statements attributed to Diebold's C.E.O. about "delivering" the electoral vote to Bush is just ludicrious and rightfully cast serious doubts on his company's credibility in this arena.
Electronic voting can be done right. But currently it is not...
Marge: So, did you call any of your friends?0
Lisa: Friend? [scoffs] These are my only friends.
[holds up a book]
Grownup nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys
than I ever will.
Marge: Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration
Everyone who pays taxes in the US is a "donor" to the executive branch. Perhaps you mean the Bush campaign? In that case, you may be suprised that most companies actually donate pretty equally to both sides just to cover the bases. What were these companies' total donations to political campaigns compared to just to just Bush's? Without that info, this is a meaninglessly paranoid "article".
In a word, apathy.
If we're talking about paper voting, don't paper mill companies give big bucks to the Republican party?
Peter puffing faggot.
Vidal prefers the term "homosexualist".
-kgj
-kgj
Mr. Vidal seems to concentrate his focus on one administration. The reality is that this power grab is not owned by one particular party. Democrats want their share of control, just like Republicans. Both parties have entitlement systems and power systems which are designed to further the goals of the elite, the politicians, and their financial backers.
The rights of corporations often trump the rights of individuals. Just look at the recent laws on the books...if they were reversed so corporations could also be fined not per song per use per day, but per person ripped off, colluded against, lied to, and per person they commit fraud against - at the exact same rate individuals pay per song, per offense, per unauthorized use...you would see laws get changed and fines more representative of real damages...or maybe they would just change their practices as would the public (if both were liable for $150000xYxZ.
The point is, while the Bush administration scares me, so does the other side of the isle. The only ones I am not so fearful of are the ones with (I) or (L) or something else next to their names, other than (R) or (D).
Everyone is aging at exactly the same rate. Isn't this rather agist, anyway? What information does that description impart, exactly?
The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.
:o)
Really? The PATRIOT act was written in German?
...uber-corruption neo-conservative chickenhawk-ism
about my karma. I also dislike Bush, BUT you do raise an interesting editorial question. And, I, myself have seen a trend lately in content. And... you should have been modded as "OFFTOPIC" not "Flaimbait"
There is no spoon or sig.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Guys, this is the man who wrote "Caligula". He is more intimately linked to many bad and savagable works of humanatiy than most of us will ever be. If he says that e-voting is bad, who am I to doubt it?
"I didnt hear the "vast right wing conspirators" whining this much when Bill "pants around my ankles" Clinton was in office for 8 years. Lying his ass off and basicly fucking us all in the ass." Let's see.... a balanced budget, huge surplus, a military that's kicked ass for Bush (deployment in Afghanistan happened long before the Bush administration presented a military budget), lower unemployment, lower crime rate... Yeah, that's fucked in the ass. http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/10/tomasky-m.htm l
Enjoy.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Since the SC made him the Selected President*, that's the official descriptor now.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps the USA already is a despotic state but with better PR. After all the last election wasn't actually won by Bush, and there was that scene of Republicans battering down the doors of the Democrat offices where they were holding ballots. You wont know if you're living in a dictatorship until you test the boundaries. But if the voting machines get in then you'll lose your chance.
Gore also mentions the partiot act part II which he condemns utterly. An old quote I came across recently now seems frighteningly prescient:
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"There are no homosexuals, only homosexual acts." -Gore Vidal
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
The parent is correct, PLUS Gore Vidal is the brighter cousin of the Al Gore/Gore Vidal kinship (yes, the relation is a fact that seems to be little known).
Odd that so many times Bush's relatives are dragged out to make some sort of wacky conspiracy theory, but Gore Vidal talks about elections and everybody forgets that he is Albert Gore Jr.'s cousin!
I would be quite surprised if the blanket statement about contributions to "the Bush Administration" (sorry, in the USA we contribute to campaigns, not administrations) ommitted contributions to the DNC, the loosing campaign of Al Gore, and current Democrat candidates. Just a hunch, since large firms usually contribute to both sides.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
It never occurs to people like you that you might simply be wrong. No matter what the facts, no matter how thin or tenuous the 'pattern of evidence', no matter how ridiculous the conspiracy, you're just right and anyone who has a differing opinion is either stupid or 'in on it'.
Actually, it just boils down to complacency and sheepishness. You'd be suprised how many people support Bush simply because their parents said to or their preacher said to.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
>>they can sneak some socialist in and tax
- 20 03Nov11?language=printer
>>us all to death.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28252
The GOP is already taxing you to death. Wake up.
Manufacturers of voting machines and their employees must be stripped of their freedom of speech in regard to campaign donations.
And, more importantly, there must be mandatory disenfranchisement of anyone who works there, is related to someone who does, or saw an advertisement for the company at any time in the last 5 years.
This is the only way we can remove corruption.
I'll vote for a measure like this in a heart beat! Where do I sign?
Clif
Blogzine
clifgriffin > blog
I suggest strongly you actually read the Patriot Act (which I assume you're referring to) and see what it is really all about. Ask you local librarian to pipe down for a moment while you read the text.
May I respectfully submit this to you ?
This
I believe the correct answer to your question is mu.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
LISA: Books by grown-up nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys than I ever will.
MARGE: Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss _girls_.
The sweet side says "Mod +1 Funny"
The plain side says "Mod -1 RTFA"
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Gee lets think. Gore has a 200+ IQ, while the Bush administration asked the public for ideas on the terrorist issue. Hmmmm. Maybe with a person with who actually knows how to think in charge, we would not be in as much trouble as we are in today. Trouble: Largest deficit, increased military spending... And if you think this is just b/c of 9/11 then think again. Look at the deficit figures and economic markers before that time. And lets not forget that Bush did get more votes. No matter what the voting problems in Florida came out to be.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?
Because if Al Gore had been president any of the following may have happened:
1) We would have surrendered before the second plane hit the WTC.
2) Only criminals would have guns.
3) Even more money would be taken from my pocket to support inner city kids who don't understand "Gang Banging" isn't a productive life style.
4) We would be paying $5.00 for a gallon of gas, to put in a sub-standard 1000 pound car that would be destroyed when it collided with a june bug.
Ya know, there's more, but I'm getting angry just thinking about it.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
I guess that makes it insightful, as opposed to a steaming pile.
I really wish we could abolish "Left", "Right", "Liberal", and "Conservative" from political language. They've become no more than insults. The "Left" is in charge? Oh, then the "Right" is a bunch of evil zealots come to crush us under their heels! The "Right" is in charge? Now the "Left" is a bunch of evil terrorist sympathizers who want to bring about the downfall of America!
Stop it. Just stop it.
It disgusts me how easily people are blinded by their preferred camp. Both major parties(and their associated platforms) have major problems. Pretending otherwise is foolish, but it seems that that's just what people want to do. It's especially amusing when we have repeats of previous incidents that garner the same response from opposite sites. Clinton lies about blowjob? IMPEACH!(if "Right"), FORGIVE!(if "Left"). Bush lies about WMDs? CONDEMN!(if "Left"), IGNORE!(if "Right"). Sound similar? They are! What happened to lying itself being bad? Why won't people admit that their own side can fuck up too?
It doesn't matter which side you claim to be on. Evaluate people based on what they do, not what views they pay lip service to. If you do otherwise, you're just being a sheep.
And for the love of all that is good and right in the world, come up with some new insults while you're at it!
Visit the
How hard would it be to hack up a cash register to work as a voting machine, complete with e-reporting to the vote counting center and printing of a hardcopy receipt in duplicate, one for the backup ballot box and one for the customer?
.
You could revel in your contribution to democracy with the sound of the cha-ching!
--
"Every time a bell rings, a founding father gets his wings."
Of course, Clinton didn't involve us in wars of aggression for the OBVIOUS benefit of his cronies. He also had a vague concept of this thing called "diplomacy" that keeps us from being at war with everybody. But of course talking is for wimps when you have the biggest military in the world...
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Is this not corruption? that has to be the biggest understatement of the year, why arnt their riots in the streets? why has no-one used their founding-father given right to bare arms and march against the government, every day i see Bush doing this, Bush doing that, filesharers face jail time, people who burn flags face jail time, people who talk about rot-13 face jail time, 12-year olds face fines and maybe later jail time, tabacco companies lobby the government so that lighters dont get banned on planes, evoting companies which couldnt even design a system to count chickens,big politicians with alterior motives - enron etc i thought America was supposed to be a country where people took no bullshit and stood up for themselves, hell they kicked us out, whats going on?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
Vidal has also been in movies, without being an actor -- he played Director Josef in the movie Gattaca.
He's a bit stiff -- hell, he's an old man with no visible acting experience -- but there was a certain charming gleam in his eye, like he was having such a good time that you just couldn't help believing in him.
-kgj
-kgj
Sure, Gore would be corrupt and a slave of the RIAAs and MPAAs in America. But I bet that there would have been no 9/11 and no invasions of Afghnanistan and Iraq. Also, the economy wouldn't be in such a bad state.
The Tlog - a technology blog
All three makers of the voting machines are Bush donors. And if they were Dean donors, this what matter... how exactly? Gore is once again shown to be a mere blathering idiot. Most corporations make political contributions to one or BOTH parties. It is irrelevant.
Is it really that hard to implement a decent system without retarted bugs like in the last article
Nope its not hard, I think they commonly refer to that method as pencil and paper, though.
I live in Mississippi, where they're still untangling a mess made by malfunctioning electronic voting machines that do have a paper reciept deposited in lock boxes. As just an example of things that can still go wrong:
-Some poll workers didn't put reciepts in lock boxes.
-Some poll workers decided to "manually enter" data from back-up paper ballots once they got the machines working.
-Some reciepts/machines did not make it back to the main office until two days after elections.
-State law requires initials on paper reciepts. Some unititaled ones were counted anyway.
And before you come down too hard on Bush, it's the Dems who are benefiting here. From a developer standpoint it is clear to me that the problem is poor system design. Every company is trying to design an electronic equivalent to a paper process that is already suprisingly flawed. For example, because of civil rights issues, it is illegal to require a voter ID here. Which means in the electronic world, you cannot store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote. What needs to be done is a standard design process: gather requirements, design the system, and implement it. Because state and federal laws come into play, legislatures should be envolved in the whole process and revamp laws where necessary. In the end, it all comes down to poor design.
Not off topic? How about not relevant?
Like the onion once said:
"Our 8 year nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over" -GWBush
No US Servicemen died when Clinton lied.
What's the death toll in Iraq?
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
what's so sneaky about slashdot, is that they just don't discuss the issue more directly, they always have to wrap it around some leftist political drivel. So this discussion will inevitably devolve into a Bush hatefest.
slashdot has really shown its true colors now. the editors are the real trolls.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
What do you mean. The Repubd were and still sre hung up on Clinton. 3 years out of office and they are still whining about him.
The real issue here is the voting macihnes. They do not work and are not able to be audited. I heard an interview with a person who was a precinct captain. They wanted to make sure the machines were working correctly so they wanted to cast some mock votes, like they used to. She was told they could not because the system is proprietary.
"You'd be suprised how many people support Bush simply because their parents said to or their preacher said to."
And how many would that be, then? Exact numbers please, and a link to a definitive study.
Or, as is likely the case, are you simply pulling that 'fact' out of your ass to fit your own beliefs and prejudices?
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
No, I think that at least 95% of Americans would have major problems with Hitler being president. Also I am sick of hearing camparisons of Hitler to Bush. Bush has no chance to be anywhere near as bad as Hitler. Hell even Sadam was nowhere near the level of evil that Hitler was and Sadam was thousands of times worse than Bush could ever be. Bush has gotten rid of two horrible dictatorships, Hitler marched accross and conquered almost all of Europe. Go read a book on Hitler to find out just how bad he really was. Also it is illegal in Germany to say that the Holocaust did not happen.
Woops Gore got more votes, by 300,000 I think. Hit submit too soon.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
"It requires electronic machines to produce a receipt which is deposited in a lock box.... "
Lock box.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Electronic voting is screwy but, IMHO, The guy is just a little too out there on some stuff to be an effective spokesperson. If you google around you'll see.
For Example
America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.
Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home
Yes, how dare he use the word appropriately!
Just because you aren't familiar with a word or phrase as used doesn't mean it isn't correct. I'm quite familiar with the usage, and perhaps next time you should look such a thing up before shooting your mouth off.
TRANSITIVE VERB:
Inflected forms: savaged, savaging, savages
1. To assault ferociously. 2. To attack without restraint or pity: The critics savaged the new play.
[The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.]
GL
Isn't it funny how some conservatives/facists call anyone that has non-conservative
ideals "elite", "educated" and "highbrow".
Like there is something wrong with being "elite", "educated" and "highbrow".
Is there?
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Damn, I blew my last mod point earlier today, otherwise you'd get a funny. That's one of the most hilarous spoofs of the right's view of the left I've seen in ages. You forgot to include the line about requiring everybody to participate in homosexual marrages.
I read the internet for the articles.
Let me remind the weak minded people just who started this assault by the Bush administration on the Constitution; someone you never hear complainst about from those people screaming about Bush & Liberty.
i ?dbname=104_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ132.1 04 )
The Patriot Act came from the same administration that tried and failed to force the clipper chip, the COPA, successfully got the DMCA, etc through. Their version of it was actually WORSE than the current patriot act. In fact it was struck down more than once and determined unconstitutional.
Counter Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ( http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cg
Had all the secret court where defendants were not allowed to see evidence against them, secret wiretap monitoring, deportation of foreigners for "moral turpitude", etc, etc
So blame it all on Bush, obviously the Democrats are going to protect our rights. Maybe neither one is looking out for our rights.
Wally O'Dell has sworn to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for G.W. next year. That's well beyond the level of the generality you've just expressed.
And no, companies and industries don't give money equally. In some industries they do, in some there's a much more slanted bias. Think the energy industry's giving money to Howard Dean much? Trial lawyers give money to Democrats. HMOs give money to Republicans. For some mysterious reason, there's a very real Republican slant among these vote-counting companies. We're not talking about them covering their bases both ways, we're talking about openly advocating for one party while selling machines that count votes.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Will our next bought of "News for Nerds" be Kate Moss weighing in on Open Source?
(Pun intended.)
I didnt hear the "vast right wing conspirators" whining this much when Bill "pants around my ankles" Clinton was in office for 8 years.
;-)
You don't call forcing an impeachment that was unwanted by the people, "whining"?
are you simply pulling that 'fact' out of your ass to fit your own beliefs and prejudices?
Well, all I have is anecdotal evidence from what I've seen around me. There are strong correlations, however, between the Bible Belt and voting Republican, however. I've also heard a lot of very scary things from some Christains who really do put religious significance in Bush's election.
This isn't a matter of my own beliefs and prejudices; it's a matter of other people's prejudices coming around and making mine obselete.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I think it may have been in reverse. Not sure about Bushes knowledge of 9/11 before it happened. Only know about the German warning. Betting it never even got to the administration. The economy would be better. No fake refund, most people already forgot about it. And the RIAA and MPAA crap, Gore would probably kept away from it. Leaning on keeping the internet free.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
It is rather telling how some people are still obsesed about another person's penis for over 4 years! I am sure there must be some wonderful homoerotic reasons for so many white males in the republican party to be so hung up on sexual interations between two consenting males. Afterall it is not like Newt G. would do anything as bad as getting a blowjow. Afterall all he did was to leave his wife, while she was undergoing breast cancer treatment, with a staffer 20 years his junior. I mean that show moral "claritude"
Anyhow, a blowjob never killed anyone last time I checked. I am sure your boy Bush never lied right? I mean we sure found those pesky weapons of mass destruction who were pointing at us and ready to wipe our collective asses in 30 minutes flat. Right? I mean lying about a blowjob is certainly far more dangerous than the lifes of hundreds of US servicemen/women.....
Keep it up, but may I suggest you at least have the courtesy of getting out of the closet first. This whole obsession with Bill "pants aroud his ankles" is becoming rather unhealthy....
I do believe it's "PATRIOT Act", as "PATRIOT" is an acronym.
And regardless of the content of the act, you have to admire the wordplay.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
What do you think he would've done? Just wondering.
I want to tell everyone the joys of the ABSENTEE BALLOT !!!
I live in Washington State, USA.
Almost a month before election time, for every election, I recieve my ballot and a booklet outlining each candidate (usually statements by them) and propositions or initiatives or whatever is on the ballot. I have plenty of time to think about the issues and look at the ballot. The only extra cost is the stamp I have to put on the included return envelope. (It would cost me 4 times as much to take a bus to the polling place) And there is a paper trail.
I originally requested it when I actually was going to be out of town. But have been 'enrolled' since and get an ABSENTEE BALLOT for every election. I love voting at my dining room table!
Also, IMHO...
I don't even care if the ballot is secret and I will freely tell anyone who asks who and what I vote for. (BUSH admin has set US back soooo much in the last 2 years!) I think that every social security number should have a record of voting. That way, you could go online and check that your vote is registered the way you want it to be. You could even go back and change your vote before the election was over. You should also get a tax break for voting, or I suppose, a tax penalty for not voting.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
If Al Gore were president, then they would be Gore (Al, not VIDal) donors. They just want to make money through policy, it doesn't matter the administration. Vidal needs to stop making it a party or conservative vs. liberal issue.
However, I am firmly on his side WRT paper trails. E-voting is fine in concept because of the ease of burden, but I have yet to see a viable solution, and moreover, I don't believe there is one. Basically, circuit boards are just too easy to switch out without people noticing as opposed to mechanical devices.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
Yeah... of course if thousands of voters had not been "conveniently" wipped out of the registration lists. Or the fact that the person who had to certify the counts actually worked for the Bush campaign, or the fact that Florida's supreme court allowed the recount, while it was the US Supreme court who over ruled the Florida's decision... of course ignoring that most of the justices who voted against the recount were either Reagan or Bush I nominees.
Yeah, if we can ignore all that... then by all means Bush won "fair and square"
Oh, and if Bush was winning why did the republicans have to send their stormtroopers, err. I mean staffers to stop the recount and hackle the officials?
Is there?
Only if one aspires to be common, ignorant and lowbrow. Know anybody like that in Washington? ;)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Actually, the word they use is 'elitist'
Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?
This is mixing two issues. Motor Voter is about allowing you to submit for voter registration *at* the DMV. It is not about giving the right to vote to people with drivers licenses. They are two entirely different processes. Motor Voter was a _huge_ success in increasing voter registration by making it convient for the average person.
Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.
From what I've been reading. O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, has been reliably quoted as saying that he will deliver states to the Republican party.
Chuck Hagel, a republican senator, was at one time (and probably still is) a part owner of Election Systems and Software (ES&S).
It does not matter if they *are* being evil, what matters is that they should not even be _close_ to voting companies. It is a clear conflict of interest and smells bad no matter how you put it. I'd go further and say that all voting machines should not be done by companies at all -- too much at risk.
This has nothing to do with conspiricy theory, it has everything to do with common sense. You lock doors of your house, not to keep bad people out, but to "keep honest people honest". Power corrupts. And these people should not be putting themselves in to places where they could be corrupted, or even give the appearance of being corrupt. Its just wrong.
Its funny how the best defense anyone can come up with for the current administration and the E-voting scandles is to say "But everyone else is corrupt too."
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Possibly we need some civic minded hackers to demonstrate the terrible failings of these systems, since the local two-bit supervisors of elections are too arrogant and too ignorant to listen to more than 200 PhDs in computer science warning them of trouble.
"Welcome to GITMO Disney, illegal combantant #873-78-3356!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere.
What an absolutely bizarre comparison. Schools are funded by property taxes collected by the local/state goverment and given to schools completely managed by those local/state goverments. The federal government has absolutely no control and no fiscal responsibility for this local issue. Sometimes they make grants to states but this is an inefficient step for the federal government to collect taxes away from states and then give it back.
There is no health care
Another absurd statement; health care in the USA is the best in the world. Oh wait, he means health care paid for by the taxpayer. There are plenty of private health insurers and hospitals are forbidden to turn away patients who cannot pay.
We get nothing back for our taxes.
That's odd, I get protection from the greatest, by a wide margin, military in the world. Interstate highways, police, fire, national parks, etc. The list goes on and on. Vidal must be a serious hermit to not get ANYTHING for his taxes.
I wouldn't have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through.
Thanks to superior medical care and a solid national defence...
He's wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up.
Umm, what about last week's unemployment numbers down to 6 from 61? Umm, what about the stock market up significantly from the first of the year? Umm, what about corporate earnings meeting and beating expectations (which are up from last year)?
In short, there's nothing in this interview except paranoid rantings.
The only reason 95% of Americans wouldn't like Hitler is because they KNOW about Hitler. If Hitler was starting today, he'd be Bush's campaign director, or Secretary of Defense (since he came from the military initially - and with the Iron Cross to boot).
A large number of Americans supported Hitler in the 1930's - including Prescott Bush, George's grandfather who eventually had his bank taken away from him by the US government for supporting the Nazis.
Bush is at least as much a raving rightwing religious lunatic as Hitler was (he has allegedly been found face down on the Oval Office floor praying) - and he has much more power and much less control and much less opposition in this country than Hitler did in Germany.
Finally, Bush's cronies, the neocons, are mostly neo-Troskyites. It's amusing to me that the rightwing Christian Zionists are all supporting people who follow other people who were essentially ex-Communists! It doesn't get more bizarre than this.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Imagine, for a bit, what the world would be like if votes were done completely in the open, attributable to persons who come in and cast their votes.
Sure, the FBI would have to spend a bit more on cracking down on those who illegally attempt to fix an election--but they have to do that anyway.
One could even bind it so that there's no more of a record than the final tally--which should be enough to satisfy the non-rabid privacy advocates.
Man is there any sort of minimum moron level to be a right winger?
Gore Vidal and Al Gore are different persons...
NO, it's not
corruption is when you have actual proof of wrong doing
Manufacturing voting machines is not illegal
Donating money to politician is not illegal.
Where is the logical conclusion that because I give to a certain candidate, that I am going to behave badly and create machines that vote for that candidate? Many companies give money to WHOMEVER is in power because they want things done now, now have wait years for the next administration that is to their ideological liking.
Sure there is concern about such machines. Obviously the machines do need to be well documented, tamper-proof, auditable, etc. But there are many problems with the current system also (punch ballots anyone?).
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
That leaves us with a mere 25% who do have a problem with Bush.
1) 9/11 happens and nobody from the administration, CIA, FBI, Department of Transportation, Department of Immigration etc. is fired/held responsible for the falling asleep on the job
2) We have the first net loss of jobs for 70 years
3) The economy tanks (unless you make over $300,000 a year from investments, in which case, sit back and enjoy your big, big tax breaks buddy)
4) We pre-emptively invade a country with no real International backing, find no WMD which was our specific reason for invading in the first place, sign off on lots of no bid price+profit deals for big, big, big connected companies, fail to find Enemy Number 1 (just like we failed to do with Enemies 1 and 2 from Afghanistan), declare "Mission Accomplished" and then so screw up the occupation that we go crawling on our knees to the UN begging them to come help and they laugh in our face
You know, there's more, but I'm still angry just thinking about it.
this.vote.print
if this.machine.vote.president.bush > 1
this.vote.president = bush
this.vote.record
Wow, a paper trail! A paper trail without feedback is useless.
Use 'paper ballot', or 'printed ballot' or 'printed selections to be deposited into the ballot box'. When people here the word 'receipt' they get the idea that the voter can take home a copy of how they voted... and this is *dangerous*. You don't want to confuse people. It is _not_ a receipt.
english is so much better with the 5 and 10 for fifteen. Most every language has stuff like this built in.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Let's see here... Dell, Unisys (ludicrus claims about unix and win2k), and Microsoft. Of course they support Bush, he's in office, and Both of the companies are somewhat unified with Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't want Bush to hit them with another lawsuit (not that they'd loose, judges suck), so they pay him off.
I don't trust Bush on a lot of stuff, but I don't particularly think Bush would want a payoff from microsoft, and I really don't think he's going to risk buying off voting machines when the Democrats still can't come up with a canidate that would get over 30% of the vote! (If I said that 3 weeks ago, you'd be talking about Wes Clark... no chance now)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. While we squabble enlessly over who's the eviller party, both are doing whatever they can to fuck us just a little bit more, every day, a little harder and deeper. But so slowly we'll never really notice.
This didn't start when Bush was put in office. I just have this horrible feeling that The Man(tm) realized -- when we didn't revolt over the circumstances of Bush's election -- that the American people no longer care about their rights.
It's open season on us, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves... or rather the people we elected to do this to us.
Continuing our farcical argument of Liberals vs Republicans just prevents us from seeing that both are at fault. They care only for the cash given to them by corporate interest. We however are simply the cattle: we buy what we're told, we watch what we're told, we believe what we're told, and when the time comes to elect somebody new, we pick one of two essentially identical people and let it begin anew.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
So you are telling me that the majority of newspapers -- which are municipal, county, and regional publications -- are liberal? It goes to follow, then, that massively-syndicated columnists like Dear Abby are also liberal. Does this mean that staunch conservatives in your strange corner of reality read the The New York Times for their daily dose of news?
========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
At least Al Gore seems to have "moved on" from those days and taken a stand in favor of freedom (more in opposition to the outrageous Bush "enemy combatant" designation than the Patriot Act, but this is definitely in the category of Bush's refusal to respect basic civil rights.) And Howard Dean, whom I support for President, has as well. So there are alternatives, even if there weren't previously.
sulli
RTFJ.
Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?
I have a problem with Bush. But I'm not so arrogant to think that people who don't agree with me are stupid, inept or brainwashed.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
And Gore is wrong about this exactly how?
That's exactly what did happen.
In fact, it's likely that 9/11 was ALLOWED to happen (I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories that say that the CIA directly caused it to happen - that's not necessary) for precisely these reasons.
If you don't comprehend how far a US government will go for pretexts for war, Google for the "Northwoods Documents". And that's back in 1962.
And recently Harold MacMillan and Eisenhower were revealed to be using the CIA to fake border incidents to invade Syria - back in the 1950's.
You think somehow things have changed?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Put a big 64 box of Crayolas at each precinct. Print up a bunch of ballots with big boxes next to the names of the candidates. Mark ballot with Crayola. Voters can even pick their favorite color.
Count by hand.
Sounds childish, but I get the feeling it would be more accurate than e-voting.
I would use Burnt Sienna to cast my vote, btw.
The AC provided no proof for the assertion that the companies also donated heavily to the previous administration, just like you didn't. All the AC said was "I'm sure" (just like you said you'd seen the proof but didn't include any links).
Hmmm, are you the same AC pretending to be someone else?
Does anybody else think "leftist" really sounds like a property for a quark or something? Up, down, charmed, and leftist? It's probably just sticking it next to spin like that.
to cause giant problems.
Ya, bad-code is bad-code. The problem is bad code can cause far worse problems then a nice healthy conspiracy. Take a peek at MS LookOut, err I mean OutLook some time. No conspiracy alive could have caused that many problems on purpose.
As things are at the moment, my skin crawls at the thought of electronic voting used in the US for any serious election.
Of course, I'm a silly Libertarian, I lose if "either side" rigs the election...
If I had my way, you would need at least a high school education to be able to vote.
If I had my way, a person would need an IQ above 80 to serve as president.
Well genius, this is low moderated Slashdot comments after all, not the London Observer's Editorial page.
If you don't believe that the U.S. is a now a dictatorship and
:
are not operating under Plan G, after you read this, you WILL believe
the U.S. is a dictatorship and implement Plan G:
Despots in the Whitehouse
We are the patriots
How is it possible for the US to engage in
wars without the consensus of a large part of
the American people? Gore Vidal places the
question within a historical perspective that
reveals the remarkable foresight of Benjamin
Franklin
I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that's that. We won. And those
who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity--Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against
what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.
But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last
century--and I lived through three-quarters of it--we still
held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of
Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once
believed that I would see a great part of the nation--of we
the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of
war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an
arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting
wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the
unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of
the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.
During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard.
Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam,
replied, "I had other priorities." Well, so did 12 million of us
sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to
fulfill.
So who's to blame? Us? Them? Well, we can safely blame
certain oil and gas hustlers who have effectively hijacked the
government from presidency to Congress to, most
ominously, the judiciary. How did they do it? Curiously, the
means have always been there. It took the higher greed
and other interests to make this coup d'Ttat work.
It was Benjamin Franklin, of all people, who saw our future
most clearly back in 1787, when, as a delegate to the
Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, he read for the
first time the proposed Constitution. He was old; he was
dying; he was not well enough to speak but he had
prepared a text that a friend read. It is so dark a statement
that most school history books omit his key words.
Franklin urged the convention to accept the Constitution
despite what he took to be its great faults, because it might,
he said, provide good government in the short term. "There
is no form of government but what may be a blessing to
the people if well administered, and I believe farther that
this is likely to be well administered for a course of years,
and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done
before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to
need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Think of Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc., of chads and butterfly
ballots, of Scalia's son arguing before his unrecused father
at the Supreme Court while unrecused Thomas sits silently
by, his wife already at work for the approaching Bush
Administration. Think, finally, of the electoral college, a piece
of dubious, antidemocratic machinery that Franklin
doubtless saw as a source of deepest corruption and
subsequent mischief for the Republic, as happened not only
in 1876 but in 2000.
Frankli
That attitude starts to border on religious fanaticism, you know.
Yeah, but it's fun. To hate Clinton or somebody you have to pretend to hate good things, like blow jobs and naked college students. To hate Bush I just have to hate anal-retentive recovering alcoholics with crappy willpower. I hardly even have to sit up, and it takes up time that I would otherwise have to spend seeing another Matrix or one of those ones where the dog plays shuffleboard.
Can you actually confirm a (vaildated) test of Gore's IQ. 200 is well into the 90th percentile of IQ, my personal opinion is that your number is just some rah, rah Gore is smart partisan chestthumping.
BTW: If you were to look at intelligence, it has not normally been the best indicator of presidential success and ability. There are many more aspects to leadership than intelligence. Also the enormous staff a president gets to employ enables him to enhance his intelligence based on who he selects for a staff. This is true not only of Bush, Clinton had very smart people like Dick Morris, and (shudder) James Carville (wrong on lots of issues, but strategically very smart).
Give up on the IQ angle already.
Put a big 64-box at the precinct. Print up ballots on paper. Have voters put an 'X' by the candidate with the Crayola. Votes are counted by hand. In fact, an eight year old could even do the counting.
Problem solved... and voters can even pick their favorite color. Burnt Umber, anyone?
Sound childish? Maybe, but it probably would be more accurate than e-voting. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
Keep it simple, stupid.
"Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?"
Normal americans wouldn't have a problem with a reincarnated Hitler. As long as they have TV, plenty of food, etc. most of them will be happy.
Who the hell is this eurleif, and what gives him the authority to speak for most normal Americans?
If anyone can answer for those Americans, it's they themselves. I say we put it to a vote. Preferably not on an electronic no-paper-trail voting machine. Then we'll know what most normal Americans think of people like eurleif and their opinions...
"There's always been a liberal bias among the editors (and many posters) on Slashdot"
Don't blame me! I voted with the MAJORITY!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
And isn't that German law silly, from the outside looking in? Think how silly we must look to the rest of the world, watching while the document that is the basis for modern democracy slowly erodes...
Gore makes some interesting perceptions of the founding fathers and what not, which I personally did not know myself, so it was interesting to read. Then he went into this anti-Bush slander spin, which to me, completely rendered his points about the founding fathers as probably misleading or just plain wrong.
For instance, he blames the economy on President Bush. However, as any intelligent person would know, and as any economist would tell you, the President has zero to nothing to do with the economy. If any branch of government affects the economy, it would be the Congress, but even that affect would be minimal at best.
Secondly, he insinuates that Bush will win the election by playing favors with voting machine manufacturers. I would like to see his proof. I will take his word for it that these companies contributed to his campaign. I'm sure they contribute to lots of campaigns, on both sides of the isle, but I think the sin-of-omission rule applies here. This also borders on slander, since I do not think he can prove the case that this collusion is taking place.
He also claims the USA Patriot Act is similar to Hitler's rule over Germany, and says that the this is all Bush's fault. While that may or may not be true (which I personally think is a little extreme), the fact is, many of the ideas within the Patriot Act were first introduced by Al Gore in 1996 prior to Clinton's re-election (in order to help Clinton get re-elected probably?) Such items include the roaming wire taps on suspected terrorists and holding terrorists without access to lawyers and such.. was all first introducted by Al Gore. BTW, the President does not pass bills, the Congress does, and records show that the Patriot act was supported widely on both sides of the isle.
Then he refers to the president as deranged. Well, this is just a great comment because it shows the immaturity of an old man. You can disagree with anyone on politics, but to insult someone on the personal level is extremely immature.
Then he accused the administration of leaking the name of the CIA agent, when the reporter who leaked it, Robert Novak, has said he did not get that info from the administration, and that he himself, put this information together. Secondly, it has been public knowledge that this CIA agent was the wife of an ambassador even as far back as the mid-90s. Again, a statement like this makes Mr Vidal look petty, immature and uninformed.
Although I do agree that electronic-only ballots are not to be trusted...
you mean the ones owned by giant corporations? Like general Electric for instance? G.E. being a major defence contractor is sure to hire a bunch of pacifist lefties for their news operation because that would help their bottom line, right? I mean just look at the hard in dpeth questioning Bush got during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. The liberal media was out there all the time questioning whether Iraq had WMDs and whether they had ties to terrorists etc. Not.
LOL, so you count Mr. Savage (aka Mr. Wiener his real lastname) as a true "journalist." A guy that said "gay people should get AIDS and die"... so that is what you consider the kind of journalism that can save a newschannel?
Kind of scary when you consider "opinion" pieces as reporting, and when you consider ABC and NBC liberal. Of course with no data to back your claims whatsoever, you just keep the whole rightwing mantra that if you repeat something enough times it becomes true.
And calling FOX news centrist is just funny, afterall the only openly liberal (and a poor one at that) in that whole organization is Colmes, whereas Hannity, O'really, Oliver North, Cabuto, and the rest of the semi-dead uptight middle aged angry white males that appear in the rest of the shows are just handy dandy centrist, are they?
LOL, nice try though...
We do, of course, have two American citizens (Padilla and Hamdi) declared as enemy combatants kept in Naval brigs, not charged with any crimes, not allowed access to lawyers, not allowed the right to remain silent, held indefinitely by fiat of W alone. But you're right, they're not at Gitmo. They're here in the US.
So then, yes, you basically made up that little 'statistic'...
Correlation does not prove causation. Not even close.
I've heard a lot of scary shit coming from a few atheists and nihilists and religion-haters too, does that mean they're all liberal psychopaths? Does that mean even a majority of them are like that? Of course not.
Try a slightly less wide brush next time you want to paint stereotypes. Sheesh.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Nobody ever seems to get this. I have a few friends (quite liberal) in media, mostly in entertainment (although this should apply to all facets). Nothing will ever make it to press without approval from the 'top 10%' as you put it.
OK, I don't agree, but I can understand the logic. If you assume that everybody belonging to a party is corrupt then you have to reject everything produced by that party's supporters. If, however, you believe that both sides are corrupt, or if you believe that neither side is completely corrupt, then the logic pretty much falls apart.
Then he says they need to have paper trails. Why? If the software is rigged, that same software will rig the paper.
And what about older mechanical voting machines. They also have raw-number output with a paper trail. But does anyone begin to understand how they work? Do you think anybody could tell if one was rigged? And couldn't their paper-trails be similarly rigged?
What about punch cards? If the ballots are printed directly on the cards, then they can't be rigged. (Of course, if they're punched via a machine, that machine can be rigged, and tabulation machines can be rigged.) But hand-counts are extremely time-consuming and error prone (remember hanging chads?) And every recount causes more chads to fall off, so repeated recounting destroys any hope at accuracy.
OK, so we're now down to someone writing an "X" in a box on a piece of paper. Do we really want to force this system on the entire country? And even that is subject to tampering, since they'll be read by optical scanners (which can be rigged) or by human volunteers (who can be bribed.) And hand-counts will be time-consuming and error-prone (but not as error-prone as visually reading punched cards.) But at lesat they won't get repeatedly damaged as the candidates repeatedly demand new recounts.
But mandating paper ballots will bring back all the corruption problems that voting machines were supposed to eliminate - like ballot-stuffing (where corrupt poll workers literally stuffed extra ballots into the boxes). And there will still be disputes when someone checks two contradictory boxes, or when a circle is partly filled-in. So in many respects, we get back to the same nonsense that Florida's punch-cards produced.
Every voting system can be hacked and abused by corrupt individuals. Modern software-based systems are no more or less secure than other systems. They replace one set of flaws for another set. You can't just point to the flaws of one mechanism and automatically declare it evil without comparing it to all the flaws of the other competing systems.
But again IQ scores are not a true mark of intelligence. I am a prime example iof that I have a great knack for figuring problems out. However I am very much socially inept. I am a Horrible typist and have a very bad grasp of writing. But I do have a rather high IQ score so what does that mean in the grand Scheme of things. I am good at Math have a good memory and I can do logic puzzles and pattern recognition like nobodies business. However will that help me write articles for a newspaper? no. Does that help me sway peoples opinions with what I say? No. But flat out Bush is a freaking Idiot. but who says thats really that bad. Clinton was not an idiot and he scammed the Country over and over again.
Well, funny you said that he got rid of two terrible dictatorships, care to elaborate how both Saddam and The Taliban got into power?
Go and read the book on Hitler, and read about how exactly he got to power. I recommend you follow your advice first.....
In all the arguements about the viability of various voting methods, there is only one that really does work: optical mark-sense sense similiar to a Scantron sheet.
:-)
Similar to the forms you use to fill out the answers on an SAT/ACT test or fill out a paper lottery ticket, optical mark-sense scan sheets are easily read by both machine and hand counts, and the potential for fraud is by far the lowest on this method, according to the November 2003 issue of Popular Science.
Here's how I would implement it:
1. The sheet would be standard letter size (8.5" x 11"). Most paper-handling machines are already designed for this paper size.
2. As each blank spot is filled, it'll be filled by a very small black ink stamp set up on a special mount so it precisely marks each blank spot at the correct location. I prefer ink stamps because they produce marks that are easier to read by machine and hand counts.
By the way, they can use recycled paper for the ballot sheet, since what it needs to do is read the black markings in the blank filled areas.
It's a method I'm sure even Mr. Vidal would approve of.
All I can hope for is that all of the people who are yelling about how evil Bush is get out and vote next November. If every person here on Slashdot votes next year we'll get him out for good. And if the guy we vote in sucks then lets vote him out as well and keep voting them out until they get the message that THEY work for US.
"Terminate?"
"Terminate... with extreme prejudice"
"if Al Gore had been president any of the following may have happened:"
Troll, you left out:
- The US wouldn't have alienated the rest of the planet by launching an unprovoked war on Iraq.
- The US would have signed the Kyoto Protocol, and not alientated the rest of the planet on that front as well.
- Hundreds of americans, and thousands of Iraquis, would still be alive.
- The US economy would be about $130B better off (only counting money wasted on the war in Iraq -- more if you could secondary effects, like the business cost of companies refusing to do business with us, etc.).
- Enron, etc., would have been better managed, because the white house wouldn't have been so busy covering things up instead of addressing them.
- The US energy policy would be balanced, rather than written by the oil industry in order to maximize dependence on them, and thus on middle eastern oil supplies.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
All three makers of the voting machines are Bush donors. And if they were Dean donors, this what matter... how exactly?
Nobody would bat an eye if the donors were any other party. I'm actually kind of glad that this electronic voting crap happened on a conservative rather than liberal watch. If this had happened, say, with Clinton in office or after the next Democrat President, we'd never hear about the problems inherent in the system in the mainstream press.
Most corporations make political contributions to one or BOTH parties. It is irrelevant.
Thank you! Did anybody ever see a report on exactly who Enron donated to? The Rebpulican connection was heavily touted as "proof" that Bush was in bed with Enron, but the truth of the matter was that Enron donated heavily to both of the big political parties. Yes, they did give a bit more to the Republicans, but the disproportions can be traced to state and local political parties. Enron was in Texas, a heavily conservative state.
I'm really getting sick of the constant Conservative bashing using distorted facts. It's gotten to the point now that if somebody in the mainstream media (anything but Fox News) criticizes Bush, I just can't believe it; it takes too much effort to verify the sources any more to find the real truth. Since Fox has a decidely "fair and balanced" Conservative bent, any criticism of Bush from them automatically gets more attention.
It's sad, really. If they guy I voted for is screwing up, I want to know about it. But I can't trust any of the sources to tell me the whole story any more.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
There are strong parallels between early Hitler and the current Bush. I'm not saying that Bush is or is going to be as bad as Hitler. The big difference to my mind is that Hitler served in the trenches during the WWI, Bush hid in Texas during Vietnam. If you cannot see the danger in :-
the new laws like the Patriot Act,
treating POWs as examples, Guantanemo Bay,
the use of no-bid contracts by the executive,
the new people employed to spy on Americans,
the increased control exerted over the military,
the attempts to obilterate any dissent,
the new selective service jobs,
then feel free to read what Hitler was doing after his first election. I take it you have the books you so freely ask others to read?
Bush got rid of two dictatorships, I assume you mean Afghanistan and Iraq. My politcal knowledge is limited but I do not think Afghanistan was a dictatorship, no single leader you see. Also, Saddam is not accounted for, his dictatorship is seemingly gone.
Why did the US invade these countries? We were after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and WMD in Iraq. 100% failure so far. Silly me I was forgetting the world is rid of two dictatorships.
Now I see you're anger when people compare Bush to Hitler. Hitler could plan a decent shock and awe, I mean blitzakrieg, campaign. Bush couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
The EFF is running an action alert on the Voter confidence and Increased Accessability act of 2003 which mandates public review of the machines (i.e. opening the source for review) and including paper recipts for recounts. U.S. Citizens can go here to submit a letter to your congressional rep.
What's a few minutes of your time for democracy?
Isnt that for allowing hunters to cut off and stuff bears arms? Or is it to allow patients to be transplanted with bears arms in an emergency?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I, for one, long for the days when the economy was booming, civil liberties were intact, the world basically liked us, and the nation's biggest problem was a stupid blow job.
One more thing -- at least Bill Clinton had the guts to attend the funerals of servicemen killed in action. He was a real President. Resident Bush has yet to stand in front of one of the hundreds of coffins coming back to this country because of the decisions he has made.
But, hey, he sure looks good in that flight suit...
There is no technology news in his commentary whatsoever. Why is it here at Slashdot instead of some liberal blog? Oh, I forgot! Slashdot IS a liberal blog. :)
I guess you haven't looked at the Republican Party's membership lately. Strom Thurmond left the Democrat Party for the Republican Party because the Dems were for civil rights of all. And I am pretty certain that the list of lies from the current administration (or avoidance of the issue) can easily be found if you know how to use a search engine. Let's see....start with his response to whether he had ever been arrested (he denied and when caught, said he wanted to avoid looking bad for his kids...you know, the ones getting caught for underage drinking). The refusal to answer if he had done cocaine... And so on ad infinitum.
Well, you seem to forget that Al Gore was VicePresident for over 8 years, and last time I checked:
1) The guys who bombed the WTC and the Cole were all brought to Justice. Saddam was bombed when he refused to comply with the UN, the Republicans argued that the moves were politically based.
2) Did you stop owning or were forbiden to own a gun during those 8 years?
3) How much money did you stop making during those 8 years?
4) Last I checked gass was over $2.00 on the average since Bush has been in office, only recall a few spikes during Gore's first 8 years. And 1000 pound car can be both fuel efficient and safe, what it can not do is compensate for whatever shortcoming you may suffer.
Ahh yes, the chewy nougat center. The one where you find the extremes and measure inward.
If we only include current American media, FOX might be somewhere near the middle. However, if we include the rest of the world and historical examples, the center is a little left of NPR. Thus putting all of the TV networks firmly in the right. [pun intended] This is closer to what is traditionally considered the center.
If we only measure by the current US, then the US will always center around the center. You won't be able to say anything meaningfull.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
I just get beat over the head with it constantly. Bush is evil, Bush is bad, Clinton is great, Clinton was the best prez. It's just so irksome when they seem to be stuck in a vote "party line" mentality.
If he obviously hates this country so much (or the way it is now at least), why did he decide to make this his place of residence? I am not saying he should "love it or leave it", but if we are doing things so horribly wrong, and there are places in the world doing it better - than why not live there? Isn't it hypocritical to choose to live here and then say that it is effectively garbage? I for one think that most people that live here do so because for THEM it is better than living just about anywhere else. Just my 2 cents. BTW - I am a foreigner :P
"I am sure your boy Bush never lied right?"
He hasn't yet.
"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
"Iraq has been trying to get yellow cake uranium." (Well, okay, that one was solidly debunked, but hundreds of people still got killed.)
"Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11." Well, okay, he never actually came out and said that. But he never actually went out of his way to deny it either until he was forced to.
And didn't he say something about how much he loved our veterans and wanted to help them, while happily slashing their health benefits and their childrens' education benefits? He won't even go to their funerals, for God's sake.
Biggest whopper of all: "I am a uniter, not a divider."
If Bush were so honest and pure, then why is this administration the most secretive since Nixon? Why can't we see the details about Cheney's meetings about the energy bill? Why won't the White House cooperate with the 9/11 investigation? And what's up with those 28 blacked-out pages, anyway? The federal government should be subject to the same transparency on these issues that the USA PATRIOT act makes all of us. And yet, somehow, it is not. If we're gonna go with Bushie logic, this sounds fishy to me.
You live in a little fantasy world where Bush et. al. will take care of all your problems and make the bad people go away and you won't have to do anything about it, except maybe figure out how to spend your tax refund and maybe let the Department of Justice snoop around your records a bit (because you have nothing to hide, right? Nothing that you know of, at least).
Grow up.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Nope, not being hated more after 9/11 than before is the only thing I would expect Gore to have accomplished.
That's a good movie. Better than the last two matrix films.
I've happily past the stage where this disturbs me and can now just find that incredibly funny. It helps that I don't live in the US.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
If you have a district with 10,000 registered folks, and the fancy electronic voting system shows 120,000 votes, and the lockbox contains 120,000 paper receipts, do you believe it? If somebody is gonna hack a voting system, obviously they should be considering that their hack needs to mimic the casting of an actual e-vote, thus generating an e-receipt. Rather than spend millions on what most techies see as a bad idea, why not spend those millions to educate folks on how to punch a paper ballot? "See the box next to the name? Poke a hole through the box. Yes, like that. Good."
1) The guys who bombed the WTC and the Cole were all brought to Justice. Saddam was bombed when he refused to comply with the UN, the Republicans argued that the moves were politically based.
Wow, we brought some lakeys to justice. That's like saying you locked up some longshoreman thereby solving that entire mafia problem.
2) Did you stop owning or were forbiden to own a gun during those 8 years?
It was a tough battle, and thanks to that bastard Clinton there are things we can no longer own. Doesn't seem to keep the local bangers from getting their toys though.
3) How much money did you stop making during those 8 years?
Has nothing to do with how much I made. Why should I be forced at gun point to give my money to people who don't deserve it and aren't willing to help themselves? And don't say "it wasn't taken at gun point.", don't pay your taxes and let me know what happens, eventually somebody with guns will show up!
4) Last I checked gass was over $2.00 on the average since Bush has been in office, only recall a few spikes during Gore's first 8 years. And 1000 pound car can be both fuel efficient and safe, what it can not do is compensate for whatever shortcoming you may suffer.
The technology does not exist to make an afforadable car that weighs 1000 pounds and can survive a side impact with most vehicles on the road, sorry.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
I am confused.
Why would it bad if Bush was found praying?
Or are you one of those who thinks all religious people are crazy/lunatic?
I personally would find it reassuring to know that he at least believes that there is a power greater than himself. In my opinion, it keeps a person from doing anything too stupid.
Before anyone gets too crazy on this, YES I am aware of all the crazy and terrible things that have been done by various zealots of pretty much every major religious category (Christians, Muslims, etc). I would argue that the people behind those crazy acts were only using religion to get at an end they wanted anyway, not because they believed that it was what God/Allah/whoever/whatever really wanted them to do. But they knew that if they could convince others to do think that's what God (etc) wanted, they could get there way. I am aware of all this, and still believe that those who truly believe that there is a higher power of some sort will tend to be more responsible for their actions when in a position of power.
That said, while I voted for Bush, and generally support him, I don't really like some of the things he has done (PATRIOT act comes to mind, as dose TIA).
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or does he work for Renraku?
Yep - go back to sleep America, the Megacorps are in control.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I posted this as a reply to another comment here, but I saw other comments which claim that Diebold probably gives to Democrats equally, depending on who is in power. This is simply not true.
Diebold employees give exclusively to Republican candidates and organizations. During the 1996 and 1998 election cycles (when, I probably don't need to remind you, Clinton was president) Diebold gave over $36,000 to Republicans, and $0.00 to Democrats. Source. Further, for the 2000 and 2002 cycles, they gave $31,000 to Republican causes, and zero dollars to Democratic ones. Source.
As ridiculous and conspiratorial as it sounds, there is some evidence that the Republican party, or at the least some of those who have associations with it, is engaging in a conscious effort to undermine the democracy. Add to this the fact that all opposition to paper trails is coming from the Republican leadership and things begin to smell just a tad.
Given that most of "the war on terrorism" was set out in the Clarke plan commissioned by Clinton on the basis of the Hart-Rudman security analysis after the USS Cole attack, but not implemented as it would be unfair to saddle a brand new president with a war started only weeks before the election, but then put on the back-burner by the new administration, I think there might well have been an invasion of Afghanistan within days of a Gore administration assuming office. Clinton had already reshaped the US military into the awesome force Bush was able to unleash on Afghanistan.
The dot-com bubble would have burst regardless, but a different administraton might not have crippled America's steel users with massive illegal subsidies which are about to rebound in the form of an electorally-targetted trade war with WTO backing.
And of course Clear Channel's holdings are a representative distribution between huge stations in large cities and tiny little country stations with mere thousands of listeners...
Oh wait, no, that's absolutely not the case. Nor is it with Murdoch and newspapers. The majority of the holdings in both cases are large metropolitan media outlets where the majority of the population lives.
That 8% holding of Clear Channels probably reaches 90% of the population. (Though it's not a monopoly for all of those people.)
And you'd be surprised how many people vote Democrat because their union or preacher said to.
My whole family is Democrat, and so is my wife's family. Yet I tend to vote Republican. How does your theory explain this?
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Take a read, AC. Too bad the SC didn't
Lets not forget Clinton vastly expanded the War on Drug Users.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You know, I know that Onion article was satire/parody, but has it said anything that hasn't come true?
[o]_O
From WHO COUNTS THE VOTES?:
"Here are short profiles of the three most important voting-systems companies in the United States:
ELECTION SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE
By far the largest vote-counting company in the United States, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Neb., was founded in 1980 by brothers Todd and Bob Urosevich. According to internet journalist Bev Harris of Talion.com, the company, originally known as American Information Systems, was controlled in the 1980s by the hard-right, fundamentalist-leaning Ahmanson family of California, heirs to the Home Savings of America fortune. In the nineties, the company could boast future U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) as its chairman; Hagel still owns stock in the McCarthy Group, which currently has a stake in ES&S. Since ES&S enjoys an exclusive contract with the state of Nebraska and counts 80 percent of the state's votes (the rest are hand-counted), Hagel is effectively part owner of the firm responsible for counting his own votes.
ES&S has been involved in voting-related scandals across the country, particularly in the South. In April 2002, Arkansas secretary of state Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks in voting-machine scandals, part of which involved Business Records Corp. (BRC), now merged into ES&S. A BRC executive, Tom Eschberger, accepted immunity from prosecution in return for cooperating in the investigation, and has since become a Vice President of ES&S.
According to The Tallahassee Democrat, Sandra Mortham, Florida's top election official from 1995 to 1999, lobbies for both ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties, which endorsed ES&S in return for a commission. Mortham herself received commissions for ES&S touch-screen machines purchased by Florida counties (see "The Re-Election of Jim Crow," Southern Exposure Election 2002 Special Edition).
In another revolving-door scandal, the state of California has begun an investigation into Louis Dedier, the state's director of voting systems. Dedier accepted a job with ES&S, then made recommendations without disclosing the potential conflict of interest.
Breakdowns and other problems have plagued ES&S machines since at least the late 1990s. When the company's new ballot-reading machines malfunctioned in Hawaii in 1998, Tom Eschberger admitted there were difficulties, but protested to the Honolulu Star Bulletin that "in all fairness, there were 7,000 machines in Venezuela and 500 machines in Dallas that did not have problems." However, during that same election season, the Dallas devices initially failed to count 41,000 votes. And two years later, massive breakdowns and technical difficulties with ES&S systems rocked the Venezuelan national elections, causing the vote to be suspended. Pres. Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan election officials accused the company of "trying to destabilize the country's electoral process," while protesters chanted "Gringos go home!" at ES&S technicians.
ES&S-related problems continued in 2002, as Bev Harris has documented:
In the primaries, Union County, Florida, used ES&S machines for the first time. According to The Bradenton Herald, under old methods of hand counting, election workers usually finished tallying the county's votes by the end of the day. This time, when a programming error corrupted the machine count, officials had to resort to the old method. Altogether the process took more than twice as long as manual counting.
During early voting in Dallas County, Texas, voters complained that ES&S touch-screen devices were recording Democratic votes as votes for Republicans. Similar problems were reported in Florida.
Twenty percent of ES&S machines in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, malfunctioned on election day. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, the state committee that chose ES&S ignored the wishes of local officials
Translation from babelfish: You should calculate the average altitude of your country, any bulldozer has this level and to start again has nine.
including Prescott Bush, George's grandfather
...just like Hitler often was, right?????
...Bush's cronies, the neocons, are mostly neo-Troskyites
So according to your logic I must be a racist, male schovinist son of a bitch, just like my grandfather?
raving rightwing religious lunatic as Hitler
What part of National Socialist German Workers Party confuses you? There was nothing right wing about the Nazi's. Try reading something other than Michael Lind's trash, like...say... The Twenty Five Points. Pay attention to the 14 demands they make. How you can relate them to Bush or the Conservative movement is beyond me, but I await the entertainment of your attempt.
he has allegedly been found face down on the Oval Office floor praying
Oh this one has to be my favorite. What is it, do you think that using big words make you sound all highbrowed or something?
First of it's: Trotskyite or follower of the writings of Leon Trotsky. Second its the left that has called them neo cons and as such, you are now trying to apply the 1970's meaning of the word to those its currently being applied to. But there's nothing to back it up. And yet the two terms are ideologically opposite One is a former socalist who now beleives in a free market, the other is a socalist.
I don't understand how these bush cronies can be capitalist and socalist at the same time? Please feel free to explain...
You're close, but the number was more like 537,850, and his total gave him I believe the second highest popular vote total ever. Bush wasn't even in the top five. The outrage here is why wasn't our antiquated electoral college thrown out as a result of this travesty? There was plenty of hype about it after Kennedy beat Nixon (won electoral college by a close race, won popular vote by over 100,000). That's right, people were more upset about the EC when it almost failed than when it did fail.
If you want a voting scandal, the whole electronic voting thing has to completely blow up to come close to the travesty of the electoral college. It's not even second on my list. That's the set of rules designed to minimize voter turnout to under 50%. Why do we vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November? Because it made the most sense for 18th century farmers, that's why. It either should be on a weekend, or, more importantly, a national holiday.
Nonetheless, the electronic voting scandal should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country until it is addressed. But it won't be. There will be hue and cry, and then there will be acceptance, and then we'll all forget about it.
Now you're just trolling. If Slashdot is a "liberal" blog, you have a twisted idea of Liberal.
I'm suprised there are so many ultra-conservative, love it or leave it, our president - right or wrong, types on here. It'd make me say that Slashdot had been invaded by Ditto-heads.
It is very on-topic that these Electronic Voting proponents are connected to the Republicans. The Republicans who many people believe both cheated and unfairly took advantage of errors in the Florida election. The fact that these companies are very obviously Republican supporters, and that they have donated to the Republicans, goes together with the apparent corruption in that party and suggests that perhaps some of the insecurity of the electronic voting platforms (and the reason it's not generated a lot more noise in the government) is intentional.
The fact is that these companies publicly support the Republicans, and that the Republicans are the largest proponents of using these machines. The conclusions are your own, but an article that mention how one political party seems to be embracing flawed technology (which has been discussed here) seems on-topic.
$party_attorney: Ok, let's see those receipts and get the recount going. Polling place worker: Sure, let me just get that lockbox out of my trunk. *PPW returns with slightly warm lockbox. Opens the box, looks at strip after stip of black paper. $party_attorney & PPW: WHAT THE FSCK!?
Sony ha
PARENT WAS MODDED FUNNY so he wouldnt get karma
I have so much karma I can fill the goatse.cx guy's ass with it and have some left over. Do your worst.
Lots of petrified grits
Really? Where's your proof?
Trouble: Largest deficitNot as a percentage of GDP
Look at the deficit figures and economic markers before that time.Recessions happen, it's a fact of life. Fewer people working and lower corporate profits and a crappy stock market mean lower tax revenue. So unless you want to raise taxes on top of the pain, you've either got to cut govt spending, (very tough to do politically) or run a deficit. According to Keynsian Economic theory, which normally Democrats love, it's a GOOD thing to run a deficit during a recession because of the stimulative effects of the extra spending.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
I find it troubling when the shortcomings of the electronic voting schemes currently being used are portrayed in a partisan perspective, to illustrate how evil Bush is, or or conspiracies to steal elections, or claims like that. Approaching the issue as a political attack ploy might mobilize the left to action, but will only cause backlash from conservatives and drive them to support these voting technologies, if only to oppose the political attack.
In truth, having fair, verifiable, open elections with accurate vote counts is not a liberal thing or a conservative thing, it's something that everyone participating in a democratic process should be striving for.
Too often, voting issues are used not simply to elect political leaders, but as a political tool in their own right. For instance, in Florida in 2000, liberals push for recount after recount hoping to eventually get a result favorable to their candidate, yet in California 2003, the same left tries to halt a recall election until all precincts have electronic voting machines that would make such scrutiny of the paper trail impossible. Do they like double checking votes, or not, or do they just pick whatever is most advantageous for their candidate? Obviously, counterexamples of inconsistent attitudes towards voting by conservatives could be put forth as well, the point is that the voting process can become politicized and that is bad.
I just want a good, honest election. I want a paper trail that can be used to verify the winner according to some specific, predefined criteria. I want the ballots secure from tampering, hacking, fraud, and such. I want every part of the process, from how the votes will be tallied to how the electoral college works to how the voting machines work (including full source code) available for full public review and discourse. I do not want these things because I am conservative or liberal, but because I believe in a representative system of government. The candidate I hope will prevail will not be shared by someone of a differing ideology, but my vision for the voting process itself certainly could be.
Don't say ths, didn't you get the memo that told you that comparisoin between Hitler and Bush are not okay?
After all, this is America and something like Hitler could never happen. America is far to superior to fall for something as simple as Hitler style politics.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
> 1) We would have surrendered before the second plane hit the WTC.
It's so much better with GWB, who is preparing the future plane bombers for the next 20 years. People are not born hateful, they grow hateful because of their enviromnent: maybe there is a reason behind 9/11, and maybe this reason is not enterily that "these people are Evil".
> 2) Only criminals would have guns
Considering that less than 1% of death caused by handguns is in self defense, that's pretty much already the case...
> 3) Even more money would be taken from my pocket to support inner city kids who don't understand "Gang Banging" isn't a productive life style.
When the inner city kids will make the next revolution, maybe you'll regret not helping them getting a better education instead of parking them in a ghetto.
> 4) We would be paying $5.00 for a gallon of gas, to put in a sub-standard 1000 pound car that would be destroyed when it collided with a june bug.
This is the case on the rest of the planet (paying $5 bucks a gallon). Only in america and in some other oil-producing countries will you still get your gas so cheap. But then again, when your gallon cost $50 because there's no supply left, you will probably be the first to insult those "damn greens and liberals" that didn't plan for the shortage of gas 50 years ago...
It's so stupid, it's not even funny.
I was not calling conservatives: facists. However, the Nazis used almost the
same wording (in the German though, of course), to describe political dissident intellectuals.
Its just that their thinking and actions mesh up nicely in that particular area.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Now the second kind you have in these parades seem to be people who want to mislabel Hitler. Everybody in the world is Hitler. Bush is Hitler, Ashcroft is Hitler, Rumsfeld is Hitler, the only one who isn't Hitler is the foreign guy with the mustache dropping people who don't agree with him into the wood chipper...He's NOT Hitler.
--Dennis Miller
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
2) It's the length of a Presidential administration. W is in line to be the first one in 70 years to have a net loss of jobs. How is that arbitrary?
3) The economy has been in the tank for three years (and counting). Despite getting all of the tax breaks he asked for and despite having control over both houses and despite all of the positive sentiment coming out of the WH, the economy has been down for 3 years. When does he start taking responsibility for this? Oh, wait. We dealt with that in number 1: never.
4) a) We've found lots of mass graves of the dead of Kosovo killed by Milosevic. That's one of the reasons he's on trial now.
b) As an obvious supporter of the current invasion of Iraq, are you saying it was bad of Clinton to bomb them to try and get them to comply?
c) Are you saying you would have supported an invasion of Rwanda to save the Tutsis? That was during the previous administration, after all.
d) No, I was talking about Iraq. I was talking about taking all of the good will towards the US after 9/11 and throwing it in the crapper, taking a big dump on it, pouring on some gasoline and setting it on fire. I'm talking about invading Iraq on false pretenses (WMD, al-Quaeda) and then rewriting your reasons after you can't support your original ones (killing fields, democracy-building). I'm talking about failing to secure the supposed prime target again (where are Osama and Mullah Omar?). I'm talking about living in a dream world as to post-invasion circumstances (they'll be tossing flowers in our path and giving us their daughters to use) and having no real plan that approached reality. I'm talking about he huge number of conventional weapons caches that we know about and continue to leave totally unguarded because Rummy has determined that exactly the right number of soldiers are there right now. Those are the things I'm talking about.
You know, there's more, but I'm too annoyed thinking about it.
I'll bet all three companies have donated to the major democratic presidential hopefuls, too. So what?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Look, you may disagree with him, but Gore Vidal is one of the country's foremost writers and public intellectuals. He's been writing and publishing a sustained and articulate critique of the current directions of American political leadership -- from a decidedly patriotic, and small-r republican, perspective -- for decades. He was one of the most prominent intellectuals in this nation before I was born. Disagree with him all you like, but calling him an "idiot" like that betrays an incredible depth of ignorance.
It doesn't get more bizarre than this.
"The best rapper in the world is white.
The best golfer in the world is black.
The French are accusing America of arrogance
and it's the Germans who don't want to go to war."
--Richard Blackwood.
you have a good point. Too bad the mods don't agree with it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I am sure your boy Bush never lied right?"
:
Two words
Mission Accomplished.
But he sure looked swank in that flight suit...
If Bush was anything like Hitler, the Secret police would soon be at your door for posting that.
Bush is at least as much a raving rightwing religious lunatic as Hitler was (he has allegedly been found face down on the Oval Office floor praying)Evidence please?
- and he has much more power and much less control and much less opposition in this country than Hitler did in Germany.Whatever! To people like you, the reason Republicans keep making gains is some "Vast Right Wing conspiracy (tm)". The truth is rhetoric of the left has become so hysterical and out of control that it's alienating people. This post is a great example of that.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
I'll make it simple for you, AC.
We're not talking about unemployment rate, but job creation. The time frame is a Presidential term in office, 4 years.
WJC, WJC, GHWB, RWR, RWR, JC, RMN/GF, RMN, LBJ, JFK/LBJ, JFK, DWE, DWE, HST, FDR/HST, FDR, FDR, FDR: None of them had a net loss of jobs during these terms in office.
Herbert Hoover, 1929-1933 was the last President who presided over a net loss of jobs during his 4 year term in office. Now do you get it AC?
or maybe he was just eating pretzels!
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
The CEO is on record as saying he will be honored to *DELIVER* the votes to put Bush into the white house in 2004.
At the very least, this is not an appropriate thing for a representative of an electronic voting machine company to say... let alone at a Bush fundraiser.
When it comes to voting, even the *appearance* of impropriety is a problem. The voting system and counting system must be above reproach by any party.
By this standard, the planned voting machines utterly fail. Austrailia has done a better job, as have some other countries. Electronic voting machines at the very least need to be open-source so that everyone can have confidence the code is valid and not biased or insecure. Beyond that, some sort of verifiable paper-trail or some other verification system is a must.
When it comes to voting systems, there MUST be voter-trust of the system. The current system that is planned for use in 2004 has no such trust, and this is a serious problem that must be addressed.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
What does this have to do with Bush? The electronic voting initiative was started under Bill Clinton.
Get your tinfoil hat ready, Gore.
The solution is not to get rid of one entirely, but rather to use both. That is, what we should have is an electronic machine that you vote on, a touch screen or whatnot. When you've made your vote, it prints out on a piece of paper your decisions. This gives the voter a chance to review their decisions to make sure everything is hunky dorey. If they are satisfied, they simply drop the paper in a slot and leave the voting booth.
Now, the votes can be auto-tallied by the computer system. If there needs to be a recount, there's a paper trail. Why is this hybrid approach not an option?
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I am aware of all this, and still believe that those who truly believe that there is a higher power of some sort will tend to be more responsible for their actions when in a position of power.
With this statement is revealed that this person has based their entire argument on a matter of faith. Thats right : He has faith in the fact that a person that has faith in a higher power will be more responsible for their actions.
Personally I'd like to vote for someone that does NOT have a track record of greed, a family history of corruption and slavish relationships with the corporations that put him in power.
But you know what pisses me of the most? The whole world feels the effects of Bush's actions as he invades foreign countries and throws the world economy into turmoil with massive spending on the military, pumping the value of certain multinational corporations that leave their mark all over the planet, yet not even 50 percent of you Americans even bother to go to the voting booths. These people cant get off their lazy asses just once out of every four years to fill out a ballot that will determine our future.
But is that all it is? You think you can stick a peice of paper in a box or pull some lever and just "sit back and relax", having "faith" in the fact that your leader will do a good job? Dont be so naive as to have faith in a man with such a spotted history and aggressive agenda, let alone ANYONE that purports to KNOW the right thing to do.
With the power of corporations and the economy far surpassing that of countries and their governments, who is going to police the economy? Right now its Bush and his Corporate Family. Well, at least he's got the FAITH!
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
Which of course means nothing. There is no national presidential election. There are 50 state elections for presidential electors, all held on the same day. Those electors are the ones who actually elect the president. So if a presidential candidate's electors in one state win by a large majority and another candidate's electors in another state win by a slim majority, they are still wins. The overall majority vote in the nation as a whole means nothing to the election of a president.
The problem with your theory is that Hitler & co. had some intellect. Bush is a rambling idiot, supported by people whom given the power could act like Hitler. The American populace, however, prefers idiots to idealists, so we're probably safe from voting for Hitler's reincarnation.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
And why didn't Clinton execute this incredible plan? In fact why didn't Clinton undertake this after the Cole bombing (instead of just throwing out a couple of cruise missles and calling it good)? Or why didn't he kill Bin Laden when the Sudanease told Clinton exactly where Bin Laden was? BTW: It's not Clinton's fault either, he didn't know 9/11 was coming as well.
This plan business is revisionist bullshit. Al Gore would have done nothing more than Bush. This "plan" is something Washington does all the time. They make plan after plan for all kinds of threats. How many documents detailing various ways of dealing with the USSR are out there?
But of course the huge disagreement and division in the US is something the terrorists really like to see.
We (the US) are really in this together, divided we may well fall. I do think that Gore may well have done some things right after 9/11. I think he might have carried through on the invasion of Afganistan (but not Iraq). But I am absolutely sure that we would have still had 9/11. Hindsight is 20/20, and hindsight as a partisan exersice is probably 20/10.
Without a doubt, "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'" is one of The Onion 's most prophetic articles. It was originally printed in January of 2001 (wish I'd saved my paper copy), it predicted, "...that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years," and a number of other things. It didn't come 100% true, obviously, but for a humor article it was inspired.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Didn't bother algore last election. (Sorry, cheap shot).
But I do get your point. Voting should be above reproach. They should arrest people that intimidate voters at polling places, throw people commiting voter fraud into jail, and make sure that everyone that wants to vote GETS to vote.
That's regardless of party. The voter fraud in the last election in Missouri (let's leave the polls open late to stack the deck) and Wisconsin (let's bribe the homeless with cigarettes to vote), was bad, but nothing compared to what it will be next election. Electonic voting will only make it worse.
A bit more vehemently than I would have said it, but an adequate summary nonetheless. ;-)
I keep forgetting about another part of the Bush fantasy, which is that we are the Good Guys and the other guys are the Bad Guys. Yes, we are quite the Good Guys, innocent and undeserving of any hatred or dislike, because we always have the best interests of everyone else at heart. Absolutely. Heh.
And I must admit that the comparison between Dubya and FDR made me laugh out loud. I doubt that if Bush were around during the Great Depression, he would have come up with the New Deal or the WPA or Social Security or anything like that. Comparing FDR -- one of the few Presidents who seemed to give a hoot about the welfare of the American people -- to GWB -- who has demonstrated a truly frightening contempt not just for the people but also for the rest of the government is tantamount to insult to an honorable man like FDR.
These guys just keep the laughs a-comin'.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
>>Or are you one of those who thinks all religious people are crazy/lunatic?
If we are speaking about organized religion, then for the most part, yes. Definately a diagnosable mental condition.
I have misplaced my pants.
Well it's no wonder that Gore's all upset about voting methods. Look what happened to him in the last presidential election!
And this has to do with technology... how, exactly?
The fact is that these companies publicly support the Republicans, and that the Republicans are the largest proponents of using these machines. The conclusions are your own, but an article that mention how one political party seems to be embracing flawed technology (which has been discussed here) seems on-topic.
This is a political aspect of the business relations of companies working in the field. It has nothing to do with the technology when the technology clearly can be made to work and free of influences. What is being said is that something is wrong because the owners of these companies have donated to the Republican party. The implication being that if the people making voting machines happen to support Bush then OBVIOUSLY there is something fishy and illegal going on. The conclusion being that Bush is corrupt and trying to steal elections and the correlary being that Democrats are pure as the wind-driven snow and the voting machines would be accurate if they were made by Democrats.
This is all just idle speculation of a conspiracy. There's no proof whatsoever. Until there's proof it's just dirty, nasty political mudslinging of the worst kind and has no reason being on a website that is supposedly technical in nature.
That's why we should put someone who will cut federal spending like Dubya in. No wait, he just spends money like there's no tommorrow and cuts taxes, bankrupting future generations.
Tax and spend liberals my ass.
It's better then running up a tab that someone else is going to have to pay for.
Yes. Yes it is.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
During my time at University, we had a lecture given by Professor Conan Fischer, a leading researcher on the Nazi party. This was given by the History Society and not part of any course. It was entitled "Hitler, the Nazis and the politics of New Labour". It was just after Tony Blair had become leader and was not yet Prime Minister.
Anyway, just before the lecture began we had about 30 university Labour group members march in and sit at the back of the lecture theatre. They then sat with folded arms and could not have made the point more clearly if they had brown shirts on.
The argument that was presented was that the mix of left and right wing rhetoric, family values, tough compassion, was very similar to the rhetoric that the Nazis used in pre war Germany. It would not be hard to draw parallels to Bush's compassionate conservative rhetoric. The cult of the leader was a strong theme as well.
Now I'm not suggesting that either Tony Blair or Dubya are Nazis, but it becomes clear that the same ideals and rhetoric can hide a multitude of different meanings.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
Nobody would bat an eye if the donors were any other party. I'm actually kind of glad that this electronic voting crap happened on a conservative rather than liberal watch. If this had happened, say, with Clinton in office or after the next Democrat President, we'd never hear about the problems inherent in the system in the mainstream press.
And how many stories have you heard about this in the mainstream press? By my count, CNN has run one story on it, and the New York Times has run another single story on it. The AP also ran a story, which was picked up by some outlets. But doing a search of news.google.com does not turn up all that much, certainly not as much as you'd think this would warrant.
Thank you! Did anybody ever see a report on exactly who Enron donated to? The Rebpulican connection was heavily touted as "proof" that Bush was in bed with Enron, but the truth of the matter was that Enron donated heavily to both of the big political parties. Yes, they did give a bit more to the Republicans, but the disproportions can be traced to state and local political parties. Enron was in Texas, a heavily conservative state.
Look at this. Summarized here for your pleasure: Total donations, 1990-2004 for Enron: 29% to Democrats, 71% to Republicans. Enron heavily favored Republicans in their political contributions, both on the state and national level. Enron obviously favored the Republican party.
Wait a second, Gore invented the internet-- how can he be against e-voting?
My point is that the absence of a paper trail is not a new problem. The real problem with electronic balloting is the fact that the ballots can be hacked remotely - a fact that we will realize only when wake up one day and find that a 14-year-old punk hacker nobody ever heard of has just been elected president.
[this
There are plenty of us on the other side of the pond with voices of reason. It just so happens that MY voice of reason may not agree with your voice of reason.
First off, Bush had absolutely NOTHING to do with invoking the September 11th attacks. Just like there was no way of him preventing it. Remember there was a bombing attemp on the WTC years before Bush was even elected. It has been a desired target for many years by those who would wish to cripple Western Civilization.
The economy was going bad before Bush was elected. Most of us saw it comming, and were ready for it. Those who were taken by surprise were the ones that actually thought that the president has the power to turn the tides of commerce.
However, don't take my defense of Mr. Bush as support for him. I think that he has bungled up foreign affairs even more than they were before, and embarassed our nation.
But the mess didn't start with Mr. Bush. It didn't start with Clinton either. It's been brewing for a long time. The English are mainly responsible for the mess over in the Middle East (Check your post WWI history). The U.S. didn't help the situation with our one-sided involvement with Israel either.
What urks me is all of those european "intellectuals", and the self righteous ones from other countries, who do nothing more than sit back on their laurels, find fault, and try to make themselves believe their country would handle things any different than the way the U.S. has if THEY were the most powerful nation in the world.
I didn't vote for Bush, and I certainly didn't vote for Gore. I'm an Anarchist by philosophical choice. I just wish the governments would step asside and let the people run the show. Then we'd see some real results.
-Jim
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Plato
But I guess it is hard to acknowledge that you are methodically and knowingly sowing the seeds of your own eventual destruction.
At least you aren't alone, my government is hell bent on following yours into the gaping abyss.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Good job stating the truth...now if it would only matter to this crowd.
You point is 100% accurate, but, unfortunately, you're talking to dead wood. Notice how the concept of a majority vote is constantly repeated, with no recognition that we are not a democracy, we're a representative republic.
Anyway, it's nice to see that there are a few individuals on here that have a brain!
Cya...
Somebody mod this up as funny. I can see why you posted this as Anonymous.
.
I live in the real world where the government should get off our backs
Hilarious. The USA Patriot Act (might as well be the Committee of UnAmerican conduct) has been the single biggest act of American state oppression since 1776. Except maybe the Guantanamo Bay thing, oh, or the illegal invasion of a sovreign state, oh, or the illegal steel tariffs that have caused more problems than they have solved. Ah, but none of these things affect you do they?
let us solve our own problems
I would have thought that your biggest problem would be working out how to address you sister, is it Cindy-Lou or is it Momma?
Some problems the government should handle, like foreing monsters attacking us
Well, let me see. The last "foreing monsters" to attack America were Saudis. And the considered response was, invade the poorest country in the world. Ah yes, and then when you take prisoners you throw the Geneva convention out the window and don't see the irony when you try to take the moral high ground as you use faked, old and misleading evidence to invade yet another country. Yes, I see the structure and integrity of your argument. Someone call the Oxford debating society, this guy is a shoe in.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
...is ill-fated on many levels. If you have the time, listen to "The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice" audio found on this page. If fills many gaps as far as understanding the fundamental "problems" with e-voting.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
What gives you this great insight as to what normal Americans think? Don't assume that normal Americans are like you, or those you associate with.
And how many stories have you heard about this in the mainstream press? I've seen several in Newsweek recently, actually. My local news in Phoenix also ran a few stories recently. That's exactly my point, though. There actually were stories, though far too few for the magnitude of the problem, reported on this recently in the mainstream press.
By my count, CNN has run one story on it, and the New York Times has run another single story on it. The AP also ran a story, which was picked up by some outlets.
Yep. There were others, mostly local. I believe Fox also ran one, but I'm not entirely sure.
But doing a search of news.google.com does not turn up all that much, certainly not as much as you'd think this would warrant.
At this point it's largely (and badly) treated as a "techie" issue.
Look at this. Summarized here for your pleasure: Total donations, 1990-2004 for Enron: 29% to Democrats, 71% to Republicans. Enron heavily favored Republicans in their political contributions, both on the state and national level. Enron obviously favored the Republican party.
I don't know anything about opensecrets.org , but it's yet another source I wasn't familiar with; thanks for another site to look at. And that, I believe, illustrates my frustration a little better. Looking back on the mainstream stories I've read about how Enron was totally a "Republican" company, there was never a mention of any donations to the Democrats; even a statement of "largely donates to the Republicans" would have been nice.
It comes down to this for me: I'm having a hard time finding any news sources that don't present a glaringly biased point of view for either conservative or liberal views. CNN is extremely liberal, Fox is extremely conservative. Even my local news stations are leaning towards the conservative side, as I live in a largely conservative state. Finding out the truth is becoming more and more confusing as more and more sources dilute actual news with political leanings towards one side or the other. I'm watching CNN and Fox together to try find out what the real truth is, but I suspect that a lot is left out on both sides. I want facts, not political interpretations of some of the facts that support a position.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
It's related to technology because the way these companies could cheat is through their technology, and it's a technology they have a motive to leave weak, simply to allow them to cheat.
We could end up with weak voting systems because industry specs for it, adopted by a friendly government, don't specify the kind of security we need.
" Lets not forget Clinton vastly expanded the War on Drug Users." Well, I'm not 100% Pro-Clinton, and his war on drug users is certainly something I didn't agree with. Still, the guy did a lot for this country, despite a rightwing that was hell-bent on destroying him.
As a review of the sordid history of the election from some reputable source such as This One will remind you, the recounts were stopped by order of the US Supreme Court in response to legal action sponsored by Bush et al, and Florida selected it's electors based on the original, suspect totals.
The remaining thousands of votes were thus never actually recounted properly. If they had been, it could easily have been either candidate's race.
In my opinion, when the margin of victory in any state is less than the margin of error in your polling, it is negligent in the extreme to claim that either side is a valid victor. Of course, if more states followed a process of proportionally selecting electors, rather than the prevalent all-or-nothing system, this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue...
>Every company is trying to design an electronic equivalent to a paper process that is already suprisingly flawed. For example, because of civil rights issues, it is illegal to require a voter ID here. Which means in the electronic world, you cannot store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote.
Secret ballots are an important principle. You don't *want* to store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote. The secrecy allows voters to be free of pressure and intimidation.
When you vote you should be given a copy of how you voted. It should be electronic and have an identification number. Just purchase and bring a usb memory device with you when you go to vote and you get an electronic receipt which you can verify later when you get home and compare with voting records.
Organizations for voters rights can solicit people to send in copies of your receipts for stitistical validation of an election.
If you can get a stitistically signifigant amount of voting error an election should be invalidated and people should vote again. Florida should have voted again during the last presidential debacle as well as other states given how close the election was the ammount of error was statistically signifigant.
What better place for the paper trail than with the voters?
"all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?"
Gore Vidal, just because this is something you would do if you were President and had these donors does not mean everyone will too.
Thank God I don't think like Gore Vidal.
Not even worth bringing up. He is simply speculating, and everyone jumps on it as proof. E-gad, it's just some old guy expressing an opinion.
As for other states, it's the same way - it's not that Drivers licenses have been given out to illegal aliens for decades, but rather that states didn't impose non-driving-related requirements until recently. During the 1980s, the Feds changed the 1970s privacy laws to permit the States to collect SSNs from foolish volunteers, then changed them again to permit States to make SSNs mandatory, with the excuse of preventing bad drivers from getting licenses in multiple states after losing their home licenses, and then started using Federal highway money bribes to get states that weren't collaborating with them to play along, just as they did for forcing the drinking age up to 21. There have been states besides California that wanted to go with the right-wing political correctness flow and harass immigrants during the 90s or maybe even 80s, but it was all basically a new thing.
Free countries generally restrict who's allowed to drive to protect other drivers. It's not strictly Constitutional, and it's an interference with the fundamental human rights of freedom to travel, but road safety is an important thing to preserve and nobody's come up with a really good alternative. Totalitarian societies, on the other hand, like to have pass laws, and internal passports, to keep the rabble in line and make sure the underclasses only go where the government wants to let them. You've probably noticed that over the last 10 years, the airlines have gotten the US government to let them require ID to fly (the government likes the amount of database feed they get, and the airlines get to stop travel agencies from buying lots of cheap discount tickets and reselling them), but even Greyhound has been talked into letting cops harass passengers, and in some cities, they're also demanding government photo ID, and increasing numbers of hotels are demanding photo ID, sometimes claiming it's because of local government requirements. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether the US climate is moving more towards freedom or totalitarianism.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won?t be pretty."
No wonder more and more Americans go live there...
I will gladly help them pack!
With their hysteria I think that the central message gets deluded... that this is a bit of a conflict of interest. There is proof of any wrongdoing but yes it is a conflict of interest, but Slashdotters continually make themselves look stupid.
(Disclaimer: I'm not deeply into languages, but...)
o ixante,
If you went to Belgium or Switzerland you would discover that alternative terms for these numbers do exist: eg:
dix,
vingt,
trente,
quarante,
cinquante,
s
septante,
octante (also heard 'huitante'),
nonante.
Of course, if you can't cope with quatre-vingt dix-neuf, you're not likely to do very well with German either, where everything follows the old English pattern as shown in 'four-and-twenty blackbirds'... (neun-und-neunzig - nine-and-ninety).
Let alone Japanese, which goes "nine tens nine" (kyuu juu kyuu)...
Even Spanish, which at least in England is the language that is reserved by secondary schools as a last-ditch attempt at providing a single GCSE pass for those students that prove to be utterly incapable of a little basic French, has some peculiarities when it comes to numbers.
Diecinueve. Treinta y dos... ten and nine. Thirty and two...
You just have to get used to the idea that when Douglas Adams said, "The past is now exactly like a foreign country - they do things exactly the same there", he was clearly not thinking about numbers.
Face-down praying? And we're occupying a Muslem country? Stranger and Stranger... By the way, what's a NEO-Troskyite? I thought the standard progression was from old style Trotskyite to Maoist. Or is this why so many /.'ers didn't care for Matrix Revolutions?
Who is John Cabal?
...he wouldn't have hacked the electoral college's vote. The people don't elect the president, the electoral college does. Of course, I pitty the electoral college representative (in some states) who doesn't vote with the mandate of their state's population. Some states will hand out jail time.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display -- vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity -- their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.
I dislike making statements like this, but only an American could have said that. There was a democracy in Switzerland in Europe in the 8th century, almost 1000 years before the USA came to be. And it's not the only one. There were others as well.
But that's not really my point, although the American habit of forgetting that a world exists outside its borders is surely a problem. No, actually I think the problem in the USA is a two edged sword. On the one hand there are few nations that believe in a written document as religiously as the Americans do in their constitution (I doubt that even Islamic republics have as many true believers). That blind belief in the constitution and the freedoms that it entails is what makes America a country that is not beset by shifting forms of governments and revolutions.
But that same belief in a document that is over 200 years old also makes the USA inflexible to change until it gets forced on them by corrupt politicians using fear to corrupt the system and change the meaning of that document.
Because if you get a receipt to take with you out of the polling place, you can prove who you voted for, and purchasing votes then becomes feasible. The only thing preventing buying votes right now is that the people would take the money then vote for who they were going to vote for anyway.
I can't help but thinking that this is a very weak argument. Buying votes that way would require an enormous conspriracy, and would be discovered in a heart beat (in order to get people to sell the votes in the first place, the buyers would have to get the word out to a large number of people...the chance that at least one of them would rat on them is about 100%).
Instead, we get the nice quiet "all in the family" conspiracy of rigged voting machines, which is much easier to keep quiet.
I, for one, would rather see reciepts.
-- MarkusQ
I agree with you up to this point:
The technology does not exist to make an afforadable car that weighs 1000 pounds and can survive a side impact with most vehicles on the road, sorry.
Ah, the tragedy of the commons. We should all buy bigger-than-average cars to have a greater degree of safety on the roads (obviously this doesn't work). Whereas if I buy a smaller-than-average car to be socially responsible, I must assume additional risk from those who are not. This is the kind of hidden costs that capitalism as implemented in America does not distribute well.
..at the least they can realize that he is far from perfect. I think the public's views of him are far more accurate now then right after 9/11 when many people treated him like a great American hero for making a few speeches and promising revenge.
Hmmm... Pie...
I can't think of a more appropriate response. Really.
Of course, I would like to make a few more clarifications. First I don't think you will find a serious candidate for election in most countries that does NOT have some spotty ties. I would like to say that I felt that I could vote for someone who was not corrupt, had no questionable ties, and whose family background is not in question. But I defy you to find a POLITICIAN with serious prospects for election in pretty much ANY country that doesn't have some dirty/spotty history.
Yes, I have faith that people who believe a certain way will tend to be more responsible. I don't believe it makes ANYONE perfect, nor do I advocate the idea that anyone should be given absolute power because they have faith in a higher power.
I would point you to the Bible, a fairly well accepted document (even if not completely historical in some people's view), for an example of what can happen when even supposedly good people are made kings. When the Jews switched from a system of judges to a system of kings, things went downhill pretty fast. (I will probably get flamed for this by someone with a little more knowledge of that document than I).
As for voting, yes I think more Americans, and everyone in general, should go to the polls and vote. I personally make that effort, and find it worthwhile. I also feel that if you don't vote, you shouldn't complain. Along with that there should be an option for "neither" on all elections, so that people can express their dissatisfaction with the political system itself.
As for someone purporting to KNOW the right thing to do, we all make that assertion at some point. Sorry to dissapoint, but that is human nature. We claim to know the solution to all types of things, when we almost certainly do not. As for faith, I don't put my faith in Bush, rather I reserve that for a higher power. I am of the opinion that IF Bush REALLY does have the faith in the God he claims to, then that makes him a somewhat better person than he would be otherwise. NOT that it absolves him of irresponsible, poorly thought out decisions.
An important concept in psychology is the idea of locus of control. That is, do I believe that my situation is a result of my behavior (internal locus), or the actions of others (external). It has been shown that those with an internal locus of control are typically better adjusted, more successful and suffer less from depression.
Why is this relevent? Because I believe that responsibility for one's own actions is a basic tenet of a successful society, and is inherent to an internal locus of control. Therefore when someone, such as a president of a very powerful country, does something stupid, they should be held accountable, certainly.
There are bounds and limits to this, but essentially, if it was truly within their control, which it may not have been, they should be responsible.
Here's the catch: even if you or I were to find a politician that one of us felt was "clean", I seriously doubt that we would agree about that. It's just the way it goes.
Sorry about the rant--and by the way, even though I am basing a lot of this on my personal faith, religious views, etc, let's do try to keep the discussion intellectual as possible, and not denegrate to name calling. It really doesn't help.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I think that some of the reason is that although it is a matter of public record that Bush made some questionable statements, many people still feel that the war itself was justifiable to a certain extent. As for what he lied about, please clarify exactly what your point of reference is.
If it is WMD, then yes I am extremely curious what happened, but I do believe it is possible that Saddam got wind of the impending war and moved things right out of the country, even with UN inspectors present.
Personally, I don't like the idea of the US being the world police, and arbitrarilly removing dictators--something both Bush and Clinton may equally be held to the fire for (as a reminder, Kosovo wasn't exactly a UN supported idea, and certainly Saddam has done just as much as previous Kosovo leaders to deserve military action). Clinton, though, for some reason, is generally not held to the same fire as Bush for those actions (I am sure this will cause some serious flames as well).
As a note--it is because he tended to be such a pathological liar that I did NOT vote for Gore. He made so many questionable statements about issues that were unimportant that I couldn't even begin to trust him with ones that were. Bush, I felt, had some integrity, even if it is spotted with some pretty heavy blemishes.
Just some thoughts.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Are you saying they aren't? If I was to start speaking to mysterious invisible beings, despite never actually hearing from them or seeing any signs of their presence, and then I start donating significant amounts of my time and money to people who claim they can converse with these invisible beings, wouldn't you think that's a little crazy?
Or does it stop being crazy when millions of people share the same delusion?
Yes, I'm trolling, but only because there's a hint of truth in what I say.
We don't want an election without a paper trail...
Umm, I think an electronic trail would be much more reliable than a paper trail.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
It seems, that if the machines were made by the Democratic Party's contributors, he (and/or many of people agreeing with him on this forum) would not have minded.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
ummmm, except in Rush's case, it's just false. This isn't about ideological bias; it's about intellect.
Gore Vidal is related (albeit distantly) to Al Gore. Doesn't this sound like sour grapes to you? Plus, he's got a new book out so he's probably going after some free publicity. The new book looks pretty good, though, I must say.
Amazing magic tricks
Strategery.
Ah, I see you follow the time-honored Slashdot tradition of replying before you finish reading the article. The missing logic is the point of the post....as noted, conveniently I might add, in the sentence following the one you cited.
===============
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Look at this [opensecrets.org]. Summarized here for your pleasure: Total donations, 1990-2004 for Enron: 29% to Democrats, 71% to Republicans. Enron heavily favored Republicans in their political contributions, both on the state and national level. Enron obviously favored the Republican party.
And yet when push came to shove, and Enron came begging the Bush Admin for a bailout, they shut the door in their faces. Contrast with the Clinton Admin, which pulled big strings to win a lopsided deal for Enron in India. Which dollar was the better spent for Enron?
It is false that dollars spent=influence gained. The dollars get the donor a hearing (sometimes), but the convincing is not merely in the talking.
Personally I don't have a problem with the US removing dictators and trying to install democracy somewhere, provided this is objective. The US famously did that to Europe and Japan and were really born as a super-power there and then.
I do however, and I think a lot of the world do to, have a huge problem with the US installing and supporting dictators everywhere, including for example Saddam Hussein.
Now turning around and removing dictators that were installed previously by the same country is called hypocrisy in my book. SH is by no means the only one BTW, the list is very very long.
I believe that it would be in the US's advantage both political and policital to proactively support true democracy everywhere, not just when it suits them in the short term.
You're right, but it does explain why MORE comments are on the liberal side, because MORE people feel that way. Especially when you add the Democratic and Libertarians together. You've got a few million more liberals than conservatives. It's very simple math, DUH
Slashdot is made up of INDIVIDUALSposting their opinions, not representatives of groups of opinion holders. If it were we would all call it stupid.
So when you sit there and go "GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE ALL THESE FUCKING LIBERALS" Just think about the past presidential election and you will realize that there are more voting liberals than voting conservatives.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
The governor of Florida helped out, too.
It's worth noting that Fox presents a fair number of NPR correspondents and former hosts. This doesn't mean they have liberals. Liberals hate those particular correspondents. It means NPR is Fair and Balanced.
The fact that they do 2 and 3 minute stories instead of 10 and 15 second stories is just a bonus. The fact that people don't shout over each other on NPR is a bonus as well.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
And calling FOX news centrist is just funny, afterall the only openly liberal (and a poor one at that) in that whole organization is Colmes"
...
He's actually the best "liberal talking head" in television today, as he is able to make convincing arguments without becoming another human cartoon like
The best "liberal" talking head is Michael Kinsley. Though, they don't allow him on telivision anymore. He's too convincing.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Normal americans wouldn't have a problem with a reincarnated Hitler. As long as they have TV, plenty of food, etc. most of them will be happy.
Thats unfair and out of line.
Hitler was far too competent. Try Moussalini.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
This isn't about ideological bias; it's about intellect.
Ah, you seem to think that one cannot be an idiot if one has intellect. I disagree with that position. Indeed, I acknowledge Mr. Vidal's knowledge and skills, but IMO that isn't enough to disqualify one from idiocy. Intellectual idiots are everywhere. In the world of partisan politics, in fact, one need only stroll across the aisle to find them (either direction; idiocy is of course in the eye of the beholder).
Republicans are also very fond of corporate welfare as well as welfare for private education. They are also in favor of public welfare for religion.
;-) Enough electronic voting machines and he can rig them for good!!!!!
Lets not forget that Hitler also came to power by rigging elections as well.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
If Bush was anything like Hitler, the Secret police would soon be at your door for posting that.
Patience, the Third Reich wasn't built in a day. The first step is information collection. One could call it "Total Information Awarness".
Either that, or peek warrants that allow the FBI to search your home without you ever knowing it.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Bush's father armed Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld shook his hand and praised him as an ideal Middle Eastern leader.
As far as the dictators are concerned, they are STILL dictatorships. Bush has only replaced one dictator with another. True democracy is still pending in both Afghanistan AND Iraq.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Which is funny because we all know what a commoner Dubuya Bush is. Yeah the scion of a powerful Eastern family, graduate of Yale, member of the Skull & Bones secret society. Grandson of a Senator, Banker and Nazi Callaborator. Son of a congressman, CIA director, oil millionaire (now billionaire) and president. He's just like you and me ;-)
Dubaya aint from Texas, he's from Connecticut. He moved to Texas cause that's where his Daddy set him up with jobs. Just cause he talks all texas like don't make him a Texan.
It's amazing how someone can throw around adjectives with no real real respect to what they mean. By any reasonable EVERYONE connected to the Bush administration is ELITIST!!!!
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
LOL, have you forgotten to take your medication again?
"we need to stop paving the earth and be friends with the people of the world!" "I love Captain Planet" "Never use force unless its to take land and rights away for the good of the social collective" "We are responsible for 9/11" Good God protect me from this load of horse shit thinking
Crying "dictatorship" over this reminds me of those that cry "genocide" over a few people getting injured, while overseas real genocide (ie. lots of people getting killed just because the belong to a particular group) is going on.
People will tend to remember the hysteria but not the problem - which is a large and scary issue in this case. I don't live in the USA, but it sets the policy of my country.
Indeed, it's 'Quatre-vingt-dix neuf', which is 'Four-twenty ten-nine'... there is no explicit 'times'. (And if you're going to criticise, learn to spell first).
My point is that most languages do addition to express numbers - that's what the 'y' is doing in Spanish. I feel that 'dix-neuf' is pretty much equivalent to the Spanish 'diecinueve', so I suppose your difficulty is purely this 'quatre-vingt' construct...
Perhaps it would help you to look at the reason for this - which, as I say, is pretty much superseded outside mainland France by these 'septante', 'octante', 'nonante' constructs. Since Babylonian times, humanity seems to have had a habit of counting, rather than in hundreds, in sixties. (See 'Number words and number systems' by Karl Menninger, or this site). The link suggests a number of reasons for the popularity of the number sixty, including the two that I was given as a (British) child for the popularity of currently popular non-base ten systems like the foot or the dozen - firstly, that such numbers (12, 60...) maximise the number of divisors - secondly, that there are three joints on each finger, five fingers on each hand, allowing one to count up to 60 by pointing at one of the twelve parts of the fingers of the left hand with one of the five fingers of the right hand...
One can see the importance of the number 12 in Germanic languages, like English, whereas Latin languages actually inherit a simple base-10 system (undecim, duodecim, tredecim...) Germanic languages use 'one left after ten, two left after ten' - many hundreds of years of accent and erosion have simply hidden the meaning of the terms 'eleven' and 'twelve'.
The number 20 also has a special significance in English - it is the score, 'Three score and ten'. In fact, this 'score' is exactly the equivalent to the French 'eighty' that upsets you so much. The French are simply using a somewhat Biblical expression; "Four score".
Base sixty is indeed a little further from English-speaking experience, though, as I have said, it has a remarkably long historical pedigree. However, it was historically in use in Germanic languages, including English, where I believe sixty were given a special name (like 'score' - in the case of English, it was apparently 'shock'). Dictionary.com informs me that the term 'shock' is still in use in some Baltic ports to refer to a set of sixty loose items.
Until very recently, English included a good number of these peculiarities - and still does - English as a second language is full of irregularities, in and outside the language of mathematics. Remember, Americans didn't raise an eyebrow at the term when Lincoln said "Four score and seven years ago"... when the French say it, neither should you.
The two sets of skills (politician, critic) do not necessarily intersect but bot are necessary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... don't ejaculate such nonsense.
Anonimity is the only thing that ensures people can vote according to their beliefs and not to social pressures.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If Hitler comes into a heated political debate, one can be pretty sure that most participants do not know what they are talking about. Comparing the Bushs or the current situation in the US with Hitler, that's comparing apples with dogshit.
Maybe there are people who wish to plunge the US in dictatorship. Maybe it is true that they apply dirty tricks for this purpose. What has this to do with Hitler ? Nothing. Can someone find any insight in contemporary politics by reading about Hitler's rise to power? No, except that being ruthless might pay in the short term. This is as insightful as stating that humans sometimes do evil things.
So please Americans, if you argue pro or con gun control [an issue, BTW, which is totally irrelevant for the rest of the world], or pro and con Bush, or abortion, or the Patriot Act: leave Hitler out of the way, and get real.
It is just that the politicians have legalized it and you, the US citizens, even defend such rotten state of affairs.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Goverments do not affect the economy.
To inccur in a debt of 87 billion US$ to "reconstruct" a foreign country will have neither a positive nor negative effect in the US economy.
To protect US steel producers will have no effect on the economy.
To ignore the Kyoto agreement will have no effect on the economy.
NAFTA did not have any effect on the economy.
Man, thanks for letting me know, I was under such false impressions that I now feel ashamed of my ignorance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Or the Mafia guy hanging around outside (or even working at the polls) says to you "vote for 'so-and-so' or else! We'll be watching."
You know...there are some reasons for anonymous voting...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
OK, so Gore's older by far than the average Slashdot reader; presumably most of us won't mind be referred to as "puerile readers"?
I think you are forgetting what most people forget. Since the US has a relatively short maximum presidency, the actions of one president are very frequently reversed by another. Even if they are the same political party.
The idea of installing and supporting dictators is obviously a bad one. But if at some future point someone gets a clue (after being smacked with a clue stick in the form of 9/11), you can hardly blame them for wanting to undo previous mistakes.
I can see where it could be seen as hypocritical, but really, if we are cleaning up past mistakes, can't it be seen as owning up to past stupidity and therefore a good thing?
The time when it is really hypocrisy is if the SAME president simultaneously removes a dictator while installing another (either there or somewhere else). If I thought GW was doing that (which I don't), then I would be first in line to toss him out of office.
I do agree with your last sentence--yes we should support true democracy, and not just when it is convenient. Unfortunately, how do you tell the difference between a president who is looking ahead, and a president who is working for the NOW, when both will be out of office within 8 years (maximum).
In so many ways, the eight year maximum is a wonderful thing. The one downside is that it tends to encourage short-sighted, quick benefit programs that make one's own political party look good within about a year. The electoral college actually exacerbates this problem, as it makes presidents more likely to cater to those within their party.
Personally, I think that Presidential elections should be party-nuetral (like some mayorial elections), and anyone with more than x signatures would be allowed to run (say 5,000 or 10,000). This would allow for a much more diverse and interesting election, as well as help clean up some of the politics.
For those who boohoo this idea, remember what happened recently in CA--Arnold got more than enough votes to be considered a clear winner. Yes there were problems with that, but it was obvious that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have considered running for governor did because entry to the election race was much easier than normal.
I personally think entry to the presidential elections should be easier, barring only a criminal record other than minor traffic violations (got theft? no election for you! got DUI? no election for you!).
Maybe I'm just a little to optimistic though.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
...including for example Saddam Hussein.
I love how this is used as an argument. Without historical context it just sounds so damning. But if you start to look at why it was done and what other options there were it falls flat. At the time there was a little war going on between Iraq and Iran. Iran had just kidnapped several american citizens and held them for a conciderable amount of time. Iran was run by one of these overly religious leaders the original poster was railing on. The same type of people that attacked us on 9/11...hmmm.
The vietnam war had not been over for even 10 years yet. Reagan was just beginning to put the military back together. Do you think we should have invaded both countries then and place ourselves next to afganistan, which just happened to be were the russians were going? Ya that would have really stablized the world.
Hindsight is 20/20 but at the time there was a choice. The lesser of two evils was choosen. There were those then that told Reagan he would regret that decision. The lesson is not whether it was the right decision or not, its what we learned from it. So now, with the world in a completely different political climate, when we can remove a dictator from power and bring some stablity to the region, we do it. And when there is ample proof that we can create a stable society in both Germany and Japan this is still painted as the americans rough riding over the world.
How is this insightful?
Hmm If i were a voting machine company, wouldn't I donate to WHOEVER was in office to get them to use MY machine in the next election?
It's the Slashdot conspiracy effect! All theory, no logic!
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
You can't tell me that the multiple levels of Micro Management proposed by Al Gore would be any different than the spy networks Hitler had. We're talking about a duo (him and his wife) that support using drugs to lul the masses into a hypnotic state of obedience.
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Plato
Hell, true democracy is still pending in the United States!
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Plato
> more votes in more states would imply that Bush got more votes
Maybe in your fucked up left-wing logic (right-wing logic is just as bad). "More votes in more states" means that in each of more than 50% of the states, Bush got more than 50% of the votes. That does NOT mean that all states counted he got more than 50%.
> including ALL of the scenereos where the will of the people was taken into account
You cannot determine the "will of the people." If you could, only one recount would have been necessary. "Will of the People" is a bullshit term used to make themselves look like they care. They don't. Neither do the Republicans.
At least Al Gore [moveon.org] seems to have "moved on" from those days and taken a stand in favor of freedom (more in opposition to the outrageous Bush "enemy combatant" designation than the Patriot Act, but this is definitely in the category of Bush's refusal to respect basic civil rights.)
BAHAHAHAHA! Yea, he moves on and supports freedom when he is out of office? How wounderful, generous and all the rest. BTW, he was saying the same things when he was IN office and dismantling our freedoms. Seems to be a family thing with his wife, Tipper, heading up the PMRC.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Just to be clear, since you seem to be defending him fairly assiduously, do you agree with the president on this? Stand and be counted if you do.
sulli
RTFJ.
First, I was speaking of GORE.
Now, for the unrelated question, YES I support the proper application of the President's Constitutional Powers.
Where were Canadians sent to Syria by the US? You are speaking of that Syria that is constantly pissing us off and barely has any sort of diplomatic relations with the US?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Backing up a bit, who was held without legal representation?
If his lawyer filed anything I believe your question is poorly stated.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
read my most recent journal.
sulli
RTFJ.
The whole story is based on which "US Official" "admitting" that this was done so the suspect would be tortured?
What would this "official's" title be?
Ah, yes, un-named.
The Washington Post Guide to un-named officials:
White House Source: a person who delivers stuff to the White House
Administration Official: a person who signs for deliveries at the Department of Education cafeteria.
Pentagon Source: perhaps a janitor, perhaps lower.
Pentagon Official: the E4 I got drunk at Bullfeather's last night
etc.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
That is one of the funniest trolls I have seen in a while.
Welcome back, PG.
Your credit card information wants to be free.
But see, interestingly Iran is going closer to a true democracy every day, on it's own term, and would have gone there quicker possibly had the US not sponsored a war with its neighbour.
I remember exactly why it was done and at the time I thought (unless my memory is now playing tricks) that sponsoring Iraq to invade Iran would strengthen Iran, not weaken it. I believe this is what happened.
The invasion and occupation of Japan and Germany was justified because together they had launched a world war against everybody else. They lost and changed their way. Now the foundation for invading Iraq
I'm a liberal, but I'm not for any kind of moral relativism. For example, I consider you to be a complete idiot, an unsalvagable human being. There is no point of view from which I can see any truth in your position. Morally, you're the definition of pure evil.
Oh, and your god is an asshole too.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Wag the dog? Remember that? Go fuck yourself. All you pill-popping conservatives were all over Clinton when he fired the missles in, rather than supporting him in an attempt to kill Osama bin Ladin.
And how about the latest terrorist nut to be arrested for a bombing plot -- that's right, in Florida. A card carrying member of the god-crazed right wing.
So, just get out of my face, you traitor. If you and your kind had supported the attacks on terrorism, we might have stopped 9/11. But no, conservatives are called reactionaries for a reason. First the building has to fall down, THEN you get your lard asses into gear.
Thanks for killing nearly 3000 of your fellow Americans.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
You, my friend, are exactly the kind of person that is giving the terrorists hope that they can actually win.
,personally, not my party, thought that the cruise missles in response to the cole bombing were justified. But, if you want to go on spouting off about not stopping 9/11 (something Clinton did not do either), you should start with the fact that the response was cruise missles, and that was it.
I
Hey, I don't pretend to think that Clinton had any idea that 9/11 would happen, and don't blame him for it either. But you want to have your cake and eat it too. Bush is blamed for not stopping 9/11, but a preemptive strike in Iraq is just not acceptible to you liberals.
Make up your mind do you want preemtive strikes to stop terrorism or not. And don't give me any of that Saddam didn't support terrorists crap, he was paying for suicide bombers in Israel.
You see the world in black and white, and that's whats wrong with you. Either you're with us, or you're against us - any thinking woman can see that's a bunch of hooey. That's right - HOOEY!
Just a tip for you: Iraq is not linked to terrorism. Even that tea-bagger George Bush has said as much, so don't give me any of your spew about paying bombers in Israel. We aimed our attacks too far to the North. We've worked hard to develop smart bombs, but if the target selectors are morons, they won't do any good. Why aren't those bombs being dropped on Saudi Arabia? Most of Fox New's audience think that Iraq had something to do with terrorism, but I attribute that to all the oxycontin that they take rather than any sort of general mental defect.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Liberal? Conservative? When did I mention or even hint at either class?
If you had bothered to actually read what I wrote, you'd find that I did neither. What I did comment on was his explanation of our election system and how the reality of it is lost on a lot of the Slashdot crowd.
It is you who assumed that I was making a political comment. In fact, I was making a comment about how everyone seems to think that our government is all about the majority of people voting a certain way. It is not. We are, again, a representative republic, not a democracy. Granted, there are democratic principles at the core of our government, but we are not a complete democracry.
And, I'm glad we're not. People like you are the reason why.
DEAD WOOD comes to mind again...get a brain and learn how to respond to what people write, not what you think their beliefs are. That you assume, and assume too much, is obvious.
But, since you brought it up, I don't sit around going "GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE ALL THESE FUCKING LIBERALS", I sit around going "GOD, I WISH ALL THESE FUCKING LIBERALS WOULD GO THE FUCK AWAY BECAUSE THEY'RE FUCKING ANNOYING MORONS."
Regards.