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Senate Candidate Wants to Ban Polling
Masker writes "This is just too funny. Alan Keyes, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois, who is running against Democrat Barack Obama, wants to ban political polling for 'a certain period' before the election, since such polls are 'manipulative and degrading and damaging to our political system.' Could his opinion be influenced by a recent poll that shows Keyes trails by 45 percentage points behind Obama?" Could be. But it could also be influenced by the fact that polls are often wrong; they influence how people vote (people are less likely to vote for someone who "doesn't have a chance"), and polls get reported on more than issues, which can't be good for anyone except the pollsters and whoever happens to be leading the polls.
Isn't it the duty of every good citizen to try to influence how others vote? What are we supposed to do, lock ourselves in a political cage for 6 months before every election so as not to influence other voters? Cool, we can all go to the polls with no idea what the issues are we're voting for. Oh wait, I forgot, this is bipartisan politics, there are no issues.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't understand why that link was for "polls are often wrong" when the first 2 paragraphs of the story it linked to specifically say:
"A review of the 159 Governor and U.S. Senate polls reported by the media in 2002 shows a very good performance for most polling organizations. The average candidate error for all polls was 2.4 percentage points. 84% of the polls differed from the election outcome by less than their theoretical margin of error."
I'm confused.
Combine this with electronic voting with no paper trails, and you have a great way to rig an election, since nobody has any idea roughly how it should have come out to even contest the validity of the electronic votes.
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What's even more important in fact, is that the media is not allowed to report on the campaigns at all during that time, there's a complete black out during which voters are supposed to make up their minds, analyzing the merits of each candidate.
Alan Keyes, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois
It should be noted that Alan Keyes isn't FROM Illinois, he is merely running in the Senate race. I don't think that in itself is bad, but it is probably one of the many reasons he is trailing in the polls.
I seem to remember Keyes once saying that people from out-of-state SHOULDN'T run for a state office, but I can't find that quote now, so maybe I'm just spreading nasty rumors. But it's ok, because I fufilled my duties.
So Alan Keyes, another Republican who wants to control things. There was once a day when Republicans were about NOT controlling things, but that time is long gone.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
What about the first amendment?
Ban voting. It also can also affect election outcome. Unless you live in Florida.
_______
2B1ASK1
I'm ALL FOR banning Senate candidates. Excellent!
Oh, wait...
Perot, Dole, Clinton race.. I was working in a small retail store. The owner (my boss) talked for weeks of voting for Perot (after all Perot was a bidnessman)... I watched the store while he went to vote. He came back and blew my mind by stating "I voted for Clinton, because he is going to win anyway" (this is what I call the football game mentality of polls ... he wanted to be a "WINNER")
Of course after that I always thought of him as a real winner ! :)
I firmly beleived polls should be blacked out at some time period before the actual election day
Personaly, I can wait until the next day to find out the results.. .especialy if it encourages people to vote for who they "really" wanted.
regards
dbcad7
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
is on my permanent .ignore list.
Why anyone takes this loon seriously is mindblowing. This is the guy that called Hillary Clinton a carpetbagger for moving to New York to run for the Senate and then moved to Illinois to do the same. I guess this is just par for the course for the GOP these days though. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is going to help this guy win against Obama. There's no contest.
As for polls, who cares. It's better than 24/7 coverage of IBM typewriters and 30+ year old war stories.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Please, please, somebody tell me that my browser mangled the <sarcasm> tags.
For those who did take that seriosuly, you'll get a good idea of who Barack Obama is by reading the transcript of his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
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...but they can't do that.
That's the primary way we're going to get CowboyNeal elected!
Keyes is off his rocker. A carpetbagger from Maryland who vocally criticized Hillary Clinton for moving to NY to run (successfully) for senator. And the Republicans who picked him, to run a black man against the likely first black senator representing Illinois, shows their contempt for democracy, race, the people of Illinois, and sanity. What's worse is the cadre of other actually insane Republicans he fits in with. How much more obvious a charade could they run?
--
make install -not war
Furthermore, the intent to have children does not imply an intent to do so immediately. One could get married planning to have children five or however many years down the road. That's still fulfilling the main purpose of marriage by his standard, just not immediately.
Bear in mind that both of these are patently obvious problems with your argument assuming that your premise (i.e. your description of his beliefs) is entirely accurate. Which I very much doubt.
Incidentally, I don't agree with him. But if you're going to argue against his position, you need to (1) argue against his actual position; and (2) make sure your argument isn't as broken as his. I'm not convinced you did either, or in fact made a serious effort to. That suggests that you aren't arguing from reason, but from mindless belief - doubtless one of your purported objections to his beliefs. Consistency is a virtue, though not a perfect one. You should strive to attain it in at least some small measure.
Alan Keyes: "No, the point of the matter is that marriage, as an institution, involves procreation. It is in principle impossible for homosexuals to procreate. Therefore, they cannot marry. It is a simple logical syllogism, and one can wish all one might, but pigs don't fly and we can't change the course of nature."
Mike Signorile: "But one or the other in the couple can procreate. The men can donate their sperm, the women can have babies."
Alan Keyes: "The definition and understanding of marriage is 'the two become one flesh.' In the child, the two transcend their persons and unite together to become a new individual. That can only be done through procreation and conception. It cannot be done by homosexuals."
Mike Signorile: "But what about a heterosexual couple who cannot bear children and then adopt? They are not becoming as one flesh, they are taking someone else's flesh."
Alan Keyes: "And they are adopting the paradigm of family life. But the essence of that family life remains procreation. If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it is possible to have a marriage state that in principle excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism. This is unacceptable."
Mike Signorile: "So Mary Cheney is a selfish hedonist, is that it?"
Alan Keyes: "Of course she is. That goes by definition. Of course she is."
Mike Signorile: "I don't think Dick Cheney would like to hear that about his daughter."
Alan Keyes: "He may or may not like to hear the truth, but it can be spoken."
Alan Keyes: "By definition, a homosexual engages in the exchange of mutual pleasure. I actually object to the notion that we call it sexual relations because it's nothing of the kind.
Alan Keyes: "It is the mutual pursuit of pleasure through the stimulation of the organs intended for procreation, but it has nothing to do with sexuality because they are of the same sex. And with respect to them, the sexual difference does not exist. They are therefore not having sexual relations."
Offtopic question time. Prior to a year ago, gay marriage wasn't an issue. Then *boom* the SF Mayor did something controversial and the whole world is calling conservative americans evil nasty fscks for opposing gay marriages. My offtopic question(s) are:
Where were all the pro-gay-marriage politicians before last year? Where were the elected officials scrambling to be the first on the block to have gay marriages? Why is the US the only country being called a primitive throwback for not having gay marriage? What nations had gay marriage last year? This year?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Why he even agreed to enter this race is amazing, and the fact that the state Republican Party saw fit to pull him instead of the number two Primary winner (after Jack Ryan's campaign imploded over relatively irrelevant allegations from a contentious divorce) is a mystery to those of us who live here. The #2 guy was Jim Oberwies, a well known (in Chicagoland anyway) conservative dairy owner, who was a completely viable candidate--easily with more connection to the residents of Illinois than Keyes, and easily conservative enough to be electable with the more conservative downstate electorate.
All Keyes entry does is prove that all the negative rhetoric about Hillary not really being from NY is just so much hot air on the part of the GOP. He's clearly going to lose, and I can't think of any of the republicans I know here who want to vote for him given his public record as a lunatic and a jerk. Being behind 45 points in the polls is probably accurate given the distaste for the man here, regardless of the accuracy of polls in general.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Sorry to distrub your editorializing here, but there are in fact quite a number of countries that do this. Other things more modern democracies have found out work pretty well are not announcing any election results until everybody's vote is in (aw, the Californian says, why go vote, Gore is going to win anyway); vote on a Sunday so people don't have to skip work; give everybody the same ballot sheet; give every person one vote instead of some screwy system with a bunch of middlemen who distort the effect of the popular vote.
As with the legal system and electricity, America's electorial system suffers enormously from being one of the first ones implemented and the inability of Congress to pass any serious reforms. Get rid of trial by jury, switch to 220 volts, make it a direct vote, and then you will be ready to enter the 21. Century. Computers that run with 220 volts are twice as fast!
but gave up because the polls showed that the bill would not pass.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
As I have learned since I started paying attention to electoral-vote.com, most polls are BS. For example, two different polls recently conducted in Wisconsin show Kerry getting 50% and 38% of the vote. The polls don't even have overlapping margins of error. Therefore, at least one of them is simply dead wrong. Similar polls have been popping up all over the map, even from "trusted" sources like Gallup. If it's so easy for polls to be so wrong, why should we trust any of them?
I think Keyes is right about this mostly. Besides if the media weren't spending all their time trying to manufacture news via polls, maybe the'yd have a few extra minutes to check some facts or locate confirming sources of information.
They (the media) are forgetting how to do the one thing that really separates them as a legitimate news source from the tabloids and bloggers, and I think the introduction of manufactured news sources like political polls are partly to blame.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Perhaps we should take this a step further and deny "marriage" to:
Of course, if we do that, then we have to start seeing the lack of universal health care for children for what it really is; an assault on the institution of marriage, a "family" tax penalty, and something no upstanding conservative Republican worth his salt would ever stand for.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
I'm a Republican, and let me say this about Keyes running in Illinois: it's hypocritical in the extreme. Hillary shouldn't have been allowed to run in New York, and Keyes shouldn't have been allowed to run in Illinois. The very concept of a famous person moving to a place just because they think they can win a race stinks. It's basically giving a big backhand to the idea of representative democracy.
When all is said and done, I think that overall, the GOP will win big this year. But when you ask party leaders what they'd do differently, in private they'll tell you that importing Keyes was a huge fuckup, and will likely hurt them in Illinois for years (a state with a not-insignificant 21 electoral votes). Maybe Barrack Obama was going to win no matter who ran against him. But something about the mindset of the GOP in Illinois really bugs me. When Ryan backed out of the race, and Ditka wouldn't run, there was this assumption that since the Dem's were running a black candidate, hey, we have to have a black candidate too. That's stupid thinking number one; just get a good candidate, color or sex not being part of it. Stupid thinking number two comes in when they've decided that they HAVE to have a black candidate, and we've found this woman that's a doctor, and a loyal republican, longtime resident of Illinois. BUT WAIT......Let's bring in Alan Keyes instead! Never mind that he's never LIVED in Illinois before.
Put this one into the "what not to do" section of campaigning.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Jerry Kohn is running as a Libertarian. Last I checked, he didn't want to ban polling and he actually shows up for debates, something neither Obama or Keyes seem willing to do.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...let Badnarik debate...
We're likely to trip-up on the word "marriage" here. As it's used today in the context of this discussion, "marriage" implies a union recognised by the Federal Government for tax and benefit purposes. (Gay's can already get "married" where "married" implies a religiously sanctioned union which is not recognized by Federal Law)
The Federal Government is within it's right (through Law and, in my opinion, in a moral sense) to craft laws and legislation to promote causes where there is a compelling reason to do so.
I believe family values constitutes such a compelling reason. I believe raising children represents another. I believe these two are seperable, meaning I believe there is a compelling reason to promote family values even when no connection to raising children is present, and I believe there is a compelling reason to promote the raising of children even when no connection to a family is present.
So if a pair or group of people shows effectiveness in raising children, their success should be rewarded regardless of their individual races, religions, sexes or biological relationship to one another. As such, I support the work of orphanages, foster homes, grandparents raising their grandchildren, step parents, single parents, people raising a child resulting from an affair with a third party, and people raising adopted children (including Gays.) So, to answer your question, I would approve the Federal Government crafting laws and legislation to assist those engaged in the task of raising a family.
Your question didn't ask it, but I would include in that set a brother/sister pair, regardless of the fertitity of either of the two.
Similarly, I might support Federal Legislation supporting what s been called "family values"; that is, promotion of close bonds between people working together in long-term relationships to offer support, guidance, etc. I'd have to see the details. But in this vein, such a "family unit" wouldn't have to include (or even be intended to eventually include) children of any type. Such a family could consist of two married people, or them and their children, or include adopted children. It would apply even if one parent of the children died (or left through divorce) but only if there were dependent children in the mix. You don't get the benefit if you live alone. And, again, under this definition, a family which loses both parents is still a family, even if there are only two (but at least two) children making up the remaining family unit; even if one is male and the other female, and whether or not the male has had a vasectomy. I don't believe you could exclude polygamy from this benefit. Not unless the Federal Government could show a compelling reason to do so.
Of course, I've been avoiding the term "marriage".
In my opinion, "marriage" is a strictly religious function, and as such, the Federal Government is forbidded from either sanctioning it or outlawing it.
This would mean Gays would be more than welcome to get married, but they'd have to find a religious institution to sanctify the marriage, and they'd gain no Federal benefits simply by having been "blessed".
On the other hand, as soon as they declared themselves "domestic partners", they'd qualify for all the same "family values" benefits "married" people (under today's definition) are granted. And if they chose to adopt a child (or if one of them produced offspring with the biological involvement of some third party) they would qualify for the same "raising children" benefiits "married" people (under today's definition) are granted.
So, to answer your question Should a guy be allowed to marry his sister if he gets a
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Those quotes are all from the same interview.
Polls are a way to make a good story out of campaigns that are way too long. If I actually got the information I needed about the candidates' record and proposals (with facts, not spin), I could choose in a day (and many people wait until the last day anyway). Polls are pointless.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan