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Does Redskins Loss Presage A Kerry Win?
Puny Human Nick writes "As mentioned before, the last home game the Redskins play before the election has predicted who will win since 1944. Well, the Redskins v. Green Bay game ended a few hours ago and it looks as though Kerry is going to win on Tuesday."
As someone who watched the game it means that Bush will win the election and then it'll be overturned in favor of Kerry by the judges. That would be the exact parallel with the game.
You would think that people with sport superstitions would have had some sense knocked into them after the World Series...
... not that I would mind Kerry winning.
Yeah, but Tues/Wednesday of what week? Surely you don't think the election will actually end on the day it's supposed to...
Loves science, hates superstition... unless it agrees with their world viewpoint...
Of course, I'm continually let down. What in the heck kind of superstition makes this worthy of being posted to Slashdot in the first place? Are we trying to ignite flamewars? Are there too many mod points being used in technically sound articles and we need to draw some away? Seriously.
If not now, when?
Sigh...drawing causation or correlation from 5 data points is just sad. Kerry supporters are grasping at straws.
...sure helps to demystify curses with logic, but most people don't bother.
There's been 17 elections since this 'pattern' supposedly emereged. At most, that means 9 times an incumbent was running. At most, that means 5 times the incumber lost when the Redskins did.
-R
But this one (and its predecessor) take the cake. How many times have I read about one of these flaky statistical prediction mechanisms? When it's a bull market year, this league will win the Super Bowl, or that league will win the World Series. When this team gets in the playoffs, that party's candidate will win.
People always trot out these stupid correlations which are roughly true in the past, and then as often as not their predicted conclusions are wrong, because the correlation is entirely spurious. If you look hard enough you'll find something like this that matches past results. The question is how long does this particular metric's 'predictive' power hold up for, and I think you'd find that in general, these statistical correlations/coincidences that people like to trot out have a very poor record of actually successfully predicting anything.
But not because it predicts anything. Interresting because it allows us to discuss critical thinking. This is a perfect example of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" - a VERY common logical fallicy, also known as a "coincidental correlation".
Basically the problem is people frequently see something happen and ASSUME that something they noticed, or known about the prior situation MUST be the cause. - It gets better with increasing numbers (if the reskins game had only predicted the winner once its cute, but after 15 elections it has got to be right!)
Now the reason this is such a good exercise to use for this important critical thinking skill is because most reasonable people would already know that the redskins game predicting an election is absurd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Say we're talking about 15 elections. To be able to predict them accurately is a 1 in 2^15 chance or 1 in 32768. All you need to have is 32 thousand things going on and you're all but assured that one of them will be a perfect predictor.
It reminds me of a stock scam from a few years back. You mail out aprediction on some random stock to 10,000 people. Half you say it will rise, half you say it will fall. Repeat until you've been right 10 times in a row. Now contact the 10 people you were right for, and offer to sell them your method for $LOTS. How many people would turn down someone who was right ten times in a row.
Of course, like every other non-american, I'm desperately hoping Bush loses
The real reason Kerry will win is because the polls are very wrong. Just as generals always "plan to win the last war" the polls are showing methods designed to win the last election.
When they poll "likely voters" they ignore, among other considerations, people who have cellphones. AFAIK, they only poll over land lines.
Also, there's huge assumptions in the statistical breakdown of voting age. Young voters often don't care about the election and have the lowest turnout. However, many people are so worked up over this election and the results of the last one that I believe we'll see the highest percentage of young voters in a long time. Most younger voters lean more towards the left.
Thus the polls are skewed because their assumptions are totally wrong. Given that it's a dead heat in most polls right now, Kerry should come out ahead.
Unless there's some kind of cheating/manipulation of the election, but what are the odds of that?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
'nuff said, really.
Please vote. Please encourage your friends and families to vote. Please don't vote for Bush.
-Russ
Me
Ahem. Allow me to demonstrate to you chaps my fine-tuned statisical methode for calculating the electature of the united states presidentiary - because as we all well know, a correlation implies causation, especially when we have a data set of such magnitudinous proportions ...
I personally didn't take the article as anything that was meant to be remotely serious - I figured it was just some people having fun and saying 'hey, look at this neat thing' - is that so wrong? I seriously doubt there is anyone who thinks this actually means something, but everybody's pounced on this story as if someone suggested that installing linux causes bad breath - it's obviously meant to serve as a little bit of humor to lighten to overly virtriolic political atmosohere. Let's not go crazy over it...
My blog
Yes, they're both rich white men. But aside from that there are a host of rather large differences.
For one thing, the Bush Doctrine is a serious departure from previous American foreign policy. Kerry has advocated an approach that relies on the sort of coalition-building that Bush Sr. used with such effectiveness in the first Gulf War.
Kerry believes that excessive tax cuts for those who make over $200k per year is counterproductive. Bush believes that tax cuts of any kind, particularly those that favor the wealthy, result in increased entrepreneurial activity, which pumps up the economy, resulting in more jobs for everyone. These differences definitely have an effect on economic policy.
On the environment, the candidates aren't even close. Kerry has a long history of working for the environment, and Bush doesn't even know what the word "environment" means.
Bush has to cater to his "Base" by nixing stem cell research. Kerry knows that science is not something to be feared.
The differences go on and on and on...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Then your as bad as the people you're trying to kick out. Don't drop to the republican's level.
Wow, I must have a magic penny. Maybe it will be worth something on ebay!
Love your comments about the polls. I think it's hilarious that people pay such close attention to them; they ask 3,000 out of millions of registered voters and claim that it has an accuracy of +/- 5%... ludicrous....
I think you're reading WAY too much in this. Get out and vote, rather than saying who's going to win based on a football game...
Holy shit .. by the looks of these replies, you'd think you folks were on his Doctoral comittee and he just submitted this as his Disertation thesis ... ... sweet jesus, it's just a funny coincidence ...
...
... hey, there is no Santa Claus either so I don't want to hear about that weird deer you saw running around on your roof on christmas eve last year, either ...
It's an 'interesting' statistic -- an urban myth. You people are busting out with Chebyshev's law this, and according to Modus Ponens that
hey, news flash, you're not going to find the meaning of life encoded in the articles of slashdot
Wow
Policies aside, at least with Kerry the rest of the world won't be snickering so much.
I mean, ~290 million people to choose from* and George Bush was viewed as the USA's best choice for President? That really is funny on a very fundamental level.
* Yes, I'm aware that the entirety of the US population isn't eligable to be president, but anyway....
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I have also been informed by reputable sources that the tidal force of the moon affects human behavior, in spite of the fact that monitor you are looking at right now has a greater tidal interaction with you than does the moon.
English is easier said than done.
We can see sequences and coincidence in anything. Give me a large enough stat base and I can probably work out the odds of Kerry winning based on the nth decimal place in pi.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
Every time kids/teenagers have been polled en masse about the presidency, the president they chose won. Strangely enough, Bush came out on top by about 10% in ChannelOne's massive poll of teenagers. Does this mean Bush will win? No, it means superstitions are bullshit.
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Monday football as a terrorist target. It would be right before the election, would be very public, and would impact a large group of people.
Just like every other major sporting event or human gathering has supposedly been a terrorist target for the past 3 years.
Last time the Red Sox won, the incumbent lost. How's that for a pattern?
http://www.snopes.com/politics/humor/redsox.asp
Are you trying to unsubtly boast that you make > 200k/yr? Or do you believe the bush propaganda that he's going to raise taxes for everyone? Kerry said on national TV that he's not going to raise middle class taxes, but he has to do something to pay for Bush's adventures in Iraq. Bush's father lied about not raising taxes, but at least he had some sense - Bush just plans to keep printing money to pay for his failed policies, and we all know where that will take us.
The apathy of the electorate, in *not* demanding better candidates from the major parties, has gotten us into a mess. The parties have no interest in *really* fixing things, because a fixed government is one that doesn't need to give handouts. But the handouts are what buys the votes of the uneducated/ignorant/lazy.
The definition of a democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Any of you lefties care to show me any single instance of the US government being defined as a democracy in our Constitution? For bonus points, show me where the right to vote in a federal election is guaranteed.
bzzzzt. Time's up. You'll have to keep waiting for your precious Socialist Utopia, cause it ain't gonna happen on Tuesday. Not on my watch.
Love,
Thomas Jefferson
PS: Move to Canada. They have "free" healthcare there. Just remember that you get what you pay for, and TANSTAAFL.
You do realize that it's this kind of paranoia and fearmongering that got things like the PATRIOT act and DMCA passed?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
To believe otherwise is metaphysics.
I hope this helps.
--- Ban humanity.
"I think it's undeniable that letting those embryos go to waste has significant ethical considerations. Gee, we can use this tissue to advance medical science or we can incinerate it. Man, that's a hard decision."
Or a third option. Not creating them in the first place. But then we wouldn't be human if we didn't create slippery slopes every chance we got.
Actually, the umpires could be percieved as either the UN which Kerry is charicatured as bowing to, or the Supreme Court that validated Bush's 2000 presidency.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
May I ask what money you are referring to?
* Do you earn more than $200,000 a year, if you do: welcome back to 1999. Big deal. You just helped our country. If you earn less than that, you keep your tax break.
* Are you referring to premiums for non-privatized health insurance? That's why Kerry supports a cap on insurance payout: $30,000.01 and up is covered by government. This effectively reduces how much you pay for your insurance premium each year. Privatizing health insurance leads to misinformed citizens and patchy plans - backed by companies that could go under any second in the resulting big business competition.
* Are you referring to the war in Iraq which has cost over $120,000,000,000? Are you not concerned that nearly half of your taxes go to the military and fund this war? That's what is being deducted from your paycheck. Vote with your wallet.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This idea of predicting the election is silly. About like watching those signs at the roulette table listing the past numbers and seeing 5 reds come up in a row. You just know that the next number to come up has to be black. No such thing. The last roll has nothing to do with the current roll.
:)
If you want a predictor try this out:
http://128.255.244.60/graphs/graph_Pres04_WTA.cfm
And if you want put $50.00 on number 35 for me. It is a sure winner.
I know a few people that feel that this election may result in wide spread violence in the streets. In effect a civil war. So far there has been nothing very civil about this election. Just look at the replys to this item. People are split with few people undecided.
Have to say the article is not a bad troll just before the election. The editors might want to watch that in the next couple of days. I am sure there will be more troll arcticles like this. Would be nice to be able to moderate the main article instead of just the replys.
Looks as if you are swallowing the Democrat party line of class hatred and not looking at the actual process and results of taxation and the history of how Congress votes.
Another Democratic platform is codifying 'workers rights' into labor laws that companies are forced to adhere to that is the same as taxation. When's the last time you bought any thing European other than a tin of biscuits, wine, or a Linux distro? They are not expensive because they are good. They are expensive because you are paying for the outrageous taxes and labor costs which many European companies have to pay.
Do the research and really think before you vote.
Too lazy to create a sig...
As a slashdotter, I think we have the responsibility to actually listen to "Mosh" and act responsibly. The republicans can sink to their own filthy level of voter fraud and intimidation by themselves. There are two ways to stop them:
1) Get out the vote, and overwhelm any cheating the bad guys can do. That kind of cheating works great if the candidates are tied (which every wishful poll in the country would have you believe). The more people get out to vote for Kerry, the less chance cheating can throw the election. So don't go to those polls alone: bring your friends, family, and anyone else you can (without forcing, kidnapping, or bribing them, of course). Give Kerry a landslide from the people those polls don't count.
2) Join the efforts by various rights groups to help monitor and protect voting polls and voters.
Personally, I think Eminem delivered the true October surprise. He's right too, the coming of the King of Terror began in a schoolroom, it's reign should end there too, with the only real swing state that matters: the youth of America.
There is hope Kerry can win, and not only from sports omens. Leading Hindu astrologers and a noted Hindu mystic believe that Kerry is going to win, Bush will never again be president, and Kerry will end terrorism and bring world peace! The sun and the moon have even endorsed Kerry.
"The last hope is to fight by ourselves."
Belebera, "Mothra 3: King Ghidora Attacks"
Not true. None of the military absentee votes were counted at all. They all were thrown away because military mail doesn't have a post mark. This is in excess of fifty thousand votes.
But a bigger problem is so few study history. The first two years of Vietnam, under a Republican administration, we never had more then 950 troops in Vietnam. After two years of a Dem administration there was over one hundred thousand men in Vietnam. And Kerry has openly said he is going to send more men. If Kerry wins it's Vietnam all over again.
Bush's regime would have you believe terrorists just came to be 3 years ago. They don't want you to think about the fact that there have been terrorist attacks before and we didn't need things like the Patriot act to make ourselves feel safe....
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
The fact that the next leader of the freaking world can be predicted by a game...
So, anyone want to take a guess as to why the rest of the world thinks Americans are arrogant pricks?
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
All of these polls (and especially the superstitions) are a crock of shit.
wtf? Why are seemingly all the pro-Bush, or at least not pro-Kerry comments being modded down? I don't necessarily agree with all of his points but this fellow's posting seemed reasonable enough. I hope a few people take the trouble to metamoderate some of these questionable ratings.
What has turned me off of John Kerry is not so much his liberal ideas about raising taxes and increasing social spending as his rather transparent and hypocritical attacks on Bush. To hear Kerry talk, he seems to believe that Bush is dishonest and incompetent and has accomplished nothing of note either domestically or in his foreign policy. He blames Bush for everything but the weather. Heck, he blames him for global warming. He's got some pie-in-the-sky health care reform plan and he's got a malpractice lawyer for a running mate.
If the Dems presented a candidate with credible foreign policy credentials and some concept of how to spur economic growth, I'd be all over him. As it is, I'm worried Kerry will become a 2nd term Clinton with a hostile Congress and no real mandate to govern other than "Whew at least I'm not George W. Bush!!"
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
And it looked exactly like the number "7". When that happens it means a few things:
1) Democrats become president
2) My penis grows 48 inches (cool, eh?)
3) I meet a girl with an 8 foot deep vagina (and this time she doesn't moo)
4) My ferrari needs new brake pads
5) I've been looking at my own poop again
So please, everyone look at the poop that makes you think happy thoughts. We'll get together and compare notes REAL SOON.
PS: "The Sky Is Fallin'" by Queens Of The Stoneage is a really great song after hearing it 10 times for some reason.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
[What's even more fascinating] Is that people whine about spelling so much.
Maybe because not making the effort to use proper spelling and grammar demonstrates a lack of respect for the reader? Nobody's perfect, but even without a spell checker you can catch the vast majority of your errors by just re-reading your post, and if you don't know the spelling of a word, there's a handy thing called a dictionary (there are even online dictionaries) to help you out. I'll agree that criticizing another's errors is generally uncalled for, but the nature of Slashdot (an "informal Internet forum", as you put it) doesn't mitigate the impression your post makes on readers--especially given the emphasis many people here seem to put on proper spelling and grammar.
Just a thought . . .
Well, MOST people who follow the situation in Iraq closely believe that the Bush administration is incompetent. Where do we begin? Letting looters run wild? Not securing the arms depots (not just the high explosives, all kinds of stuff was left unguarded- hell they stood by and watched as insurgents carried weapons off)? Disbanding the army? Going into Fallujah? "Flip-flopping" and getting out of Fallujah when it got a little too messy? Total cockup start to finish.
Afghanistan has been done better but there is still more of the country under the control of the Taliban and warlords than Karzai. Half-assed, but not a total cockup.
Bush on the economy has been something of a failure. Sure, we're coming out a recession, and I'm sure the tax cuts helped that- they could hardly hurt. But instead of directing the money where it would do the most good (the middle class) it went to where it did much less good (the wealthiest people in America) and created a massive budget deficit that will take years to pay off. This didn't help the economy so much as it helped the rich. The recovery has been far from amazing.
Socially? Most people feel he did a good job post 9-11. But it's amazing to see how much that has been messed up. He said he'd be a uniter, and he hasn't been- he's divided this nation. America is now more divided than it has been since the Viet Nam War. For some people he's been a good leader. If you're rich, right wing, and/or Christian he's great. But he seems to think that everyone else can go fuck themselves.
Finally, how about those American values like freedom and our rights that he is supposed to be protecting? Under the Bush administration we have seen people locked up without trial for years at a time. Four years ago if you said that America would do that I'd never have believed it. Sure, governments do that. But just the bad guys- the USSR, China, Nazi Germany- right? Those kinds of governments lock up people without trial. Not the good old freedom-loving USA.
I could go on forever. As for mandates, let's not get started on that. Bush lost the popular vote, so he has no mandate.
Hi, I'm not American, but living as I do in Australia, I might as well be one since the US elections are going to be deciding who runs the land of oz for the next 4 years. And I don't know what scares me more - the idea that Americans think their election outcome might be decided on a sports game or the fact that they do have a hegemony in international relations. Or maybe it's the voting system of the supposed paragon of democracy....
Except then you potentially screw over the rural people, because it will be easier, cheaper, and more effective to campaign in the large cities.
Better to keep the system, for now at least, and award electoral votes based on the method used by Maine: whoever wins the popular vote gets the two EV's from the Senate presence, and then one EV goes to the person who wins each precint. This makes politicians more accountable to states like California (usually a Democratic stronghold) and Texas (usually a Republican stronghold) that are often ignored in the presidential races.
Of course, additional balance for this would also hinge on the courts being given the work of redistricting instead of letting the parties carve things up for themselves.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The rest of the World doesn't give a fsck about baseball (except a few Americanophiles in Japan and Cuba).
But I can assure you the rest of the World gives a fsck about the US presidential election, because their life is affected by it even though they don't have any influence on it.
And they sure as hell root for Kerry.
the country hasn't melted
But it's about as close as possible.
Budget: fail
Foreign Policy: fail
Education: fail
Healthcare: fail
Jobs: fail
What else? Oh yeah, we were attacked, and we started a war that we are losing with people totally unrelated to our attackers.
What else can go wrong?
I know more than you drink.
I find it highly amusing, but at the same time disturbing, that the Americans since 9/11 have been shouting for terrorists heads on a plate while for many years before 9/11, and quite likely after 9/11 as well, collections has been and are being made in support of the IRA.
Do tell me that you actually realise the double morale in that...
Swedish, but resident in the UK since 1996.
Well, truth be told, it has been done elsewhere. Putin in Russia seems unlikely to give up power, though he is not in danger of losing any elections. The opposition parties are finding it curiously hard to gain any ground against him. It helps to have all the TV stations on your side. He has a vast majority in their congress and he can legislate more terms for himself as he sees fit.
But we're not Russia. Truth be told, I really think it's just not worth it in a truely robust, though obviously imperfect, democracy like ours. Even if the election goes horribly for the Republicans they'll still hold nearly half the congress and in just four short years they'll get another shot at the White House.
What you are talking about isn't an impossible scenario, given extremly dire circumstances, but it's very difficult to imagine it now. We did have a civil war once upon a time, but we were a different country then, and people's allegences were much more local. I think that anything like that happening now would never work because people, despite their differnces, would rightly see it as an attack on democracy on a very fundamental level. In other places in the world were democracy is a relatively new thing this might not be as huge of a concern. Many peoples have known only periods of disorder and periods of tyrany. Look at Russia or Iraq, many people there still believe that however scary it may seem, one all powerful man may be the only force that can actually keep order. Saddam was a brutal tyrant, but he kept the many fractured, tribal elements in his country from endless bloodshed.
America, fortunately has no such history. We have seen democracy work. We have a peaceful country and we are not concerned about internal strife like this. The Republicans, or the Democrats for that matter, have lost many presidential elections but have always been able to get power back down the road. Our political warfare has so far served both sides relatively well. If Bush loses, a war will certainly begin to restore power, but it will, thankfully, be a peaceful one.
You do realize that it is sort of suspicious when Bush's brother is in charge of the disputed state?
And you do realize it's more than a little suspicious to have Bush's Florida campaign manager play a major role in the recount?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Everyone repeat after me... Correlation does not prove causality... correlation does not prove causality.
Looks as if you are swallowing the Democrat party line of class hatred and not looking at the actual process and results of taxation and the history of how Congress votes.
I know you're probably trolling, but lots of people really believe (and spread) this kind of BS, so I'll pretend you really think what you say.
In short, you get economy 101 but apparently you didn't make it to 102.
Sweden (yes, 50%+ income tax Sweden) has a massively positive trade balance with the USA. When I say massively positive I mean they sell you almost three times as much as they buy from you ! And no, it's not biscuits or linux distros. It's high tech industry-oriented goods. Except for Ikea, Ericsson and Volvo, most Swedish exports are from small specialised companies that employ ridiculously educated workers to desing and produce high value-added goods.
France and Germany are a mess, but that's not because of taxes or social security. It's just that they dug themselves into a bureaucratic hole. Saying that a strong state with highly developed social services entails sprawling, Franco-German like bureaucracies is a lie ! Hell, you Americans share a border thousands of miles long with Canada, don't you ever look at what's going on up north ?
Your whole argument about labor costs and massive offshoring is dumb. The same BS that politicians serve us daily. Read any book by Paul Krugman as an introduction (looks like you'll need it), then hit a real economy manual. In short, wages in any given national industry tend to equal the average productivity of this industry in this country. Do you really think that wages in India and China have not risen in the last decade ? See South Korea or Taiwan for other recent examples.
Do the research and really think before you vote.
Yup, good idea.
Thomas-
Also: Norway and pretty much anything nautical.
From a purely economic standpoint, anyone who works for a living and votes republican is an idiot. They've been duped into voting "what's good for the country" instead voting based on their own situation.
For 2003 a single man making 28,400 dollars, and living in WA state (8% sales tax) he will pay 27% of his wages in tax. This assumes that 50% of what he makes will be spent on taxable goods, and that he takes the standard deduction. It should be noted that this same table gives the U.S. tax rate at 35% because it only displays the highest rate for countries with a variable tax.
According to www.worldwide-tax.com, if the same man lived in Germany he would pay 25% of his wages in tax. In Norway, 28%, in the UK, 30%.
The way I see it, the big difference here is not how much we pay vs. European countries, but what we get for those taxes vs. what people in European countries get for thos taxes. Free medical, free University level education, real Social Security. We get give two billion dollars to Halliburton.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
It appears that many of the /. readers still think Gore "won" the 2000 election by winning the popular vote. If Bush wins this election but loses the Electoral College, will you be crying and whining just as loudly for the next 4 years? I didn't think so.
PS. I'm not voting for Bush and didn't in 2000.
Interesting point here is that the Constitution specifies that treaties we sign and get ratified by Congress BECOME the law of the land. ;)
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
For 2003 a single man making 28,400 dollars, and living in WA state (8% sales tax) he will pay 27% of his wages in tax.
l
Where are you getting those numbers? Spending half of his earnings on taxable goods yields about $1100 in sales tax, or about 4% of the income. Are you implying that he would have a 23% income tax rate? Think again...
At the other end of the income spectrum, the bottom 50 percent of the nation's taxpayers (everyone whose adjusted gross income was under $28,654) earned more and paid less. Total income for this group rose from $861 billion to $870 billion. That was up from 13.8 percent of all income in 2001 to 14.23 percent in 2002. Despite growth in the percentage of total income earned by the bottom half of earners, their average tax rate fell from 4.1 percent to 3.2 percent.
(http://www.taxfoundation.org/prtopincome.html)
What a lot of people are confused about when it comes to income taxes is that just because you get a certain amount of money taken out of your paycheck (in the neighborhood of >20%) doesn't mean that that's your actual tax rate. When tax return time comes around, you get a lot of it back (depending on how much you make), making your effective tax rate far lower than what it APPEARS to be on your paychecks. If you make a decent amount of money, you OWE additional money come tax time, making your effective income tax rate even HIGHER.
You know why low income earners don't get many tax breaks? Because they hardly pay any taxes to begin with!
Here's a good table: http://www.taxfoundation.org/prtopincometable.htm
Nobody glorified the war before it happened. It was the Bush administration who envisioned the Iraq war as planting democracy in the middle east, among other great pictures. In fact, the majority people around the world always knew this was going to be messy, costy, fruitless and backfiring. However, in spite of waves of anti-war protests, Bush lead the world to war. Now it turned out to be ugly, you say it's meant to be this way. This is either naive or dishonest. Neither is suitable for the US president.
you do not get rich by spending money foolishly. and you spend it very foolishly.
I don't want to get rich, and I don't want to seem rich. I want to live well. You seem to think the wealth is what matters. It doesn't, and there's little point in accumulating huge amounts of money if you don't spend it on things you enjoy. Believe me, I spend my money very wisely.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I for one, hope that we can modernize the whole election system. We are worse than a 3rd world country. Which other developed country has as much problems with their elections as we do? Not a single one! You never see a court deciding the outcome of an election in any other 1st world country. Voter frauds? Unknown.
We also need to get rid of a system that only gives your vote importance if you live in certain states. I live in Florida and you all know the issues we have had and how important it is to vote here. If I had lived in Nebraska or South Dakota I could just as well have stayed at home and not voted since the outcome of those states are already set. Our election system is a leftover from the days of no communication and a different world. We are the most backwards country in the world when it comes to electing a leader, it's a disgrace to this country!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Wow what a typical "know-it-all" slashdot attitude. He gets 2 ridiculously minor details wrong so of course he doesn't know what he's talking about..
In other sports, such as baseball, the officiating crew are called "the umpires". This nomenclature does carry over sometimes to football, although the more correct term would be "the officials".
Yes, technically after the QB says "hike", or otherwise indicates to the center, the ball is "snapped". However, to say that the ball is "hiked" is not incorrect. The usage is common.
What's next, are you going to start running around posting how "ain't" isn't a word so any poster who uses it must be wrong? Hold on, gotta check my grammar.. wouldn't want you to think I have "no clue" because I have a misplaced comma..
Hmmm, the most active article on Slashdot is about football and politics. It doesn't seem like "news for nerds" anymore, it seems more like "news for dorks".
A real nerd doesn't care about politics, since its run by all the popular rich guys that made fun of us all through school.
Sleep is for the Weak
When you consider how the Skins game ended (with a questionable call taking away a Portis TD that would have won it for the skins), that would translate to a questionable legal decision deciding the election. That part is almost sure to happen, given all the shysters, I mean lawyers both sides have hired.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
What really fascinates me is how Kerry 'bowing to' the UN is being presented by the Republicans as a bad thing, yet the justification for going to war in Iraq is now claimed to be that Saddam refused to bow to the wishes of the UN.
Thats the sad part of Affirmative action, rich white liberals dont think Black people can make it unless they are given in's.
It informs the reader. You must not like reality.
That is a troll.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
I'm not sure that anyone will read this, as I'm late to the party and replying to something way, way deep in the comment tree, but I feel like I need to respond.
I'm a Christian (Presbyterian to be exact) and Bush is hardly a "great leader" for me. Christianity at its roots values love and tolerance, two ideals which I'd hardly associate with the current administration. The Christians whose values coincide best with Bush's are evangelical and fundamentalist. I and many other Christians I'm sure, think that those particular sects give the rest of us a bad name.
It really saddens me to see that "Christian" is almost becoming derogatory because of a vocal minority. I just wish people would remember that most of us also value things like science and the right of everyone to determine their own way of life.
Being a resident of a state in this condition (Montana), I understand the regret that my vote is unnecessary given the overwelming support for my chosen candidate (if only I could vote in Michigan...). However, this is not the fault of the electoral college, nor does it make my vote less important.
If it were not for the electoral college, my vote would actually be worth less than it is today. Montana has less than 1 million people, and yet we have 3 electoral votes. This makes our votes worth just a little more, and for us, this is a very good thing. Otherwise, the election really would only matter in New York, California, and Texas (possibly Pennslyvania and Florida). As it is, this election could be decided in Iowa or Wisconsin or even Hawaii (that's my personal choice -- cliff hangers are fun :-) ).
The electoral college just like our congress (with each state having 2 Senators) is designed to try to balance the power between states and popular vote.
Now this one is just way out there. Are you kidding me? We have had peaceful elections for over 200 years. Even with our problems in the last election, was there a civil war? Was there a military uprising (and please hold off on the conspiracy/radical anti-Bush talk -- lets be real here)? While most of Americans (popular vote) did not want Bush as president, our country kept trucking along despite what some would call the "wrong" decision. The process was actually fairly painless compared to the rioting and fighting that happens in many other countries.
Do not get me wrong. Our election system definitely needs improvements, and both parties are guilty of improper tactics. The new paper-less voting, I feel, is a big mistake and needs a serious redesign (and yes, I am a Bush supporter). I don't like voting fraud in any shape or form even if it might help my cause. However, to say that our elections are worse than a 3rd world country is simply ridiculous. And the fact that this post got a +5 insightful... scary?
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
than the fact that the 19 of the 20 counties with voting irregularities were run by Democrats and the 20th by an independant.
No more factual of an issue than using a football game to predict an election.
The only difference is that certain people needed something to blame and a conspiracy makes them feel better about it.
Besides, Florida's voting actually was less problemsome than Georgia's. Yup, the rate of issues was lower in Florida than many other states. However Florida was easier to tip using the courts. I fully expect this election to be no different, if a state has a difference low enough to affect the overall election I fully expect certain parties to be out in force in an attempt to claim voter fraud or similar.
Voter fraud only became an issue when it no longer worked.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Anyone lacking his connections who had the same discipline and academic record as The Shrub would likely have been expelled from Yale.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?