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Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
jZnat writes, "In June Rolling Stone ran an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delving into the statistical improbability that Bush won the 2004 election based on massive amounts of evidence that support a Republican-sponsored election fraud across the country, particularly in Ohio. The GOP used a number of tactics in its fraudulent campaign including ballot-stuffing, denying newly registered voters (particularly in urban and minority precincts) their voting privileges via illegal mailings known as caging lists, inane voter registration requirements, preventing thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots, under-providing Democrat-majority precincts with voting machines thus creating enormous queues of voters, faulty machines (particularly from Diebold) that skewed results in the GOP's favor, mostly unnoticed ballot-stuffing and fraud in rural areas, and a fixed recount that was paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties that essentially supported the initial fraudulent numbers." From the article: "'Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me."
There has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time. (And, might I add, consider the source.)
This hasn't change since Bush took office, and won't be any different in 2008. It's not just Republicans that do it, nor is is just Democrats. (Witness the decades-old joke from Democratic stronghold cities: "Why did the Democrat walk into the cemetery? To thank his voters.")
As dirty and reeking of conflict-of-interest as it is, when Diebold's CEO said he was committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush, he meant it as a Republican corporate leader and campaigner; not in the context of "rigging" an election.
No, the disenfranchisement that happens now and will continue to happen is the same disenfranchisement and dirty tricks that always happens: the rise of the internet for the general population, particularly since the last pre-Bush presidential election, has enabled the kinds of incredible information exchange on all manner of topics that we've seen in the last two elections. That will only increase, and it cuts both ways: as much as it allows the exchange of legitimate information, it acts as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, some wacky, some not-so-wacky, some with elements of truth, but still serving to subvert any faith we ever had in our system.
The worst part is so many people believe that not one, but two, elections were actively and intentionally "stolen"/rigged exclusively by Republicans, that anytime any Republican/conservative candidate ever wins an election from this point forward, it will always be doubted. Even recounts will be doubted. People want to believe, well, what they want to believe.
All of the political, governmental, financial, famous and otherwise, and other powerhouse figures in the United States on the anti-Republican/conservative side(s) didn't just stand idly by while not one, but *two* elections were stolen.
Nothing new has happened on either side in 2000 or 2004 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life. These are the same county election entities that have run elections in locales for generations. Yes, things change a bit, especially with the introduction of electronic voting machines (which, ironically, were the result of various Democratic and bipartisan initiatives designed to allow more equal and consistent management of and access to polling places). But all e-voting vendors offer permament voter-verified receipt options on current and some previous models of machines - but these additions cost even more money; money that many municipalities weren't willing to spend.
Worse still, we're talking about it two (or six, depending) years later. Not only do we have people who believe firmly that both elections were stolen, but we have people who literally believe something will cause a suspension of the 2008 elections, allowing Bush to remain in power. To me, the growing ranks of people who believe that with all their heart - growing mostly because of the internet, and sources of information that reinforce what they want to believe - are actually more of a threat to our system of government than anything else.
Rehashing a Rolling Stone article from June, that was already covered on /. at the time? Running a dupe a few days or a week later is one thing, but it's been 3 months!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
We are talking about a Rolling Stone article... a half-gossip magazine. The "entertainment industry's" take on politics... why is this even on Slashdot? Of course the election was rigged! This would explain why the disjointed, disorganized, and divided Democratic party lost an election to an incumbent. Lets just keep making excuses if it makes us feel better.
If you want to see what a real stolen election looks like, take a close look at what happened in Washingon State when they tried to elect the last governor. They kept recounting until they got the result they desired, and then told everyone to stop.
THAT'S a stolen election.
Democrats versus Republicans
Creationism versus evolution
Open software versus proprietary
These are all sure to create vicious back-and-forth arguments that'll put the responses over that magical 300 number.
all i had to do was see the name Robert Kennedy and know this story wouldnt be biased AT ALL!
Like this is different from any other election? Look up what happened in 1960 in Texas and Illinois if you think 2000 or 2006 were the most crooked. The only difference was that Nixon refused to demand a recout because it would hurt the country and the last two don't care how much damage they do!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
So now slashdot is reduced to pandering political gossip?
Any particular POLITICAL reason Slashdot waited until mid september to post a story about a JUNE Rolling Stone article?
C'mon Slashdot. This isn't news relevant to nerds or stuff that matters.
*grabs popcorn*
Seriously though, Diebold machines are a joke. What I don't understand is why widespread vandalism of these machines hasn't been done.
The exploits are, from what I understand, incredibly simple.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling that even if Osama bin Laden won the 2008 presidential election based on votes from machines, it would just be blamed on "terrorist hackers" and no actual accountability would be implemented.
Then, 2 years later, the American public would go back to voting on the same buggy machines, as oblivious as usual. Nothing would of have changed.
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So where is your fact checking? I followed reference number 6 and it appeared to be accurate.
So whats wrong with number 6? It's not a link to the onion or something inane like that, it looks like a real newspaper article about a Republican PR company sending out letters claiming that it's affiliated with America Votes, when America Votes has no knowledge of it, and as a non-partisian organization wouldn't have affiliated with a Republican firm or provided a phonenumber to a voice message asking people if they're interested in hitting the streets to get people to vote Republican.
From Andrew Gumbel, "Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America"e mocracy/dp/1560256761
http://www.amazon.com/Steal-This-Vote-Elections-D
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If Bush couldn't be ousted in '04 and if the Dems can't take control of Congress maybe its something they're doing wrong, cause Bush isn't doing anything right.
Yeah, I heard Bush is in league with Robot Jesus too!
I am not a fan of our current president and I have never voted for him (but I did vote) But the democrats were stupid enough to put a Northern Liberal Democrat against a South Western Republican. So what it did was create a polarized nation during the election, it forced people to be deadly afraid of the other side. So they all voted for one side or the other. So being that bush won, all the people who got all hyped up the Bush will be the end of the world are now going on conspiracies and trying to find any thing to make them seem like they were cheated. While it was a fair fight and they lost. If the democrats were more willing to get a more middle of the road candidate they could have one. But they were betting on that GWB wouldn't win because he didn't win the last election with a majority vote so they were betting that if they get a Full to the left Democrat then they would win hands down. But guess what it didn't work. Next time I hope they get a more middle of the road democrat and perhaps I may vote for them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
On top of it, they never mention how US military overseas from Florida specifically (that overwhelmingly vote republican) didn't get their absentee ballots
I CLE_ID=15597l 1 1/20/military.ballots/index.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/News/20001128-1.htm
http://www.cwv.org/milvote/milvote.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/
http://www.uhuh.com/laws/milivote.htm
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A2901_0_2_0_C/
http://www.mcsm.org/vetsvote.html
Nice straw man, idiot. Possible electoral fraud demands investigation, despite your cretinous opinion that it's all about pouting Bush-haters.
Slashdot is now blatantly ripping off Salon.com, which also had an article headline about Kennedy's Rolling Stone piece staring with Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" Too bad Slashdot, in its ridiculous slanting, removed the final word of Salon's headline: "No." Even Mother Jones and NPR repudiated Kennedy's claims. Mother Jones, fer Christ's sake! What's next, Slashdot? How about some articles about World Trade Center demolition conspiracies! And Was Paul Wellstone's Plane Shot Down?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
You can whinge about sources if you want, I dont give a crap, most murdoch/GE/etc owned news companies lie through their teeth, so the only place you CAN go for some of this news is "less reputable" sites.... (eg look up "outfoxed" on google video, a doco by ex fox news reporters, describing how dodgy the station ewnt after murdoch took over)
watch "the money masters" on google video
Because one or the other party did it in the distant past does not make it okay. Technology gave the current ruling party the ability to subvert our election process in a broad and coordinated fashion not available historically.
The bottom line is a lot of good people fought and died to uphold the ideal of one person, one vote and take pride that we run honest elections. The current administration tramples on the Constitution and stacks government agencies with unqualified partisans. They've looted our national treasury and gotten three thousand of our people killed in an ideological war in Iraq. Not only should they be impeached, but if evidence of rigging elections come to light it should undo all that Bush has done in office, including his Supreme Court appointments.
I think Bush lost 2000 and 2004 and that represents a greater threat to our country than terrorism. If the right wing wasn't so shamelessly hypocritical they'd be rioting in the streets for Bush's impeachment. The fact they're lending tacit support to this fraud only demonstrates their lack of character.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If the election was in fact stolen, "moving on" is the worst thing you can do, since its a direct attack on both the constitution and the legitimacy of government - and through that, an attack on the US and its citizens. Finding the criminals who helped steal it would be the right thing.
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." - Robert Hanlon (disputed)
We had a fun 2004 election up here in Washington state. At the end of polling, the Republican Dino Rosse had defeated Democrat Gregoire by ~200 votes - so close that a recount was mandated. After one recount, Rossi was still ahead by about 60 votes. The Dems paid for a second recount, during which multiple small groups of uncounted ballots from highly-Democratic King County kept turning up. Gregoire won that recount, and is now our (rather uninspiring) governor.
Thing is, this really looked like a rigged election; and a lot of Republicans still think it was. But looking at the various pieces, my personal conclusion is just that the King County Elections department is largely incompetent, and has been for a while - it just hasn't come up because we've never had this close an election. Ballots left uncounted inside of voting machines; absentee ballots that get stored away, uncounted; ballots from overseas military people that were wrongly disqualified... it's all easily covered by incompetence.
I have no doubt that fraud occurs; but I also don't doubt it runs both ways.
Another other issue that everyone conveniently ignores, of course, is counting error. Simply put, the likely error in any given count of N random items (as long as N is sufficiently large) is 1/sqrt(N). With a really close election, you simply can't know who the true winner is.
#DeleteChrome
(Just my two cents)
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Well, really, is there ever any true unbiased opinion? by its nature, it has to be biased, even in subtle ways. Its impossible to approach
exactly 50%, because how do you measure bias truely accurately like electron charge?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If there ever was any Proof that was valid, then yes, I would agree, but every couple days, I see the same kinda article with same laughable sources.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Hopefully it was obvious, but I am trying to mock the (Karl) Rovian technique of branding anyone who wants to discuss the invasion of Iraq as "cut and run" people.
It seems kind of ironic that RFK Jr is talking about voting irregularities, considering that his uncle got into office under the same cloud of suspicion (precincts in Illinois and Texas where there were more votes for the candidate than there were registered voters).
Excuses excuses excuses. We see smoke and mirrors from the democratic party that doesn't want to admit that they have been unable the last two presidential elections to present a legitimate contender for president. Trust me if the Democrats could put forward a candidate that was even halfway decent he would win the election in a landslide. Instead we get candidates that are wanted by the leftist fringe that has started to infest the democratic party. Just like the republicans have their anti-science, pro-war, pro-israel right wing idealogues. The democrats have their anti-religion, pro-appeasement, anti-israel etc left wing idealogues. Both of the parties are slowly starting to become controlled by these people. Hopefully it will result in a legitimate third political party with moderate policies (which is what I would like).
i res-slashed_x.htm). Also as another voter said democrats nation wide are famous for having dead people vote for them.
Fraud happens, there were several legitimate cases of Democrats committing election fraud such as the son of Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis. and some of his friends being arrested for slashing the tires of 25 cars and vans rented by republicans to help get people without transportation to voter sites (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-24-t
It truly depresses me as I see slashdot.org politically becoming like http://dailykos.com/ when really you should be focusing on things besides crying about how the democrats lost the elections and republicans must be evil because (insert celebrity) said so.
Oh, yes. Everyone knows Republicans aren't allowed to have voter registration drives. Republicans cheat, see, because they picked a name that some other obscure voter registration organization had already picked. That proves Bush stole the election. [/puke off]
The people here are lame and pathetic.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
The programmer who was paid to actually write the code (not that this is hard to do) for a politician in florida. His affidavit can be found here http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Af fidavit_120604.pdf
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
It's not like we can get rid of the bastard anyway.
It's a girl!
Argue with the argument, not the arguer.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Facts don't need bias. Whether something happened or not when evidence is available and verifiable makes the facts of the event immune from bias. The interpretation of those events "Bush won fair and square because of x" "Bush stole the election because of Y" is where the bias in this case comes in. You shouldn't dismiss something (well, something possible or probable) outright because you don't like the messenger or the possible implications.
At least it seems like it.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
The US is in deep dung when it comes to its democratic system. The voting process itself is kinda questionable. It was fine and very understandable when it was created but, hell, 200 years have passed since! There are amendments to the constitution that don't even make sense anymore in a system where only two parties remain. I kinda doubt that this was what the founding fathers had in mind when they created it.
Of course it's prone to ballot stuffing and other dodgy tactics to "win" this or that state. It all starts that your vote only counts if you're in a certain state. You're in Alabama? You're a Democrat? Don't bother going to the booth, don't waste your time. Your vote is wasted! Move to Florida or Ohio!
I'm wondering why there ain't more people moving "officially" to another state.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Kennedy article was a rehash of all the nonsense liberals have been spewing since 2004. So the article itself was redundant when Kennedy wrote it. And it's been months since it was published, so why exactly is it suddenly news now? Oh, that's right, because the elections are just over a month away and the Democrats are offering no clear and concise alternative to Republicans so all they can do is rehash the same assertions they've been making since 2004. Heck, let's be honest, since 2000. The close election of 2000 and the close election of 2004 gave them the idea that if they try to highlight how close the election was and try to make the case that they should've won, people won't realize they have no platform themselves.
Democrats, wake up! Come up with a real platform and stop bitching and moaning about past elections and start focusing on future elections and you'll do a lot better. Even on the off chance all your assertions about past fraud are right, what do you really expect to gain from from staying stuck in the past? GET A PLATFORM, PLEASE! GIVE US A REAL ALTERNATIVE!
A big -5 flamebait for the rediculous article about a rediculous topic that a majority of the people in the US have moved past a rediculously long time ago.
Now theres redundant for you. Stop rehashing uninteresting garbage, and if you really want to go all out I hear there is a new "docu-drama" on a 9/11 conspiracy floating around.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
I'm affraid I have to disagree with your point of view. In a democracy, accurate polls are essential and an ideal that always deserves effort. Specific controls to reduce fraud and disenfranchisement (denial of a vote) weather explicit or though increased opportinity costs is always a worthy cause. Because the very foundation of the law, of the constituion, of the form of government is that there is no method of keeping government honest and representative of the people than to allow them to pick their leaders in a fair and honest way.
I know you guys have to be tossed your daily ration of red meat nowadays so you can all post about how evil Chimpy McBushHitler is and how cheating is the only way an idiot like Bush could have won.... but I got the karma to burn tossing a clue by four at yer heads once in awhile.
There really are millions of people who did indeed vote for Bush, twice. The first time the Bush didn't quite have the absolute numbers of popular votes to win, but they did win the electoral college. And yes this is a perfectly 'legitimate' way to win since our system of government is a representive republic instead of some daft direct democracy. In 2004 Bush won both the electoral college, and although not relevant, the popular vote as well. Deal with it and stop chasing black helecopters.
No, Florida was not 'stolen'. Bush was ELECTED, not SELECTED. The press did do their own recount.... and when they were finished announced that by the election laws in effect on election day 2000, Bush won. If enough rules are bent regarding counting misvotes in select counties when the totals are already known, it is possible to get totals that give FL to Gore, but that isn't the way the game is played. So shut the hell up about 2000, if you can't get the Miami Herald on your side you don't really have a case.
As for 2004, only crackpot conspiracy theorists think enough irregularities exist to shift any state from one side to the other. Were there some suspicious events? Yup, just like in every other election. Enough to tip the result? Nope.
If you ask me it sounds like projection anyway because the only cases of election fraud in the 20th century were all cases of Democratic machines stealing elections for their side. Kennedy's win over Tricky Dick is nwo widely thought to be due to the dead in Chicago voting early and often. I'm in Louisiana and I can't count the frauds committed, all by Democrats, most recently when the dead in New Orleans put Sen Landrieu into office. Personally I, and probably most Republicans, just assume at least 1% of any national election and 5% here in Louisiana will be Democratic machine generated phantom votes and we get on with winning anyway.
Try coming up with reasons for people to vote for you and ya might be able to win some elections fair and square, with enough margin you won't have to worry about irregularities.
Democrat delenda est
Journal written by jZnat (793348) and posted by kdawson on Sunday September 17, @03:40PM
Uh...who is jZnat, who is kdawson, and why is Slashdot now posting journals to the front page? How does one get their journal posted? Does jZnat know kdawson in some way?
What's going on?
"Sufferin' succotash."
So far, we've got posts bashing the slashdot article for not being current, bashing the Rolling Stone article for being by Rolling Stone, and a few posts of "it's not that bad, get over it". We remember the Florida 2000 fiasco, which was much ado about nothing, and assume this is the same.
It's not.
Seriously, read the article. This isn't just about a few dirty tricks, although there are plenty of those. It isn't about a few thousand votes, like Florida was. It's about outright, large-scale ballot stuffing, hundreds of thousands of votes, fraudulent manipulation of voter rolls, and deliberate sabotage by the Republican secretary of state (who was also the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee).
It's an extraordinary claim, which does indeed require extraordinary evidence, but the evidence IS there. But no one's willing to look at the naked emperor. Everyone made up their mind about whether Bush was good or bad a long time ago, but now the Bush-supporters have no defense but to close their eyes and plug their ears. And for the most part, they're doing exactly that.
Sadly most Americans simply don't care. If we did, we would have been out in the streets like what is going on in Mexico, especially after 2000 when Gore won the popular vote, but lost the presidency because the supreme court said so.
Apparently Bush's administration isn't bad enough to get us off our couches in any significant numbers.
It's indisputable that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Quit worrying about your political party affiliation and look at the damn information. YES the election results were ALL skewed for the GOP where it counted. That is why the bad-bush is in office. Quit bitching about the dems and the reps and go check out the damn facts. The voting system is a complete joke and if you think we are not getting screwed by it then you aren't paying attention or you're just ignorant about the facts. Maybe you just haven't noticed that the currnet administration transparently lies about shit all the time. The voting machines have been *simple* to tamper with and there wasn't a way to verify the votes from the e-voting either. If the system is tampered with they have NO LOG or AUDIT TRAIL on the machines either. Would you let you bank do this? Maybe they should just send you bills without a log and you can pay those as well. WAKE UP ALREADY! Diebold is a corrupt influence and is in the President's pocket. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm
There is one indusputable fact and that is that the statistical proabibility that the exit-polls could have contradicted the actual results by such a huge margin are vanishingly small (on the order of 1 in a million). And further, that specific contradictions have an even more impossible probability.
You can trash this article all you want, but if you are a math-fearing geek (as you should be to have a slashdot membership card), then you simply cannot argue with the conclusion of this article. Being a republican or a democrat does not allow you to magically modify mathematical certainties. Personally, I am appalled at the number of people trashing this article because it is written by JFK Jr or published in the Rolling Stones. Use your geek sense! Geeks dont think like that... So who are you guys?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Are you saying that a few workers from Fox (that were probably fired or whose bosses made their life hell so they'd quit) made a documentary about the company they used to work for?
Now thats gotta be factual.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
Oh, good. I was afraid there wouldn't be any ad hominem responses, without which we would have to judge on the basis of facts and reason. Who wants that?
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
You mention Hitler in your argument, you automatically lose. You mention Diebold in Ohio for 2004 and you also automatically lose.
Diebold machines were only used in two counties in Ohio - Hardin and Lucas - and in both counties, these were optical scan machines. The total population of these two counties is less than 500,000, or about 1.5x the vote margin in the entire state. Couple that with the fact that Lucas County went heavily in favor of Kerry in that election, and we see that implicating Diebold in improprieties in Ohio's 2004 election is a load of crap. Most left-wing noisemakers have the good sense not to implicate Diebold directly, instead trying to make a tenuous connection to the former Diebold CEO's comments about winning the election for Bush, and letting suspicion and paranoia take care of the rest. But never let the truth stand in the way of political propaganda on Slashdot!
Diebold machines were used in about half the state's counties in 2005, so if you want to rail about that, go right ahead.
Today in scanning the BBC headlines many of Bush's like minded are winning in Europe. The far right has picked up in Germany (even farther right than the current government) and in Sweden the conservatives have been elected removing the socialists than have ruled the last 10 years....Interesting....
Keeley vs Danni
It is amazing that people get so worked up about one corrupt, incompetent politician getting elected over yet another corrupt, incompetent politician. The people in power has an awful lot of say about the results, so it's no surprise what will happen with that. I'm not even sure why this is surprising anyone, and the only way I can see it would is for someone who is wearing rose colored glasses. That what happens when one person has power over another. They will obviously do whatever they can to maintain that power, and they have quite an advantage to do so. Democracy is nothing more than a wolf and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
If you do indeed have evidence and not circumstantial conjecture, I'd love to see it. Put up or shut up.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
We can say anything if we just ask!
As much as I was disappointed by the 2004 election results, my desire for impartial truth outweighs my personal affinity for party-bashing, conspiracy theories, and groupthink. More informed investigation and reporting, less rabble rousing, please, fellow liberals! Hopefully we can earn an impeachment if it is deserved, and not just the ire of our GOP counterparts.
Then again, just because I disagree with the election result doesn't make it legitimate either, right? I mean, who exactly should challenge the results of an election, in the face of overwhelming evidence it was only won through fraud? Of course the losing party is going to be the one to complain.
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is it just me, or was there almost no discussion of the possiblity of election fraud (which, unless you can refute all the evidence, seems pretty damn likely). Isn't it kinda f'd up when we've got to turn to a "gosip rag" for debate on one of the most crucial elections in American history?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The sour grapes just keep on comming. Some people really seem to want to prove that they don't believe in democratic processes. I do wish though that these kinds if crazies were limited to just one side of the political devide.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I forgot to add, I notice you (and others like you) are attacking the source of the evidence, not the evidence itself. That's a classic debate technique. Bravo sir. And sorry for replying to my own post.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The end result of your statement is circular logic at its finest:
If you have proof that's valid ...
If you already have the proof, why investigate?
The simple fact is that more than half the population feels the election was stolen - an investigation is needed, even if it wasn't - to restore faith in the system.
If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a second
In fact, this has me thinking now... We may constitute a particularly difficult demographic to brainwash for exactly that reason - geeks don't take anyone but other geeks seriously and that means if you don't bow to geek religious beliefs (such as science and her language), you have very little chance of adjusting our opinions. If there are enough of you and you push buttons fast enough, you might be able to sling your comments around and mod-up the memes of your cohorts, but you will have little chance of making any difference to the thought process of the readership here.
Ok, tinfoil hat off... We geeks are probably just as gullible as everyone else and even easier to control... Just promise us dates if we go along with you...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
"Show me any human on this planet who is not biased."
Check the cemeterys.
Please check your objectivity, nuance, and common sense at the door.
Now, we all get to read the political rantings in journal form of a slashdotter who finds himself/herself on a political extreme but, by chance, likely happens to coincide with an editor's own position. Oh joy. Particularly when the author of this journal is also the author of gems such as his own take on the Declaration of Independence.
SlashKos. Really old opinion pieces from music/culture magazines spun by random journal writers for far-left geeks. Stuff that really, truly doesn't matter, but hopefully will stir up some controversy and ad clicks.
I find myself on the right politically, but I'm not one to complain about stories that show the left's point of view, even the more extreme left. This however screams to me of "slow news day" and "must do something to get site traffic up" nonsense.
I realize my post is likely redundant, but some things simply must be said over and over. Why on earth was this posted here, now?
I come to Slashdot expecting Slashdot. Not SlashKos. For that matter, I'd also be unhappy to see SlashLGF, as well.
Look, it may not concern you that Bush stole the election, because you wanted him to win, but I garauntee it will concern you when someone you don't like uses the same techniques to steal it. Wake up. This isn't partisan, the Democrats have done the same thing in the past, and it sucked just as much then. But we did somethign about it.
Just read the friggin article and perhaps you will see some ways that our elections are unfair and should be fixed, ignore the fact that it's your man who did it. Mentally insert "Bill Clinton" in place of GWB if that helps, but read it, and believe it, and get riled up and do something or our country is going to go down the crapper in a big scary way. I gaurantee that if no one does anything about this, someone who you abhor is going to use these tricks. And by then it will probably be too late.
And if you think everyone here is lame and pathetic because they don't agree with you, well, maybe this isn't the place for you? I hear freerepublic.com is nice...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Surely that's a great way to continue to sound totally unappealing to the American electorate. Lose the 2000 election, claim it was stolen because you apparently didn't pay attention in sixth grade civics class -- and continue whining about it to this very day. Lose the 2004 election in a contest that no one at the time had any qualms about, and invent charges after the fact that it was stolen from you too -- just in time for the 2006 midterms. Surely Americans won't see through this one, right?
It's nonsense to suggest that just because something happened in the past we should all simply accept the outcome and move on...past elections were rigged? Ah, well...better luck next time!
Accusing the Democrats of sour grapes seems within the realm of possibility but to suggest that even if this were all true just to ignore it undermines the very foundation of your democratic process. Like it or not (and I'm guessing not - as it is a clear and present threat to your obvious political alligence) free and fair voting for everyone matters in a democracy.
You don't like that because your side won't always win?
Tough.
No election frauds should be "let go".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
A grade-school understanding of probability?
The margin of error on those exit polls is at some confidence level, which is never specified. A "margin of error" is meaningless without the confidence level.
The best you can say about a poll is something like "it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3% at 95% confidence". In other words, there's a 95% chance that the difference between the poll and the actual, real value is within 3%. But there's a 5% chance that the real result is outside the margin of error.
Without that confidence level we have no way of knowing if the margin of error isn't for a ridiculous confidence like 50%.
Plus, while there's likely to be a correlation between exit polls and what people voted, there's no way to rule out a self-selection. Maybe Kerry supporters were more likely to answer the poll. Maybe people were embarrassed to admit they voted for Bush and lied on the exit poll. Maybe the people taking the exit poll rigged the exit poll for Kerry.
This isn't a random sampling of the actual votes. It's a random sampling of what people say after exiting the polls. While it may be likely to have a high correlation with the actual polling results, it's not impossible for it to be completely off.
It's far more likely Kennedy has discovered that the sampling method the exit pollers use are heavily flawed than that the election was rigged.
On a related note, I love the duality of various far-left Democrats, howling at the same time that the current administration is completely incompetent, while at the same time accusing them of managing to conspire to rig the election. If they can't keep secret prisons secret, what's the chance that they'd keep an election conspiracy secret?
You have no proof, just propaganda.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
If you'd like to educate yourself on what actually happened, I would suggest reading Harper's excellent and insightful None Dare Call it Stolen, which delves heavily into Representative John Conyers of Michigan's Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.
Government regulation is neccessary to curb abuses. They enhance our freedoms by breaking monopolies, limiting the scope and depth of corporate fraud and malfescence and providing us with many different forms of consumer rights.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I'm sorry, but I have serious trouble believing that Bush is capable of even aspiring to become such a fascist monster. The man is a moron. Now, I don't have any problem accepting that he is simply a figurehead for more influential people (lurking in the shadows, if you will).
As was posted earlier, if the Democrats can manage to find a half-decent candidate, they'll win the next one in a landslide.
Now ask me if I care. For the most part, not at all.
Not that I don't think it affects me, but I don't believe it will affect me any less to have another empty shirt pushing the polar opposite agenda.
Call me unamerican, but until I see a candidate worthy of office, I'm staying out of the voting booth.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Why is this even on Slashdot!??! Come on! Bush haters simply can't accept that the majority of voters voted FOR George W and not against him. Get over it! If you don't like it then run for office or get your own candidate elected, but don't overrule the will of the people because you disagree personally. Enough is enough!
Doesnt proving something usually start with an allegation of
wrongdoing, then move to proving it? How can this be proved
if, because there is no proof ( as yet ), nothing to prove the
allegations is ever allowed to be developed?
How about the Brian Bilbray thing? Case shut down because the
house swore him in before the count was official? Why the rush?
Machines going home for overnights when it has been shown that
the machines are vulnerable to undiscovered tampering.
emt 377 emt 4
I think the url is: http://www.freedomtofascism.com/
Hi, I worked that election for my precinct in TX. As alternate election judge. NO PROBLEMS beyond the usual two or three regular people who said they lived there but were not listed on the rolls adn thus voted a challenge/provisional ballot.
But my information is inductive knowledge (applying particular to the general). So it cannot apply everywhere. Far away Ohio or Florida may have had problems.
the allegation has been presented an insane number of times, and everytime it is presented, the evidence shows it is nothing more then allegations.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Did you hear that Louisiana sold its old set of voting machines to Mexico?
They had an election down there, and Edwin Edwards got 50% of the vote!
The elections are a charade. Elections and politicians are in place in order to give Americans the illusion that they have freedom of choice. - George Carlin
The current US political system is not much of a democracy anyway. It is a choice between right and further right.
The power is increasingly shifting from the hands of the US population to those of the establishment - institutions like media, government, religion and business - and will only continue to do so because of the effects of the corporate media over pubic opinion and from the effects of big money on the political agenda of both parties. Not to mention how malleable an entire population can be when it is constantly being bombarded with messages of fear.
Elections will continue to be stolen.
1 voice in a sea of voices
Mod parent up IMO.
Obviously you did not read the article. Republicans continuing belief in their own righteousness is completely predicated on ignorance.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
obviously you did not read my post. Democrats continuing belief in a conspiracy against them, just cause they didn't win is completely predicated on ignorance.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
IANAA (I Am Not An Australian), so I don't know how things work there, but maybe voting in at least presidental elections should be required to maintain your US citizenship. The ability to (partially) elect your own goverment is what makes America so great, but it gets screwed up if people don't vote. I guess most people just don't care.
...not because it's not important for the democratic process and our election system in the U.S., but because trying to thoroughly investigate will be impossible. Both political parties have their own political agendas, and the manufacturers of voting machines have their own self-preservation agendas. Now, I'm not posting this because I believe the election was or wasn't stolen; it's just an issue that rears its ugly head every so often without results. The answer to the question "Was the 2004 election stolen?" will be at best an educated guess, IMO.
I love how poeple mod other people down just because they don't agree. Grow up. Everyone has a right to speak
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Who modded this redundant or offtopic?
:-)
:-)
He's discussing voting systems here! (Well, not for governments, but anyway
.
.
.
How about a system where this data is encoded into the post (like your -1, flamebait) in a defined way and a firefox plugin which hides the corresponding stories? Anybody?
The vote for the story could be weighted with the moderation score of your post. Also, this would be complete independent of slashdots staff and could induce some changes which support such a moderation style.
This idea is somewhat heretical, I know. But I'm reading with the Slashdotter firefox extension script so this idea came to my mind.
Republicans aren't allowed to have voter registration drives
As a matter of fact, on federally funded public properties, they aren't. Neither are Democrats. That was covered in the article too, but apparently you can't be bothered to read that, since you're too busy lowering the Republican IQ.
The people here are lame and pathetic.
Next thing you know, you'll be claiming that some guy who opened a new store and called it "Wal-Mart" made an "honest mistake" because he picked the same name as some "obscure" chain of stores.
The only thing lame and pathetic here is you, defending your party by casting them as idiots who just couldn't figure out how to operate that newfangled Google thingy. Of course, this is nothing new, you can search the web to find millions of people defending the Republicans by claiming that Clinton or the Democrats did whatever first. Well, if your lot just didn't get enough of Clinton, you should have voted Democratic!
Oh, and assuming that they did screw up on their organization name, why were they sending out letters claiming they were non-partisan? Was that just an honest mistake too?
Sour grapes are even worse when they've been in storage for three years.
So have you refuted every argument put forth by the Discovery Institute on why evolution is bunk? Or after the first few stupid things get debunked, do you learn to consider the source until Nature comes out with the announcement that it's all been a big mistake?
After Kennedy re-hashed tired and long-disproven arguments about vaccines causing autism, I learned to consider the source and will wait for somebody more credible to make the argument before I bother trying to support or refute it.
Most people cannot even take a poll in the office to see where to have the "Holiday Party," yet they think a state and national election should be easy. I have seen election fraud. It is an equal opportunity employer. So let's pretend that each party steals 100 votes per district you know what it's a wash in the end. Election fraud isn't a republican tactic only. Part of democracy is living with a bit of fraud, unlike an old school Iraq which was all fraud.
well, technically just under half thought it was stolen. They all had nervous breakdowns and moved to Canada, remember?
Since you aren't from the US, I'll help you out on some history here. Since we are a very old democracy, obviously we have had our share of voter fraud in the past - enough that here in Chicago there is a joke about the Democrats getting to keep voting after they die...
The situation has improved greatly since the beginning (where candidates literally bought votes from people), but still has room to grow. These instances of fraud of dispicable (and as much as possible are acted upon), but the people that do the fraud tend to be well connected locals. That makes it very hard to get a case brought against them.
In general, the voter fraud is down to the level where it does not effect the outcome - the only time this can really be argued about is when the polls are very close. And, in a democracy, if the polls are really close then throwing a dart at a wall is a reasonable way to elect the gevernment...
I know that in my city, every time we try to pass a law to prevent the dead from voting it is knocked down on the basis of discriminating against the poor or some such. No idea if that is true, or if it is a cover run by the dead guys voting coalition.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Whether or not the elections in 2000 and 2004 were stolen does not change the fact that we are witnessing an unprecedented attempt to consolidate power in the hands of a very wealthy, very few. And they are mostly Republicans.
You say that people believing that the Bush Administration is capable of the most egregious types of illegal activities is more of a threat to our system of government than those illegal activities themselves. This is known as baloney.
Yesterday, we saw a President declare that a law must be passed that will have the effect of absolving him and his administration from any war crimes that may have been committed since 2001, retroactively. He is afraid that as the 14 prisoners that he's transferring from secret prisons (just the thought of secret prisons is anti-American) are interviewed by the Red Cross when they get to Guantanamo (Guantanamo is anti-American) we will learn that they were tortured in ways that violate a Convention that has served us well for more than half a century, and this will expose Mssrs Bush and Cheney to quite valid charges of War Crimes.
So, in a classic cover-your-butt move, this despicable man is going to pardon himself and his friends, in advance. I hope those of you who voted Republican are proud.
All this to protect his sudden need to try people with secret evidence. Let that sink in for a second. You are arrested and not told why. You are held for 3 years without any charges being brought against you. You are brought to court and a judge tells you that you are found guilty, based on evidence that you and your lawyer will not be allowed to see. Who wants to try to argue that any of this is the "American Way"?
And this entire charade, 2 wars and untold suffering is done because 19 guys in dirty nightshirts were able to commandeer a couple of planes and kill 3000 people. We're told not to worry about the guy who masterminded this crime because after all we can't find him anyway, and there's a much more important thing we have to do because of this massive crime and that's fight a war thousands of miles away from where this criminal is hiding. And it just so happens that this war that's so urgent is in a place that has a huge supply of oil. And, it just so happens that the President got into politics with the help of the oil industry, but that's all just a coincidence. And it's a further coincidence that the one corporation that has profited the most from this war was run by the Vice President until a short time before the election. And, by the way, that Vice President's income tax return last year showed income of tens of millions of dollars even though his salary is only about 250 thousand bucks. But ignore all of that because THIS PRESIDENT IS A-GONNA KEEP US SAFE. Safe from terrorists. Forget that you're more likely to die of toenail fungus than from terrorism.
One great thing about this country is that although it's possible to scare Americans, they don't stay scared for long. If there's a God in heaven, the Bush Administration and his Republican lickspittles are going to pay dearly for what they've done to a country that not too long ago was held in regard by the world as being a beacon of freedom, but is now known for secret prisons, torture, domestic spying and stupid, destructive wars.
To Hell with George W. Bush. And Dave Schroeder, regardless of whatever it is that would make you try to defend him, to Hell with you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Look, bantering back and forth that both the Democrats and Republicans have fixed elections is pointless.
If we, as Americans, aren't will to vote for someone other than the two major political parties then we deserve what we get.
If we, as Americans, condone election fraud/fixing by overt actions or our inaction by doing nothing to fix the problem then we are guilty of aiding and abetting a federal crime.
Until we stand up to our "elected" officials and force them to play by the rules, we'll all continue getting screwed.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Your guy lost, suck it.
Perhaps, but why have exit polls been so amazingly accurate in the past - and now, when anomalies turn up, the exit polls don't match for those places where weird shit was going on, like voters being turned away from the polls, or machines malfunctioning?
On a related note, I love the duality of various far-left Democrats,
That doesn't make any sense. The terms "far left" and "Democrat" are mutually exlusive. Democrats are typically centrist, many of them increasingly right-leaning.
howling at the same time that the current administration is completely incompetent, while at the same time accusing them of managing to conspire to rig the election.
I don;t see the contradiction. They are incompetent at running the country, because they spend so much time on their corrupt self-serving schemes. Same with most bad politicians, of whatever persuasion
If they can't keep secret prisons secret, what's the chance that they'd keep an election conspiracy secret?
They can't, and they haven't. Anyone with their eyes open knows there's dodgy stuff going on. Of course, that doesn't mean most Americans care. Hell, we KNOW, for sure about hundreds of screw-ups and lies, and somehow Bush hasn't been impeached yet. They openly come out and advocate torture, and it seems nobody cares. Maybe it would be a different matter if the President got a Blow Job. Seems that harmless personal infidelity is evil in the eyes of the voters, but corruption on a massive scale is perfectly OK. People very quickly forget. How many people really even remember what happened at Abu Ghraib? How many people remember the "anthrax attacks" and who it was that was investigated for those?
If people don't even remember such major events and atrocities, they aren't going to remember much about the fiascos in Ohio and Florida. It's basically been revealed that Diebold machines are easily hackable, and the people that run the company have partisan intentions. Where is all the outrage? Why isn't that issue being covered every day on the national news networks? Instead, all you get is celebrity gossip and talking points about Democrats "giving aid to the enemy" or being "terrorist sympathizers" and other such nonsense.
... and then they built the supercollider.
That was blatant election rigging.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Evidence? Perhaps I missed it, what evidence is there
that there is no possiblity of problems? Mind you,
for every blog you can reference that alleges that all
is in order, I can probably find another blog that
alleges problems.
All my reading leads me to believe that there is an
uninvestigated possiblity.
Why can election personel take home the voting machines,
but black box voting cant get within 10 feet of one? Do
you know of repudiation ( outside Diebold press releases )
that the machines can be tampered with in a matter of minutes,
in a way that leaves the all the tamper evident seals
undisturbed?
emt 377 emt 4
Neocons? Weren't those those little transformers that turned into the heads of bigger transformers or something?
So hey, how about those elections!?!!11!one
Who cares if a hacker can loosen the seal on a voting machine and swap out the flashcard with one containing a virus designed to spread to all the machines?
Who cares if the central vote counter stations have a trivial-to-hack dialin connection?
Who cares if voting machines return negative numbers for a candidate?
Any time this comes up, all we get is millions of mindless Republicans droning on and on, "bush won get over it bush won get over it bush won get over it." But none of it gets fixed.
One day, someone is going to steal the election out from under your noses, and then you'll be wishing you had fixed the problem instead of pointing and laughing.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
They chose a disproportionate number of young females to poll/hit on.
The bias was predictable.
The data is there. Females were overrepresented in the sample. It's just ignored by those that want to believe, like the parent.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Liars one and all. Slauhter them, and let Charon ferry them as he will.
the evidence that nothing wrong happened is the lack of evidence that anything actually happened.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
No idea for Australia, but in Belgium (where voting is also mandatory) I think you get fined.
On the other hand, blanks votes usually have a meaning in countries where voting is mandatory.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Right and the most heavily populated states 'generally' vote blue. Maybe most of the cows vote Republican but...
If there is that much evidence... then prove it, in a court of law with cross examination.
'nuff said.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I don't think the 2004 election was stolen, in the sense that Republicans manipulated the numbers and that's why they won. I think, at the time, Bush and his government really were very popular, and they legitimately won the elections.
However, with a government that spread lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks to get people to support an unprovoked attack on Iraq, nothing is unthinkable...
For example, the government was certainly painting a brighter picture of itself than the facts would have justified, and probably also vilifying the opposition more than they deserved. Contrary to the Democrats, we will protect you from the terrorists! The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are pretty successful. Bush has done a lot to improve the environment. Education and unemployment are better, especially for the lower classes. Things like budget deficits and large scale spying on American citizens hadn't really mounted up to the levels they are at now.
All that the Democrats had to say was mostly that the Bush government is doing bad things, so you should vote for us (the Bush campaign also cleverly robbed the Democrats of their ammunition, by accusing Kerry of some of the main faults of Bush). In such an environment, it's not too strange that people massively supported the Republicans, and weren't really open to criticism.
Of course, now we know that Osama _still_ hasn't been caught, Iraq didn't have WMD, much less posed a threat to the USA, the Iraqis didn't receive the US soldiers as heroes, but rather plunged the country into chaos and civil war (and the same seems to be happening in Afghanistan), the Bush government really is massively invading the privacy of innocent citizens, and probably holding innocent people without due process, as well as torturing. It could even be argued that the US' aggressive policy makes more enemies than friends, making Americans less safe than the more moderate policies the Democrats were proposing would have been.
All of this was obvious to many, many people even before the 2004 elections. So why did Bush get re-elected? Did they manipulate the vote counts? I don't think so. Did they manipulate people's minds? I think they did. Does that equate stealing the election? You be the judge.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
..backed by good or by bad evidence. That the earth isn't the center of the universe once was a conspiracy theory spread by those 'unbelieving heathons who "think" too much'.
Anyway, I'll do my part spreading the evidence; just found this clip a few days ago. I posted the link already, but I think it's worth reposting it for anyone who's interested. It's about a programmer who had been hired (by a politician) to write code to manipulate voting machines.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
That's a pretty disingenuous comparison. We are talking about a current issue that hasn't had much light shed on it yet, not something that's widely examined and held to be true.
After Kennedy re-hashed tired and long-disproven arguments about vaccines causing autism, I learned to consider the source and will wait for somebody more credible to make the argument before I bother trying to support or refute it.
I don't see what autism has to do with elections. One would think a politician is more expert in the field of politics than medicine. In any case, you are setting up a straw man. Nobody has all the facts on Ohio yet. Kennedy may be right or may be wrong. But there was certainly suspicious activity. The American public should demand more transparent elections, whether or not Ohio was stolen. It's absurd that information surrounding what really went on at elections is so obscured.
It's nothing like arguing against evolution. It's more like discovering some phenomenon, and then investigating further. Or would you just rather not bother? After all, it's only democracy which is at stake.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Democrats think they can get you there quicker, in a special handbasket.
The handbasket is union-made. The road was built with a no-bid contract.
Pick one.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This reminds me of a movie quote:
Stop living in the past and then maybe you'll get somewhere this next election.
Condoleeza Rice: "I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons." [responding to Kean]
FACT: Condoleezza Rice was the top National Security official with President Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. There, "U.S. officials were warned that Islamic terrorists might attempt to crash an airliner" into the summit, prompting officials to "close the airspace over Genoa and station antiaircraft guns at the city's airport." [Sources: Los Angeles Times, 9/27/01; White House release, 7/22/01]
Rhetoric? You cite Rice's reassurance that her gang won't postpone elections as reason to "cool the rhetoric"? Why wouldn't she lie, especially if it got people off our guard?
--
make install -not war
I can't agree. I think people should be free to express their opinion as they see fit. If they don't want to vote, they shouldn't be forced to. Why encourage people who know nothing about the election to randomly vote? Encouraging civic responsibility is great -- forcing people to go to the polls and punch the left hand column is bad.
+1 funny - think about it^_^
Did you read this article? I know it was a bit long and it's so much easier to keep talking rather than listen, but seriously you haven't responded to anything that JFK jr. is talking about.
The stuff with Diebold is a minor note in a long list of much worse and more obvious tactics. Try reading it. If you still think it's not true, check the sources and refute it based on that. Frankly, I never suspected this election until I read this article but there are just too many examples in the article for me to be as sure as I was.
The most damning evidence, in my opinion, was the discrepency between exit polls and the results of the election, which almost always were swayed toward Bush. There's also the fact that not enough voting machines were allocated in areas with large black populations.
Seeing as this is a 4-month-old political opinion piece of a speculative, conspiratorial nature that doesn't even pretend to promote an unbiased or nonpartisan viewpoint, what business does it have on Slashdot?
If Slashdot is going to be linking to Robert Kennedy, Jr's writings, it better also link to those of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Bill O'Reilly. Frankly, I'd rather Slashdot stay away from all of them.
I wish the article itself could be modded down to -1 Flamebait.
THANK YOU.
Geez...
I lean to the right politically, but I would love - LOVE - to have an alternative party. The Democrats have largely set themselves as simple contrarians with one plank on their platform - "vote for us, we're not the Republican party!"
Yes, I can see that. I saw that little "D" instead of the "R" which seems to be so dominant amongst elected officials these days.
But why on earth should I vote for a party which wants to get into power before stating a platform?
Economically speaking, the U.S. is doing quite well, so economics aren't much of the issue and elected officials have an often overstated effect on the economy as is. That's not much of a reason to vote for the Democrats. The present deficit level is high, to be sure, but that's not the sort of concern that really gets the voters out.
Iraq's a bit of a mess, but the Democrats haven't really stated what they're going to do with it beyond "we shouldn't have gone in". Great, we shouldn't have gone in, that's lovely and all, but guess what, we're there now - what do we do? They won't say. They don't have a plan at all... granted, the Bush administration's own plans are not particularly well-defined, but they are committed to staying for some time, which isn't the road map I'd like to see but it's heading in the right direction. Democrats can't decide to stay, go... or do anything else. Give me your party's POSITION on the matter! Do you have a position? Oh, that's right, I forgot, your position is, "we're not Bush!"
Then there's the "cultural issues". Democrats and their supporters alike can't seem to wrap their heads around this, but every time they lose an election they blame it on people who vote on "cultural issues". Perhaps if they learned that these cultural issues were really, truly important to many voters they could win votes, but noooo... instead, we hear the same mantra of, "stupid rednecks only care about x!" each election cycle. These stupid rednecks are voters, you know, and cultural issues are important to people, no matter how much the Democrats want to deny it. Responding to elections lost due to cultural issues by reaffirming your stance on these issues will NOT somehow magically bring people to your point of view.
I'm not entirely pleased with the Republican party at the moment, and would love to see some new ideas pop up on the hill. But the U.S. lacks an opposition party, and only has a band of contrarians without ideas.
It's like the Cola wars all over again, except instead of 'Coke' and 'Pepsi', I have 'Coke' and 'we're not Coke and we think Coke sucks!'
Please, SELL me some ideas and I might BUY THEM!
</rant>
I don't know how it works in Australia, but I lived in Brazil for a long time, where it is also compulsory to vote. What they do is make your life difficult if you don't have the receipt that says you voted in the last election (they require the receipts in order for you to get renewed documents such as passports, etc). Thus, the system works in that people do vote. The argument there is similar to the one you're making. You have the right to vote, so you should damn well use it, because that's what makes a democratic government great. I disagree with that in so many ways that I can't cover it all, but I'll just discuss the major problems with it right now.
I suppose the most important reason is the practical one: It doesn't work. They can make you vote but they can't make you care. The ballots were secret as they are here (a very good thing), so there were a large number of nullified ballots by people who just didn't want to vote. Essentially, they'd check the mark next to all the candidates, making the ballot worthless. They're doing the electronic voting there too now, but that's after I moved out, so I have no idea if the software disallows that. If the software does prohibit you from doing that, it puts you in a much scarier situation. I imagine most people who didn't care would simply vote for the first person on the list.
The second reason why voting shouldn't be compulsory also relates to the fact that most people don't care. You say that the system gets screwed up if people don't vote, but I claim it gets screwed up even more when people who don't do their research vote. I really hate the whole "get out and vote" campaigns because they make it seem like just showing up and voting satisfies all your civic responsibilities. It's not about just making a decision, it's about making an informed decision (although I guess "The Decider" would disagree). I'd be seriously in favor of the "Get out and learn about the candidate's track records, their proposals, and the success rate of similar actions to the ones they are proposing in the past, then vote for the best candidate" campaign, but people don't seem to want to do the hard things. Frankly, people who just show up and vote based on the fact that, "I don't like the damn republicans, I shall vote democrat" or "I'm conservative, I shall vote republican" are ruining for the rest of us who are actually doing our research.
Finally, there's the freedom argument. I don't like any laws that restricts people's freedoms. Your right to not vote is as important to me as your right to vote. If you want to vote I'll fight against anyone trying to prevent you to do so, regardless of whether or not I agree with who you are voting for. If you do not want to vote, I'll fight against anyone trying to make you do that.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
It is far clearer that the Democrats steal elections in my home State of Washington....It is not statistics but actual votes that were fraudent. Dead people, people voting twice etc...The more people counted and recounted the more the Democrats "found" new votes in Democratic districts won by Democrats. This wasn't the opposition finding new votes or uncounted ones to over turn things for the real winner ( ie Gore) after the winner was declared ( Bush in Flordia and Ohio) but it is a clearly a manufactered election by one party. Ohio, maybe tactics were used, but this was a stolen election in WA in black and white .
This is like the Democrats of the Chicago era.
Not "Joe Lieberman" bipartisan. Certainly not W bipartisan, which means, "Do exactly as I say, and I'll make sure to Swift Boat you even harder next time."
Let's talk about actual corruption today, not back in the Big City Democratic Boss days-- which are gone. Besides, any honest observer knows that "everybody does it" is a foolish argument you don't even accept from your kids. The Rove era is much more subtle. First of all, there's monkeying with the voter's lists, as was done, massively, in Florida. Whatever you think of felons being barred from voting for life, the fact is that the lists were cleansed by Choicepoint, misidentifying people all over the place. if you last name was, you know, black, and it sounded like a felon's, you were off. Similar tactics are going on all the time. In three states, Republican voter registration efforts were caught throwing out Democratic registrations. There were very high-ranking GOP members caught tying up the phone banks of the Democrats in New Hampshire, and people have gone to federal prison for that. Never explained was, who did the criminals call in the White House in the days leading up to this? And we haven't even talked about the I.D. card movement in many Republican states that amounts to a poll tax, and is bound to disenfranchise the poor and black, as certainly as an evacuation of New Orleans left those without cars of their own. Or, the big one, the easily-hackable voting machines. One of the first things that Schwarzenegger did was get the Democratic Secretary of State out of there, with his anti-Diebold, pro-paper trail attitude, and put in a guy for whom that's just fine with it. When the voting machine thing actually blows, it will be the biggest scandal in decades.
Now, on the other hand, there are always Republican accusations that Dems use the graveyard, and pay illegals to vote. About the graveyard, that might exist in Chicago, but I'd say it's a dying method. Records are too good today.
Paying people to vote your way has been a problem for a long time. One of my mother's first memories as a child was riding around in a truck at Christmas with her uncle, and handing out turkeys and booze to the Republican homes in Philly. Early '20s. True story. Her uncle was a Republican ward boss. Was it bribery, or just the party looking after its own?
But that kind of corruption requires people paying the bribes, and that's traceable. When Loretta Sanchez beat B-1 Bob Dornan in Orange County by about 1,000 votes, he contested the election, and gave many statements to the effect that some massive number of illegals must have voted. The inquiry found that there were, at most, 300 "questionable" votes. Some of these just couldn't be tracked down. There were a dozen or so, I believe, who had passed all the tests for citizenship, and the instructor said they could vote, even though they couldn't until the actual day of swearing-in. So the degree of "corruption," if that's what it was, was miniscule.
Any politician who paid illegals to vote for him would need his head examined, and he would belong in jail.
But let's not get into the partisan thing about elections. They should be straight and honest. Isn't that bipartisan?
How non-Americans get this oft times more than Americans do.
Thank you for your comments.
To me the scary part of this isn't that there's evidence of comprehensive voting fraud, the really scary part is the way the U.S. votes is so flawed that such fraud can't really be detected. No valid proof can be obtained. The system itself should be so squeaky clean that no one can legitimately grumble - and it isn't - it isn't by a long shot. Elections in Venezuela are cleaner than elections in the U.S.
Steven Hill writes in the introduction to his book "10 Steps to Repair American Democracy":
The U.S. is a backwards and corrupt nation when it comes to fair, transparent voting. And even worse, this somehow became a partisan issue (and hence one that will never be adequately addressed).
That is the thing that ultimately disturbs me about the situation.
into a political discussion, like most other slashdot topics do.
It was Birchibald T. Barlow!
Don't Tread on Me
How would you know? What evidence do you have that fraud is at an all-time low?
The US electoral system is not very open. It's nearly impossible for citizens to know what is going on. Just take the Diebold fiasco for example - how is it possible that in a modern democracy, a single company is able to control access to the voting system like that? They claim their system is a "proprietary secret." How can a proprietary system like that possibly be accepted by the electoral system? Diebold doesn't have any right of ownership over it - the American people do.
And if things are so great, then why is it so easy to just strike valid voters off the rolls? How was it possible for the recount in Florida to be stalled? The system seems utterly absurd and totally abusable, when compared to most other modern democracies in the world. Hell, even without comparison to other democracies, which generally don't have these problems, the system raises questions on its own terms.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The bias problem isn't tampering with the math, it is selectively reporting the numbers in order to emphasize his position. I don't really know or care if he is, but that's the issue with bias in this case, not the validity of the numbers he reports, but the completeness.
As far as slashdot and geekdom go, the demographics of slashdot probably aren't quite as homogeneous as you seem to be assuming. Two slashdotters are going to be as different and alike each other as they are compared to people who are more likely to frequent a gym. Despite all the time that we spend doing it, people just don't sort into convenient little groups.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I have to wonder about the 2000 election....When ABC (or was it NBC) was making their first prediction that Gore had won Florida (about 08:00 pm CST on election night), GW Bush said like "that's not possible, it can't be" instead of "we'll wait for all the votes to be counted" or " our polls find differently"....
I didn't think anything of it at the time...but what has ensued since, I wish I had a recording of the broadcast, and have experts review it.
Although I'm inclined to be more sympathetic about the "stolen election" hypothesis than you are, I fully support your plea for a real alternative. It seems to me that both party platforms have essentially devolved into "We're not as bad as those assholes." I'm waiting to see that on a bumper sticker.
Compló!!!
You start off by saying that "there has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time", which seems to be a plausible statement to me, but then you dismiss the whole idea by saying that "people want to believe, well, what they want to believe".
So what's your point? Did you read the article? And what did you mean when you said "and, might I add, consider the source"? Do you mean Rolling Stone? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr? Good job getting a 5, Insightful on a post that didn't even attempt to refute a single one of the 208 references in the article, yet still managed to cast doubt.
We should be ashamed here. This is news for nerds and we're nerds, right? So we should be smart enough to mod this guy down as a Troll, and then go ahead, read the fucking article, and look up the references ourselves. What hypocrites we are. We deride religious fundamentalists for pushing intelligent design into school curricula ("Ha, ha, what ignorance-- here's a spaghetti monster!") and then we turn around and do the same thing by modding up a post that contains NO FACTUAL INFORMATION in its rebuttal.
I'm going to finish reading the article. Then I'm going to look up some of the more brazen references (not all of them, of course-- I do have a life after all), probably more than the two or three the mainstream media is going to latch on and harp on until this article is "discredited". You should all do the same.
WTF? Hey Slashdot editors-- maybe you should have a quiz on the article before you're allowed to post. 'Cuz we all just got F's.
As this very thread proves it, yes we are.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The exit pollers in Ohio where young men.
They polled/hit on young women way more then random. It's there in the gender/age data. Next question.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Agreed !!!!
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Ignoring the fact that you have failed to rebut any of the facts or arguments presented in the article:
1. Use a word processor to replace references to Kerry and Bush and election 2004 in that article with other names and a different election.
2. Read the article.
3. Note whether you form emotions of anger or if there is a "salty discharge" flowing down your cheeks due to feelings of sadness.
Because what the article shows is that regardless of who "won" that election, our election system as 1) far from perfect and 2) even outright broken.
Now, the fact that there is even a case to be made here means that our election system is seriously flawed. Counting is a mechanical process - it should not be subject to even the slightest error, and therefore should not be subject to even the slightest doubt. Transparency and perfection are achievable. And yet, at every turn, Mr. Kennedy has been able to show the continuing presence of openings and loopholes and conflicts of interest in the counting process and the registration process.
Now, why haven't we reformed the election process? It's in everyone's interest to make sure that the will of the people is realized, correct? It's in everyone's interest to see that the votes are counted and that we live in a truly Democratic society, right? Or is it?
This is so very important. Unless we establish transparency and reliability in our voting system we are forfeiting our democracy itself.
The Kennedy article was a rehash of all the nonsense liberals have been spewing since 2004.
Since 2004 Republicans have been calling these accusations "nonsense" when it appears to be in their interest to settle the question (and thereby obtain a stronger mandate) by discrediting the facts at hand. And yet this hasn't happened. A mandate was asserted even without rigorous testing of the election results. And here you are, defaming the article and its author as "nonsensical" without actually countering any of the facts.
It's almost like one side is screaming "Our democrcacy is dying" and the other side responds by tacitly and cynically admitting "Haven't you heard? Our democracy is already dead."
As your best friend forever George W. Bush has stated, "Sometimes you need to repeat the truth over and over, so it sinks in." In this case, of course, the "real truth" is what's at stake, and we have an obligation to discover what the real truth is, and repair it if it offends us. Lots of credible people are still reporting on this issue, yet, for some reason, it hasn't made its way into the mainstream media besides in minimal ways.
Good f*cking question. Nothing in our society stays relevant. Important articles disappear all the time - we live in an information world where, regardless of actual relevancy, nothing stays relevant for more than 24 hours. Or it could just be a collective will of our news media not to "rock the boat" too much, as I believe Keith Olbermann points out in the article.
Mob rule is not a goal. The constitution is there to moderate the weather vane nature of the mob and to control it's reach.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Very different indeed. I agree. But all geeks love math. Some might not really understand it, but all will respect it more than any particular source. You can't discredit math. Even if you discredit the person providing the math, it still doesn't discredit the math. This is one place the hypothetical propagandizers can't really go. They can't discredit math to a population of mathematicians. It will only serve to discredit them, instead. And my position stands. bye!
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Actually, the quickest fix would be Approval Voting. It's as accurate (in terms of game theory / the 5 criteria of Arrow's Paradox) as IRV is, and is a hell of a lot easier both in implementation (the method of counting the votes is almost identical to how we do it now), and in explaining to people how it works (i.e. "Put a check next to anyone you think would do a good job. You are not limited to one choice.")
As for the best solution overall, one of the Condorcet methods would be the best — preferrably one of the clone-proof methods, such as CSSD.
They certainly do by my read.
Your ISP is restricting your right to operate an open mail relay. Bastards.
Do you really trust congress to get it right enough to not force ISPs to open mail/windows share ports etc back up.
An unregulated 'neutral net' has been maintained by market forces for decades. Why do we need government to 'help' us now?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some of the problems were caught and corrected, which could be used as an argument that the problems were normal and unintentional. See Ohio 2004 incidents.
Bush *is* an illegitimately elected aspirant dictator, a large scale mass murderer, and a war criminal.
This is why you guys are going to keep losing. As a conservative who actually believes in limited government and individual freedom, I strongly disagree with the current Republican leadership on many issues. But when the opposition is this unhinged, all I can do is either leave my ballot blank or "waste" it on a third party.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I would ask two further questions. For those who live in countries where voting IS compulsory, ever have an instance when there was no one you wanted to vote for? What then?
And if maintaining one's citizenship were predicated on voting, would voting be predicated on being a citizen?
Australia -- another country lucky enough to live under an American supplied defense shield.
American defense shield = Biggest protection racket ever.
Organized crime took over the American government in the 1960's. We in the US are basically screwed.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
But that is precisely how the American system works. You look forward, not back, and the system remains stable. 43 Presidents since 1789.
That is not evidence. That is a lack of evidence.
On this, I can go mark every bug in bug tracking as
"no problem found". I didnt look, therefore I did not
see, therefore there is no problem.
The lack of evidence is not incredible, since, as far as
I can tell, none of the allegations have lead to
investigations.
And this is the problem, things suit you now, if there
was a problem, it was in your favor. What will you
do when the problem( if there is problem ) does not suit you?
It's a pendulum, and it swings.
emt 377 emt 4
Do you have anything to refute the content and the facts laid out in the article? It doesn't matter who the source is. It matters if it's true or not. Show me any human on this planet who is not biased.
Argue with the argument, not the arguer.
Been there, done that.
Arguing with fraudsters is like arguing with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. As soon as you demonstrate that one part of their evidence is either bogus or had no significant impact on the election, they'll move on to the next supposed conspiracy to steal the election. Eventually, they start bringing up rumors and coincidences, which can't be disproven since it isn't evidence in the first place. Or else they accuse me of being a Republican stooge. But I'll give it a start anyway with the Diebold claim.
Only 2 out of Ohio's 88 counties used Diebold machines in 2004. The vast majority of counties used punch-card ballots. So then how are the machines "particularly from Diebold" supposed to have "skewed results in the GOP's favor", as the article claims? If there was any significant bias, wouldn't those two counties have stuck out like a sore thumb, if they are to account for Bush's margin of 118,000 votes?
But in fact, comparing 2000 to 2004, Bush's margin decreased pretty evenly throughout Ohio. If the Republicans gamed the Diebold machines, then they also managed to ga
In Australia its manatory to vote in National and State elections and Referendums.
People who dont get fined.
Our system is very streamlined. Walk in, check your name off a list and vote. The process takes a minute tops.
If people dont care then they can part with some of their money.
Making voting compulsory solves many problems and when done correctly makes the country happier.
We are forced to pay attention to who we are voting for thus having a greater understanding about whats going on.
We also dont get people saying that the Ballots were rigged.
If I don't vote and thereby lose my US citizenship, can I stop paying taxes too?
br>
You can actually stop paying taxes now, and retain your US citizenship. You'll even get room and board for some number of years, and never have to worry about voting again, since felons lose their right to vote...
Not voting in Australia results in a monetary fine.
I fully support compulsory voting, because I believe it encourages some people to be more aware of the relevant issues around election time (though obviously if someone wants to be ignorant you can't force them not to be), and it reduces (not eliminates) the power of highly dedicated groups being able to sway elections too easily (i.e. there is no risk of a party or group who ordinarily wouldn't show up to vote, all showing up and voting a specific way because they're all pissed off about one issue). That said, Australian politicians still pander to such groups to a degree because one group pissed off about an issue can still vote in a coordinated manner, but I *think* its less an issue than in the US, since more people vote, including those on both sides of the issue, rather than just those who stand to suffer negative consequences.
The main criticism of compulsory voting here is that people who don't have an interest in voting will just tick random boxes, or fill out their voting form incorrectly so their vote doesn't get counted (You only get fined for not turning up, as long as you show and take a form, you don't get fined).
So name an older democracy? America is new as a country, but the other democracies that are around now just seem older because their countries weren't always democracies.
I know it's been done before (Rome, etc), but I believe we're the oldest democracy/republic that's still around.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As an Ohioan that voted in 2005, I have to say that the machine I used did indeed have a paper trail. Before the vote was affirmed, a paper tape was displayed inside a locked compartment with a glass window. Each and every choice I made was printed on that paper. I was given an opportunuity to review the entire tape before I affrimed my vote. The paper was then moved into another nonviewable locked compartment. I never had the opportunity to actually touch the paper.
That sounds very much like an audit trail to me...
That seems odd. Arguing that something had "no significant impact" does not mean it did not happen. Are you OK with fraudulent things happening, if they don't affect the outcome?
Only 2 out of Ohio's 88 counties used Diebold machines in 2004. The vast majority of counties used punch-card ballots. So then how are the machines "particularly from Diebold" supposed to have "skewed results in the GOP's favor", as the article claims? If there was any significant bias, wouldn't those two counties have stuck out like a sore thumb, if they are to account for Bush's margin of 118,000 votes?
But the Diebold machines aren't even a major allegation over the Ohio election. Do you deny that many voters were struck from the records, particularly minorities and lower-income people?
Are you denying that there were problems, and people were turned away from the polls? Are you denying that the exit polls had a significant discrepancy from the outcome (something which is not typical)?
... and then they built the supercollider.
And that is another thing.
The burden of proof needs to be on the system.
If the system cannot be shown as correct, then,
why should it be trusted?
emt 377 emt 4
This isn't partisan, the Democrats have done the same thing in the past, and it sucked just as much then. But we did somethign about it.
Really? When did that happen?
You sir are an idiot. You dismiss agruements without thought because they disagree with your prejudices.
It was'nt two young men polling mostly women. It was a work force made up of mostly college aged men (strange how that turned out almost like one side was putting their low level people into the exit polling process intending to skew the process, er, keep them honest after 2000).
The exit polling companys could just release a % female polled number. They refuse. Why? (They know their poll was bad, it was designed to supress Republican voter turnout in the western states.)
I can live with some idiot calling me not a geek. I'm so hurt though. Asshat.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Midterns are in 2 months. Can't have any Republicans win, now can we?
Is this propaganda? http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatu srept1505.pdf
It's places, people, and numbers, timelines and sources, and quotes from at least one court decision that Kenneth Blackwell was not doing his job.
It's not the emotional, name-calling, irrational appeal that most people mean when they say "propaganda".
Between statistics and math.
If you argue with a fool...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
not in the least bit. It is simple logic that if there is obviously no evidence proposing one side, then the other opposing side most likely is true.
The point is not whether things suit me or not, the point is that since there is no evidence to fuel your claims, then your claims are bitching about not getting what you want.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
OK, and who are you to protest an ad hominem response? I know that you failed latin, you son of a motherless pig!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
You have no point, just propaganda.
The argument is that we should've investigated. Are you honestly arguing that we shouldn't investigate until we have proof? The whole point of an investigation is to find proof, one way or the other!
Please read this until you understand. Please do not reply with the same illogical line you keep repeating.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Right.
Of course, the ONLY places where these "millions of conservative voters out there who rightly or wrongly feel betrayed by the mainstream media" live are in Ohio and Florida.
Also, exit polling caused some anti-Kerry districts to have 95+% turnout rates (a totally ridiculous number if you know anything about voter apathy in this country)?
Plus, exit polling is also responsible for illegal voter purges, having less than half the number of voting machines per capita in Democrat-biased areas than there are in Republican-biased areas, etc. etc. etc?
Besides, the article itself (if you'd bothered to read it) addresses exactly the argument you stated and showed why it is complete bullshit.
Oh, also, "some lib from Reuters outside the polling place" is NOT who did the polling. It was not Reuters, and the polling place was hired by several media outlets including Fox News (that bastion of liberal bias).
"We are forced to pay attention to who we are voting for thus having a greater understanding about whats going on."
No, you are forced to go down and at least pretend to vote. I don't know how the voting process works in your country, but I guess you would either get blank, invalid or random votes, depending on how the system works.
There must be people who still don't care.
Propaganda is more then emotional, namecalling. It also includes faulty information and lies, used to weaken one's argument. Just because the source you gave had "places, people numbers" etc, doesn't mean it's not propaganda.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Voting isn't compulsory in Australia.
It's compulsory if you're on the electoral roll, but it's quite legal to not be on the electoral roll. They don't publish this fact very often though...
I haven't voted for years, I'll be b*ggered if those politicians are going to tell me what to do with my Saturday!
I am artificially intelligent.
We are not bitching that we lost. We are asking if he really won.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Maybe voting in at least presidental elections should be required to maintain your US citizenship.
Or how about increasing voter turnout using the carrot instead of the rod:
- Change Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday. Nowhere in the US Constitution does it say that elections must be held on Tuesday, and I'm sure many people agree it's not such a great day to do it.
- Give preferential treatment to responsible citizens when applying for a passport, driver's licence, etc. All you have to do is show your ID that proves you have voted in a number of consecutive elections.
- Discounts on the previous things for citizens who have voted in even more consecutive elections, while throwing in discounts for public transport when you show your special ID...hey, maybe even a parking fine amnesty!
I think these would be pragmatic steps to increase voter turnout. However, with the way things are, the Powers That Be intend on keeping the number low, because if you change the status quo, lobbyists and the corporations they represent lose the upper hand. The current levels of contributions that lobbyists hand out are the difference between winning and losing an election, channeled towards the few undecided people who will vote in battleground states. Their influence is exactly as tremendous as american electoral apathy. They have this down to a science and all of Washington knows it. However, if you increase voter turnout, their contributions will be diluted, which is to say, their power will be diminished. They would no longer be able to make or break presidents! Or governors, or congressmen, etc.
So I don't think any rods or carrots will appear in the foreseeable future.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I was only 14 during that election, I couldn't vote.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
70% anti-republican propaganda. I've been a subscriber for about a year and every time I read one of their propaganda articles I feel sorry for the brainless potheads absorbing this stuff.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In Australia they issue you a small fine if you didn't get your named marked off at polling booth. You don't actually need to vote for anyone - you can put the blank ballot in the box and go home. And it's really easy to dispute the fine (speaking from experience) - if you have anything vaguely reasonable as an excuse you tell them and they drop it with no need to go to court or anything like with parking fines... There is no receipt and no way to prove you voted (other than the electoral commission checking their lists I guess).
The informal voting rate isn't that large - about 5% of the votes cast are informal (there's a great tradition of Donkey voting though - being first on the ballot can give you an extra 1.4% or so, unless you're a woman strangely enough when it gives you nada - Robson rotation would fix that but they don't bother). And the turn out rate is 95%. So 90% of the registered voters (which is essentially everyone 18+ with a few slipping through the cracks - made up for by the dead people who manage to vote somehow) cast a valid vote.
Compulsary voting gets rid of the "get out and vote" idiocy that clearly favours candidates with the resources to round people into buses... It also removes the ability to influence the outcome by preventing people from voting - or at least makes it very noticable if you try.
Are you also going to fight against those who try and make people do other "civic duties" like jury duty?
I suspect compulsary voting would interact badly with first past the post voting, and hence would be a bad thing for America - not that that's an issue - it goes completely against the concept of liberty the US has (though the last few years seem to have shown that liberty isn't so important to most americans but that's an unrelated issue).
I'm just waiting to loose karma for this one but here it goes... Have you ever thought of the possibility that you lost a fair election (well, as fair as any other)? Have you ever thought that perhaps you weren't right? That the majority of the country doesn't agree with you? Its shocking, I know. But in between self righteous rants about how no one in their right mind would vote for the other side try thinking - just once - is your side right? Does your side really represent the majority of the population? (Now that you're all riled up ---> This post is directed at both parties)
...as many times as they want, without having to be a US citizen or even a resident of any of the precinct(s) they decide to vote in.
Anything else is Republican intimidation and fraud.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
It boils down to target marketing.
X% of people will vote D
Y% of people will vote R
Z% are undecided
Each side wants to win, but they need to spend as little money as possible to do so, so that they have money for other elections.
So they each try to get just over 50% of the vote, using targeted ads, are spending the money in just the right places to get that 50% with as little excess as needed.
That used to be very difficult, but now with improvements in information technology, they can develop computer models to very presicely choose where to spend exactly the right amount of money to get 51%
The problem is, that both sides are doing it. I think, that because R's currently are associated with big businesses, they have on their side the advantage of highly trained and talented marketing people; which give them enough of an edge to beat the D's predictions.
In the future, elections will get closer and closer, as the marketing of canditates becomes more focused. Many people will make informed decisions, but the election will be decided by the guy who chooses what time slot to stick campaign ads in.
Personally, I not too disappointed that Bush won; even if there was a small percentage of fraud/manipulation, it's not like he only got 20% of the 'real' votes; if the differance is between 49% and 51%; I really don't think it's particularly awful for the 49%'er to get the job. In the end, it's like Coke vs. Pepsi, you're better off drinking tap water.
While we've always had voter fraud, electronic voting allows the potential for fraud to grow to crazy new heights. In 2004, one precinct here in Ohio had 4000 more votes for Bush than there were people in the precinct (which was only a couple hundred). If you can find the voting totals for Franklin County (it used to be online, don't know if it still is), you'll see some rather impossible numbers. All your dead voters in Chicago couldn't mess up things up as bad as they were in Ohio in 2004.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
The way electronic voting is now set up there is really no way to audit or check the results of what's recorded against what the voter actually entered. because no independent record is kept of what the voter entered. So, no one can say one way or the other conclusively whether or not the votes were recorded accurately. I had a personal encounter with a fellow from one of the auditing companies who claimed to have set up a vote audit procedure for one of the states. He said, they did a black box audit, by setting up dummy voting machines, running votes through them, and seeing if the count was accurate. Of course, it was. His position was that this conclusively showed the machines were accurate. I very strongly disagree. Without any audit at all of the real-time voting process, not even spot-checking, there is no way anyone can validate these systems in operation. The problems found by the Princeton team (see other comments) are only examples. One simply cannot trust any system to be accurate without auditing it in my view. Computer systems have all kinds of design and input-output issues that require monitoring, testing, and controls. Would you put your money in a bank that was never audited (well, I hope not much!) You're putting your votes in a system that's not audited, so don't expect the counts to be accurate. This is especially disturbing when the CEO of the machine that makes the most voting machines (Wally Odell, CEO of Diebold) stated during the last election, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." It has widely been reported that Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel has an interest in another voting machine company. (Hagel did not disclose this until it was reported by others. See http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) In this context, reliable auditing of the systems seems all the more important to me. I do not understand why there is not a strong consensus behind a program for at least doing an audit that would confirm the accuracy of these systems in real time.
Off-year primary this week in Milwaukee (very blue city...in more ways than one) had the city reporting 80,000 ballots cast. A three-day recount of ballots shows 46,500 votes tallied. The recount was asked for by officials after the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel newpaper raised some pointed questions. Even in 2004, there were big issues here. I think that whenever a magnifying glass is put on every election from here on out, there will be issues found and the extremists on all sides of the political spectrum will try to milk it for all its worth. This is especially true as voting becomes more complex. Maybe it is time for the voting process to have some form of double-blind setup as scientists use that can't be politicized. As long as there is some way a loophole can be milked or inserted into the process for fodder, this will keep going on. Me, I am just amused.
look on video google. look up voting machines. people stating before congress that the voting machiens were built to flip votes.
Pay very careful attention to the Conyers report/links to it. Also, there is a lot of info in the online version that was not in the issue that was sold. (I read this the day it was posted, and really dug into it over the course of a few weeks, and it convinced me.) I don't feel like getting into a flame war about this. However I will say there is a hell of a lot that has not come out yet--one reason is the technology and the posibilities of how it happenned is not easily understood by most. (In that respect, it is similar to Net Neutrality.)
Socordissimus asinus es.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
and everyone that bitches about exit polls being lopsided, get a CLUE! I LIE everytime a pollster asks me about who I'm gonna vote for! because it is none of their F'n business! I've a number of friends that also did that.. Trust me, I never bitched all those years my guys lost... (Not always Republican either, so don't jump to that conclusion!)
How many people thought Pero Should have Won? Was it stolen from him? no... Thats just life.
Again, Get over it... It's the Wah-Wah-Wah and inability to support a secured america that will be their downfall again unless they come up with some REAL plans instead of just "Bush did this and it suxs. Don't you hate him too?" type of mentaility that I currently see being offered by the Dems.
But, I warned you, so don't come crying again in 2008...
By the way, if you are afraid of the "Machines" being hacked, do like my plan this year... Vote Absentee... it's 100% papertrail. But you may need to register soon for Primaries... (Oct. 10 hear in Ohio I think.)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
You know what these stories and rants always fail to mention? That the Democrats cheat very heavily in elections as well. I don't think there's been a legitimate major election in Illinois (a Democrat stronghold) in decades, here we get dead people signed up to vote, fictional people voting, absentee votes coming from non-existance addresses....all votes for the Democrats. On top of that there's all sorts of fraud and corruption at pretty much all levels. And the Democrats haven't been above tactics like "slash the tires of the cars of volunteers of the opposition", or having the cops called with bogus complaints.
The Democrats cheat just as much, if not more than the Republicans....that in 2004 they just weren't as good as the Republicans at it is no reason to go whining about "stolen" elections.
Ignoring the question of whether the election was or wasn't stolen, I think it's fair to say that the last two elections in the USA have been very close, as has the latest one in Mexico. This leads to the interesting question: how valid is a system where the outcome goes against the wishes of up to half the voters?
In a parliamentary democracy, what would happen is probably that the largest few parties would form a coalition that held a majority in parliament. They would be in power, but the parliament would still have a say. This way, there's a much closer representation of the various wishes of the voting public.
"Democracy is the mistaken belief that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." It's a nice quote, and especially applicable to systems in where there's only one winner (e.g. the winner-take-all system in the US).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Check out this report on the 2004 election cycle. http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html
Both Iceland and Great Britain, off the top of my head. What is it with the US education system?
I notice this about America. They don't seem to care about the information if the source can be discredited...
Take for example Michael Moore - now I don't live in America so I cannot comment if he is indeed accurate or not - who every few years comes out with some thing which to the average viewer/reader (eg me) appears to be well researched and portrayed yet due to the simple reply by those who dislike his work of "But it was made by Michael Moore" instantly drops it out of concern. Personally in my country if even a few of the claims made in any of the documentaries had been suggested about our government/way of life there would be a huge group of people calling for action and some thing would most likely be done about it. For example the health system in my state seems to be breaking at sides with corruption; the people who brought it to light were completely destroyed publicly by the system and the state government though the general population caught on and now there are inquiries every where and the state government are under huge pressure to fix it. So why do Americans dismiss it without second thought as the bias is blatant (and you are clearly able to see his bias, it is not hidden) and the facts appear supported and open?
This is more of a general question on the topic though Michael Moore is the best example of what I'm trying to ask that I know of, feel free to ignore him completely in any answers.
I ate your fish.
All these arguments about who's more biased or who has "sour grapes" are anti-intellectual clap-trap that serve only to stiffle open discussion of vitally important issues.
Evidence of Democratic fraud does not invalidate evidence of Republican fraud.
It is not "OK" if both sides cheated. Evidence that both sides cheated re-inforces the conclusion that the election was invalid.
Why do people keep doing that? countering accusations of fraud with counter-accusations of fraud? It does not follow from that argument that the election result was an accurate tally of voter intentions, quite the contrary. Are people seriously suggesting that we make an assumption that the level of fraud was "probably about even repub/dem" so we don't need to recount?
I also don't understand why there is any opposition to counting ballots.
If results are very close and/or if anyone doubts the validity of the results I can think of no legitimate reason to refuse to count the paper ballots.
Except one: cost. I have a hard time believing that americans are willing to forgo double-checking their election results because it would cost too much.
Am I the only one here who thinks that fighting to stop a ballot recount should be a criminal offence?
particular points worth expending mod points for:
Evidence of Democratic fraud does not invalidate evidence of Republican fraud.
It is not "OK" if both sides cheated. Evidence that both sides cheated re-inforces the conclusion that the election was invalid.
Am I the only one here who thinks that fighting to stop a ballot recount should be a criminal offence?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There are allegations that some find credible. These allegations
dont get investigated, which would be a requirement to produce
evidence. In the days before everything broke open in watergate,
Nixon didnt do watergate, "because we have no evidence". Before
the investigations into the Clinton affair, he didnt do it,
"because we have no evidence". Paula Jones was just an allegation,
Monica's dress was just an allegation. Because there was no
evidence. So, before the investigations, there was no evidence.
So, there should be no investigation.
Simple logic indeed.
emt 377 emt 4
1845248 ref unperson, unevent, rewrite fullwise.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I don't know about anyone else, but I wouldn't need to read about evidence of electoral tampering to find Penthorse disturbing...
Whether or not this election was tampered with or whether the outcome would have been different, we still need to get more people to the polls. Instead of generating yet more apathy, an article like this should goad more people to get out and vote. It may seem counter intuitive, but more people in the booth will actually create fewer opportunities for manipulation.
Have you read this article?
e dy/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kenn
It does a good job of picking apart pretty much everything Kennedy said. Basically, Kennedy spouts a bunch of numbers, and makes conclusions about what those numbers mean. The Salon article establishes that many of his conclusions are not particularly sound. The process by which Kennedy reached his conclusions didn't really involve math.
By the way, here is some math(or something that looks substantially like math anyway): 2+2=5. If I claim that is true, I am an idiot, it simply isn't credible. To discredit my math, one simple has to count to four.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Absolutely. All those talking points being parroted by the mindless drones of the media come back to mind:
Kerry = flip flopper (whatever the fuck that means).
The sordid Swift Boat fiasco, while Bush = Hero (even though he was AWOL for a year and a half). There is a deep, deep circle of hell awaiting Karl Rove.
A vote for Kerry is a vote for Bin Laden.
In fact, the CIA has officially stated that the Bin Laden tape was put out to scare americans into voting for Bush. Which is to say, Bin Laden wanted Bush to win. Which was obvious. But the press took the grey lard between peoples' ears and molded it in exactly the opposite direction. I can think of nothing worse than being ignorant and scared, and that's precisely what the american press has done to a large amount of its' people.
Who were partners in the failed oil venture Arbusto Inc back in the early nineties? Poppa Bush and Salim Bin Laden (one of Osama's big brothers).
Hey, just keep this tidbit a secret, 'cause whenever Bush supporters hear that one, they foam at the mouth and start screaming "bloody treason, you goddamned liberals, you want the terrorists to win blah blah blah". Well no, 'cause what I'm actually saying is that your beloved president has been compromised.
well ok, but as a control, i'd like to see some analysis on dewey v. truman.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The fact is you have to go vote. Most people wouldnt go to the bother to go vote and then submit a invalid vote.
If you dont want to vote for anyone then you usually go start your own political party. :P
thats right, mod me as a troll because you don't agree with me. Thats right, try to hide the information you fear.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
How? The Wraith and the Ori can actually run a war. The neo-cons, not so much. Truly sad from the party I always percieved as anal retentive perfectionists. Oh well, Mission Accomplished!
-those people who tell you not to take chances, they are all missing what lifes' all about-
no, I am arguing that I am tired of hearing this accusation which has been proven time and time again to be completely bullshit. I have yet to provide any propoganda.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
http://www.cambridgenow.ca/spps/sitepage.cfm?catID =119
The same guy created Penthorse, Cowsmopolitan, Playboar and Vague. He, of course, was not intending to be taken seriously.
Well, if you think that Mr. AWOL G.W. Bush who makes an appearance for political gains landing on an aircraft carrier is better, then well, can I have some of the kool aid too? The 1st 4 years were a joke and im supposed to believe that my Fellow Americans are so stupid as to re-elect him? If I start buying into that we are truly in trouble. It amazes me that fear and ignorance seem to be the main tool of Bush and his dogs, and the so-called patriots eat it up while he screws them @ the same time. Go Red States :|
-those people who tell you not to take chances, they are all missing what lifes' all about-
Well, there's nobody watching you vote, so people turned in blank ballots too. The more paranoid people would nullify them instead to prevent people that are counting the votes from checking the boxes themselves (I don't know if it's actually an issue, but it doesn't hurt to be paranoid). As for the fine, it's the same method in Brazil. After all, they're not going to just not allow you to renew your documents. If you don't have your receipt, you pay a fine, and all is well. Still, generally people don't want to pay a fine, so you get extremely high voting turnout, but I argue that doesn't mean the system is better.
That may be true, but still doesn't solve the problem of people voting for people without doing their research. Name recognition is a huge boost for example. It's the reason why Arnold gets to be governor of California. There are a whole bunch of stupid reasons that causes people to make choices, and although many of those people would stay home, more of them show up if they're forced to show up. Now, if they want to show up and vote for their stupid reason, that's their right, but I see no reason in forcing the other people who don't care to go.
That's pretty interesting. I had no idea you could get so much of an advantage by being first, even when you can turn in a blank ballot. I guess the problem would be even worse if you couldn't because the software forced you to choose someone. Of course, it would also be easier to implement a rotation, but somehow I'd think that they still wouldn't bother.
Those are good points. I guess there are some advantages to compulsary voting, but I still don't think it's worth it.
Yep. Although that's an easy fight, anyone who wants to can get out of jury duty in the US. There's an old joke, "the only people in the jury are the ones that are too stupid to get out of jury duty."
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
If simple people are forced to vote, they'll undoubtedly vote for whoever had the better campaign advertisements. Compulsory voting = even more private money-dependent campaigns. End of story.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Does it really matter anymore ? The truth, and the lies. The propaganda and manipulation before, during and after ? WHoever may or may not be doing this has already succeeded. The American people are more and more polarized everyday. As long as I can have you arguing among yourselves about Christians, Moslems and Jews, 911, the Election and The "War on Terror (what a joke...like terrorism is new), I have won. I will raise your taxes and lower your standard of living and you'll be blaming the Terrorists, the Moslems and Gas prices... It's a game people, and we are merely pawns... Even if we knew the truth no one would want to hear it either way.... Go ahead and vote...and pray...and trust. We all have our own ways... PS (Just my opinion, not a troll)
End of Line.
At least in the states, mandatory voting would be bad. "Mandatory caring" (not possible) would be decent though...
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The truth is the democrats didn't do themselves any favours. Bush how ever bad he was and is, is at least consistent. John Kerry on the other hand had difficulty trying to keep his point of view. The major issue was he couldn't decide whether he was for or against the US in being in Iraq, simply because he was trying to win everyone over, therefore winning few over.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
So where's your proof that it's bullshit?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The New York Times Book Review - Fiction / Sci-Fi,Fantasy
Unless you are rich. In that case, you probably aren't paying any taxes anyway.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Their platform as it stands now:
-withdraw from iraq, try to do so gracefully since were damned if we stay and damned if we go.
-undo the damage to our civil liberties done by the patriot act
-reform social security by removing the blatant privatization bush put in which basically amounts to abolshment (but with the added benefit of commissions to brokers before your stock tanks)
-Universal health care (which responds to the increasing 10s of millions of people without healthcare, and which they make a damned good economic case for!)
-Investigation into bush's illegal activites, followed hopefully by impeachment
-Investigation into oil companies among others for gouging.
Among others.. it's all laid out..
Big media is owned by republicans so you don't see it.. listen to air america and they spend each and every day spelling out those exact same points.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
my proof is the FACT that people have been searching for the last few years to prove your point, and not a single one has been able to come up with a single fact.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Don't give yourself a hernia setting up those strawmen, screechy.
Dean sucked even worse than Kerry or Bush. Remember his plan to make all plug in an electronic ID card before accessing the Internet? Of course you don't. Or you'll pretend that you don't, anyway.
The fact is the Dems didn't field a single credible candidate. Not one.
The only reason the election was as close as it was they were up against Bush.
Good thing they weren't up against someone with the charisma of Reagan or it would've been a slaughter.
On the other hand, maybe that level of defeat would've convinced the remaining sane Democrats to eject the consipiro-nuts from their party once and for all. Instead, they now have Deaniac running the show. Expect further humiliation at the polls.
From Wikipedia:
/. is waiting till NOW to publish this story? I mean, this was A) A Rolling Stone story and B) A June Article. Something that was published THREE MONTHS ago IS NOT NEWS. Secondly, when did Rolling Stone become a reliable news source that was fair and balanced? When did they suddenly become political experts?
"Election of President of the United States and Vice President of the United States is indirect. Presidential Electors are chosen by the popular vote every four years on Election Day. Although ballots list the names of the presidential candidates, voters within the 50 states and the District of Columbia are actually choosing Electors when they vote for President and Vice President. These Presidential Electors in turn cast the official (electoral) votes for those two offices."
(emphasis added)
I find it amazing the sheer number of americans who find time to bitch about the government and don't take the time to understand it. Maybe 1 out of every 5 people I'll talk to know that you aren't voting for the president when it comes time to vote. Having moved from canada just 6 years ago, and knowing more about american government than most americans do, I find this very sad.
It's a few months before the congressional election, and
(I am neither Democrat nor Republican, I am for which is actually making sense, and who I happen to agree with at the time, unlike some who are fanatically and unwaveringly either on the right or left)
In a democracy, accurate polls are essential ...
Ah but you see we've managed to spin that one too. The US "is not a democracy," no, no, it is "a Republic founded on democratic principles." Being non-core, these democratic principles can (and should) be overridden if it is necessary to keep the government in safe hands during times like these when the US is threatened with imminent destruction from the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Great Britain hasn't been a monarchy (technically) since the Civil War (1651) long before American Independence (1776).
We could of course argue about suffrage and what percentage of the population need to have a vote in order to be a "true" democracy - but considering the subject matter of this article that might lead to some very uncomfortable questions.
Some people think that the Democratic machine in Chicago stuffed the ballot box to get Kennedy elected in 1960.
Nowhere in the US Constitution does it say that elections must be held on Tuesday, and I'm sure many people agree it's not such a great day to do it.
It is done this way so that very low-income voters, who tend to vote Democratic and cannot miss a day of work to go vote, have more of a chance of being pushed out of the voting process.
There is no other justification for it.
+++ATH0
For those who live in countries where voting IS compulsory, ever have an instance when there was no one you wanted to vote for?
No. In Australia we have parties like the Fishing Party. No matter how whacky your views are there is a good chance they are represented by some party. Also in the elections for the Senate you have proportional representation. If you get 1% of the votes you get 1% of the seats.
On the other hand if you want to vote for someone who is actually going to get in, well I guess there aren't as many options there.
meh
A recount isn't really possible anymore, you know. Absence of proof doesn't prove a thing, it's just more circular reasoning.
Now, if people like you hadn't stopped any thought of a recount or investigation right there on election night, who knows? And yes, I remember Kerry conceded, he didn't want to look like a sore loser -- and whose fault is it that anyone wanting to see through the full process of democracy is a "sore loser"?
I'll bet you're an atheist, too.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They should send UN observers at the election to make sure that there's no cheating.
'There are lies, damn lies - and statistics.' - Disreali
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I wish I had mod points.
You are absolutely right, the voting system in this Country (The U.S.) is broken! It is broken because Eleven Score and ten years ago, our forefathers decided that the average American was too dumb to vote and thus formend the Electoral College. Since then, the whole damn system has gone full bore down the tubes it was trickling down in the first place.
Perhaps it's time to revamp the voting system...
Make America grate again!
Actually, the article says: "...the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country". Now, there is a subsequent statement that says the "discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. But, I think it's interesting that the article is admitting that precincts where Kerry dominated matched the exit polls, while the biggest discrepancy occurred in precincts where Bush dominated.
The article quotes several people that say they studied the potential errors caused by self-selection bias in exit polls, and concluded that it wasn't the problem. Even they guy who originally floated the theory said: "It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters."
I think that's just a lame attempt to avoid the obvious. Anyone that has been following the national elections for the past few years could tell you that Republicans are furious with the mainstream media for their repeated attempts to influence the outcome of elections. In September, 2004, it exploded in what has come to be known as Rathergate.
I've had the opportunity to vote for Bush in various elections since 1992. I haven't done so once, as I've always thought he was a lightweight riding on his daddy's coat-tails. But even I was flabbergasted at the brazen attempt by CBS to discredit Bush so close to an election.
After I voted in the subsequent election, I was approached by an exit poller. When he asked who I voted for, I told him I voted for Kerry. I didn't vote for either Kerry or Bush, but I intentionally lied. I was so tired of their lies, that I lied to them. I wanted them to forecast the outcome of the election based on erroneous data, and then be discredited (again) when it turned out to be wrong. But, my effort was foiled: when the mainstream media realized that the exit polls weren't coming out as they expected -- even before the election was closed -- they realized that something was very wrong and declined to report them.
I live in an area that votes about 90% Republican, so my actual vote was nothing more than a protest. But if enough Republicans shared my disgust and acted similarly, I'm not the least bit surprised that the discrepancies between exit polls and actual votes were the largest in Republican strongholds.
No, the point is that the election is over. get over it.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Not to dispute your theory because I do believe what you said is correct in ways.
:)
Numbers and maths can be manipulated though. So a lot of geeks won't trust the maths unless they come from a source they trust.. hence we're going round in circles again. Some geeks are also hardcore zealots and you can throw any numbers at them and they will find some way to distort them to ehrie bidding (the old "Security fixs debate" comes to mind).
Also I think we're just as easy to control as anyone else. It just takes the right triggers and you can make any puppet dance. If you found a geek's buttons they could be pressed as easy as anyone else, and the ego most of us have would only make us more likely to keep being fooled rather than seeing we're wrong.
Just a thought
I like muppets.
You can have a secret ballot, or you can have a (mostly) fraud-proof ballotting system. If anyone knows a way to have both, I'd love to hear the details.
Yes, thanks America, for keeping us safe. By safe, I mean that we have troops in Iraq & Afghanistan, fighting YOUR war,our citizens get blown up in Bali for helping YOU out in wars, and Al Queda would like to blow us up, for being on YOUR side.
Offtopic, sure, but the parent comment was too fucking idiotic for me not to reply.
Ohio in 2004 had some dirty stuff going on with a bad secretary of state. Florida in 2000 had some dirty stuff going on in 2000 with a bad secretary of state. As others have mentioned the US has a long history of serious problems in presidential elections, 1960 being a notable instance. At the municipal level things have been very bad too at times. Determining just how corrupt an election is, is difficult. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans have taken a longterm interest in clean elections.
There are other problems too. One of the big problems is the statistical tie. This is basically what happened in the Washington state race for governor and the Florida presidential election. The voting technology in use isn't that great and there is in practice a margin of error due to hanging chads, butterfly ballots, faulty computer hardware or software etc. With votes numbering in the millions the margin of error due to votes that aren't clear or properly recorded is hundreds at minimum. The result is if Bob leads Joe in Michigan by 300 votes that really doesn't mean anything because the margin of error is say at least 800 votes. To use the legal phrase the will of the voters is not determinable. There is no winner. It is a tie. Of course the US system has no provision for ties so things get really messy. This explains the Washington state governor's race I think, but it does not account for all of corruption, disenfranchisement and dead people voting elsewhere.
Please remember how long it took for the 19th Amendment to get through. (which gave women the right to vote in the US, approximately 50 years after Blacks were given the right to vote)
_ to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
the dems and libs suck it up and face the fact they lost again? Stop the mud flinging and start saying what you will do better. I would have considered voting the other way if kerry would have said more then "i have a plan for this and that". yeah ok what is that plan? But i never saw one... oh well.. flame me if you wish.. will just back-up my thinking that dems and libs always throw mud.
Uh, hang on - who would be invading if you weren't "defending" us? Indonesia? You're a fucking joker, YOU should be thanking Australia for throwing its teenaged boys into bullets every time your misguided administrations decide to pick a fight. America's "support" consists of using our uranium, forcing trade agreements down our throats, parking their spy stations on our land, and asking for our help in various conflicts. Gee, thanks. Why I'm letting your stupendously ignorant bullshit bother me enough to respond, I really don't know. This will be the last time.
I guess the Demopubs need to find something to say since they don't seem to be organized enough to have a platform for the next election. Sort of funny, the Dems complaining about a "stolen" election when Mayor Richard Daley was caught stuffing the ballot boxes during JFK's election (wonder why folks never mention that while they're complaining about losing an election). JFK even joked that his father Joe (who made his money as a bootlegger during Prohibition) told him to only buy the votes needed to win because he wasn't paying for a landslide". Oh well, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
(And I, for one, ignore our new overlords)
Look at the video on this page.
Rep Peter King (R-NY) spills thebeans
A quote from the page:
Alex Pelosi's new film "Diary of a Political Tourist" catches a tipsy Congressman Peter King making a comment at a White House function before the election had been finished that, "It's already over. The Election's over. We Won."
When Pelosi asks, "How do you know that?" King replies, "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
~~~~~~~~~~~~end quote
James Baker III bragged to Russian businessmen after the 2000 election about fixing the election for Bush in Florida.
"I fixed the election in Florida for George Bush." James Baker, Bush family lawyer speaking before a crowd of Russian businessmen.
photosMy Photostream
The Democrats have done the same kinds of things in the past, but people noticed, and they got angry, and they did somethig about it.
When? Chicago during the Kennedy/Nixon election. Kennedy won by a very small margin... so close that removing a few dead Chicago voters would have made a difference in the election. "The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit challenging the Chicago results. Not coincidentally, the lawsuit was assigned to the courtroom of a judge known to be friendly to Daley and the Democratic party, Circuit Court Judge Thomas Kluczynski. After predictably dismissing the Republican suit, Kluczynski was rewarded by "President" John F. Kennedy with an appointment to the federal bench." "Following Kennedy's inauguration, the U.S. Department of Justice performed an inconclusive investigation into the accumulated evidence of voter fraud. The head of the DOJ was none other than U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, brother of you-know-who." (From here... good read, I recommend it!)
In other words, I have to call Bullshit on people's anger stopping the Dem's from cheating. With all the tire slashing that happened during this last election, bums given cigarettes and rides to the polls, the retarted taken to the polls with instructions on who to vote for, and of course, I should not mention how many Bush signs were stolen from my front yard, stickers removed from my bumper, keys removing the paint from my car and flyers claiming that the vote has been moved to Wednesday left under my wipers(!!!). I live in Texas BTW, I can't immagine that shit that must go down in Mass, RI, or Ill! Now I'm not saying that Republicans are 100% innocent, but don't give me that bullshit that the Dems don't cheat any more. I've seen them do it first hand. I have never actually seen a Republican cheat, nor read any sustantial proof. (just read about it here, a trusted news source, no doubt)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
So, who's responsible? Is this considered "treason", Or just "fraud". If such a scam gets wholly exposed (which is unlikely in this day and age, but we'll just cross our fingers here), what happens? Is the election overturned, or the current president just impeached? Does someone hang, or just get a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to?
Without a truly impartial review board with limited power over the presidency exists, and a system of accountability is established, there's almost no point in voting at all. At this point, it'd almost take another civil war, or revolution to fix things.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
I think it's fair to say that all the reasons stated above for holding elections on a Tuesday, while stellar in their reasoning for the nineteenth century, are now obsolete. Read on...
Although measures have been taken in some places, clearly it's too little at this late stage of the game. If the american public wants to scare the pants off the Washington lobbyists, a good place to start would be to campaign for Election Saturdays. Ironically, it's something that will probably be decided on a Tuesday.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
First off, I live in Louisiana, while we may not have invented scummy politicians, we did perfect them. The following are in jail or have been in jail, a former Governor, a former State Rep, three Insurance Comissioners in a row, and that is the short list. Then there is Congressman Jefferson and his cold hard cash. Here the Democrats use race amongst all of their tools to win office. Jessie Jackson among others were saying that they were going to challenge the results of the elections in New Orleans, when it looked like Nagin was going to lose. They weren't saying "if", they were saying, "we will challenge the election." When Nagin won, that all went away...interesting... We have all of these people who aren't living in Louisiana anymore after Katrina and Rita, but they'll be able to vote for who knows how long in our elections. This is a dream come true for so many politicians, they don't live here, so they don't know how bad the politicians are, and all the politicians have to do is send them a ballot every election. And people wonder why I am so eager to leave when I graduate, but at least I'll be able to vote.
Now that I've established that, I wouldn't be shocked about problems in Ohio, or anywhere else for that matter. The Democrats are most upset that the red-neck Republicians out played them at their own game. I am surpised at how many people actually voted for Kerry, or did they first vote for him and then against him? In Louisiana politics I have to sometimes vote for a Democrat, as he/she is the best one for the job. With the presidential election I did the same thing, and it was a no brainer to pick between Bush and flip-flop Kerry. Kerry just didn't have anything to offer, he tried to please everyone, which I've seen too often down here to fall for that trick. The Democrats shot themselves in the foot with that one. I could go on, Blanco Nagin , but I have things to do....
I wasn't going to post in this thread, but "The Man" probably already has a file on me, so I'll go ahead and excercise my first amendment rights and comment.
My comment is this: so what? The president cheated. It seems pretty clear that something fishy was going on in the 2004 election. I am from Ohio, I saw as our shameful Secretary of State (possibly our future governor) stood by his man and took 3rd party candidates off the ballot to make it easier for his master to get re-elected. As much as I didn't want Bush re-elected, I accepted the "truth" like everyone else did. I was even suspiscious. But what's going to happen? Is the Republican controlled Congress going to investigate? Is the Republican appointed Supreme Court going to invalidate the election two years after the fact? Is an armed militia going to march down to the White House and give control back to the people?
No. None of this is going to happen. As much as our commander in chief goes around waving his flag and talking about how we are "spreading freedom" across the globe, we have lost our freedom in this country. Even if this article is 100% true, nothing will ever come of it. You know why? There are two ways of dealing with those who dissent. One way is to kill them all. Stalin did this, and it worked for a while, but he tends to be frowned upon by history. The other way is to just ignore them. What are they going to do? Post an angry article in their blogs? Write a letter to their congressman? Write and host a satirical fake news show? Even worse, are they going to show the fat cats in Washington and run for office themselves? At the end of the day, nothing will happen. Don't think that the Democrats are any better. The illusion of politics is that you actually have a choice. You don't. All the people in power just take turns passing it around to each other. They pretend to disagree about the issues, but they all have one thing in common. They all want to wear the crown and carry the sceptre. The most devious ones make it to the top, and the others end up getting jobs as high paid lobbyists or fade out of existance.
So here is what I'm choosing to do. I'm not stupid enough to fight the system. It's like swimming against a rip tide. You swim and swim against the current, and you never get anywhere. Eventually it takes you out to sea, and you die. Instead, I'm going to make the best life I can for myself and my family. I stand up for my rights where I can. I write my congressman, and read about the issues, but I don't fool myself into thinking I can make a difference. Most importantly, I put blind faith in the idea that what goes around comes around. I am not a member of an organized religion, but I'm not arrogant enough to think I know how the universe works. I think there are other facets to our existance that we can't even begin to comprehend. I believe that in some way, in some form, the people who do evil in this world face subsequent consequences in the next. I strive to be the best person I can in this one, and hopefully I will be rewarded. If not, hey, at least I didn't waste my whole life on this Earth stressed out about something I can't do anything about. Sometimes, the blue pill isn't all that bad.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
You're a perfect illustration of why I won't vote for Democrats for the time being.
Thanks for the refresher.
Those who go down there and make honest, informed choices (i.e. the ones who can actually NAME the candidates a week after the election) CARE; those who do NOT go down there (or go down and file null or despoiled ballots) are the ones more likely to bitch and piss and moan about the results.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
You don't actually need to vote for anyone - you can put the blank ballot in the box and go home.
While commendable when the only good option is "None Of The Above" Down Under, there are other countries where this is extremely dangerous for the democratic process. Certain parties in many countries will find it irresistible to fill in the ballots in the process of sorting and counting the ballot. A case in point would be Mexico, where the vote consists of crossing the candidate's country with a black crayon, one ballot for each public office under contest, then each ballot goes into the appropriate urn (again, one for each public office).
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
We had Republican gubernatorial administrations for a quarter century until the most recent. So if, as you claim, there are no legitimate elections here, the Democrats apparently have been cheating for the purpose of bringing in Republican administrations for decades. So you have to admit that they at least are evenhanded in cheating on behalf of everyone.
As to Democratic corruption, the last Republican governor, George Ryan, was just sentenced to six years in Federal prison for...corruption. The point is not that both sides engage in this type of behavior, but that it can't be condoned or excused because "everybody does it". It needs to be exposed wherever it occurs by whoever engages in it.
(If you replace "Illinois" with "Chicago" in your post, I think i might be inclined to agree with you, though).
The terms "far left" and "Democrat" are mutually exlusive. Democrats are typically centrist, many of them increasingly right-leaning.
Umm... do you know what the term mutually exclusive means? "Far left" and "Democrat" are NOT mutually exclusive terms. A person can, in fact, be a Democrat and be "far left" at the same time -- depending on your definition of "far left," I suspect that this is actually quite common. A person could even be "far left" and a Republican, although that would be rather improbable under most circumstances. Democrat and Republican, on the other hand, are mutually exclusive.
I feel like the Republican party is not necessarily to blame. All I see in my state (Utah, WAY Republican) is new Diebold machines with the voter-verified paper that you get to check after you vote.
Maybe I'm missing something, though. If so, please enlighten me.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Gore was obviously the "designated loser" in that election. It's also true, however, that Bush was so bad that they STILL had to use fraud to win. It wasn't even supposed to be close. Nobody was more unattractive than Gore stumping for president, not even Adlai Stevenson. Except that Bush was so revolting that there WAS someone more unattractive.
So the election was corrupt, and even with Diebold counting the votes Bush couldn't put on a good show. They had to get the Supreme Court to seal the counts to get Bush in. And it STILL was clearly corrupt. There wasn't enough white-wash available (or, more likely, they really didn't care).
The interesting question that I haven't been able to resolve is "Who is this 'they'?" Suspicion has to fall on the CIA if only because Bush the elder was an ex-head...but suspicion isn't proof. Actual hard proof it hard to come by anywhere in this mess. A few small things are evident. (E.g., precincts where people turned in 200% of the vote or more are obviously fraudulent...though one can't PROVE a software bug. Strange that all such went to Bush, but bugs are unpredictable. Reports of votes that change their contents AS the person hits the button to submit their vote. Strange. And all the reports say that they changed into a vote for Bush.) Well, no matter how many anecdotes you hear, there's always some explanation, however flimsy. And you can't effectively challenge them. But you don't have to believe them.
The interesting thing is, it's looking already like the next election will be as corrupt as the last one. All the major engines of corruption that operated last time are still in place. One can't PROVE that it's because of intentional malice that they're still in place. The voting registrar that I braced about the Diebold machines said "but we signed a contract with them", as if that excused criminal negligance and/or malfeasance.
Well, I'm submitting an absentee ballot. Yes, they'll probably just throw it away, but at least they have to forge the entire ballot. Big deal. I'm sure that gives them not problems. But it does require that they admit to themselves what they're doing. I.e., commiting treason.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And Dave Schroeder, regardless of whatever it is that would make you try to defend him, to Hell with you.
The above comment epitomize what, in part, I believe is wrong with political discourse in this country (USA). We can't disagree in a civil manner. No, no, no... We have to turn around and name call and tell people to "rot in hell" among other things. Our debates turn into the fights small children have:
Child 1 to Child 2: "you're a poop poop head"
Child 2 to Child 1: "You're a ca-ca face"
Except replace the names with nastier ones.
You don't have to agree with your oppenent, but remember they're a human being too. Be civil.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I'm not an American. I am gob-smacked at the head-in-the-sand attitude being displayed by Republican supporters on Slashdot.
From the article:
"According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion."
This is something to be VERY concerned about, not to be brushed aside with some facile quip.
The article also mentions the fact that the Democrats don't seem to be pushing the issue of electorial fraud, which rather puts the lie to all the posters claiming that this is about Democrats not accepting defeat. The reality is, that had this election been held in a third world country, we would all be decrying it as a case of clear electorial tampering and demanding a fresh election with neutral observers in place.
When you fail to care whether the electorial process was tampered with, you fail to care about democracy at all. What's more important? GW winning or democracy itself? To me, that's a no brainer, but clearly that's not the case for many of the Republican supporters here and as a member of TheRestOfTheWorld, that's a real worry for me. You need to sort your priorities out.
Of course, even if the election of 1960 was stolen, it was to get JFK in office isntead of Nixon, whereas the election of 2004 was to keep GWB in office instead of any other random person.
It's akin to the difference between robbing a bank so you can live in the Caymans the rest of your life, vs. robbing a bank so you can purchase and torture small children(1). The means might be identical, even the ends might be the same, being president, but the actual results varied rather largely.
And now I'm imagining paranoid Nixon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1) Like John Yoo says, the president is legally allowed to crush the testicles of the children of people we suspect of being terrorists to make the parents talk.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm surprised that some citizen in good standing (No tickets, no misdemeanors, no felonies, makes good money, is well respected in their neighborhood,) hasn't legally issued a citizen's arrest against the President for Treason. Our citizen's arrest powers, from what I'm reading, are not limited to other citizens, they can go all the way up the chain if one has the backing and evidence to support it. We've already 'witnessed' the crimes, everyday on Television, and Rumsfeld last week came out with the excuse that we invaded Iraq, crying "Think of the oil prices!" Which tells me we did start a war over another nation's oil. These morons are confessing right in front of our faces and we're damned-near blind to it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's nonsense to suggest that just because something happened in the past we should all simply accept the outcome and move on
It's ironic that you chose the phrase "move on", the Democrats used that very same phrase when we bitched about how the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media duped the general public into believing that the Clinton impeachment was "just about sex". Hell, they even built a political movement around it. Perhaps they should follow their own advice.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
From a political perspective, this is huge for both parties, expect the dirt to be knee deep.
Obviously he's never been to Illinois, Wisconsin, or New Jersey. Or Louisiana
To elect a guy who "..actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Kerry's top Ten Flip-Flops
Compared to Kerry, I'll take Bush anyday. At least he doesn't flipflop on issues. I can't imagine how
Kerry in office would have handled Iraq (total withdrawal??), Katrina (yeah, save the people), the economy
(raise taxe$) and other issues.
Bush may not be perfect, but he's no John Kerry...
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
-withdraw from iraq, try to do so gracefully since were damned if we stay and damned if we go.
So, the Democrats' official position is that Iraq's hopeless? Wow, I'm inspired with confidence. The solution of "no solution". Great.
-undo the damage to our civil liberties done by the patriot act
Yes, because the majority of the U.S. population is so pissed off that you can look at library records. Forgive me, but the PATRIOT Act is by far the least of my concerns. As someone who has done more than his fair share of studying national security issues, I recognize the need for something that goes well beyond FISA, which was designed to operate against different kinds of threats.
-reform social security by removing the blatant privatization bush put in which basically amounts to abolshment (but with the added benefit of commissions to brokers before your stock tanks)
Make Social Security insoluble. Great. Pardon me as I run for the ballot box...
-Universal health care (which responds to the increasing 10s of millions of people without healthcare, and which they make a damned good economic case for!)
Because it's worked oh so well for Europe and Canada! Quick, let's all jump on that bandwagon! And where do you plan on getting the funding for all of this?
-Investigation into bush's illegal activites, followed hopefully by impeachment
DOWN WITH BUSHITLER! Please, did you bother to read the post above?
-Investigation into oil companies among others for gouging.
Because there could only be one source for all the world's problems - rich people.
Among others.. it's all laid out..
I sincerely hope this isn't a serious party platform. Please, please tell me that your post is some kind of sick joke. No serious group could put this forward and expect people to vote for them.
Big media is owned by republicans so you don't see it.. listen to air america and they spend each and every day spelling out those exact same points.
And, of course, the big time media conspiracy theory which I don't buy from the right wing and find particularly fatuous when coming from the left. Yes, I must listen to the great Air America and exorcise the right wing demons like Ted Turner! Save me! Why, I've been wasting all of this time reading ridiculous publications like Foreign Affairs, Policy Review, and the Christian Science Monitor when I could've been listening to some idiot and paid political actor with a BA in Government tell me what to think in the form of nice, compact bumper sticker slogans! Oh, the fool I must be! I must throw away my entire library of books written by influential political thinkers and replace it with Al Franken and Noam Chomsky ravings!
If you're looking to convince me your party has anything resembling a platform, you've failed miserably.
I have absolutely no problem with that. Both Clinton and Bush should have been impeached.
Both of them contributed to the decline in esteem of the presidency, as did most of the presidents in the last 40 years.
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1057
Interesting to see that the only president who people outranks Bush in the failure score is Nixon. Rounding out the bottom 4, we have Johnson and Viet Nam, and Ford screwing up by pardoning Nixon and saying he had to, when he clearly didn't.
What would happen if you walked in, ticked your name off, then didn't vote and just wrote "Screw you!" on the ballot paper. It's a secret ballot, right? So you didn't vote, but.. you kinda did. That's what I'd do.
Um, no you didn't. Every single frigging election, votes in wisconsin and illinois are forged profusely for the democrats, and yet nothing's ever happened.
And anyone who wants to can get out of voting in Australia - the fine thing is seriously trivial to have an excuse for. Of course most people just spend the 10 minutes going to the nearest polling place and voting on the way to the shops or whatever (elections are on Saturdays) - since unlike jury duty it's not taking time of work, potentially weeks or months of substantially reduced income, and of course the slim chance of ending up on a mob hit list...
Australia has good scrutiny making that unlikely. If you're sufficiently paranoid you can just create an informal vote by putting 1s in all the boxes, or writing "They all suck" across the page...
However, local areas for things like judges, mayors, council members, State Senate and the like are prone to fraud because the numbers and precincts are low.
Perhaps even to the Govenor level in the smaller states.
Voting area's are typicaly challenged for historical reasons ... such as a large number of dead or non-existent people voting.
Knowing human nature, Vote fraud certainly exists.
Also knowing human nature, claimes of vote fraud where none exist is a certainty too. It's done to challenge the victor and to steal validity. It's the deamonization process to undermine the other side.
Poll fraud also exists and is done in several ways. Poll fraud is done to discourage the voters on the other side. Just like west coast/east coast thing, where if they show the other side is likely to lose, discourages the supports of the other party to show up and vote.
The voting process should be simple. To register to vote, you establish your identity, and you get a voters registration card. When you go vote, you show them your registration card and they mark you as voted.
The only problem is, certain areas have some advantages to *not* making the voting process simple, to not make voters establish Identity or citizenship, and they always fight these vote/registration changes tooth and nail.
The article presented here has too many half truths, too many urban legends/myths, and too many instances where doubters have to prove a negative.
It's always intresting in slashdot reading the politics part as there are alot of comments witch most are worthless reading and thus get stripped away by the threshold :)
Yeah, because two wrongs make a right! Dumbass.
"I agree that the polarization is getting worse, but I don't think the Internet is to blame."
Here's the cause (IMO): Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, Harpers, September 2004
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Hey! The neocons can run a war just fine! They're making plenty of money!
In related news, we've apparently completely lost the Anbar province, the entire western third of Iraqi, to 'al-Qaeda in Iraq'.(1) We no longer are bothering to even try to control Anbar, and apparently can't according to some recently leaked classified reports, so no longer have to drive across that damn desert anymore, and, hell, they didn't even have any oil.
And the north, of course, is happily in the hands of the Kurds, where they're having lots of fun advertising on TV and infiltrating across to Turkey and blowing up them up. I'm hoping it will be Turkey/Kurdistan trying for a 1980 Lebanon/Israel, where Turkey invades(2) and controls them for a few decades, and experiences even more and more terrorist working with native Turkey Kurds. They'll have their work cut out for them, because Lebanon is back in the game, baby, and they're not about to let their title get taken away sitting down!
And Iran is stepping in to control the remainer of the country. Luckily, they have experience at running oil wells, so that should work out nicely. Perhaps in a few years, they could remain themselves Iranq or Ira? The Kurds, of course, are 'Kurdistan', leaving 'Iraq' for the west, if they want it.
See, we should be entirely out of Iraq really soon, because soon the Iraqis will be able to fight the war all by themselves. Is it a civil war if there are three sides? Maybe a trivil war?
1) You know, the organization that didn't even exist until two years ago. Luckily, right now they're just killing us over there, and I'm sure they won't come over here, because...well..I forget, but I'm sure there's a good reason they won't. Probably they're scared of flying, what with all those airplanes flying into buildings. (And most soldiers are poor, anyway, so does it really matter if they die?)
2) We could complain, but seem to recall us invading a country just a few years ago because they supported terrorists, although I forget the name.(3) Starts with an A. Man am I glad that war was over, although it sucks we lost and the Taliban are back in charge. It probably wasn't that important, though. I mean, what did the Taliban ever do to anyone? They did blow up those giant Buddhas, but, frankly, those statues didn't look anything like Buddha anyway.
3) Not that we could complain if they just invaded for no reason at all. They could always assert that Kurdistan is hiding, for example, a black hole and a slingshot to launch it at them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That doesn't make any sense. The terms "far left" and "Democrat" are mutually exlusive. Democrats are typically centrist, many of them increasingly right-leaning.
Support "abortion rights"? Check! Support "Gun Control?" Check! Support Federal versus local control of everything? Check! Oppose tax cuts? Check! Oppose privatizing anything? Check!
That, sir, is a far left agenda.
Maybe it would be a different matter if the President got a Blow Job.
Laura seems kind of hot to me, I'm sure that at least once or twice the Presidential knob has been spit polished. If President Bush were being sued for sexually harrassing one of his subordinates and then during a deposition lied under oath about his sexual proclivities with his subordinates AND the opposition hadn't ignored the law when their guy was on the chopping block then sure, we'd happily support impeachment.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Both Clinton and Bush should have been impeached.
um... clinton was impeached. The hearing just came out his way.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Any time there's a story on wrong-doing, it all comes down to "everybody does it." That's the worst position I've ever heard.
Not everyone does it, and if they do, they should be investigated, convicted or if that fails, they should be exposed to the point where there is such public outrage that they're thrown out of office.
My politics are left-wing and I support the movement to purge the DLC and corporate democrats. The only reason I am part of that movement is because of the internet, something you say is a threat to "our system." Well maybe, but I think it is actually a threat to THEIR SYSTEM, because one day my right-wing counterparts will wake up and realize their party is also over-run with corporate puppets, and start voting Libertarian or someone else in who isn't bought off by lobbyists. People will stop getting their news from the corporate press, and will go to places like opensecrets.org to get facts about who actually pays for legislation.
I got off-topic from the vote-rigging, but I was making a point that your apathy and defeatist attitude is not helping the cause to expose corruption. Vote-rigging is the worst crime against our democracy, but you'd rather attack a democratic medium such as the internet for bringing up the issue. In your world, democracy is dangerous, ignorance is strength, down is the new up.
I know of no (democratic) country that has compulsory voting that has any law against turning in a blank ballot.
Most of the issues opponents of compulsory voting have are really dealt with. The only real problem I have with compulsory voting is that a perfectly legitimate reason for not voting is that you consider the whole deal a farce. But turning in a blank ballot will generally make much the same statement.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You know how newly modernizing third world countries skipped all the legacy technology and went straight to state of the art phone networks in the last 5-10 years, while older rich countries kept adding incrementally to their old systems?
The US has a very old democracy. It started way over 200 years ago, and the traditions are from that era. By 1770's standards, their current electoral system is a miracle of fairness and accuracy.
But by the standards of European countries who only fully accepted democracy in the last 100 years, and instituted modern state of the art systems when they did, it's a bizarre medieval mess.
Hope that helped!
It's more a symptom of the 2 party system than anything. It's much easier to carry out operations undermining democracy when you only have two powers among which power is divided. You have more people in the right places, and less oversight.
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Take a look at the pic of "the average guy" railing at the courthouse in 2000. They're all GOP operatives who swapped their suits for blue-collar costumes. They're power-mad liars, and we live in a banana republic. George will nuke Iran based on God's will, i.e. the voices in his head. God help us all.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Without forgetting the possibility that an election was or in the future could be easily rigged, let's take some of the time we're spending throwing around wild accusations and conspiracy theories and spend it seeking out candidates that will pull the US out of its current spiral. If we have candidates available to us that are not as dumb/evil/corrupt/ignorant, we'll all be better off. The disenfranchisement, bickering and schoolyard 'my-team's-better-than-yours' mentality are ruining America faster than Bush can.
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Australia has good scrutiny making that unlikely.
I agree wholeheartedly. In fact that's my point. It speaks volumes about a society in which one can show up and perform a non-vote as a form of protest. In fact, I would love to think that non-votes are also tabulated and presented statistically, for they are also a voice.
If you're sufficiently paranoid you can just create an informal vote by putting 1s in all the boxes...
That is a great idea. Let me tell you why I'm interested in this. I happen to live in Mexico, and I voted this past July. I know some people who did not vote, as an act of protest. I was angry at them at first, but I've come to respect their decision. However, what still bugs me is the futility of their non-gesture, lost, as Roy in Blade Runner says, like tears in the rain.
Now, in Mexico we take it as a matter-of-fact that the government has for decades commited massive acts of electoral fraud. We hope this is changing, but the horrid electoral noise this year also makes us remember that we don't have the political maturity that Oz, Canada and many european countries have. But that's a story for another time.
My point is that in all truthfullness, we have to work on the assumption that only a limited number of governments will refuse to exploit a blank ballot to their advantage.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Maybe US should buy the voting machines from India and save a bunch of money from going to Deibold.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Really, it's all a load of crap anyway. In the end, the only guarantee is that the government will get bigger and more intrusive, while at the same time doing less useful work. Government that big isn't about us, it's about itself.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
As a long time Ohio resident I have no doubt what-so-ever that the election here was stolen.
Failure to show up and get your name crossed off the list on election day results in a fine.
Note the only compulsory part is showing up, whether the voter actually filled out the ballot correctly or not (incorrect ballot forms, otherwise known as "donkey votes", do not count) is irrelevant.
The US was attacked by terrorists. Historically, we don't get attacked by terrorists very often and guess what -- we don't like it. The rest of the world has become accustomed to terrorism -- learned to live with it. I guarantee we will never be content with frequent terrorism. How you can be is beyond me, but hey -- enjoy your outback. Alternatively, you can do something about it. Like Americans do.
And just what is it we Americans do about it? We turn off our brains while they send the military to blow the shit out of people who had nothing to do with it? We hide under our beds whenever we fart because it might be a terrorist gas attack? Actively assist in the creation of a DNA database by "registering" our kids with it? Defend all sorts of bullshit "security" measures which aren't?
Yeah, we came out of this one a winner all right. Keep waving that flag and don't stop beleiving in the tooth fairy, either.
"The simple fact is that more than half the population feels the election was stolen"
While you're pointing out the finer points of logical deduction, how about something to back up that particular gem?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
only providing enough polling booths for the turnout based on the previous election
turning voters away at voting day based on some dubious criteria
disenfranchising working voters by holding elections on working days
The benefit of maintaining the integrity of the voting system (from the point of the government properly administering an election) far outweighs the cost to the "right not to vote".
Compulsory voting also diminishes the influence of ideologically extremists who vote not because they are informed.
The ballot should be preferential and the first candidate should be "The ballot ends here", so if someone numbers the ballot straight down, it is an indication that the voter votes for no one solving your "scary" scenario.
Has anyone ever been polled after voting? If so, did you answer honestly? Or answer in a way to help your canidate? Most smart voters know the purpose of the exit poll is to keep voters at home. What other purpose would releasing expected vote counts before the polls are closed serve? Let the folks that haven't voted watch a little TV, see their canidate is ahead, and stay at home. For that reason, anyone that tells the truth to an exit pollster is hurting their canidate.
Bottom line is a win is a win. If the ref doesn't see the foul before the game is over--there is no foul! Conspiracy theorist are going to love seeing the price of gas shoot back up to $3.00 a gallon after the mid-term elections. Amercians tend to have a very short memory. Come election tim, expect to pay $1.25 a gallon and see a bunch of ads linking our successful War on Terror to the decrease in prices. The sucker play will be when gas prices plummet a few months before the 2008 elections.
With so much "conclusive" evidence, one would think a lawsuit would have been filed by now.
Piss or get off the pot already. If you have evidence, call the ACLU. Stoking conspiracy theories on the Intarweb just wastes all of our time.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
As always, thanks for the laughs.
Most of your post is simply too absurd to bother with responding to, but I'll have some fun while I'm here:
First, naom chomsky and Al Franken are influential political thinkers.. or maybe lies and lying liars didnt make it to the the top 10 best sellers list?
So, I should read Ann Coulter as well? Great! She's influential! Stupid, but influential! She's on a top 10 list!
By influential, I mean people that write things policy makers read and have some hope of being implemented: Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Scott Sagan, John Mueller, Thomas Friedman, et al. People with doctorates in relevant fields, people who have worked on this. People who have done analysis or worked in the field. Not op/ed page dwellers that make a quick buck off of political rantings. Not linguistics professors who have made a living writing rants that find a home amongst Marxists.
Finally.. that whole rant just pegged you as an extreme neofascist right wing nutter.
Help, mommy, he's calling me names! Oooh... fascist. The left's favorite word! I'm so scared by it, ooooooh!
Those publications you seem to sarcastically laud in your shameless frothing rant have been thoroughly debunked as extreme right, and it's been shown from first hand witnesses that anything opposed to the right wing agenda since '01 has been kept out of the main stream by zealous editors, corporate chiefs, etc because it would be "bad for america"...
The Council on Foreign Relations has been "debunked as extreme right"? Are you really so stupid as to say something like that? No, seriously, if you post in response, I'd like you to type exactly those words - "The CFR has been debunked as an extreme right organization". They'll make a great sig for me. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I mean at all? Have you heard of these publications? Read them? Or is anything other than The Nation simply a right-wing rag? Who, precisely, has debunked these publications? Where is your evidence? Oh wait... you don't need any... BUSH SUCKS, FASCIST!
Make Social Security insoluble. Great. Pardon me as I run for the ballot box...
better than making it "nonexistant".. by the way making it actually worth something to people by reforming it and undoing bush's rediculous privatization does not necessarily mean making it insoluble.. it may however mean that corporate executives will have to get 3 solid gold hum-v's this year instead of 4.
Yes, we should really stick with the present social security system, which is bound for failure in the next few decades, just to make sure no one gets "solid gold hum-v's" (which should be HMMWV, but hey, it's not like you're concerned with accuracy). Riiiiight...
Social Security will, effectively, become "nonexistent" unless massive reforms are made. Personally, since you're so concerned about rights and freedoms (vis-a-vis your position on the PATRIOT act), if the government wants to invest money in a retirement account for me, I'd like the choice of where that money goes rather than trusting the government (something you obviously have issues with) to put it into a system which depends on birth rates the U.S. is highly unlikely to sustain in the long-term.
Take a look at similar programs in countries whose present birth rate reflects what the U.S. birth rate will be in a few decades - here's a hint, it's not pretty. For someone who's supposedly so concerned about government intervention in our lives, working against a program that would allow people to exercise some freedom over how THEIR money is spent for THEIR retirement rather than just placing it all in a system that will not be able to provide for them in a few decades would seem to make sense. But your positions aren't based on personal consistency - simply arguing the contrary of what someone you don't like says.
As to the rest... heh, thanks for the laughs. It was a boring boring BORING (as you seem to like to type it) repeat of the gibberish found throughout the left and about as enlightening as reading a Franken/Chomsky/Coulter/Limbaugh debate.
"illiterate people have just as much right to choose who represents them as literate people do." ...but how the hell are they going to read the ballot?
Are we currently discriminating against brain-dead people? Doesn't seem like most voting booths are very accessable to the brain-dead. From the representation we end up with, it sure looks like they are getting the job done somehow. Maybe they wheel them in at the end of the night or something....
I wouldn't asy the story is bogus outright, but I don't trust *any* of the political parties. My relatives are election judges ( the members themselves are fairly fluid as to their political affiliation voting for regan, then bush I, clinton, Dole, Bush II, and then Kerry) who were discusted with what they saw in 2004 by both parties. It was all local grass root partisan crap. Each Parties Observers kept challenging everything, the local party lawers were called in several times. It was weird stuff, In Wisconson, where its legal to register and vote at the same time, One party's operatives brought in a busload of people from a mental institiution who tried to use had writen birthday cards to establish residency, identification, and age. The other party, in apparent retaliation went to a retirement home and picke up a buch of people, most of which had already registered and voted at the same polling place. it was a mad house, in the southern Wisconson, Northern Illinois area. I wouldn't be suprised if it was repeated elsewhere, but I really couldn't blame any party more than the other. You'd thin that on a local level politics would be more civil, but you'd be wrong. I hate them both. Don't blame me, I voted for Kronos.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I've heard this meme (that "the Democrats also steal a lot of elections") a lot lately but I have not seen anyone substantiate it. I don't recall anyone getting up in arms about the process of the Clinton elections, though certainly there were people upset that he won.
Does anyone have anything other than innuendo on this talking point? It sounds a little too much like a Rove snowjob to me -- I hear the talking point a lot from different sources but never any deeply resourced, specific complaints such as RFK aired.
Yeah, "do something," like invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and pissing off every moderate Muslim in the world.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
Another lefty with a serious BDS case. Real election stealing was done by Demoscums in Washington state.
Demoscums? I bet you also spell Microsoft Microsloth or something equally as clever.
Nixon, of course, eventually got his chance to be President, and conducted himself as the snivelling little crook and liar he was. Quite a run the RNC has going: a criminal, a delusional feeb, a gormless cipher and now a twisted little drunk with delusions of omnipotence.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
W ran on the platform of being a uniter who would work hard to bring everyone together. Am I the only person who remembers those campaign speeches? We appear to be about as divided as we've ever been, as a nation.
"Change Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday. "
I'll go you one better.
Change the election date to the fourth of july. What better way to celebrate your independence then to vote. It's a holiday, people are running around getting BBQ supplies and beer anyway. Just pull into the polling place on your way to the supermarket.
Easy, simple, effective. There is no way it will get done.
evil is as evil does
Maybe campaign finance reform and a viable 3rd party to bring some health back to your so-called democracy?
Voting is not compulsory here in Sweden. Still, of the people allowed to vote, 80% voted in the election yesterday. This is considered low and will hopefully change for the better.
Hopefully the Pirate Party got a place in parliament.
The point is that that's pretty much the only thing Democrats have talked about since 2000. If there's a case, take it up in court. I suspect the lack of significant successful court cases (or even filings) is due to a lack of evidence which is very curious given the supposed magnitude of the fraud. But to make that just about the only thing Democrats talk about as they head into another election is just stupid. Sure, they can talk about it until the cows come home but it doesn't matter unless they make their accusations in court, not in the court of public opinion. Making this the only issue (well, and Iraq of course, but without really explaining what their alternative is) might get your loyal Democrats upset and get them to the polls, but you generally need substance to bring in the independents and maybe grab some conservatives, too. And that's how you win elections.
Let me put it this way: You deal with past perceived transgressions in court. You secure the next election by giving the voters something of substance to vote in favor of. Hoping that voters will vote against someone or something will only get you so far, and that's pretty much the only thing Democrats have done since 2000--and they've continued to lose because of that. If they had presented a compelling platform that people could get excited about, and you add to that the general discontent with Bush and the war, they could've cleaned up in 2004 and sent Bush packing. They could have won by such a margin that fraud, even if true, wouldn't have made a difference.
I'll be the first to recognize that elections are not always clean, and it happens both at the hands of Republicans and Democrats--to suggest otherwise is naive. But even if we assume the Republicans engaged in some fraud, the only reason it even mattered is because the Democrats were unable to open up a statistically significant margin. And considering all they had in their favor going into 2004, it should've been cake. They should've won by 10% and all the Republican fraud in the world wasn't going to be able to overcome that. If the Democrats had a platform, I think they would've accomplished it.
It is my position that until we get a good, solid, open-source voting system with appropriate safeguards, there will always be some amount of fraud on both sides. That's just the ugly truth. I also think it is safe to assume that Republican fraud is generally counteracted by Democratic fraud in other places. I also believe that such fraud is always small-scale (nothing like what liberals suggest happened in Ohio) because anything large-scale would be impossible to cover up sufficiently to stand-up to legal scrutiny--so the fraud we face around the country is small-scale that could only have an impact on a race that is so close that it's in the statistical noise anyway. That doesn't excuse the fraud, but it does recognize that it's statistically irrelevant.
I do not accept allegations of fraud in the magnitude of hundreds of thousands of votes. It's just not possible. In the case of Ohio, the election came down consistent with the multiple polls done in the days and week ahead of the election. There is no statistical evidence of fraud in Ohio--the election agreed with numerous pre-election polls as close as the day before the election. The odd-man out were the exit polls, not the election. If hundreds of thousands of votes were really manipulated, then all the pre-election polls would've had to have been wrong.
I had to use it a few months ago because i went and nuked my ankle playing sports. I thought it might have been broken. I was in there for about 15 minutes before receiving attention. I was assessed, x-rayed, and out of there in less than an hour (no break, but 3rd degree sprain). Cost: None. I even had a second visit the next day including re-x-raying being i was in a great deal of pain (severe sprains hurt a lot apparently). Cost: nothing aside from prescription costs for T3s and crutches.
I don't suppose anybody from the US could let me know what that kind of trip would cost there? I'm just curious what my visits were worth.
Amen. I wish more people understood this reality. It doesn't mean that fraud should not be stamped out, but it does make it silly to whine about it for 4-6 years. It's not statistically significant.
I'm off to bed, so no time to even bother. Great way to lighten up the evening, though. Thanks once again for the laughs, especially this nugget:
Since the left speaks clearly, but with great complexity, I can only assume you simply don't understand the complexity theyre trying to convey to you.. you insult yourself wrongly here.. because I honestly think you're more competent than that.
Allow me to assure you that I hold no similar opinion of your intellect.
Also... people with Ph.D's in fields like those you are speaking about also tend to be in the elite echelons of the upper class, because those degrees tend to cost you more money than you make from them (without the right connections, of course.. wink wink).. and you wander why they espouse elitist right wing values and are listened to by elitist right wing leaders?
Ah, the left's distrust for science...
I've got to go sleep so I can wake up with all the energy I need to keep down the teeming masses yearning to be free. Toddle back along to Kos and post away where your views won't be challenged, and you'll feel much better, I promise!
Oh man... great times, great times.
Putting aside any lawyerly evasions, it's ludicrous to compare a lie about a blowjob with a lie used in the leadup to a wasteful and unjustified war, with all the suffering, death, and costs (both societal and financial) that it entails. So far, over 2,000 good men have died more or less in vain for the sake of a repeated lie (that there was a clear and present reason to invade Iraq, rather than finishing the job in Afghanistan).
Yes, and it's perhaps the most effective and insidious type of lie. Deliberately denying the evidence of one's own senses (in this case, one's own cabinet and intelligence wings) is self-deception. Wilfully doing so is lying. It's much easier to lie to others if you first convince yourself.
Yes, if you have good reason to believe otherwise but choose not to heed those reasons.
When actions and rhetoric disagree so strongly, it is indeed hard to conclue otherwise. Rather than turn this into a lengthy rant, I'll follow one example: If the Iraqi conflict were genuinely as important to our safety as the neocons imply, we should have a draft and a mobilized military-industrial complex, as we did during WWII (which, recall, lasted just 3.5 years). The neocons know that would be political suicide, because Iraq just isn't that important -- so they tried to do the job half-assed, with the same result they had 35 years earlier in Viet Nam -- an unhappy population, a growing insurgency, and no exit strategy. They knew (or at least ha seen reports saying) that Iraq had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, that they had no WMDs, and that they were no current threat, but they still pushed that rhetoric and spent over $40,000 of your money (and another $40k from every man, woman, and child in the nation) on a pig in a poke.
1. To win, a candidate must muster at least 50% + 1 of the number on his or her electoral role to secure the seat.
2. The vote is a SINGLE, TRANSFERRABLE VOTE, which means that for a ovte to be valind (and ocunted) it must list the voter's preferences from 1 to the last person on the ballot paper. Any missed candidates will render the vote invalid.
3. After the initial count, if no silgle candidate hass the magic 50% +1, the person with the least number of votes is eliminated, and the vote preferences are allocated to the other candidates, based on that person's voter's second preferences. This process, eliminating the bottom candidate, and allocating those votes based on next highets preference, goes on until one candidate has the mandatory 50% +1 vote.
4. Voting rolls are not within the control of any political party - the voting rolls are maintained by a federal department, which does not include political appointees (well, not officially), and there is open scrutiny of the rolls at all times.
5. The candidates in the election are all able to provide scrutineers to the count(so apart from so-called "drover's dog" electorates ("If it wore the right political colors, even a drover's dog could get elected in this constituency, there are scrutineers at all counting ststions).
6. Party advertising is not allowed inside the polling stations - party people can distribute their stuff outside, but not inside. 7. In federal and stae elections, people don't directly vote for the Prime Minister or state Premier, but that office is held by the leader of the majority party in the state or federal parliament. so, voting tends to be on party lines, and the chances of a good candidate of the "wrong" political persuasion getting up against a bad candidate of the "right" political persuasion is always very poor.
8. As a corrollory to 7., if you live in a marginal seat (one that changes election to election, or which may change with a smallish swing), your vote is worth commensurately more than if you live in a "safe" seat.
Hope that clears it up a bit.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Yeah! What he said ...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I don't know what "level" of visit, i had, but taking the lowest amount puts me at $160. The only x-ray labeled is chest at another $160, so i did a good $640 (plus whatever a physician costs) of hospital visitation that week.
My girlfriend (i know, geek license revoked) had a visit a few months ago because she temporarily lost vision in one eye and got a nasty headache (apparently an "occular migrane"). They did a vision test and a CT scan. Looking at those prices, she did about $1000 that night.
I have posted this before, but I will post it again. Election theft is easy. However, beware of the 'obvious' targets. People like to yell about the voting machines. This is a distractor. The machines have a bunch of problems, but cheating at that level is simply inefficient. What works better is to go for the tabulators. Take a look at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/. There I have run and photographed some studies on tabulator software and found out things that were beyond scarey. Sure, suppress the vote, initimidate voters, but if the ultimate counter cannot be trusted, neither can the outcome of the election. Should there be an election 'surprise' in November, this could well be the reason why. When will it be time for that armed insurrection? Dr_Ish [Just asking questions and causing trouble, as usual -- see you all in the Cuban 'holiday camp']
The linked article goes through a bunch of Kennedy's claims and casts them into doubt.
Sure does, until you read the rebuttal that puts the smackdown on Manjoo.
The majority of South Americans like democratic socialism, hate America for assassinating their elected leaders and organizing dictatorial military coups in their nations, and aren't moronic enough to wage war against plants that let people enjoy life slightly more than they would otherwise. Deal with it. Americans are never quite as stupd as when they express their ridiculous delusions about South America. Actually, maybe America's behaviour at election time is stupider. After all, voting for a "conservative" who doesn't repeal gun control laws, doesn't lower taxes, doesn't promote state power, and instigates massive government oversight of every aspect of American life, is so dumb that it is literally staggering. As is voting for a "liberal" who bombs aspirin factories, encourages pork-barrel healthcare programs that don't actually provide healthcare to anyone, and wages the war on drugs with more fervor than any other government in recent memory. Goddam Americans are fucking stupid!
Oh give me a break. This could be said by either party at any time. Get over it... 2004 is in the past and Bush won. Not for, not against; just pointing out the obvious. This is nothing but political garbage being heaped on the political fire to stoke another bunch of rumors. Let's focus on what good can be done by either party, not how they cheated or stole or somehow took what was "yours". That is what is wrong with America politically these days. Take responsibility and show us what YOU have to offer instead of crying that you deserve more than someone else. Prove your value and let that speak for you. If someone cheated, fine. Don't lower yourself to that level. Rise above the rest so you can show that that kind of blubbering doesn't matter. Show us how YOU can do better or just sit it out and let someone stronger run. Just my two cents...
Finland (first really democratic country in the world), Iceland and New Zealand come to mind. USA didn't become a real democracy until 1920, 14 years after Finland.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
An enlightening article, but I agree that both sides fudge/tamper/whatever you want to name it. It amazes me that people would use slashdot to argue politics rather than FIND AN EFFECTIVE SOLUTION!!!! I consider the slashdotters some of the most intelligent based upon reading their posts....we need a better system! If the some of the top minds in the country get caught up in politics, what hope do the majority of the country have? We are bought and sold on advertising, we lay over our control to a minority of people(who ultimately go where the money is), and as long as we get our way we could hardly care. I, for one, will take the road less travelled. Disenfranchised by paritisan voting and frustrated by the lack of an efficient design of systems, I will do what I can. To say I dream one day of becoming a politician is a dirty word nowadays, but I refuse to deal with the corruption and greed of those we hire to do the job. Yeah, I know, your still wondering if its a joke! I say to the people smart and capable enough, don't get dragged down into partisan thinking, rise and do something helpful. We could argue in the computer world whether the icon should be blue or red, but until we actually make it, we aren't doing anything! cyrus
Um...I think he was being facetious.
Actually the article does mention democratic cheating. It's main point tho is that Republican cheating was massive, "egregious", and willful. They ignored decency, ethics, law, and direct instructions from judges.
All election fraud is a serious issue, and "everyone does it" is not an excuse.
Hopefully it was obvious, but I am trying to mock the (Karl) Rovian technique of branding anyone who wants to discuss the invasion of Iraq as "cut and run" people.
Not only is it obvious, but I think it's a wonderful turn of their phrase! You should send it to the Democrats - I'm serious.
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
If the american public wants to scare the pants off the Washington lobbyists, a good place to start would be to campaign for Election Saturdays.
It might not be necessary. Quite a lot of states now allow for early voting and mail in voting.
I haven't voted in person since 1997. I don't plan to either. I vote by mail 3 weeks before the election. (Ohio will probably be an all mail-voting state in a few years anyway.)
The fact is, the situation is neither better, nor worse than it was in previous eras.
It's just BETTER PUBLICIZED.
End of story.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Pick any day of the year where someone isn't working and let me know when that is.
In Australia there are a number of polling booths at strategic locations during the week before the election so people who can't vote on Saturday (work, travel, religious issues, sleeping in etc) still have an opportunity. As well as that you have the option of casting a postal vote, although that must be applied for some time before the election.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Sounds like what Al Gore and the Democrats tried to do in Florida. AlGoreithm, n. (al'-gor-ith'-m) : Any method of calculation performed endlessly until a predetermined desired result is produced.
That was the Republican talking point, but like most Republican talking points, it doesn't have anything to do with reality.
I have to say that I think the situation is even worse than I thought it was... after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legit at least had some wiggle room, because it seemed like there was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found a discrepancy, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe?
The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they screwed up: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never reported that development, and I missed it myself...
Freeman and Bleifuss do a very thorough analysis of the various theories that have been presented to cover the discrepancy, and none of them seem to hold up. It's difficult to see how anyone could read this book and not conclude that phrasing the title as a question was excessively polite...
And it's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system -- a paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? Even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be?
And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to live in.
(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected" so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)
It's compulsory if you're on the electoral roll, but it's quite legal to not be on the electoral roll.
I'm not so sure about this. AFAIK it's not mandatory to be enrolled for Federal elections, but it is mandatory to be registered for most State elections (and there's only one register). Once you're registered you can't deregister, and if you're registered you have to vote, whether it's Federal, State or even some local Councils.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Sorry, but your "debunking" was counter-debunked, on Salon as well. Turns out Manjoo was just using the right-wing's classic tricks of distraction and red herrings.
The US was attacked by terrorists. Historically, we don't get attacked by terrorists very often and guess what -- we don't like it. The rest of the world has become accustomed to terrorism -- learned to live with it. I guarantee we will never be content with frequent terrorism. How you can be is beyond me, but hey -- enjoy your outback. Alternatively, you can do something about it. Like Americans do.
When was the last time there was an attack on Australian soil? When was the last time someone tried to invade Australia?
I would hope that if Australia was attacked, we wouldn't lash out on incomplete information and invade unrelated countries. (I wouldn't be so sure, given who is in power right now, but still). I'm not saying you should like it - you shouldn't. You should do everything you can to hunt down those responsible without placing unreasonable demands on others. That isn't unfair, it's what the US democracy was founded for.
I have absolutely no problem with that. Both Clinton and Bush should have been impeached.
Nope. The court defined "sexual relations" as intercourse, so he didn't lie under oath as the AC suggests (blow jobs are not intercourse). And secondly, even if he did lie, it's not automatically perjury - the question has to be relevant, and wether or not he got it on with Monica was not relevant to if he harrased Jones. The whole thing was a bullshit witchunt anyway - the GOP was going to investigate and re-investigate Clinton until they found something. Take a look at Harken Energy as a scandal-that-should-have been and an example of GOP hypocracy.
my proof is the FACT that people have been searching for the last few years to prove your point, and not a single one has been able to come up with a single fact.
Well, other than the FACT that exit polls showed Kerry winning by a landslide, and the FACT that so many polls were off by such a large amount (always benefitting Bush) is statistically impossible.
(And if you do some web searches, you'll see that "Nathan Sproul" has been accused of involvement in a number of different types of voter fraud.)
So, what we appear to have here is yet another example of someone trying to blow smoke... (it's a little surprising to see it from someone with such a low slash id though: 981. This isn't one of the ones that got sold on ebay, was it?).
Anyway, I suggest reading reference #21, myself, the Freeman and Bleifuss book: Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
17% of the population voted Bush into office in 2000, 18% in 2004.
This is taking into account total U.S. population, eligible voter turnout, and popular vote results.
So think of it this way: there is less than a 20% chance that a person you meet walking down the street actually cast a ballot for our current president.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Can someone explain to me what compulsory voting would do to improve the situation if the voting machines are rigged?
(It sure would be nice if all these "plus 5 insightfuls" could magically be changed to "off topic".)
If you want to learn how an election should be conducted, you could try looking up north to Canada. They use paper ballots that are counted in public... anyone who wants to observe the process can attend the count, and observe it in action.
Nice, simple, and very close to foolproof, which is perhaps why we fools are using Diebold and ESS machines instead...
I totally trust your descriptions of recent events even w/o a reference to a single news piece. But then again I doubt you read any yourself, probably just got some excerpts from Kos. Try peeking out of your echo chamber once in a while.
Oh, and the bold really sells it. Try ALL CAPS too, after all if you can't present a well thought out argument, bashing it in is really the only alternative.
Two factors here, caused by one major factor - college kids.
- Exit polls are to a large degree conducted by young college kids. This introduces several forms of potential systemic bias into the equation.
- There is usually some leeway for the interviewer to pick interview subjects. Studies (you will have to Google, but check out Mystery Pollster) show that the less leeway the interviewer is given when picking interview subjects, the higher the Bush vote. Not surprisingly, the Lib college kid is going to have an inclination to pick "friendlier" subjects if given a choice.
- Also, the subjects who voted for Bush might not like to say so to the college kid in the RATM T-shirt, and thus might lie/avoid the interviewer if given leeway.
since felons lose their right to vote...
Only in four states do felons permanently lose the right to vote.
Where I live, that would invalidate your vote. Your ballot would be thrown out by the counting officials.
WWTTD?
If error is sqrt(n) then percent error is 1/sqrt(n)
Play Command HQ online
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Called Dire in West Iraq Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says
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Iraq?s Anbar province a lost cause?
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Iraqi insurgents launch wave of sectarian attacks in Kirkuk
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US intel report: Iraq's Anbar province 'politically lost'
Let us know any time you need some help with google news searches.This does affect people aroudn the world too.
Ask the people in Iraq.
And if you want the nerd angle you can look at the voting machine part of the scandal.
If you do not want to repeat the same fiasco again in 2008, welcome to Finland.
We've had democratic elections for a hundred years now. (One of the first country in the world to allow women to vote)
Every Finnish citizen gets his/her voting information by mail. No registration needed.
You can vote before the election day in post offices and special pre-election sites.
There are even election officers making tours in retirement homes, prisons, hospitals etc. for people who cannot come to the polling place.
No voting clutter. You are voting for a president . period.
No electoral college to cloud the issue.
No re-shuffling of voting counties.
No voting machines.
No election scandals.
You have several choices to choose from. Five major parties not just two.
I mean, when you point out that there was chicanery in the 2004 election, why is it that the first question on everyone's minds is "was the fraud large enough to throw the election?" It doesn't bother you at all that there are people trying to rig elections? I mean, if the election wasn't stolen last time, wouldn't you be concerned that it might be stolen next time?
No, not an idiot, just not paying very close attention. The major media hasn't exactly done a great job of covering the issues involved, you know? Check. Essentially. Yeah, essentially. True, but this isn't really the strongest point. It helps establish motive, but not really intent, if you know what I mean.I think a better point is that Diebold and ESS are both run by two brothers, and between the two of them they controlled a huge slice of the vote in 2004. That makes it start to look much less like some whacky theory of an insanely wide-spread conspiracy...
Here we get down to another interesting point... how widespread a "conspiracy" do you need to presume to explain the media's behavior in recent years? The mainstream media has been looking like it's in the government's pocket, but that could easily be a sincere rallying-around-the-flag after the 9-11 attack.The real U.S. voter fraud has been going on for 200 hundred years and in plain sight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
Nothing. As long as you dont bitch about the results its fine.
Kinda pointless going to vote if your just going to do that. You might as well just vote and get it over with.
How about Redundant since every time someone mentiones the word democracy we see someone going on a tirade how the USA is a republic. Well, guess what, there is no difference between a republic and a representative democracy, those are just different words for the same thing.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Please, speak for yourself. Its sad when I see Americans lashing out at each other about things of which none of them have any control over whatsoever. Its like fighting over crumbs. It makes you look pathetic.
Grow a spine; if you don't like what's going on, do something about it instead of denigrating your fellow countrymen over decisions made by people neither you nor he have ever seen except on the television.
And maybe you should try a little flag waving. That's one of the main reasons liberals in this country aren't taken seriously. You look like you hate this country and all it stands for. I can understand you hating the current leadership but its hard to distinguish the difference when you use rhetoric like We turn off our brains and We hide under our beds. Maybe people like you do hate the United States. Hmm, don't let the door hit you in the ass.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Assume, for a moment, that this story is found to be true ('by the DOJ'). Then what? Would Bush get impeached? Will all his (arguably quite insane) calls be reversed?
Ooh, ooh, I know! 1942! Where do I collect my no-prize for answering the rhetorical question?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Darwin%2 C_February_19%2C_1942
-Meeper
Proof that the world would be a better place if some people had just been blowjobs.
Here's what I said:
Maybe I should have bolded it in the original :-)
Its sort of like the difference between "a woman with child" and "a woman with child" - one's a woman and a kid, the other one is a pregnant woman; they're word-for-word identical, just the emphasis has changed.
if indeed the republicans did steal the election the only reason the demacratics are complaining is that they were beaten with there own tactics. ballot stuffing? come on,ohio is'nt chicago.
I agree totally about Harken. However, I disagree about Clinton's lying. Here's what he said: http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-did-no t-have-sexual-relations-with.html
Here's an exerpt from his deposition: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/spec ial/clinton/stories/whatclintonsaid.htm
So, was he in the habit of getting a BJ with other people present?
You wrote:
As to whether its perjury or not, its irrelevent as to whether it was directly related to the Paula Jones case - background questions are used to establish the credibility (or lack of it) of a witness. That the witness can be shown to lie under oath about something not directly related to the current instance goes directly to the character, honesty, and reliability of a witness. Clinton was a liar. So is Emperor Bush. And Bush probably wouldn't be where he is now if Clinton had kept his fly zipped.
That is NOT, repeat NOT far left - you really have no clue what far left actually means do you?
To put it plainly - american "far left" = just left of centre to the rest of the world.
What do you do when there is no good choice? How do you choose between a douche and a turd?
Iam not republican, but i like the way you think. Either provide a solution or you are part of the problem.
I think that's the reason why Bush continues to win elections.
He doesn't vacillate, he is definitely not doing a comic routine based on weekly popularity ratings, he doesn't molly coddle the pressure groups, and he pretty well gives a damn about what people complain about it AFTER they have voted for him.
I think it is his confidence that keeps you guys keep winning elections.
Damn ! If we had a democrat like Bush instead of the kerry guy, we would have won long back.
But i do admire the enemy.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
A second problem, though I'm not sure that the parties themselves are to blame, is the meme that says voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. Apparently because they can't win.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_rob_kall_0 60511_poll_3a_2004_election_.htm
.5% 99%
Except for viewers of Fox News, EVERY DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEYED gives more people who believe the election was stolen than who think it wasn't. And look at the Fox results - 99% believe the election was legit - those numbers are right up there with results for Soviet Russian elections.
[snip]
May 10, 2006 at 22:00:00
Poll: 2004 Election Was Stolen; according to viewers of all news networks except Fox News
Who are these Fox viewers. OpEdNews gives you the details.
In the first poll of its kind, (using First choice of TV news network as a demographic variable)OpEdNews.com, in the second OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll has learned that except for viewers of right wing news show, Fox News, poll respondents believe that the 2004 presidential election was stolen.
Overall, the poll of Pennsylvania residents found that 39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. Shortly after the election, the NY Times suggested that a few fringe extremists and bloggers were concerned about the theft of the election.
But let's look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary sourc of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically:
Here are the stats by network listed as first choice by respondent and whether the respondent thought the election was stolen or legitimate.
Network Stolen Legitimate
ABC 56% 32%
CBS 64% 31%
CNN 70% 24%
FOX
MSNBC 65% 24%
NBC 49% 43%
Other 56% 28%
[end snip]
Look at the disconnect between Fox and EVERY other media. Can Fox be right and everyone else wrong? Or does Fox really just pander to the clueless mouth-breathing sloped-forehead knuckle-draggers as their "natural demographic"?
And keep in mind this poll was more than 4 months ago - the numbers would be worse today.
In Soviet Russia, voter participation was 100%!
Seriously.
I thought Slashdot was about technology and other geek things. NOT about digging up some random political news article that's 2 YEARS OLD!!! that has no basis in fact. If any of it were true don't you think that the democrats in power would have pushed for some special investigation. OR is it that the Democrats are doing the SAME THING!!! (eg - Illinios) and if they exposed the Republicans they would risk exposing themselves. It's easy to see that Slashdot slightly leans to the left, but if I wanted to read about some vast-Right/Left-wing-conspiracy (which I don't) I would go to some other website.
Welfare : I strongly suspect most slashdot readers over the age of 22 are paying rather more in tax than receiving on welfare. I know I certainly am
No war : I think there's plenty of support for war. Unfortunately there's also critical thought and a strong desire for logical outcomes. Terrorist attacks WTC does not logically lead to invasion of Iraq. Lack of evidence of WMDs does not logically lead to "lets invade because of the WMDs".
No warrant-less surveillance : Not everyone in my private collection is 18. In fact, all of them are considerably older. You also appear to have disregarded the recent article about UK CCTV gaining loudspeakers, in which several slashdot posters welcomed the imposition of warrantless surveillance.
Anti-trust legislation : As with so many topics on Slashdot, this has many people with strong views both for and against. However, you are correct: Microsoft needs to die.
Abortion : I haven't actually seen any great discussions on Slashdot on this particular topic. My assumption is that the anti-religious bias of the site's contributors will mean that most religious arguments against abortion would be disregarded, and a decision made on ethics, morality and logic. Is that a bad thing?
Gay marriage : See above re: religious arguments.
Yes, do go on. You haven't explained why this site is left-leaning at all, if indeed it is. I perceive it as being more centralist than left-leaning, and there are contributors with views across the spectrum.
Of course both elections were *stolen*, and if you think I shuold shut up, then I suppose you think that the Germans who objected in 1932 and 1936 should have shut up and "supported their government", too.
Yes, it *is* almost that bad, though perhaps fascist Italy under Mussolini is a more appropriate comparison (and no, Mussolini didn't make the trains to run on time).
Oh, and while we're at it, those who want me to shut up can arrange for the public repudiation by everyone on the right of ever snide comment, "joke", and attack on FREELY ELECTED President Bill Clinton for the last six years, and a vow to never make them again.
No? Then *YOU* *SHUT* *UP*.
mark
PS: I'm a registered Democrat. Mod me +1 Ironic
I think a better mod option for you would be "+1 Not a goddamn hypocrite." While your post would strike many people as ironic, and I suppose it is, it just strikes me as honest.
*Sigh*
I'm really sick of the Republicrats. However, I'm too politically center to support, say, the Libertarians or the Greens. If the Republicrats were at least *honest*, we'd be much better off, and could comfortably continue with our pathetic two party politics for some time to come. As it stands... IMNSHO, we're pretty much fucked.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Just pull into the polling place on your way to the supermarket.
Hmm, those supermarkets.. there are no people working there I guess? or are those people so unimportant that their vote is not wanted anyway?
I fully support compulsory voting, because I believe it encourages some people to be more aware of the relevant issues around election time
Uh no, it is way more likely that people who don't care will just cast a random vote. Those who actually care and donÄt want to vote will turn in an invalid or blank vote, but they can do that already with non compulory voting anyway.
As you correctly say, yo can't force people to care. You can try to convince people to care however...
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2006/0 90106torturechildren.htm
As a resident of Ohio and an active registered voter I can say that what this article suggests is more true than you would think. Just in my little city of about 25,000 people we had issues with Republicans "fixing the vote". Posting people outside of polling locations, harassing minorities, voting locations which previously had several machines being under staffed and not having as many machines as in the past. All of this stuff did happen, I was there, I witnessed it. It is pathetic to me that a man that lost the election in both 2000 and 2004 has persisted to be allowed to hold the presidency and screw up this country.
There was a motive to shoot down or sabatoge his aircraft. After all didn't he die a few years ago in an airplane wreck?
That's one for the conspiracy books. Lately I don't particularly like or trust any political party. They are all out for one thing, power. The United States isn't a true democracy, feel free to look it up, we are a Federal Republic. I'd like to see a true democracy emerge. And that's not a Democrat statement, in my opinion I look at the Democratic Party and view them as socialists.
The republicans are total opposite but still you can't trust them as ar as you can throw them. Every month we loose more and more
of our Rights in the name of Homeland Security. More Americans die in auto accidents than due to terrorist bombings, give me a break.
Anyone who is pissed about the outcome is just angry because everyone else didnt vote Bush out.
The problem with that kind of statement, though on the surface it seems so brazenly to "cut through the crap" etc. etc, is that it would work equally well even if the elections were in fact rigged, as if they were not. Hence, it contains exactly zero information about the claim undetr attack, and zero weight as argument.
This particular instance falls uncer the class of fallacies called "poisoning the well": attacking motives in stead of claims/arguments, event though the soundness of those claims are independent of motive. If the world's greatest villain repeats a truth, it does not cease to be true (nor can any speaker's virtue make a bad argument sound).
sudo ergo sum
Yeah he 'stole' it... I mean, this map right here just proves that Bush had no support!
t e2004/countymap.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vo
Doesn't really help the Dems that they cry that the election was stolen every election year now. Especially given that there's at least as much conspiracy surrounding the Dems actively registering illegal immigrants to sway the vote in their direction.
I'm no fan of Bush, but this election stealing conspiracy is getting almost as tired as the 9/11 'inside job' stuff. Oops I probably sturred up the Slashdot believers.
hmmm... The Jury is still out regarding Autism. Don't forget the study was done by a drug manufacturer. You can't trust that.
The study must be done by a non =-biased third partity with data taken across the whole country, not a cluster of data taken from
one geographical area. There's potentialy a problem with one of the vaccinations and an "immune" response from some kids.
Do you mean that the country that is liberating opressed countries and bringing Democracy to the world had two presidential elections stoled in a row?!?!? I'm SHOCKED!!!
Go ahead, mod me troll or flame-bait. I don't care for karma.
So say we all
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
- Stephen Colbert
Damn, I thought he said he wasn't a crook!! Well, at least he's a head in a jar now....
"I got kicked out of barnes and noble once for moving all the bibles into the fiction section"
Wow. Just... wow.
Comparing Clinton's impeachment to RIGGING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION is rather a ludicrous thing to do, IMNSHO.
In the Clinton case, a President with a ridiculous libido remained in office after lying in court about the things he does with his penis.
In the Bush case, a President steals the presidential election to win a second term, and continues to prosecute a war her started on false pretense, continuing to kill and destroy the lives of several hundred thousand people. All so Haliburton can continue building that pipeline they've been building in Iraq? Who knows.
But I'm glad your priorities are in order. If we can "move on" after a president bangs an intern and lies about it in court, certainly we can move on when our whole electoral process has been fixed in order to have King George in power.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Democrats lost. Get over it. Move along... Move along...
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
I thought compulsary voting was all that was being discussed, with Australia being a tangent on that - but I'm not paying much attention...
No you need 50%+1 of the formal votes. Of course you could just say you need 100% of them, since once a candidate has 50%+1 the maths says every one else be eliminated first - but it'd be silly to keep counting.
Yes, which may be why I mentioned I don't think the must vote system would play nicely with the US first-past-the-post system.
It's a great system, the biggest flaw being the significantly higher informal vote rates in areas with large numbers of immigrants - indicating that they don't understand the system so well. Of course the senate voting is even more fun - I'm one of those fools who number the boxes below the line (though I do check the above the line assignment first hoping some random party will rank them the way I want, but no party ever has)
This is where Austrlia is far and away better than the US. However, the US will never change it's system due them being far less "Federalised" than Australia. In Australia elections are run by a Federal government department (which isn't political it's just like the tax office in being independant) whereas in the US they are run by the states. So in the US you have 50 different ways of organising Federal elections, in Australia you have one.
I'm a truly amazed how much control the poltical parties have over elections in the US. I'm guessing there must be historic reasons for it - since it makes no sense if you want to run elections that are not only fair but have the appearance of being fair.
In a safe seat yes - it's the same as your point 5. But that happens everywhere - some areas are highly skewed to a certain party. It's not true in general though - after all independants have won seats.
There are lots of flaws with the Australian system - the fact that if you despise the government but think that your local member who happens to be a member of the governing party is wonderful for local reasons you are stuck. is just one The senate allows you to balance that a little, but not enough. However, the US vote for president system is worse overall, in my opinion obviously. Having the prime minister have to sit thro
Then it was a useless ballot. The ballot should have an entry specifically for "none of the above." The mandate of a candidate should *always* be judged on the basis of the amount by which they beat their opponent(s) *and* the percentage of the population that felt that *any* of the candidates were appropriate.
Nullifying a ballot because someone didn't want to vote for any of the candidates is throwing away information, which in an election should be criminal.
My parser is a grammar nazi.
Yes, sore losers, nevermind that there seems to be a lot of proof (that is, its much more than a conspiracy theory) that the election results were tampered with, or other illegal methods were used to keep people from voting.
Call me a 'sore loser' if you will (I personally didn't like either choice), but concern of increased corruption in our election process is warranted. Governments have been overthrown for such things.
Yes and George Bush blew up the Trade Center. The last thing the Dems need is to try and drag out conspiracy theories. Take your lumps and move on (true or not) kind of like Nixon did with Kennedy with Chicago. Politics are ok as long as you realize both sides suck. I know better people living on my block then the vanilla flavors that I am given to choose from come Nov 08. Id rather be reading about an internet enabled didlo then politics right now :)
I am having trouble understanding your point of view. If there are issues with Illinois elections, then do the research, write up an article on it, and work to get it published (as Kennedy did). For my part, I (and I imagine others as well) will evaluate your claims. If your claims are as well supported and documented as Kennedy's are, then I will be every bit as moved and outraged as I am over the 2004 Ohio elections, and will work with you to fix the system.
Or is your point simply: everyone does it, so there is no reason to prosecute this instance of it ?
2 wrongs do not make a right. The "everyone does/did it" argument held no water with me during the Monica Lewinksi scandal. "Everyone thought it" also in no way excuses Bush from fault in starting a war in Iraq under the false pretense of WMDs. "Everyone cheats" is similarly uncompelling with regard to elections. Even if every single election in this country was conducted fraudulently by every single party who has ever run for office, each incident should be treated as a dire threat to the foundation of the United States. To do anything else is moral relativism of the highest order.
We are capable of providing a system where voters have a national voting ID. We are also technologically capable of providing a system whereby everybody can vote from home. Republicans favor efforts in this direction and Democrats oppose them. This makes no sense if truly, Republicans are the ones defrauding the process.
Unless you're rich AND and a felon, in which case you're a candidate.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Plenty of things that are illegal now, and seem unimaginably repugnant, used to be legal. Or at least there was no legal penalty for them, or plenty of disincentive for law enforcement to investigate. Both parties used dirty tricks, but the Democrats were recognized (fairly or unfairly) as more sophisticated, shameless, and successful at cheating, just as Republicans are now. Perhaps that reputation comes inevitably with success.
In any case, it would be a shame if we stopped caring about election fraud and stopped passing laws against new dirty tricks invented by the political parties, especially since the latest tricks are aimed at stopping citizens from voting.
I only ask one thing....PROOF. Not ONE instance have I seen anyone able to prove what is in the article. In fact, the local news here did a story on this right after the election (oh and by the way, Kerry won our county.....Franklin County, OH) and the only thing that they did seem to find was there was not enough machines at the polling locations. That's it. Nothing more. IN fact, because of this situation, the board of elections kept most polls open longer then the regular closing time. If there were still people in lines at the posted closing time, they let them vote.
This is just more democrats whining about not winning the election.
Gorkman
That map certainly proves that the vast majority of empty land supported Bush. >Especially given that there's at least as much conspiracy surrounding the Dems actively >registering illegal immigrants to sway the vote in their direction. The difference is that Republicans don't have proof of this, they just use it as a scare tactic. This article lays out clear and documented instances of illegal activity. Look at the whole Republican agenda, it is scare you with "Gays are gonna ruin my marriage." Scare you with "If we don't torture people, we cant keep you safe." Scare you with "Immigrants are gonna take over soon."
And maybe you should try a little flag waving. That's one of the main reasons liberals in this country aren't taken seriously. You look like you hate this country and all it stands for.
Maybe you should start with some critical thinking. Being upset and vocal about freedoms being lost and creating lots of enemies around the world due to misguided or even criminal is standing for those things that are fundamental to the USA.
By depicting those things as anti American, yyyou are in fact helping those trying to destroy the USA as it is.
The simple fact is that more than half the population feels the election was stolen - an investigation is needed, even if it wasn't - to restore faith in the system.
Um, I consider myself neutral for the most part. I've picked each of the winning Presidents since the first Bush. What is there to get upset about knowing that Bush was going to be re-elected? I didn't even bother voting for that round. I didn't vote in the Bush/Gore because I really was neutral though slightly favored Bush because of the Liberman as Gore's running mate. The platform that I'd really like to have won was Ross Perot's or the libertain group. I'm against the concept of the Green Party. The Greens seem to be more of a religion than a party. Was 2000 or 2004 stolen? Nope. Why? Because every freaking one of our elections is run like that. What you think that either side has ever played fair when given a chance? Limited dirty tricks have always been there. It's politics what did you expect? If you really want to send a message, vote independent reguardless of the candiate in the next election.
Hey all you political this and that (two party) cyber warriors.
Electronic Election Fraud is a non-partisan issue!
We are all *fucked* if this doesn't stop!
It's already cost lives, rights, and trillions of dollars.
bradblog.com (The #1 Real Journalistic News source on Electronic Voting.)
blackboxvoting.org (The First Technical Front line in the war agaist your right to vote)
Time to travel way, way back up the thread...
This post makes the point very clearly that "getting over it" is the worst thing we could possibly do, if, in fact, it was stolen. You replied to that with "But there's no proof!" Looks like you can't really argue that anymore, so you're back to your original BS -- "Move on, you sore losers."
Right, unless we didn't lose.
You have a right to free speech and a right to vote. That's important, and I wouldn't take it away from you, but I do believe people like you are dangerous to the democratic process, and to the American ideal.
Live free or die -- unless we're terrorized by terrorists, or unless it's too damned inconvenient to check if we're really still free.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I would have liked to see a comparison with the Presidential Election of 1960...
Mama, I got 'dem ole cosmic blues again.
I appreciate the debunking reference. Thanks!
I've also been thinking lately about the terribly poor quality of political debate in the US. I believe that one major factor in all this is our simplistic voting system, believe it or not!
I would content that our current voting system actually ensures having a two-party system. A popular third party candidate would steal votes from their more closely-aligned major party candidate, and thus voting for such a candidate would be a poor voting strategy. In this way independant parties frequently work against their own objectives.
This would not be the case for a voting system like instant runoff voting. In that case, independant parties can have an entirely positive influence on politics they endorse even if they don't make it into office, because any genuine public support that they have could be made known without causing their nearest major-party candidate to suffer.
Because we have this two-party system, political discussion becomes necessarily polarized on every issue, whether or not it should be. Also individual issues become colored by whatever political party supports it. People don't think in terms of individual issues so much anymore, and when they do, they are largely influenced by the propoganda from their favorite party. For example I would think there should be fiscal conservatives that are religious liberals, torn between the two parties, and the opposite as well. But it seems there are not. Total political alignment is a comforting thing that keeps us from having to think rationally about political issues.
The problem is there are accusations throughout the article used to back up the premise of the article. You can argue each one ad-nauseum. If you are on the left or right, pick a SINGLE thing and back it up. Don't sandwich 15 things in one paragraph or use one debatable argument to back up another.
Do people ask themselves WHY they believe what they believe? For the most part no.
It amazes me how the Bush administration can spout rhetoric in total opposition to its actions, and people will still buy in.
In case you haven't noticed, there have been several "State's Rights" issues during the Bush Interregnum. In all these cases, the Bush administration has come down solidly in favor of increased federal authority.
In one of the more egregious cases, the Federal Government is in favor of redrawing the boundaries of the state of Delaware so that a large foreign-owned oil company can construct a LNG pier serving the state of New Jersey. In that case, the Bush administration is actually championing the "rights" of British Petroleum, with collusion from corrupt New Jersey authorities, to override the demonstrated will of the citizenry of the US state of Delaware.
When will US conservatives realize they've been betrayed by a pack of radical facists, who favor any corporation from any nation over the rights of any individual anywhere?
Ok, tinfoil hat off... We geeks are probably just as gullible as everyone else and even easier to control... Just promise us dates if we go along with you...
Shh, there you go telling our secret weakness.
While commendable when the only good option is "None Of The Above" Down Under, there are other countries where this is extremely dangerous for the democratic process.
So, what is your solution? Vote for someone you don't want I suppose? Best of the worst?
How about simply add a box for "abstain" and a line for a write in candidate? It unnerved me greatly when in 2000 the democrats took it as evidence of voting irregularities, when certain offices had no votes. I took it to mean that people just didn't like the opitions that were presented. I think an "abstain" box would eliminate this confusion and prevent a blank ballot being used to commit fraud. Also, a write-in candidate should always be easy to provide, otherwise it is not very deomcratic.
It doesn't matter - both parties suck.
Get up!
"Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"
Yes. So was 2000. So, also, will 2008 be stolen.
Get rid of those damned voting machines, now. If the Republicans didn't know for th most part that the voting machines were being manipulated, they know now, after so many studies have shown how to do it. Even if you think no one stole an election using those damned things before, they will be stolen now. They've step-by-step instructions. How can they possibly stop themselves? You think a little vote change is going to present moral problems to the party that gave us an Iraqi invasion, an executive who claims he has authority to cancel the constitution, 14,000 people kidnapped into secret prisons, that gave us Swift-boating and Ken Starr?
Why just the Republicans? I've noodled it for years now (soapbox time) and I've narrowed it down to this: business morality. All seem to be profoundly religious, seem to anyway, and profess godly morality and all that. BUT. It's a party of businessmen, whereas Democrats tend to be a populist party. Businessmen, have you ever noticed, no matter their private morality, shut off the Ten Commandments as soon as they're on the clock? Lying, cheating, and stealing, even killing, is okay if you do it in the name of winning. This businessman's exemption to common ideas of morality is overwhelmingly present in the Republican party's situational ethics. Lying isn't just a necessity, it's practically a sport with them. There's so much BS pouring forth per second on Fox News that the heads are strangling, trying not to break out laughing in wonder at how much crap they can say without losing any professional credibilty.
Unfortunately, business's preocupation with fibbing and ignoring reality to make short-term gains inevitably butts up with reality. Cognitive dissonance, big time. Even a country that watches "Lost" instead of the news -- and who can blame it, considering how "balanced" and useless the news is now -- is noticing that the buggers are lying to them.
Unless you are rich. In that case, you probably aren't paying any taxes anyway.
If you are rich, it means that you haven't paid your taxes yet.
Clinton was the benificiary of a system of legal theory holding that he had the power to ignore the law when he saw fit, for as long as he saw fit? Clinton had his Office of Legal Counsel tell him that he could, if he thought it necessary, crush some kid's testicles for magical reasons known only to him? Or that the President doesn't have to deal with those inconvenient checks and balances when he's involved in a conveniently open-ended war?
Or perhaps you're referring to the scads of Clinton administration officials convicted for malfeasance or corruption in the performance of their official duties. Or even indicted? You should be able to rattle off a half-dozen or so. Go ahead.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is it really democracy if the only real choice is between "democrats" or "republicans", which do not differ that much if you look at the differences in parties in other countries. Most countries have at least 10 choices. I think America is close to a one-party-system, so don't care about some more votes for one or the other, it's just like "The Party" in russia, not that much difference.
The problem isn't so much that election fraud has occured, or is thought to have occured but that election margins are so razor thin that any of it really matters. The Republicans have given us divisive politics where elections aren't even won by enough of a margin to be considered meaningful as an opinion poll. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem too frightened of offending people to actually say much of anything meaningful.
Both major parties are letting us down even more than usual and the system won't readily allow for replacements.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This was known over five years ago. Have you honestly gone five years without paying attention? Are you going to pretend that you never saw this report, and spout this tired crap again next week? Magic 8-ball says "signs point to yes"...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Voting should be compulsory - if only to guarantee that the government can't take short cuts.
I'm thinking that they should just tie it in with IRS returns and the census. The government wants to know everything about you anyway. So let's give them all our money info, then our personal info, then let's vote all on the same form. Of course it would be months til we ever find out "who" won any given election since there will be people filing late or filing extensions.
I've been seeing a lot of the "we'd kick their ass in a civil war!" talk coming from the right. What's up with that? Worried you won't win an election, so you're pretending we're in middle school again, and "I'll kick your ass!" is a cogent and meaningful form of debate?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wow, that would be really, really impressive.
If land voted.
This may be hard for you to understand, so I'll go over it slowly.
People living in sparsely populated areas tend to vote Republican, while urbanites lean Democrat. Because of this, vast tracts of farmland look red on the map, while dense hives of citizens look like small blue dots. Consider the 2000 election map, helpfully linked to from that page. While the blue team won the popular vote, the map is still overwhelmingly red. This is because maps show land, not people, which, as you know, does not vote. If the map is scaled so that areas with equal population cover equal area, it looks more like this.
I've seen that map on t-shirts, and it looks real impressive until you give it a bit of thought. Does it still seem impressive to you? Do you manage to suppress critical thought, or do you convince yourself that the map's apparent implications are "fake but accurate"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And yet, I do believe it is true that if the Democrats had managed to run a candidate that anyone really cared about, we wouldn't have to rely on TFA to lay out the case for election fraud. We'd be pissed off enough that our candidate didn't win that we'd delve into these issues ourselves and demand answers.
The fact is, it's proven impossible to get the public concerned enough about the 2004 election results to reach that "critical mass" of outcry that gets the lawyers, reporters, independent investigators, and lawmakers involved. The biggest reason? No one cared about Kerry.
In my own experience, I voted for Kerry because I didn't want Bush to win. When it was announced that Bush did, in fact, "win", I was a little disappointed. But if I'm to be honest with myself (and y'all), I was also a little relieved because I has serious doubts as to Kerry's platform/ability to govern.
--
Just pull into the polling place on your way to the supermarket.
Easy, simple, effective. There is no way it will get done.
I'll do you one better. Make Wal-Mart one of the places to vote rather than schools or government buildings. Like those without kids know where the schools are or do most people have any idea where the government buildings are? But everyone knows where their local Wal-Mart is. Next put them in gas stations. I think that I'd like web voting, or atleast logging on to a website checking a few boxes and then going about my busniess. No, I'm too familiar with computers, I don't ever want website voting after really thinking about it.
To all the Republican apologists here on /. telling us Dems and liberals to "just get over it," why don't you put yourselves in our shoes for just one second, and ask yourselves how YOU would react--given the VERY same exit-poll contradictions and other voting discrepancies throughout the country--if a President Hillary Clinton were now sitting in the White House.
/., which I'm assuming you are, then turn off Sean Hannity for just a second and see what the opposition has to offer--you'll find it really isn't all that frightening, but instead empowering.
If Hillary had run, and had bigwig friends at Diebold and ES&S bankrolling her campaign, you'd bet YOU'D put a stink up about it, too--and believe it or not, so would I. Election tampering is very wrong on BOTH sides of the aisle, and should NOT be tolerated in what we purport to be the "freest" country in the world.
In addition, I am sick to death of hearing the meme from the Faux "News" viewers that Dems have no plan and no ideas. If you'd actually *listened* for 30 minutes to a Democrat's point of view--or even gone to the party's Web site and read its platform, you'd learn that the Democrats DO have positive ideas for change AND for national security. Thing is, you'd never know that by the way Republicans have infiltrated mainstream media and stolen the collective megaphone all for their own narrow "ideas," like banning same-sex marriage, torturing unconvicted prisoners, and violating other human rights.
OTOH, Democrats right at this moment are working their asses off for universal healthcare, a fair minimum wage, workers' protections, empowerment of the working classes, and equal rights for not only all Americans, but for all people.
Re: terrorist threats and the best way to handle them: law enforcement--along with special intelligence and border/port security--is and always will be the BEST way to imprison and punish these terrorist CRIMINALS, as evidenced with the most recent British terrorist attacks and threats. Democrats realize that terrorist thugs will always threaten us, and military solutions are not the answer. If the British can use law enforcement and a sane foreign policy to stop not only the IRA terrorism that has been plaguing their nation for decades--but now also al-Qaeda attacks--why can't we? Democrats realize, like the British, that TRUE homeland security begins AT HOME.
The mass media--and by virtue of it, American collective thought--has been hijacked by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations who aim to influence American opinion and poison minds (like yours) with conservative drivel. If you're intelligent enough to be posting at
And maybe you should try a little flag waving. That's one of the main reasons liberals in this country aren't taken seriously. You look like you hate this country and all it stands for.
What a laughable statement.
While you're waving your flag around desecrating it by your contempt for all that it stands for, people who actually do give a shit aobut this country are working to fix the problems created by the ignorant flag wavers.
Sorry, but you do not love this country if you think those who are actually defending it (from the savage assaults unleashed by cowardly traitors like *your* leaders look like they hate it.
Since you're the one demonstrating your complete ignorance of current events, Sparky, you are the one without the integrity to do your duty as a citizen to be informed.
I can understand you hating the current leadership but its hard to distinguish the difference when you use rhetoric like We turn off our brains and We hide under our beds
How else could you possibly explain the purely cowardly support for leaders who are going "boo! evil terrorists!! Now we need to repeal the bill of rights and the constitutional protections".
The fact is that your sort is backing the destruction of our liberty and you are doing it out of a largely nonsense fear.
That's about as canonical example of cowardice as you could ever find. It's blind ignorance as well, as it's one of the oldest tricks in the book which a little knowledge of history would have revealed to you as such. You just need to have the courage to actually think.
You just keep waving that flag as opposed to standing up for anything it represents, little coward.
It's time for you to grow a spine, Sparky. You're the coward who is working against what this country was founded on.
Just the crazy ones.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Hell why keep it restricted to one day? Why keep it at polling places instead of allowing vote-by-mail?
Why not change up some other aspects (like instant runoff or Condorcet)? Why not tabulate the votes of those that are not allowed to legally vote (minors, the mentally insane, felons) simply for the informational purpose of knowing who they would vote for? At least in the case of minors it would get some of them thinking about the government and get them used to the idea of voting.
And of course, the why is the same as why we don't make a lot of other positive changes (and is the source of the article we are commenting on): power.
Those in the driver's seat have no interest in making any change that would possibly remove them from the driver's seat. Those that fund them and profit by their deeds have no interest in it either. They are all making far too much money and have far too much control for any major change to take place as is.
The best we can try to do is vote them out. Of course that won't work if this article is accurate. Then the options get a little more complicated.
The good news about this article is the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It states unequivocally that in cases of disenfranchisement, the state where it occurs shall lose their representation proportionately. So if half the people were disenfranchised, the state loses half its representation.
Sadly, it will only be enforced if there is enough of a public outcry against fraud.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
A few problems with Diebold:
1. Non-transparency. It's the tech equivalent of bringing ballot boxes from all over to a room only Diebold employees are allowed, in which they open the boxes, "count" the votes, burn them and then come out and give you vote tallies.
2. Easily hackable. Flaws have been found before, but check the latest from the Princeton guys. So we're not only relying on the good faith of the Diebold people, but everyone that comes into contact with the machines. In CA, machines were sent home with poll workers for days before a special election.
3. What problem does it solve? Hanging chads? I don't believe electronic voting is the only way around that.
And for anyone that thinks Reps and Dems are just as guilty at election fraud, here's an idea. Why not support the Dems but put pressure on them to fix the things they've complained about. Ride that backlash against recent fraud and turn it into sensible voting practices and redistricting rules. Eventually we may even get clean money campaigning and instant runoff voting. If you think each side has been taking turns stealing elections and one side's willing to end it even if they miss their turn, take them up on it.
What the conspiracy loons never mention of course is that in many places the elections are in the hands of local election boards who design the ballot, arrange for polling places, workers, etc. In 2000 for instance the overwhelming majority of districts in Florida where problems occurred had election boards controlled by guess who? Thats right the Democrats. The most famous artifact from that period, the Butterfly Ballot, was designed by Democrats and approved by both parties.
The aged father of a friend of mine voted with that ballot. He was a man of limited education who'd driven a truck his entire life. My friend reported that his father, a Democrat, had no trouble with the ballot at all. Butterfly ballots were not that uncommon by the way. What was significant was who the Democrats chose to manage their attempts to crowbar the election their way. The Chicago Daleys for Bog's sake. If the presence of those folks anywhere near a ballot process doesn't make you see red you haven't been paying attention.
The shrieking and feces flinging over the 2004 elections merely represent the tertiary stages of
Anti-Bush Derangement Syndrome. Maybe I should start a website MoveOnandGetOverItYouMorons.org
Sheesh.
IBM
Your first point isn't a problem of the system it is a problem of the two parties running. Pero was in the debates and he took a good majority of the vote from Bush senior who would have won if it wasn't for Ross Pero. Clinton won by very few actual popular votes. But one day the people who host the debates (and no it isn't a government office like the name implies and is now prety much run by the two parties) decided not to include third parties that don't have a chance to win. This was because not only did clinton win because Pero stole some votes from Bush senior, he took votes from clinton too. Then Ralf Nader poped his head around and it all the sudden was a threat to democrates too. The womans legue who originaly held the debates saw this comming and decided to wash thier hands of it when the parties started demanding control over the debates. As for television coverage fo the conventions, well that as easy as ratings.
Your second point thouhg, I'm sure some one has explained this before bu
t i will touch on the reasons why the vote is waisted. First, the two parties have aligned themselves as far to the center to attract as many people as possible. This means that most third party candidates not pulling a lieberman are going to be somewhere to a fringe on at least one topic therby alienating some voters. In a presidential race, voting for a candidante because of one reason means the candidate that agrees with you 90% of the rest of the postition won't be elected. Also in large bodied governemnt (like senate and congress) you need people willing to support your ideas in order to make then laws. A third party candidate won't have the support one of the two original parties have. They will be shown as inefective or just ridding the wave trying to vote how thier morals dictate on what is thrown at them. This seems to happen the more removed from the local constuance an office gets. Now in state and local races, were the third parties tend to ignore more often, the party affiliation plays lessor of a role and a third party candidate could be more effective.
https://slashdot.org/~pudge/journal/137466
RFK Jr.'s article is utter bullshit.
If you actually examine his claims, they simply do not hold up.
Here's the executive summary: "[RFK Jr.] claims 357,000 legal voters were denied the right to vote, or did not have their legal vote counted. He has no actual data to justify the inclusion of at least 347,000 of the 357,000, and his claim that this is mostly the fault -- let alone the intent -- of Republicans is, to be kind, specious."
Oh, also note that RFK Jr. is the same winner that blamed Bush and Barbour for Katrina, in one of the biggest bullshit articles of 2005.
This doesn't belong on Slashdot. Take the argument somewhere else - there are plenty of places appropriate for it. This ain't news for nerds. This is blue vs. red. And red vs. blue stories are just as inapropos.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Please explain to me which of the following Geneva Convention categories applies to captured terrorists:
The Genevea Conventions apply only to those who respect and follow the Conventions' rules regarding war and the treatment of prisoners. Combatants disguising themselves as civilians and violating the rules of war are afforded no protection whatsoever by the Geneva Conventions. I'd argue if anything is undermining international law and threatening to "break" Geneva it's applying it to only one side of the conflict without regard for the blatantly illegal behavior of the other side. Please explain to me the incentive for obeying the Conventions if you can reap the benefits without even paying lip service to its requirements?
And the president doing illegal and unconstitional things and never being challenged isn't something we can recover from, that sets a very very scary precedent. That must be challenged and stopped.
Oh yes, you're SO right, Bush never gets challenged over anything he says or does.. /me rolls his eyes in disbelief..
And it's the Republicans who are playing the emotional politics. They're the ones painting people as traitors for opposing them, they're the ones with public figures who can call for the execution of Surpreme Court judges, they're the ones ramping up the fear at every election.
True, I mean, no one opposing the Republicans would use fear for political purposes.. unless the fear was of the BushHitler KKKabal and how they're destroying the country. Let me find of an example of that.. Oh yes, how about the post you JUST WROTE. Hypocrisy, thy name is DavidTC.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
That was really a cheesy question. Fat and easy, pitched right over the plate. It was there to let John Yoo look good. And he waffles, and hedges, and says that our sweet, sweet gonads persist in an uncrushed state at the sufferance of our Dear Leader.
Gets me every time.
I wish someone would ask these people what they would consider going too far. What's something the President can't do? What's something that you'd say, "whoa, whoa, going too far now" about?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
IMO, there are a few problems with your assessment here.
First of all, a factual error: Mandatory voting as implemented in Brazil does not affect your freedom of expression. Even with electronic voting, the voter has the option of anulling their vote, by selecting the "Annul Vote" option. So, if you refuse to vote for any of the candidates, you still have that option. That clearly indicates a protest vote. The one thing the electronic voting system did away with was the possbility of mistakenly annulling your vote (see Florida elections, 2000).
Second, I disagree that not being forced by law to vote generates better informed voters, necessarily. Again, using GWB as a case study, it seems to me that a lot of his voters were lured by vague things like "Values", or "Tough on Terror". I don't have especific references to that last statement, but it is the impression I have from following political news for the last few years. It seems to me that ellective voting tends to favor well-organized minorities, which simply by voting as one block may outnumber the votes on certain issues, even if the majority of Citizens have a different view on said issues. E.g.: A president is elected in singnificant part based on his positions on issues like Stem Cell Research and Abortion, while polls show that the majority of Americans disagrees with him.
Voting as a legal duty solves the issue above since most people are likely to have an opinion on most things, so vote counts are more likely to reflect the collective mind of the Citizens. And even if they don't have an opinion, they can still abstain by actively annulling their vote. The amount of annulled votes is a valuable statistic that reflects the fraction of the population that thinks the system has failed them. No such assessment can be made from the fraction of the Citizens that just didn't feel like voting that day.
In summary, we disagree on this: the right not to vote because you can't be bothered to do it doesn't mean much to me. But the right to actively abstain from voting by indicating so on a ballot, that to me is as important as voting.
Where I live, that would be counted as a clear vote for the Republican candidate(s).
The eletronic ballot in brazil allows you to nullify your vote (this means that none of the options are good) or to blank it (means I don't care). The candidate have to be elected with the majority of the valid votes, so if you nullify or vote blank is much the same as a person who don't vote in a place where voting is optional.
:-)
I used to think that mandatory voting was bad, but as of today I am not sure. Voting don't hurt, it usually (in most voting places at least) quite quickly done, and usually you voting place is quite near of your home. If it were optional many people would not go for lazyness, many people who do care but are lazy.
In france, I don't know when, there was an election that all the polls were pointing to a certaing candidate to win in the first turn. The election day turned out to be a pretty day, and most people who would vote in this candidate did not showed up to vote, instead they thought "my candidate is elected, and the day is pretty I will go out and enjoy the day". The end result was that the candidate did not won, I don't remember the specifics but he may not have even got to the second term. This is the risk of the optional voting.
(If any french person care to clarify or correct my story be my guest.)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Really, calling one political party better than the other in term of morality or integrity is like trying to decide which 10lb rock you'd rather get hit in the face with.
Freedom of speech is worth much more to a democracy than some political party. Political parties will come and go, but FOS needs to stay for the democracy to be vital.
"When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit."
-- Lao Tzu, 500 BCE
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Yeah he 'stole' it... I mean, this map right here just proves that Bush had no support!
t e2004/countymap.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vo
Way to read the article dude!
The whole point of the article was the count was wrong, and the scale of fraud was such that such a map as that is utterly meaningless.
Keep in mind also that that nice flat distribution there says NOTHING about population density.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I see where you are coming from, and I can't say I'm up for trying to force people to vote. It would be nice if there were some reasonable and appropriate way to encourage voting, though. It would be even better if there were a none of the above option, so that people can express their "I don't like any of these losers" opinion by their vote, rather than by their lack of a vote.
A bitterly-contested election totally excuses six years of poorly-planned, incompetently-run war, insane deficits, tax cuts for his buddies and claims to kingly power. Oh, and some bloggers talked smack about him. How terrible. My heart, it bleeds.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Dear Confused Guy from Finland: Believe me, as much as Party A tries to get (qualified) voters from party B off the rolls, Party B tries to get more (qualified or unqualified or perhaps dead) voters from party B back on the rolls. That's the problem with one-sided bullshit. You people from outside the country don't know what you're talking about, and most people inside the USA don't know what they're talking about or refuse to admit what they really know. Saying that polling irregularies in Ohio are a Republican problem (excuse me - I never say ROTFL but this is one time I'm going to say ROTFL!!!) is like saying that war is an American problem.
In the Clinton case, a President with a ridiculous libido remained in office after lying in court about the things he does with his penis.
Almost.
A president was being sued for sexual harrassment. He was accused of trying to get a subordinate to provide him with oral sex. During a deposition he lied under oath about having recieved oral sex from a subordinate.
He committed a felony. He committed a crime that, at the time, there were over 100 people in prison for committing.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Here is Missouri, the Democrats kept the polls open in 2000 past the designated close time in Democrat centric areas of the state, while the polls were closed at the correct time everywhere else. Most of the state is Republican with St. Louis and Kansas City being mostly Democrat. The state was leaning very heavy towards Bush until results from these countys that stayed open late came in. They brought the percentage from about 80% Bush closer to 50%. Bush still won Missouri, but locally Republicans lost due to this.
This gave the Democrats extra time to vote, which a Democrat judge ruled legal. So both sides do this crap.
So, even though we have better means of verifying, ascertaining, and finding out new information, we should not act on that because those who came before us did not have that information to act on? I think that, with better tools, it is reasonable to demand a higher standard of quality.
My other body is also not wearing any.
And there's still the central claim that exit polls are the gold standard in every other country about how honest and fair an election is. How could they have been so wrong twice in a row? The compelling paragraph for me was:
?'"Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. "I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats," [emphasis mine] he says. "I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong." In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling."'
not an American, just a neighbour and a confused one at that...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
First, this is three months old.
Second, his claims were debunking shortly after he published them, in Slate:
Was the 2004 election stolen? No.
All this crap does is further alienate voters by convincing them that their votes don't matter.
Clear, Dark Skies
That the 2004 election was stolen was blatently obvious to anyone who cared to pay attention to the facts, which are nicely listed at the start of the story. As was the election of 2000. But the majority of the public prefers accepting comforting lies to protest so it's probably going to be stolen in 2008 too. President Select JEB (that's John Ellis Bush, not a name, by the way) most likely. The Bush dynasty will continue. At least until it's either bankrupted us or gotten us nuked by Russian, China, and/or North Korea, or both. :-| Pity so many people are such cowardly fools.
Why is it so hard to believe that people voted for Bush on security issues and against the anti-gay ammendment because they didn't like that level of interference in people's private lives?
This may come as a shock, but few people actually toe the party line - of either party. They vote on the issues they feel are most important.
Clear, Dark Skies
The "facts" listed in that article are all exaggerated, selective or distorted.
I notice he didn't mention how the only actual convictions for interfering with the Ohio elections were Democrats charged with vandalizing Republican campaign sites and vehicles.
Clear, Dark Skies
I agree with you mostly about Kerry, but I think his platform was obscured by the endless supply of misrepresentations coming from the media and Bush's campaign, deliberately making out Kerry's platform to be weak on security when in fact it wasn't. Kerry's platform was reasonable, and I think he showed what it was composed of during the debates. As such, the 59 million people who voted for Kerry according to his platform qualify Kerry as someone who people cared about. For the other 62 million people who didn't vote for him because he didn't have charisma or you "couldn'/t have a beer with him" or he wasn't an evangelical Christian or he appeared weak, we still have to make the case that there was election malfeasance both in 2000 and 2004 - and we have to use means other than people's sympathy for Kerry's loss, since that's not present on the other side.
Kerry is a admittedly more like a tree than a human being, but I can guarantee you he's more competent than Bush. That said, a tree would be more competent than Bush.
As you can see, my issues with Bush aren't simply ideological anytmore - they deal with the more basic issue of being qualified for the job. If you can't take in real-world factual information and make sound, reasoned decisions from it, you aren't qualified. I wouldn't trust Bush to manage a McDonald's franchise, let alone our country. The only business he hasn't run into the ground is the Texas Dodgers, but that's because he's a talented politican more than a talented leader.
Competency is a core requirement for voting for somebody, and for that reason, regardless of ideological decisions, I think you made the right decision by voting for Kerry.
know what a "citizen's arrest" is?
Clear, Dark Skies
To put it plainly - american "far left" = just left of centre to the rest of the world.
American far left is just left of the european center. In case you were unaware, this planet doesn't consist of the US and Europe.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Rangers, not Dodgers. Sorry.
And it may have a lot to do with why younger democracies seem to all be parlamentary systems - people have learned from the "founding fathers'" mistake.
One thing few people realize - the U.S. system was designed to have no political parties at all; such organizations were banned. Unfortunately, people noticed that this was unconstitutional and within a few decades the two-party system was more or less established.
Clear, Dark Skies
the point is that it has already been proven that there is no evidence to support your claims. If there is no evidence, then there is no argument. When I say get over it, I am refering to getting over the fact that President Bush won the election, and there was no voter fraud. Again, just because who you voted for didn't win doesn't mean there is a conspiracy. Not a single post against mine has provided a single piece of evidence proving me wrong. Instead, I get partizan attacks.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
It does seem to me that, to nearly quote Shakespeare, there is something rotten in the state of Ohio.
/. stories could be cited) the problem runs deeper.
Looking deeper (i.e., following-up a few other sources), it seems to me that this is merely the latest manifestation of an endemic problem. Throughout American history, various forms of ballot fraud have been common (both parties) and that while many of the recent problems have centred around the use of voting machines (innumerable
Here in the UK voting has always been a purely manual affair, as well as being fully open and scrutible. Registration for voting is an annual (and compulsary) affair, with every household being required to list each member with an eligeability to vote. The resultant records are freely available to all. Counts are carried out openly with full media coverage. Counts can be (and usually are) scrutinised by representatives of all the candidates. Furthermore the rules are universal, not determined locally, so that (with the usual variations in Scotland (minor) and Northern Ireland (less minor)) everyone from Lands' End to John o' Groats follows the same procedures.
Because of this and other factors election fraud is a very minor problem here. I won't say that it never happens, or that there aren't loopholes (eg registration forms sent to tenement buildings, where this only one point of delivery for the post, being incorrectly completed by the landlord, thus disenfranchising some for the next year) but they are minor.
Perhaps there is a lesson here.
Did I mention anything about Nigerian Uranium? Let me re-read, no, I did not. Did I mention anything else? Yes I did. Are you interested in any real conversation given that you ignored what I actually said and then whipped some irrelevant factoid that I made no reference to out of your arse? No, you are not.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
Yes yes! I don't think I strictly disagree with any of your message, but this, I think, is the key point. I believe there was election malfeasance in both 2000 and 2004. I believe it is important that we make the case for this. But, right now, we are lacking a enough caring people to do anything about it.
The normal methods one employs to get a great many people to care about rigged elections (rousing anger and indignation over the co-opting of one's voice in free society) cannot come in to play here because Kerry didn't win any hearts. People don't care enough about Kerry to care about their Kerry votes. And thus they don't feel disenfranchised by their votes being rigged.
So how do we make this case? What are the "means other than peoples' sympathy for Kerry's loss" that we can employ to get polity to sit up any take notice of the problem?
--
(Sigh.) How perfectly you exemplify my comment to the previous poster. Instead of intelligently replying or even attempting a cogent refutation, you, in typical liberal fashion, resort to name calling and insults. You'd make Michael Moore proud.
Sorry, but you do not love this country if you think those who are actually defending it (from the savage assaults unleashed by cowardly traitors like *your* leaders look like they hate it.
And how simply does it need to be put so that even your pea brain can grasp, insulting the citizens of the entire country and calling them cowards and saying they "turn off their brains" therefore implying that they are acting out of complete ignorance and that they are afraid of their own farts, though hilarious in its inanity, is not defending your country. If those comments are directed specifically towards Bush loving republicans then say so. Just making a blanket statement seemingly about all Americans does nothing more than piss people off and quite simply borders on bigotry. In typical liberal fashion it comes off as being tolerant of everyone and everything as long as they agree with you.
And no that does not nearly qualify as defending it (from the savage assaults unleashed by cowardly traitors like *your* leaders look like they hate it.
Please don't be so presumptious as to assume that they are *my* leaders. Again, in unadulterated liberal fashion you put your true colors of intolerance, bigotry, name-calling, and condescension to the fore. When you don't agree with someone, they are "ignorant", a "coward", "Sparky" whatever that means, etc. Congratulate yourself on being a perfect example of why liberals attract nothing but derision by mainstream America.
You just keep waving that flag as opposed to standing up for anything it represents, little coward.
If you weren't such a narrowminded asinine little ass (see now you have me doing it), I'd inform you that it is perfectly reasonable to do both. But I'm sure you'd just stick your fingers in your ears and start singing "la la la" or something. Yes, I am a liberal, just not a sniveling, Michael Moore acolyte like you. And, yes, I intend to keep waving my flag. Part of that being to constructively and rationally engage in political discourse by not marginalizing and antagonizing Americans as a whole like they are all part of some dronelike hive conservative front but actually pinning blame where it really fits. Namely, W and friends, true republicans that actually are a member of the aforementioned dronelike hive, and whiney bitches like you.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I'll grant you that a lot of RFK's numbers may be a little inflated, artificial or puffed up.
... it remains at most a mere anomaly, representing nothing in particular about how the votes were counted.
... vote at all?
Well, no: most of them are complete bullshit with no basis in fact whatsoever.
But what about anomalies like rural voters in southern Ohio voting for Bush and against an anti-gay marriage-amendment ballot measure in the state?
What about it? I voted for Bush, and would be against such a constitutional amendment.
That doesn't make any sense at all on any criteria that I can figure out. Have you got any hypothesis to explain that?
I don't need one. I would vote that way.
That you cannot understand how someone would do that is not a basis for believing the votes have been manipulated. The only thing it may possibly be a basis for is doing further investigation: you see what you think is an anomaly, so you do more work to see if there is actual error or wrongdoing. If you find none, then
And there's still the central claim that exit polls are the gold standard in every other country about how honest and fair an election is.
The central, and false, claim. Like most polls, they require the pollster to manipulate the results to get what he thinks is a representative sample of core demographics. But it's even harder to do right with exit polling than with normal polling. So Zogby does an exit poll in rural WA, and he gets a response of 150 self-identified Democrats, and 50 self-identified Republicans, all of whom voted for their party's candidate. Obviously, it would be silly to think that Kerry will win by a ratio of 3:1; so, how do they deal with that? One way is that they have pregenerated numbers representing Republican and Democratic voter ratios in the area, so if they know the area is 60 percent GOP and 40 percent Democrat, then they massage the actual results accordingly.
And there are many other problems that can be encountered, as well. How do you take absentee voters into account, since you do not touch them with exit polls? Are they more or less likely to vote for Kerry or Bush? More or less likely to vote party line? More or less likely to
The first, and primary, thing to look at for problems with exit polls is methodology as conducted and assumptions made. Are their democgraphic assumptions used to massage the data accurate? Did they ask good questions, from a wide variety of areas?
Once you start learning more about how exit polling is actually done, how prone to error it is, Occam's Razor will tell you (being that the most obvious answer is usually the correct one) that the error is probably in the polling itself.
But let's assume the exit polls were right, and the official count was wrong. You can't prove it, of course, by just assuming the exit polls SHOULD be right. There's a reason it's called the "official count." Unless you can prove it by showing HOW the official count was actually incorrect -- something RFK Jr. lied through his teeth to attempt -- it's meaningless supposition. Again, as with the "anomaly" you cite about people voting against the anti-gay-marriage amendment but for Bush, this is merely reason to investigate further, and not serious evidence of error or fraud by itself.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying this just because I voted for Bush. Here in WA, our governor's race in 2004 was far closer than the Presidential race in Ohio, or even Florida in 2000. A race with over three million votes for governor was decided by about 150 votes. The final count went against the candidate I voted, and campaigned, for, Dino Rossi. Many of my GOP colleagues say that the Democrats "stole" the election. Maybe they did, but I will not consider that a reasonable possibility without evidence that actually shows it. And the evidence in WA is similar: Democratic operatives vandalizing GOP offices, missing vo
Cool. Just asking questions. Thanks for the substantive response...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
If you think it is possible for anyone to "unknowingly lie" then we are speaking different languages. To me, lying is a serious thing that indicates dishonesty. When you accuse someone of lying, you're not saying anything about their character at all.
I'm speaking english and in english, one valid definition of a lie is:
a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth
But fine, I'll play the semantic game. I will rephrase it:
This administration has failed to tell the truth, either knowingly or unknowingly...
Is that better? My point still stands and I have avoided alienating you by using the word "lie" in a manner in which you disagreed.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
There are no "allocations of voting machines". Each county purchases, pays for and maintains it's own. So, if a county or city doesn't have enough voting machines, whose fault is that?
Now, think about what it means that it was democrat-controlled areas that didn't have enough machines...
Most of these "coincidences and anomolies" are created by selective presentation of facts.
Clear, Dark Skies
There are other alternatives, you know, countries larger than yours (see Brazil), or mine, have compulsory voting and they manage (you divide the number of booths by the voting stations, and have people assigned to polling stations. Not that hard).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Anyone who is pissed about the outcome is just angry because everyone else didnt vote Bush out.
Well, halfway. We're actually pissed about the apparent IQ level it took to vote for Bush a 2nd time after so many incredible failures. We still have Abortion, we failed to make Gay Marriage unconstitutional, we spent 3 years prior to that election failing to capture one crazy old man in a cave, we let the Taliban escape to Pakistan and become strong again, we have the war in Iraq which was a complete failure, we have the lack of funding and support for our troops, we have absolutely no security at the border, and we have the incredible raise in future tax rates by paying for stuff on credit.
And that's just the stuff that people who voted FOR Bush care about- what Social Conservatives should care about. Bush's voter base is supposedly Social Conservatives, but we haven't seen one iota of movement on anything Social Conservatives care about. I don't see how anybody could justify voting for such a complete failure of a politician and human being. And that's what I'm mad about.
I also strongly suspect that the American people are smart enough to recognize a failure when they see one- and we didn't. The fact that you have the CEO of Diebold promising to do "everything in my power" to deliver Ohio to Bush is reason enough for suspicion of voter fraud, and we were DENIED a full and open debate on the subject by having a complete pansy as the opposing candidate. So bring all the manufactured "evidence" you want two years down the road- it won't stop a damned thing, it won't bring back our democracy, and it won't save the 6 million aborted babies' lives that have been sacrificed by this President.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Any link to WHY that is bogus, or even what the hell you're talking about (No, I can't RTFA, for some reason Oregon Department Of Transportation considers criticising the current government NSFW).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I mentioned this possibility to an Israeli friend of mine who replied that election day was made a holiday in Israel and because of the time off, many people were travelling and thus didn't cast votes. I don't think he mentioned if it actually increased or decreased turnout. Anyone know?
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
He was farther left than he pretended. I liked the real Kerry better than the Kerry he was pretending to be. Of course, I hated that he was pretending to be someone he wasn't. Granted, I disliked Bush (and still do) even more, but still...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't think slashdot's politics are necessarily left-leaning.
Bush has a ~34% approval rating and is even less popular abroad. And even less popular among the college-educated (in the last election anyway). So when thinking about what's "centrist" among international, probably college-educated, internet users, it's going to be something that's considered left-wing radical among, say, Texans (I say this as someone living in Texas).
So slashdot's policies are centrist, where the center is defined via its audience.
In my personal opinion, if the right drops the hill-billy homophobic tripe and finds itself a better spokesperson than Cowboy Cronyism, it may find a message that plays in Paris as well as Peoria -- and center will move right.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
- Change Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday. Nowhere in the US Constitution does it say that elections must be held on Tuesday, and I'm sure many people agree it's not such a great day to do it.
Hell, why does it even have to be just ONE day? Why not spread it out over a whole extended weekend? Saturday-to-Tuesday, and make the final Tuesday a federal holiday. That would allow for a much easier time of it for ALL, more time to confirm votes, perform on-site hand recounts to confirm daily totals...
As well, I support the complete and utter NON-SECRECY of any form of data like this. We already know that in our media environment it will fail anyway, so therefore our best hope in limiting fraud is to INCREASE the number of hands holding the data. (The count as it's progressing, that is, not the ability to identify an individual citizen's voting options.) Have the voter confirm the vote after casting it, and immediately send it off to all parties' command centers, any press organization that wants it, any think-tank and concerned organization... There can still be one (or, my vote, three) official "tally" point(s), but everyone else would be able to conduct their own, and therefore the ability to manipulate the counts after the fact would shink to negligent proportions.
This would certainly not stamp out ALL forms of fraud, but it would certainly make voter disenfranchisement harder, and manipulation of the count behind the scenes extremely difficult. The biggest threat to democracy is, indeed, how much of it is behind closed doors. Which is asinine in regards to voting, the #1 public concern.
An unregulated 'neutral net' has been maintained by market forces for decades. Why do we need government to 'help' us now?
The players in that market (the Telcos) are colluding together against everybody else to undermine and avoid the results of the market forces in order to bill us all again for the same services we're already paying for.
Since they are in collusion, market forces don't work.
That is why we need something to address the issue.
Whether it's the government or not is certainly up for debate, but that market sector is fundamentally broken by collusion, so it ain't going to be market forces that act to fix it.
And read that carefully, everyone.
John Yoo, for those who don't know who that is, is one of the major architeches of the presidents 'Unified executive' gibberish. See here.
And he's not asserting the president has the right to crush terrorists or even suspected terrorists testicles. He's asserting the president has the right to crush the testicles of people we know are innocent if that will make other people reveal information.
People, like, oh, you. If a terrorist likes you, Bush has the right to torture and mutilate you to make him talk, even if you have absolutely no connection to said terrorist.
And people think I'm being partisan when I talk about this administration literally being insane. That's even past '24' ground, it's into 'Evil Overlord' ground, where the villian menaces the love interest to make the hero talk.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." [on Polish TV, 5/29/03]
"We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents." [6/5/03]
"I have yet to hear from our commanders on the ground that they need more troops." [11/04/04]
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." [2004 election season]
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." [09/01/05]
"We do not torture." [Nov. 7, 2005]
"By the year 2042, the entire [Social Security] system would be exhausted and bankrupt." [2005 State of the Union]
There's plenty more where that came from.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And as for the uranium documents being "100% true"---the documents were forged. The Defense Intelligence Agency, back in 2002, considered the scenario unlikely. The Administration itself has called the use of the uranium claim a mistake.
This, by you, is "100% true"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
People say that the close votes in presidential elections are because "America is polarized" or "America is deeply divided". This is BS. Both canditates found the center line and walked as close to it as possible. As a result, half of the voters voted for one and half voted for the other. The sad fact is, let me emphasise this: THERE IS VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GEORGE W BUSH, JOHN KERRY, AND AL GORE. America is not deeply divided, America is straddling the centrist fence.
You can't find a nonbiased anything in this country. If the Democrats win, the Republicans Whine. If the Republicans win, the Democrats whine. We need to get rid of all the BS on petitions for ballots, voting place rules and regulations to allow the promise of "one man, one vote" to be a reality.
I live in a state that doesn't allow write-ins? If I wanted to vote for Alfred E. Neuman for president, I can't do it. Is that fair?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Both bush's were wackjob hard-right, reagan was between right and wackjob hard-right, clinton was centerist, and kerry was at best center-right.
So you are saying that the last election was between a center-right and a hard-right. This would mean that what 95% of the voting populace voted for the "right wing". This would be the same voting populace that voted fifty-fity for a then hard-righter (your assertion) and a hard-lefter Gore (my assertion). What does this say about the ideology of the "left half"?
At best that would make the non-hard-right devoid of something to vote for. It would make them a group that votes against rather than for. If this is true then they have lost. They will be stuck in a "make the other guy eeevil" type of war. To which the right-wingers can easily respond by pointing this out. They then lose any high ground as the other side posits eideas and the "left-wingers" propose none of their own.
Now, to a certain extent that is currently going on. But it is IMO part of a larger shift. The two parties have been merging for years: it is inevitable that they do so. As each side tries to get the "gooey middle" they incresinlgy find themselves alike. At some point the currently losing side will realize it and try to strike back out "to it's roots". Dependign on their success or apparent success, the other side will as well. But it won't change things. Eventually a third party will rise and capture those who are sick of the polarization.
What happens next is a toss up. Usually the two warring parties will try to co-opt the ideas of the younger third party. Historically prior to the implementation of the primary system and enacting of laws to solidify the two part system, they fail and the third party becomes a dominant part. At which point natural counterbalancing occurs and a new party formed of the remnants of the original two will rise to counter.
The single best change to the electoral process would be to remove partisan elections. You can still have parties, but no more primaries. Everyone who wants to run does so. This places significant barriers to a single group keeping a small subset as available to the public for voting. Everyone runs without utilizing party affiliation. Not perfect, but definitely better.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Dems didn't cry that the election was stolen because of the popular vote or the electoral college. Dems cried that the election was stolen because of Katherine Harris's involvement with the scrub list, and that the state-mandated manual recount wasn't carried out in several counties.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The thing is, most of the exit polls at the end of the day didn't show any discrepency. For example, CNN's exit polls of Ohio show Bush winning the male vote and dead even on the female vote:
a tes/OH/P/00/epolls.0.html
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/st
The only conspiracy here is a close race followed by losers who refuse to accept defeat and "move on". And just as in Mexico this year, their antics are actually damaging democracy instead of supporting it.
I mean, seriously - I can't think of a single thing that Bush has done right, but the Democrats insist on making themselves appear so insane that I still can't bring myself to support them.
Clear, Dark Skies
I call Bush's fiscal policies "cut and run economics" - give tax cuts to the super rich, run up the deficits, and run away like cowards letting future generations suffer (I am a grandpa of two young kids - this is something I really care about).
That's been their sole economic policy for three decades at the very least. Nothin new there.
Google around for this (I did a few days ago), some statistician tore through Freeman's methodology, but ended up arriving at the same conclusion... that the discrepancies are enough to warrant further investigation. Where's the harm in that?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
So... a governor (not part of the administration), business partners (not part of the administration) and Webster Hubbell (not convicted of malfeasance in the course of his official duties).
I like how "investigated under Clinton" is subtly equivalent to "jailed in Teapot Dome". And how, for instance, Caspar Weinberger being indicted (then last-minute pardoned by Bush 41) is equivalent to investigations against Clinton cabinet members that went nowhere. Very clever. Congratulate your thinktank.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is why you guys are going to keep losing. As a conservative who actually believes in limited government and individual freedom, I strongly disagree with the current Republican leadership on many issues. But when the opposition is this unhinged, all I can do is either leave my ballot blank or "waste" it on a third party.
Or you could actually take the time to do your duty as a citizen and spend some time looking into who these people are and what they really have done.
I noticed that you totally failed to address any of the OPs accusations, instead falling back on the standard deeply dishonest Republican tactic of calling anybody who doesn't spout the same nonsense propaganda as the right wing hate squad "unhinged" or similar.
That would involve integrity though. Something you're quite clearly lacking.
Oh look, some neo-nazi just voted for Bush. I wanted to do the right thing, but that Bush supporter is just so crazy! I guess I can't vote for Republicans now... sigh.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
If I were you, I wouldn't trust polls from leftwing nutbag websites as gospel. "Progressive, Tough Liberal News and Opinions"? What could possible be more objective?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
You're not seriously equating the labeling of CDs with the war on drugs, are you? I don't know anyone who got his house taken away by the war on obscene lyrics...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Stop paying taxes (legally or illegally), or leave the country. It's the same way you fight a business... you boycott them. If the ballot presents you with two untenable choices and essentially no alternative, it's not a democracy. We don't have proportional representation, and that one flaw has been exploited beyond the point of no return. If you want a comfortable life (seemingly the predicate of your entire position), then the only viable form of tax protest is to renounce your American citizenship. Money is the only real power, and if you're paying the U.S. military to bomb and invade countries left and right (half of the discretionary budget goes the military, btw), then you're partially responsible for their actions.
Personally, I feel the United States' political system is far beyond repair. This would be less of an issue if the decisions made on my behalf with the money I give to the federal government weren't consistently... well, evil. But we're a global aggressor, we've been one for decades, and we'll continue to be. I hate to be the guy saying "if you don't like it, leave", but sometimes a lifeboat is preferable to a vain attempt to patch a cannon-hole with duct tape.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I don't mind posting a couple days late...
The fact that this JUST NOW made news on Slashdot (Slow week?) makes me as sad as I was when I read it in JUNE.
read the parent comment to my post. Talk about being literally insane.
I hate to use an ad hominem fallacy to respond to an ad hominem fallacy, but generally speaking, I've found conservatives unable to engage in honest, logical debate when it comes to Bush. So I'll give the charges above a try.
One can very easily argue that Bush is illegitimately elected, both in 2000 (when the Supreme Court ordered an end to the vote counting, ensuring that many votes were never tallied) and in 2004 (as claimed by the RFK and Salon rebuttal articles referenced above).
I've only heard Bush quip once about how much easier it would be if he were a dictator, but that was obviously intended as humor. As far as I know, there's no evidence of this that he genuinely wants this.
As commander in chief of U.S. forces, Bush has ordered troops to engage in two separate wars, resulting in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not to mention all the military (U.S., U.K., and all other countries) deaths. Doesn't this qualify as a mass murderer? Those Iraqis just got in the way, and they died for it? Did they deserve to die?
The highest court in the United States, from which there is no appeal, has already ruled that the military tribunals setup by Bush violate the Geneva Convention. This looks to me as if Bush is a de facto war criminal.
If we want honest government, and want to avoid another traitor in the White House, conservatives and Republicans need to logically and calmly argue their positions, no matter how indefensible they may be, and be willing to admit how many of their beliefs stem from elitism, bigotry, and hatred of those who are unlike them (not the right color, religion, social or economic strata). I don't have any problem with people of deplorable moral character, so long as they don't try to hide it from the rest of us.
I know what mutually exclusive means, but apparently you don't know what "far left" means. Nobody in the far left could call themselves a Democrat, at least not if they actually held far left beliefs, because the Democrats are moderate to slightly right-wing.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Thank you Slashdot
for helping to secure yet another Nazi victory. Every time I hear some Sozi whining about the Reichstag getting burned down, it makes me want to vote Nazi no matter who the candidate is because at least the Nazi will have clear values and have a high chance of doing something about them.
Here's a crazy idea. Stop bitching about what Hitler is alledgedly doing wrong and start promoting what the Sozi are going to do right. What are the Sozi doing to help ensure an accurate vote?
Considering "Hitler is purposefully destabilizing our nation" failed to secure a victory twice, it might be a good idea to switch gears and try a new approach. Why not try talking about what the Sozi are doing right?
Let's assume for a second that a Sozi gets into office. What are they going to do? If their entire message was just to get rid of Hitler then they've completed the objective of their entire term in a single day and are now I have no idea what they're going to try to do.
At least with Hitler we know what he's going to do.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
What the fuck is your point? No matter what day you pick there will be somebody working. What happens to those supermarket workers when the elections are on a tuesday in november?
They can vote just like they do now. Before work, after work, at lunch or whatever. IF their bosses were decent human beings istead of corporate drones maybe they would even let them have a little time off on the fourth of july to let them vote.
What a stupid comment to make. You really think people who work don't vote if the voting is on a working day?
evil is as evil does
No not wallmart. They would not let democrats in on voting day.
evil is as evil does
(Sigh.) How perfectly you exemplify my comment to the previous poster. Instead of intelligently replying or even attempting a cogent refutation, you, in typical liberal fashion, resort to name calling and insults. You'd make Michael Moore proud.
Doesn't the doublethink ever give you a headache?
Lies, name calling, and insults constituted the entirety of *your* original post.
Then you went and dropped the "L" bomb in this post even though it in no way applies or is relevant.
And how simply does it need to be put so that even your pea brain can grasp, insulting the citizens of the entire country and calling them cowards and saying they "turn off their brains" therefore implying that they are acting out of complete ignorance and that they are afraid of their own farts, though hilarious in its inanity, is not defending your country. If those comments are directed specifically towards Bush loving republicans then say so. Just making a blanket statement seemingly about all Americans does nothing more than piss people off and quite simply borders on bigotry. In typical liberal fashion it comes off as being tolerant of everyone and everything as long as they agree with you.
My statements were quite clearly directed at Republicans, so what exactly you're whining about here, I'm not sure.
The simple fact is that this administration is acting as if all Americans are cowards afraid of their own farts since all they've managed to do is make up nonsense threats and demand the destruction of our liberty and protections from government in order to save us.
People like you are leaping up to defend them while they're doing it.
Again with the "L" bomb.
Is that really all you have? Well, obviously, otherwise somebody on your side would have come up with a credible argument for their policies which isn't easily proven to be a lie, but nothing yet. We're still waiting.
Please don't be so presumptious as to assume that they are *my* leaders. Again, in unadulterated liberal fashion you put your true colors of intolerance, bigotry, name-calling, and condescension to the fore. When you don't agree with someone, they are "ignorant", a "coward", "Sparky" whatever that means, etc. Congratulate yourself on being a perfect example of why liberals attract nothing but derision by mainstream America.
You're the one defending them, so they're yours.
Again with the Liberal thing.
I'm not one.
I disagree with your politics of deceit and murder, but that doesn't make me a liberal. It's sad that this is still all you can do is pretend that everybody who disagrees with you is magically a Liberal even though you have nothing to base that on.
If you weren't such a narrowminded asinine little ass (see now you have me doing it), I'd inform you that it is perfectly reasonable to do both. But I'm sure you'd just stick your fingers in your ears and start singing "la la la" or something.
Hardly. It is perfectly reasonable to do both, but the problem is that the current Republican party is waving the flag around while wiping their asses with the constitution. You're the one who has a problem dealing with reality. If you didn't, then surely you could have come up with something better than continuing to call me a Liberal when I've never said anything that could possibly lead a reasonable person to conclude that.
. Yes, I am a liberal, just not a sniveling, Michael Moore acolyte like you.
Stick to your talking points regardless of reality.
Part of that being to constructively and rationally engage in political discourse by not marginalizing and antagonizing Americans as a whole like they are all part of some dronelike hive conservative front but actually pinning blame where it really fits. Namely, W and friends, true republicans that actually are a member of the aforementioned dronelike hive, and whiney bitches like you.
Let me see if I have this straight.
W and friends are to blame for their actions, but the p
Yeah, we can prove the election was fair by showing that Republicans control more land than Democrats. Since land ownership equals enfranchisement, this is a no brainer! How can the Democrats claim to have been cheated, when they have so little land?!
So there.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So how has it been proven that there's no evidence?
I already asked you this. You said that since no one has been able to prove it so far, it must not be true. I pointed out that absence of proof doesn't prove a thing, unless you're willing to apply that same argument everywhere. I didn't do it, and you can't prove it yet, therefore I prove I didn't do it?
So, according to you, trees never fall in the forest with no one to see it, there is no God, and there was no universal force of gravity until Newton proved it.
This is not a partisan attack, it's an attack on your logic. Yours is entirely inconsistent, and you refuse to see it. Furthermore, every time one of your pieces of rhetoric fails, you fall back on the other, and it's really fucking annoying.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's it. Simply word your comments in a way that clearly delineates who you are talking about versus everybody else. Is that so hard? And the reason I keep "dropping the L bomb" is that arguing in the particular manner that you are is typical of liberals. And of course the people who voted Bush into office in '04 are to blame but what about the other 59 million that voted for Kerry or the so and so 100 thousands that voted for Nader? I would expect a little more logical thinking from a Slashdot poster.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I'm not saying *you* are engaging in this behavior, but what's your position on demonizing an entire religion and culture (Islam) based on the actions of a few radicals? Isn't that kinda like making sweeping generalizations about Americans?
As for sweeping generalizations about Americans, that's exactly what they are. Obviously, there will be exceptions. If you go by what we see in the media, though (which, to be fair, is not an accurate representation of public attitudes), the sweeping generalizations which you condemn are pretty spot-on.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
rebuts the facts as he lays them out?
I'd like to point out that Ohio's own Democratic party has a web page set up that pretty much debunks these theories. Don't you think that if 270,000 votes were suppressed, they would be the ones to scream about it?
Every Vote Will Be Counted.
Kennedy's claims are fundamentally wrong headed. No Republican could have interfered with the "allocation" of the voting machines because each county buys their own and, guess what, the counties in question were in Democratic control. The purge of the voter rolls was mandated by law and occurs before every election in order to prevent people from using the names of the dead to vote multiple times. And so on, and so on.
Oh and the big one: There was no vast conspiracy, simply because such a thing would have required the coordination of hundreds of operatives. Bush can't keep a cabinet of 12 people pointed in one direction, and you want me to believe he got hundreds of corrupt Republicans to manipulate the Ohio election without any Democrats noticing or any Republican accidentally - or deliberately - blabbing about what they were doing? I doubt it.
Clear, Dark Skies
That sentence fragment in the middle was supposed to be a link:
Every Vote Will Be CountedClear, Dark Skies
India uses far more secure voting systems that are tamper proof and far more affordable. Of course, many Americans couldn't stand the idea of importing a voting technology from India, assuming they could do a better job. Let's try using modified Indian EVMs to vote. Perhaps then we'll be able to identify the true winner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machine s
Compulsory voting also diminishes the influence of ideologically extremists who vote not because they are informed.
On the contrary. It greatly increases the influence of the person with the most political commercials. Ignoring the small percentage who are informed on the issues, the remainder will tend to vote for the person whose name they are most familiar with, i.e. the person who advertises the most. Mandatory voting will only increase the influence of the aristocracy upon our political system. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on your point of view.
Sincerely,
King David I of California
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Correct me, if I am wrong, but...
Exit polls are not mandatory, and they are not necessarily accurate for those who do participate. They are not scientific. If I am some liberal, Michael Moore opertaive with an axe to grind, I might be more inclined to participate than if I am a sane person with a job and a family. Personally, I question why various MSM channels were pushing these alleged results early in the day, as if to influence voters. Remember how Florida was called for Gore and Florida residents were told the polls were closed an hour before the polls closed in Florida? Exhaustive recounts ad nauseum went to Bush. (By the way, Gore had lawyers in Jacksonville trying to deny absentee ballots from overseas servicemen.) Liberal reporters see what they want to see, and they report what they want to report.
Could it be the MSM is trying to influence elections with bogus numbers? You assume the exit polls were accurate and the actual numbers were reported, based upon your faith in liberal conspiracy theories. You worry about voter fraud using Diebold machines. (I oppose those machines because I work in IT.) What about fraud with sketchy exit poll numbers? Remember, the MSM was claiming a Kerry landslide in states that were obviously heavily red. Hell, they were calling most of the East Coast as a landslide for Kerry when I got home from work, based on those fabulous exit polls. I knew that sounded bogus, and it was.
When liberal socialists (like Gore, Kerry, and Obrador) lose, they whine for decades and threaten not to honor the election. Grow up, and get you head on straight, Truthers.
Damn. And no, your comments were not in any way quite clear in being directed only towards Republicans. They were quite clear in your use of the word "Americans". Americans != Republicans. GET IT?
Really? Truly?
Then I'm sure that you will have no problem pointing out one single use of the word "Americans" in my post.
Yeah, thought not.
? And the reason I keep "dropping the L bomb" is that arguing in the particular manner that you are is typical of liberals.
What, you mean using facts instead of relying solely on epithets?
Demonizing "Liberals" regardless of the relevance of the term to anything is pretty much the sole Republican strategy though.
Nice try.
You're batting zero. Care to try again?
From Some Might Call It Treason by Mark Crispin Miller:
porkchop_d_clown (39923) wrote: At the moment, I'm more interested in Republican actions than Democratic psychology. One problem at a time.Well, guess what, there is no difference between a republic and a representative democracy, those are just different words for the same thing.
Yes exactly and have you noticed that the someone going into a tirade is invariably (well almost) a Republican? I'm sorry, but when I hear the words "The US is not a democracy but ..." coming from the mouths of people who want to argue away the evidence of electoral fraud, my cynicism switch gets thrown.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I know what mutually exclusive means, but apparently you don't know what "far left" means.
I would describe "far left" as a very liberal ideology, encompassing everything from anarchy, to communism, to socialism, and characterized by varying levels of militancy. The term "far left" is fairly subjective, though, so you could certainly come up with many other defensible descriptions. Like pornography, it's one of those things that most people know when they see it, but it doesn't lend itself to one universally accepted definition.
Nobody in the far left could call themselves a Democrat, at least not if they actually held far left beliefs, because the Democrats are moderate to slightly right-wing.
Someone from the "far left" is not by definition precluded from being a member of the Democratic Party, which means the two groups ARE NOT mutually exclusive. Because there are only two political parties in the US with any clout -- and the Democratic Party is definitely to the left of the Republican Party, it's not too far fetched to think that someone from the "far left" would identify themselves as a Democrat. After all, being a Democrat would be the best way for someone from the "far left" to effect change from within the system.
Are you really that stupid AND ignorant? The two do often go together, of course...
, not supposed "disciplines" cobbled together to put weight behind political dogma., not supposed "disciplines" cobbled together to put weight behind political dogma.
Wow, this would explain why there are no leftists in the political sciences! No, none at all! It must be due to all of those crazy, rich, elitist doctorate holders! Why, it's not as if there were leftists in my list several posts back about influential thinkers... no... none at all! And who are these "elite echelons" Ph.D professors you speak of? As someone who has been in the field for years now, I've yet to meet anyone with a Ph.D in the Political Sciences that comes from a particularly wealthy family, and I've met more than my share of people from across the political spectrum. Oh, but you know better.
If you are all the left has to offer - and for the sake of this country, I sincerely hope that's not the case - the Democrats will never regain power. Nor would they deserve it. My only hope is that you're not yet of voting age, which gives me little hope in the up and coming generation, but at least some hope for the present.
I wasn't being rhetorical, that was my point :P
The poster above was saying that we had 'learned to live' with terrorism, and that without the US's support, Australia would lose its independence to a terrorist faction.
I think it's hard to say that the US has been protecting Australia from terrorists/invaders for 60+ years... it's not like it was the US that won at Kokoda - we're capable of fighting for ourselves when we need to.
Not necessary. Your initial post was to defend the original poster who liberally used the word "American" throughout. In coming to his rescue, you by extension assumed his arguement and hence the word "American". I'm only using your own logic by the way. Remember this diarheatic expulsion of yours? You're the one defending them, so they're yours.
Oh and as for this. What, you mean using facts instead of relying solely on epithets? I actually mean the opposite. Your entire line of rhetoric is so full of straw men and ad hominim attacks as to render the attempt at an intelligent conversation with you worthless. For a reference simply re-read everything you have written thus far. You have yet to even acknowledge what this discourse is even about. Again, for the nth time for the really slow learners, blanket stereotypical statements about the supposed proto-typical American destroy your credibility in an arguement. But you already knew that. You just do it anyway because all your mutual circle jerk liberal friends do it. Keep blowing smoke up each other's asses all the way to November and see what happens. And you wonder why you constantly hear the question, "Why do you hate America?".
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I AM talking about everyone, in general, NOT just Republicans. The republicans are the ones who have them stepping and fetching around the terrorists, but the Dems are just as bad at scaring people of the 2nd amendment, real free speech (without "protections" for minorities), etc.
From what I can tell, there are 4 camps. The Republican hardline, the Dem hardline, the apathetic masses, and the vocal minority who call bullshit on the other three. Anyone in set #4 isn't who I was talking about, obviously, but the fact is that, statistically we're little more than a rounding error.
Very creative, another fake debunking, where you attack the messenger instead of the facts? I will admit one thing - I remembered incorrectly; the tires were slashed in wisconsin, not ohio. 4 convicted of tire slashing. Apparently the judge doesn't believe the "republican front" theory.
Clear, Dark Skies
Please explain where this gentleman provides a single cite, a single fact to back up his claims?
Apparently you believe "debunking" means "shouting down your opponents".
Clear, Dark Skies
I haven't voted for a Republicrat in the past 4 elections.
Clear, Dark Skies
I don't have to support either.. As any theory, you need a little faith to belive in it. I picked my side, it sounds like you picked yours... No argument necessary in my book. When I die, I'll find out who was right. :)
:( It's almost as crazy as the theory I heard once about apes and man being related.
I honestly don't understand what the arguments are about, if I want my kids to learn "intelligent design" then I'd teach it to them.. It doesn't have to be in a state OR church mandated book to be taught.
PS.. I also have a theory about the seasons and how everyone that starts to put on coats because of a little chilly weather, blocks the removal of body heat by the sun. thereby giving the sun less energy to shine back onto the earth and thus it gets colder... After a while we start to take the jackets and coats off to be brave and look forward to spring and that allows the sun to warm the earth back up... it seems to be a strange perpetual ritual with our species in general... But they won't teach it in my school system.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
If you take an objective view of the facts, you'll find that most of the issues we are facing now like poverty (remember the great depression, much worse), racism (remember slavery, jim crow, much worse), war (remember ww one and two and vietnam etc., much worse) religious fundamentalism (salem witch trials, puritanism, much worse), etc. have been overcome before and it stands to reason the results will be the same again.
It's easy to give up but maybe you should take a long hard look at history as well as an objective comparison of life in the United States versus most of the rest of the world to see how good you actually do have it here. And you can thank your fellow "apathetic masses" for helping uphold the rather lavish way of life we enjoy.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
And since there is no law requiring citizens to pay income tax.. Yes you can still vote (but no free room & board).
Your initial post was to defend the original poster who liberally used the word "American" throughout. I
Dude, can you make even one statement that isn't complete crap?
My initial statement was to skewer you for this little bit of fascist bullshit you spewed:
And maybe you should try a little flag waving. That's one of the main reasons liberals in this country aren't taken seriously. You look like you hate this country and all it stands for.
Remember this diarheatic expulsion of yours? You're the one defending them, so they're yours.
So, I stand by my statement. You're just apparently unable to take an extremely simple statement and apply it properly . Given your proven inability to put together a rational argument, don't you think it's time to reevaluate your ability to process all the bullshit that's flung at you constantly? You're not even making sense.
Your entire line of rhetoric is so full of straw men and ad hominim attacks as to render the attempt at an intelligent conversation with you worthless.
Right. Doublethink. You're talking about yourself there, Chief.
You have yet to even acknowledge what this discourse is even about. Again, for the nth time for the really slow learners, blanket stereotypical statements about the supposed proto-typical American destroy your credibility in an arguement.
So, then given what even brought me into this as I referenced above, what you are saying is that your argument has no credibility?
There really is no other way to take what you just said.
And you wonder why you constantly hear the question, "Why do you hate America?".
No, I don't wonder. It's due to that whole right wing hate squad villification of thought, patriotism (not jingoism like you're promoting that's very different), and government oversight. No big mystery there.
Now, did you actually have any sort of rational point whatsoever or was decrying people for supposedly doing exactly what you then proceeded to do your entire purpose in spouting that idiodic dreck you are parroting off the right wing hate squad?
I'm much more optimistic about the numbers for the "vocal minority" than you are. It seems that's where we disagree. If the political reality in this country were really that dismal, it would have disintegrated long ago. As it stands, we're all more or less chugging along just fine. And not only from momentum.
Yes, that would be a point of contention. We've nurtured "us vs. them" into an art form. The majority apparently doesn't care what goes on until it affects them, leaving the two hardline groups to manage the battle lines. And it's not some glorious Rebellion vs. Empire deal, either. They just disagree on WHICH rights should be removed and which parts of the constitution should be ignored.
If you take an objective view of the facts, you'll find that most of the issues we are facing now like poverty (remember the great depression, much worse), racism (remember slavery, jim crow, much worse), war (remember ww one and two and vietnam etc., much worse) religious fundamentalism (salem witch trials, puritanism, much worse), etc. have been overcome before and it stands to reason the results will be the same again.
I suppose that we have differing definitions of "overcome," too. If they were overcome before, then they wouldn't be issues, even diminished issues, now. I don't agree even that they are diminished. Just more subtle now.
It's easy to give up but maybe you should take a long hard look at history as well as an objective comparison of life in the United States versus most of the rest of the world to see how good you actually do have it here.
"It's not as bad as it could be" does not, by any logic, mean that it's good. It just means we haven't deteriorated to the point where you think it's worth fixing yet.
And you can thank your fellow "apathetic masses" for helping uphold the rather lavish way of life we enjoy.
Yes, I should thank them for not caring enough to educate themselves on what's going on outside thier own tiny little sphere of entertainment news. I should thank them for caring more about who moves on in American Idol than who's running the damn country.
If by "thank" you mean "hold in utter contempt," then I agree with you. I'm not certain what they are upholding about my way of life, or how lavish it is. That's a mighty assumption on your part.
You accuse me of making fascistic statements but yet you have the audacity to be just as fascist attempting to marginalize my voice by calling my opinions "laughable" as if that is some sort of cogent arguement. Assuming you have any idea what my opinions are and you probably don't since you seem so eager to jump the gun and make your own assumptions, by attempting to dismiss me out of hand you reveal your own intolerant, repugnant nature.
In the interest of an admittedly less than complete disclosure, flag-waving to me can be partially exemplified as, loving your country though not necessarily your elected officials. It means not taking every opportunity to grand stand in an international forum by denigrating your fellow citizens. It means to take pride in where you come from, maintain a sense of satisfaction in the positive accomplishments of your forebears yet always looking to a better future. I don't understand how you could have a problem with that. That was my original point and I stand by it.
Strangely, we've been going round and round about this all day as I've been trying my damndest to get some work done and you just keep mouthing off rapid fire nonsense that has had nothing to do with my original post at all. Please get a clue.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I suppose that we have differing definitions of "overcome," too. If they were overcome before, then they wouldn't be issues, even diminished issues, now. I don't agree even that they are diminished. Just more subtle now.
I'm not sure what your definition of "overcome" is either but please allow me to clarify mine. The great depression is over and has been for quite a while, slavery is over, jim crow laws have been overturned, world wars one and two are over witches can practise their religion freely these days, etc. If your arguement is that these things are only truely overcome when there are no longer any observable negative impacts on our society then you are fantasizing. Some would even say that these societal scars are even a necessary part of our maturity and further growth. It would seem that overcoming is really more a process than a destination.
"It's not as bad as it could be" does not, by any logic, mean that it's good. It just means we haven't deteriorated to the point where you think it's worth fixing yet.
I never used "It's not as bad as it could be" to support my arguement and wouldn't. Society is cyclical. It has its ups and downs kind of like the stock market. Occasionally there are corrections but in the long term, things tend to get better. If you find yourself pining after the "good old days" crack open a history book or two and prepare to be enlightened. You really do have it very easy. I'm not saying that modern society is perfect, far from it. We have plenty of room for improvement. But let's try to enjoy at least some sense of satisfaction in the accomplishments of our forebears while at the same time looking to a better future.
If by "thank" you mean "hold in utter contempt," then I agree with you.
Now that's just sad. Maybe you should look inward to discover why you feel the need to waste so much hate on others and so much unhappiness on yourself.
I'm not certain what they are upholding about my way of life, or how lavish it is. That's a mighty assumption on your part.
You got me there. I was being assumptive. Or more accurately, projective. I tend to assume that because I am successful and happy in my life despite having to overcome great adversity that everyone has the wherewithal to do the same. My bad.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Remember - Hitler was elected before he stopped holding elections, and many of his other techniques are in use today.... I especially like how Bush used the word "Nazi" this past friday as a general term to describe people who are fighting him in congress. I've never seen a blacker pot or kettle.
Bush didn't describe his oppenents in Congress as Nazis. Rumsfeld did give a speech in which he touched on the rise of fascism and the danger of appeasement. It is clear that there are countries and groups in the world today who are trying to appease the extremists. Will it work any better than it did in the 1930s?
Starting wars under false pretense to keep the military growing at a rate that is able to sustain a police state.
I note the plural - wars. Apparently you include Afghanistan in that. Wow. A multinational Islamist extremist terrorist organization essentially takes over a country, forming a state within a state, trains tens of thousands of terrorists who spread death and destruction around the world, attacks the US multiple times leading up the 9/11, and it is a false pretense when the US strikes back?! The minority of people that belive that is pretty small.
And by the way, the the US military is hardly growing at all, it is a mere shadow of what it was 15 years ago. The army is only about 2/3 the size. The other services are also greatly reduced
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Also, when did disagreement automatically become "trolling"?
Oh yeah! It didn't.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid.
Please tell me where I said "this year alone"?
Well? I'm waiting!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Higher quality?
;-)
The problem is, there's only a limited amount real "news" in the world. And with near-instant communications, live feeds from anywhere, and the burgeoning multitude of huge news organizations, the pickings get slim REAL fast. Thus, the bar for "quality" gets kicked ever lower, as they have to report SOMETHING. Nobody's going to watch very long if the reporter just sits there on camera, saying nothing and looking dumb(er than usual).
And you can demand quality all you want. You must remember that you're a lone voice in a mob of idiots who simply want instant gratification and MORE MORE MORE!
Can you tell that I have an exceptionally high opinion of my fellow man?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Nice sidestep. Completely ignore the post that I made.
I'll answer to your post though.
How does this (Parties A and B trying to get voters on/off rolls) make the voting any more fair/accurate/correct/right ?
This makes USA dismal when compared to other countries' voting systems.
One man (or woman), one vote. That's how it should be. Not: We changed the rules and you have to register to vote on this particular weight cardboard card that we are not going to even enter into our systems and even if we do we changed the voting stations so that you have to enter the right queue in the right building that we are not even bothered to tell you on our website and even if you are in the right queue for hours on end the voting machine that is totally unreliable is going to change your vote after you give it and even if it doesn't we can always change it afterwards because there is no paper trail.
Sounds more like a third world bs to me than the Pillar of Democracy US pretends to be.
I am sure that both major parties in the US are quilty of election fraud. The system is made so that it is quite easy to skew the results.
It just so happens that most of the irregularities are stacked in favor of the Republican party in the 2004 election.
I can understand that there are historical reasons why your voting system is crap. UK is still using a similarily bad system.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
'm not sure what your definition of "overcome" is either but please allow me to clarify mine. The great depression is over and has been for quite a while, slavery is over, jim crow laws have been overturned, world wars one and two are over witches can practise their religion freely these days, etc
So, specific examples have been solved. My definition of "overcome" is "to prevail." We have not. Whether we can or not depends on your faith in humanity. I know where I'm placing my bets.
. If your arguement is that these things are only truely overcome when there are no longer any observable negative impacts on our society then you are fantasizing.
I'm not fantasizing. I never claimed they were, or could be, overcome. That was your speech, redefining "overcome" to mean "improved on."
I never used "It's not as bad as it could be" to support my arguement and wouldn't.
You told me to compare life in the US to elsewhere in the world. In my experience, that's generally a milder version of the "At least it's not China" philosophy. If that wasn't your point, good.
I never used "It's not as bad as it could be" to support my arguement and wouldn't. Society is cyclical. It has its ups and downs kind of like the stock market. Occasionally there are corrections but in the long term, things tend to get better. If you find yourself pining after the "good old days" crack open a history book or two and prepare to be enlightened.
Once again, you try to deflect focus from current problems to past problems. I never said anything about "the good old days." I said that our society is deteriorating and we're largely unwilling to do a damn thing about it.
You really do have it very easy.
Another assumption, and no cited basis of comparison. I work for what I have, and take great pride in that. Some things I may, indeed, have easier than others: clean water and an accessible food supply. On the other hand, until you've tried to stay afloat in this society while still maintaining a principle tenet of honor above all else, you've no call to say how easy I have it.
I'm not saying that modern society is perfect, far from it. We have plenty of room for improvement. But let's try to enjoy at least some sense of satisfaction in the accomplishments of our forebears while at the same time looking to a better future.
That sounds like pap from a campaign speech. I find it difficult to "take satisfaction in the accomplishments of our forebears" while we're slowly undoing everything they accomplished, and not accomplishing much of worth ourselves. As for this "better future" of yours, either this is another huge semantic chasm, or whatever path leads to it isn't the one we're on.
Now that's just sad. Maybe you should look inward to discover why you feel the need to waste so much hate on others and so much unhappiness on yourself.
More semantic errors. I don't hate them, they're unworthy of it. I don't need to look inward, I know right away. Ask them why they believe something. Anything. Odds are, you'll get an answer that references someone else. "My parents beleived in $DEITY"; "$SACRED_STORYBOOK says it's wrong." Never questioning, just reciting. It's disgusting.
In the case of politics, it's particularly obvious, since only about the top 10% seem to be able to even paraphrase whatever talking head they got it from. They're not worth any more than something I need to scrape off of my shoes with a pointy stick.
Those who can truly answer, I acknowledge. Those who can answer and would force others to beleive the same thing, I fear.
"Gnothi seauton."
The parent was flamebait if this was.
I don't know how many times at Slashdot that a story wasn't checked out and people jump on these replies that hold people's feet to the fire with a "Mod up" all the time.
Just because you don't like what somebody typed does not make it flamebait.
Grow up, people...
No not wallmart. They would not let democrats in on voting day.
Um, I'd think Wal-Mart would just let everyone except store employees in to vote. They wouldn't even have any problems with store employees voting during break or after/before their shift. The problem isn't that Walmart would help democrats or republicans. The problem with highly accessible voting locations is that third party or indepedents could much more likely win. Our two inplace power blocks have a vested interest in not really getting the general public to vote. The Democrats only want democrat voters to show up. Republicans only want republican voters to show up. Independents would like that the two main parties mainly just stay at home this election. Those that get the voter consisting voting for them don't want to add the total number of unknowns to the mix. New comers might have an edge with additional voter turnout though.
Whoop-dee-doo.
Wow, that's a pretty desperate defense of your made up numbers. I assumed you were quoting figures for some rational purpose; to support an argument perhaps. Obviously, spending levels are utterly meaningless without specifying a time period. I'm sure you disagree, but you're full of it in any case:
The United States has not spent trillions on foriegn aid in the course of it's entire history.
No doubt you'll now point out that you never said you meant dollars...
I am familiar with the definitions of facism that the people who invented the word used. Perhaps you are not.
But I'm really not interested in redefining terms until it somehow magically becomes OK for the Federal Government to steal the Delaware river from the state of Delaware and give it to New Jersey for the benefit of a foreign corporation. That just doesn't work for me, so I'm not going to argue with you about what you think a facist is. I'll just stop using the term if you don't like the way I use it (which is the way Mussolini used it).
Perhaps you'd care to address the issue, which is that Bush rhetoric and Bush administration actions are completely contradictory? Can you explain how a so-called "conservative" administration can toss aside hundreds of years of precedent in order to accomodate British Petroleum?
I'm not drinking the Kool-aid just because you have a snappy comeback line, sorry.
Care to provide any counter-examples, where the Bush administration has done something other than favor corporations and big government over the little guy?
Good lord, you really are just a parrot of the right wing hate squad.
Your purpose for entering into this discussion was quite plainly to attempt to marginalize my opinion and attack me for having the nerve to go against the typical group-think by saying that flag waving is okay and should be encouraged more.
Rule 1 for douchebad arguments: When presented with facts act like a victim.
My purpose was to point out the idiocy of the fascist lies you were telling. No more, no less.
You're not "standing up to the man", you're not fighting any sort of marginalization.
Those are more idiotic lies you use because you were confronted with facts and you are incapable of either dealing with them or admitting your mistakes.
that. That's fine, but instead of finding out exactly what point I was trying to communicate, you launch into your tirade about how I'm desecrating it and all it stands for, etc. So basically, your whole plan was to score points by trying to distort my meaning completely and pigeonhole me into your little ideological box.
Lunacy.
according to you yourself in your own words your "argument" was completely discredited as you were making it, so according to you, you weren't trying to communicate crap.
Are you really this deeply stupid?
So the foundation for everything you've said was based on presumptions that you made about someone you don't even know.
No, it was based solely upon what I do know for a fact about you based on the ridiculous vitriolic screeching you were doing about "teh eval Liberulz" and similar lying nonsense.
That's probably got a lot to do with why I don't seem to be making any sense to you. You are basing your arguement on your own distorted perception of what I said that bear no actual relation to what I actually meant.
No, it has to do with the fact that your entire point can be boiled down to "teh eval Liberulz hate America".
Which is a completely nonsensical statement and a blatant lie. My argument is based on exactly what you said as is quite clear as I have now twice quoted the particular excerpt of your ravings to which I was responding.
You accuse me of making fascistic statements but yet you have the audacity to be just as fascist attempting to marginalize my voice by calling my opinions "laughable" as if that is some sort of cogent arguement.
Right.
Fascism is making fun of an idiot who can't even make a rational point?
You really need to look into what fascism is. It's kind of important at this point in time.
You point *is* laughable. That is a simple statement of fact. It is concluded from the fact that your entire rant was about how the evil liberals hate America because they actually stand up for it.
Assuming you have any idea what my opinions are and you probably don't since you seem so eager to jump the gun and make your own assumptions, by attempting to dismiss me out of hand you reveal your own intolerant, repugnant nature.
Sure, right. I was responding directly to your "opinion" which I even quoted.
I dismiss you out of hand because all you're doing is spouting ridiculous nonsense. You deserve to be dismissed out of hand. It has nothing to do with assumptions or intolerance. It has to do with the fact that you're just spouting nonsense.
Strangely, we've been going round and round about this all day as I've been trying my damndest to get some work done and you just keep mouthing off rapid fire nonsense that has had nothing to do with my original post at all. Please get a clue.
Given that I was responding to your point and quoting you while doing that, the deep dishonesty of this ridiculous statement stands out loud and clear.
You can't equate the two. It's like saying that Clinton lied (about getting head), and Bush lied (about a variety of things), so they're both bad. See, it doesn't really affect me if the President gets head. I mean, dick move on his part and all, but it doesn't get me in much of a lather, y'know?
It's kinda like saying that Israel kills civilians (by accident), and Hamas kills civilians (on purpose, and as many as possible), so they're both bad. It trivializes wrongdoing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Its gotten to the point now that responding to your sophomoric rants is just getting boring. If you can't honestly see how moronic and juvenile you sound, I'm not even going to try. Your entire debate "style" consists of attack after attack that are so misconstrued and irrelevant, they aren't even wrong. You make no valid points because you have none. What should I expect from such a vacuous intellect as yours. Your head is so far up your own ass I'm surprised you haven't pinched your butt cheeks off and murdered yourself (see your idiotic sig). I would say you've lost this debate but actually, you haven't. There hasn't even been a debate. Just you going off and ranting like some drunk in a corner and obliviously ignoring every olive branch of reason and logic I have attempted to extend to you. Life must be fun in "Darby-world" where rationality is thrown completely out of the window whenever it conveniently suits your whims. Hopefully, you are either very young or mentally handicapped so at least you'll have some excuse. You are sad and I'm busy right now so I don't have time to play with you anymore.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
The majority of you reading this blog are white males anyway. You voted for Bush in 2000 and likely in 2004 - because he promised you capital gains relief. Now, you're pissed about how much money GW and his friends make off gasoline.
Alot of you guys want to act like "oh - they both do it since the beginning of democracy" - but - you're biased in trying to be unbiased. It's like saying the troops in Haditha used restrained force in their infamous incident; or that "war makes one do crazy things". It's simply ignoring the facts; and doing a great injustice in trying to sound unbiased! The Republicans use the dirtiest and nastiest tricks and consistently do it more than any other party in American history.
Bottom line is: Republicans steal elections!
Read your political history books.
From Nixon to Ollie North. From Tom DeLay to K. Rove. Deceipt and political tricks are the name of the game for the Republican party. The 40's, the 50's, the 60's, 70's, 80's, and now in the 21st century!
Most recently the Republican majority in congress has put forth legislation to pardon Bush for breaking the law spying on Americans. They're doing this pre-emptively because judges and legal experts are coming to the conclusion: our President broke the law. But - this republican-controlled congress would rather impeach Clinton for sex-acts and pardon Bush for spying on Americans.
It is completely in character for the Republicans to change the law before somebody can be charged for breaking it. This party likes to change the rules of the game while it's being played. For them...who cares about ethics? All that matters is winning! Losers finish last!
The Republican party is a dishonest and dirty bunch. If you think popular support was 50.1 to 49.9 in 2000 & 2004 as Republicans would lead you to believe - be my guest. But to act like that's NOT a conspiracy theory exposes your bias!
A good referee calls a foul when they see it.
While all is good and dandy, calling 2004 just another typically rigged election is like calling Hurricane Katrina just another hurricane. No, never ever ever ever have exit polls differed so widely from results as they did in 2000 and again in 2004. None of the above comments addresses this issue with its proper weight. Not in JFK's win in Illinois back in the early 60's, never. To put it another way, Ukraine voters overthrew their elected leader via protests in the streets over much smaller statistical differences between exit polling and actual vote counts as their primary proof of fraud. Maybe that makes them the home of the brave. Not sure what it makes us...certainly neither brave nor free. To call 2000 and 2004 anything like election as usuall in the US is to call Hiroshima and Nagasaki just another couple bombing runs. For the statistically inept, this may make no sense. But rest assured, this was a whole new level of vote rigging--and it took electronic voting machines to bring it about. This issue trumps all others because if the present admin was fraudulently elected, that means the present government in the US is illigitimate.
Hmm. How about voting for the weaker party. That way you have the most checks and balances and the best chance at a smaller gov't.
But that aside, Let me ask you this: If you vote for a guy who wins overwhelmingly, isn't that a bigger waset of a vote than voting for a third-party?
It seems you got the point very well. Make sure that people can vote regardless of voting day being a working day solves a lot more then trying for a day when most people don't have to work.
The other part, july 4th being a good day for it because of it being independence day stands of course, I'm just a bit concerned that many people are too busy having a big party and will be drunk when voting if they bother with it to begin with.
Don't know if you've heard, and this doesn't have much to do with the GP poster per se, but Greg Palast has had some interesting things to say about ChoicePoint (which you may recall is widely implicated in shady dealings in Florida in 2000) being found stealing Mexican voter rosters and similar illegal activities in the run-up to the recent Mexican presidential election, with the FBI implicated (see here). That might count as having "interfered with Mexico in some monstrous way".
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That's got to be the perfect plan to wake America up to the idiocy of Diebold voting machines, a la Brewster's Millions. Campaign slogan: "We're all assholes!"
(Hint.)
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Sigh ... at least it's no worse than what America does to its own people.
Great idea, though probably not the way you intend it to be. Folks that realise voting is futile may well be more statistically likely to perform jury nullification as well.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Give me another reason why it is still a Tuesday.
Give me another reason why it is not a national holiday.
It's not FUD if it's entirely logical and rational. If you think there are no bad actors in Congress you are entirely deluding yourself.
+++ATH0
You're essentially just plain wrong about the statistical significance of the discrepancy. If it wasn't big enough to be meaningful, you wouldn't have had the big boys trying to explain it away with polling bias theories and so on.
It would be wonderful to have some other data to look at besides exit polls, but with electronic voting systems that leave no paper trail, we're left without any other indicator. Throwing out that one indicator is not justifiable. Excellent. So why do you keep arguing against this point? Listen: two companies between them (Diebold and ESS) are responsible for counting about 80% of the vote. They're run by two guys who are brothers. They have a history of hiring people with felony fraud convictions. Rarely does a week go by without another report of some Diebold vulnerability.You don't need to postulate some insanely large, flawless, conspiracy to explain away the Republicans ability to rig an election.
How do you use a video camera to examine what computer software is doing?And strangely enough, there were widespread reports of various irregularities... all of which are being shrugged off by people who don't want to believe that they're living in the world's largest bannana republic.
First you complain about theories about perfect conspiracies, then you complain about the evidence of a flawed conspiracy... Scum to the left of us, scum to the right of us, oh well, let's just give up and let the bastards get away with it.because if your grasp of most laws is on the order of your grasp of "treason" then your arrests were bogus.
Clear, Dark Skies
Hopefully, you are either very young or mentally handicapped so at least you'll have some excuse. You are sad and I'm busy right now so I don't have time to play with you anymore.
That's right. Back under your bridge now, little troll.
Perhaps I shouldn't, but I find it interesting how that whole ChoicePoint mess and the FBI's involvement has gotten *zero* play in the mainstream US media, with all the networks firmly behind purported winner Calderón, who is conveniently enough in the Bush camp. Meanwhile, the very real concerns of vote fraud voiced by Obrador and his supporters are completely ignored. Not too dissimilar from how the situation in Venezuela was misrepresented as some fringe group seizing power. I recall reading NYTimes articles about Venezuela and slowly realizing that all the people quoted as being against Chavez were suspiciously upper class and urban.
Things that make you go, "hmm..."
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
But, but, the constitution is a "living document". Generations of pious liberals have told us so. Who gives a shit about all that original intent crap?
If the Warren Court could find a right to abortion in the mystical emanations and penumbras of the Constitution, I am willing to cut the Commander in Chief a hell of a lot of slack in his manner of dealing with non-citizen terrorists and jihadis picked up on the battlefield outside our borders.
Be a patriot: Murder a Republican.
How amusing. Have you forgotten who owns the guns in this country? The very day the smelly lefties declare the Revolution is upon us, folks like me are prepared to cut them down in the street like dogs. They would be well advised to stick to the democratic process.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I am not american, and I wish to make no claim on the validity of the facts. I seek only to say this: Any Opposition party sho sincerely believed that this kind of election tampering was occuring is left with only one option. Boycott the election and call in UN observers. If, at the end of monitored elections there was still dispute as to wether the election was fair, then they could again boycott the elections. If one was still unhappy with the result, and if one actually believed that some grave injustice took place, there are courses of action to be taken. The party that perpertrated the act, and its supporters are so unlikely to be swayed by claims of fraudulent behaviour that it becomes futile trying to convince them. Rigged elections take place frequently around the world, i suggest that Americans take note of the means of resolution.
For some possibilities as to who "they " are, try watching these documentaries (mostly available on google video) "the money masters" "jfk II the bush connection" "everybodies gotta learn sometime" then "loose change 2E" then "martial law 911 alex jones" "terrorstorm" "painfull deceptions" "waco rules of engagement" "peace propaganda and the promised land"
or just go to universal seed and watch some of the stuff there
My answer to who after much (but not enough) research is probably: no particular person, no particular group, but more a collection of elitist groups (often termed the illuminati), each jostling for top spot while pushing the same overall plan (enslave the rest of us).
watch "the money masters" on google video
You got most of what you said wrong.
but youd have to be a complete frickin idiot not to realise that he did steal it.
There is no actual evidence of this.
Dodgy exit polls
This is not evidence of any wrongdoing, it is only evidence that either the exit polls, or the actual results, are wrong. Or both. You need actual evidence supporting this.
mathematical impossibilities
No such exist.
thousands of accounts of one sided errors
None that were specific to Bush or Kerry.
the voting machines manufacturer CEO PROMISED BUSH VOTES in a memo!!!
If you are in kindergarten and are incapable of understanding context, then yes, this "promising votes" thing is actually meaningful. If you're a thinking adult, it's not. He merely said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," which is, well, what people say when they are trying to help someone win a campaign. He was speaking as an individual, in his efforts to help Bush win. There was no implication of any kind that he would ever break the law to accomplish this. By your logic, everyone who has ever worked on a campaign is guilty of election fraud.
You can whinge about sources if you want, I dont give a crap, most murdoch/GE/etc owned news companies lie through their teeth, so the only place you CAN go for some of this news is "less reputable" sites...
How about Slashdot? It is simple and undisputed truth that the story in Rolling Stone, by RFK Jr., that purported to show Bush stole Ohio, was complete and utter lies. RFK Jr. made up almost all of his numbers. He said 357,000 Democrats were denied the right to vote, but half of those were from a single unsubstantiated estimate that "2 to 3 percent" of voters left the polls early because lines were so long, and he took the higher number, and pretended they were all Democrats. It's total nonsense. His whole article is the same sort of bullshit.
The big problem with that is that someone has to come up with the questions. And administer the test. In a country that the political parties don't run the entire election that might work, but the US is not one those countries. And even in those countries at some point that test is going to get used to exclude a set of people from voting (other than the intended set).
Tell me why, in "democratic" countries around the world, exit polls are used as a very reliable marker to check for vote rigging, and are considered almost perfect. Some countries even use the exit polls as the actual vote, and only check the real votes if the exit polls are close! Any time an election has dodgy exit polls anywhere else in the world, americans scream fraud, but at home, its ok? Gimme a fucken break. ah fuckit, Im not gonna reach you and I cant be stuffed trying.
watch "the money masters" on google video
That's a pretty stupid question. Since "True" or "False" are perfectly valid answers, so you're already trying to prevent the people who disagree with you from voting. Which is why we don't use such stupid restrictions on voting.
True, is the obvious answer for those who don't understand economics and is often the correct answer. However, if the money raised is invested in infrastructure rather than on hookers and blow, borrowing it now could result in lower future costs and hence a lower tax burden than otherwise would result. Successful, profitable businesses borrow money for example - sometimes you have to build the factory before you can sell the stuff you make in it, hence you borrow with the expectation your profits will more than cover the interst payments.
Borrowing money to build infrastructure which results in industries moving in (and paying taxes) can in fact be reduce the future tax burden on the current people/industries. Borrowing money to maintain roads now can be cheaper than putting aside tax revenue and waiting until you've saved enough to do the maintenance - if the maintenance gets more expensive the longer you leave it (faster than whatever the interest payments are) which is a common enough situation.
Not all borrowing is a bad financial move - though it often is.
actually you got all of what you said wrong.
In fact, no.
Tell me why, in "democratic" countries around the world, exit polls are used as a very reliable marker to check for vote rigging, and are considered almost perfect.
They aren't considered "almost perfect" by anyone who, you know, knows things. For example, take this article by RFK Jr. He wrote what you say, that exit polls are today a perfect science. His article is based largely on the DNC Report about the 2004 elections. One of the authors of that Democratic report recently wrote: "Exit polls have always been as much art as science and their problems have been getting worse just as presidential elections have been getting closer" and "Given what we know, it appears to be the case that the official vote count for all of its difficulties was more reliable than the exit poll."
This guy is an expert in statistical analysis of voting patterns. He maintains that Gore should have won Florida in 2000 (not that it was stolen, mind you, but that errors [specifically, the butterfly ballot] awarded the victory to the wrong guy). He co-authored the Democrats' own report of the 2004 elections. And he entirely refutes what RFK said about exit polls.
He also wrote in that same article: "unlike Florida in 2000, there is no scientific evidence that any of the reported irregularities in Ohio [in 2004] rose to the level of changing the outcome." Again, this is the Democrats' own expert. He claims that, simply, the Democrats lost the election in Ohio, and there's no evidence to suggest they should or would have won it apart from any anomalies, and that the exit polls were wrong, and the actual polls were right.
Did you miss the part where the judge defined sexual relations==intercourse? If he had said "yes I had sexual relations with that woman" he would have been lying.
So, was he in the habit of getting a BJ with other people present?
Maybe he was? SS confidentiality, and all that.
First of all, fuck you, you son of a bitch. Second, sexual intercourse as in penis in vagina. This has always been the primary definition, but if you broaden it enough, much like with "sexual relations", just about any contact with another persons genitals can constitute "intercourse." The problem with this of course is that merely brushing past another person in a narrow walkway on a bus or plane could be called "intercourse" or "sexual relations", and Starr wanted to use such a sweeping definition. Clinton of course, rightfully complained, and the judge agreed. So, once again, sexual relations != blow jobs.
And in any case, you can hardly fault someone for avoiding the "truth" when the subject is Not Your Fucking Business in the first place. There isn't a person on this planet who wouldn't split hairs or lie if trapped in that republican Inquisition, starting with the very Republicans who went after him in the first place.
This is what he said to the American public on TV on January 17th, 1998:
Then he had to admit he had misled the public on August 7th, after Lewinsky produced the dress with the semen.
In his deposition. he had said that he didn't believe he had been alone with her at any time. So, was this some sort of public orgy?
Also, oral sex WAS covered in the definitions of sex:
Definition 1 would include any contact with Clinton's own genitals ("any person" includes Clinton) for the purpose of sexual gratification. Oral sex included. Genital contact + gratification of sexual desires == stain on dress. He lied. His lies lowered th bar for the presidency so that Bush can pull the crap he's pulling now.As for whether anyone and everyone else would lie in a similar situation, a lot of people don't. They 'fess up to it, and either try to fix the problems that gave rise to their adultery, or give their partner a divorce.
This isn't a new phenomena ... the Kennedys were known to have had a few bed-hopping incidents. It seems to be mostly a Democrat problem (teh Republicans are too busy screwing the whole country, perhaps).
The vote is a SINGLE, TRANSFERRABLE VOTE, which means that for a ovte to be valind (and ocunted) it must list the voter's preferences from 1 to the last person on the ballot paper. Any missed candidates will render the vote invalid.
That is incorrect. I was scrutineering at the September 9th Queensland elections, and the Act requires either a single cross, a single tick or a single digit "1" inside one of the boxes beside a registered candidate's name for it to be counted as a formal vote, or it requires that the scrutineers agree unanimously that there is a clear and unambiguous display of voting intent.
So a vote with "one candidate gets a 1, and no marks for other candidates", "one 1, one 2 and the rest blank", "a cross and the digits 2 through 5" would all be valid votes according to the Act (note that the requirements were relaxed last year, as in the past you had to either have just one mark OR all boxes numbered!). At our booth there were about 3700 voters checked off, and only 2 of them didnt place a paper vote into the box. 128 votes were informal, including several votes for Luke Skywalker. We had about 10 votes that were not standard "cross, tick or number 1" votes where we (the scrutineers) agreed that the intentions were clear. There were another 3 votes that were much the same but we all agreed the intention was not clear - those votes were counted as informal.
As I understand it, the only reason the GWB is President of the USA is because a heap of votes were counted as informal because they didnt meet the strict definition, and you (Americans) don't have the "clear intent clause". In my opinion this weakens your democracy, but then again I don't have to live in your country (I've been there, done that thank you very much!).
Apart from the ease of voting, keep in mind that many Australians will "reverse vote", where even if they don't have anyone they want to vote for, they ceratinly know who they want to vote against. You simply vote in reverse numerical order with your most disliked candidate getting the largest number. We also have far more parties and candidates than you are used to - it is not unusual to have 5 or 6 candidates on an electoral ticket. In our electorate we had 3 - Labor (the "Left", which actually covers from hard-core Fabians rightwards to fairly central pro-freetrade and capitalism with a strong social justice agenda), the Nationals (historically the Farmers and Rural powers base, a traditionally conservative right-wing party, although they were trying to atract the gay vote this time around which was pretty surprising. I think old Joh was turning in his grave!) and Greens (environmental issues and sustainability, in a general socialist framwork).
The counting method is worth describing to you people across the Pacific:
(1) All votes are sorted according to their primary vote, and potential informal votes are examined and either classed informal or allocated unanimously by the scrutineers to a candidate. The votes are then counted.
(2) If a candidate has "50 percent plus one vote" or greater for the electorate the process stops, and that candiate is the winner.
(3) Otherwise, the votes for the candate with the smallest primary vote are taken and are sorted into those with a second preference shown, and those without. Those without are classed as "exhausted" and are put aside. The votes remaining (for this, the least popular candidate) are then allocated to the candiate in the second preference (seperate piles though!) and are counted.
(4) If there is a majority winner (the "50%+1") stop, or else repeat the step (3) with what is now the least popular candate remaining.
By the time you have only two candidates left you have to have one candidate with a clear majority.
The beauty of this system is that if you only care enough to say "I want Joe Bloggs and don't care beyond that" then you just vote "1" or a cross or a tick. Or you can vote by giving your relative ranking for as many candiates as you w
In the recent State Elections, in our electorate, out of 29,424 votes, there were 941 informal votes. Of the ones I saw (I was scrutineering) most of these were either blank or "silly" (votes for Luke Skywalker, Steve Irwin, Peter Brock, James Packer for example), with a very very few being just wrong (multiple "1" votes, putting their names on the vote - that is disallowed in our system, you can't give up your right to an anonymous vote - or confused where votes had been crossed out and overwritten - the voter is entotled to get a replacement if they feel they've made a mistake and it's not in the box yet).
There were also about 3200 voters who didnt vote. Some of these would be people who "forgot" (so genuinely don't care) or who feel that they won't vote and that $50 is a fair price for not caring (so who do care enough to make an active decision not to vote). We had 90.75% voter turnout in our electorate, and given that we have a fairly high number of immigrants who may not be fully aware of the fact that compulsory voting is compulsory(!!) this is a pretty low number by Australian standards. Most people over 30 who didn't vote that I know of are ashamed of the fact.
There is a marked difference between what the law says, and what the political parties tell the electorate on the issue of voting the whole tab, BTW. As CrankyOldBastard says, legally, you can miss out numbers and still be counted, but a couple of years ago there was a case of someone advocating that method of voting being very quickly silenced by the government - they don't like it at all.
The rest of us do have another party - the Liberal Party, which, contrary to the naming used, is the party of the right-to-ultra-right. Home of homophobia, anti-abortion, pro-war, anti-boat people, anti-public ownership of anything, anti-public spending on anything (except defence and the police forces).
The national Party (the Nats) are the only right wing socialists in the world. They allie naturally with the Libs in most of the country, but when it comes to subsidies for farmers, they're right up there alongside the old Soviet Union Farmers party with the begging bowl out.
The Liberals have become the Libs, but the Nats had to change their name (from the Country Party) before they could shorten theirs!
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi