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Algorithm Names Powell 'Ideal' Vice President Candidate
CWmike writes "Turns out the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. John McCain is the same person as the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. Barack Obama, according to a sophisticated online survey based on technology developed at MIT. Mr. Ideal? Colin Powell, a former U.S. Army general and former secretary of state. Affinnova's survey methods doesn't use the typical polling method of asking respondents to pick a name from a list. Instead, it gives respondents larger concepts, including photos, biographical information and possible first-term priorities. Affinnova calls this algorithm 'evolutionary optimization.' Steve Lamoureaux, the company's chief innovation officer, said of the VP finding: 'We never imagined that the same candidate would show up for both parties.'"
.. same as the old boss.
'We never imagined that the same candidate would show up for both parties.'
What? The Demopublicans and the Republicrats are all the same? That unpossible!
Unfortunately I doubt most people vote based on anything so scientific as biography and 1st term priorities. I bet they more likely vote for Mr Powell or not based on their gut feel about whether they like him as a candidate or not.
By the way - I think he would make a great candidate for Veep.
Nullius in verba
Powell strikes me as a vastly better civil servant than politician. But if Obama wins, he should definitely ask Powell to be Sec Def or Sec State. Hell, same with McCain for that matter. He was a good Sec. of State in an administration that didn't give two shits about him or his opinions, imagine what he could do if the President actually tried to make use of his experience and expertise.
The enemies of Democracy are
Call me an elitist jerk all you want, but I think you should have to be a property owner to vote. Not physical property, but some kind of net worth. I don't even pretend to be able to create such a system, but you should have something invested in the government before you are able to decide what is best for "everyone".
Colin Powell was the face of the deception campaign the Bush administration orchestrated. He was the one who went to the United Nations, and made a whole bunch of claims that turned out to be false. He's damaged goods. Why on earth would someone suggest he'd be a good candidate in a year when the electorate is itching to repudiate everything about this war?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Shock and Amaze! A politician who has made almost no memorable positions known on any domestic policy beyond truism of cooperation is liked by everybody!
Of course he's a top pick by everybody--he's like Opera-- nobody knows what his actual beliefs and agenda is, therefore nobody disagrees with him. If Colin Powell were so audacious as to actually make his position known on a politically hot subject he would suddenly see his popularity plummet.
This is America. If you agree with me you're a good guy. If you don't, you're a muslim terrorist. The only way to be liked by everybody is to say nothing of consequence.
Yup, what the US really needs is a VP who has shown that he's willing to help out his boss by publicly giving excruciatingly bad "intelligence" to the United Nations.
Yeah, we really need an accomplished fraud who's good at lying to the world to be in charge of the most powerful military in the world or its PR department.
I keep hearing "McCain is too old" and then read other age-relative statements about VP selection and wonder who age really matters to. Yes, at the extreme, I worry about the ages of the candidates but only to the extent that it is extreme and has other impacts (eg, health or lack of experience).
But are there people out there who are like "Gee, he's too old" even when the candidate's age has no bona fide health impact? Do the same people think "Gee, he's too young" about someone younger? Obviously there's no health issue, but experience could matter a lot.
I don't think of age outside of physical health, but I worry from the way the media portrays McCain's age that we're falling a little victim to the cult of youth.
Including what is "best" for non-property-owners?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Not to the rest of the world, he didn't. Everyone outside the US knew his presentation in the UN was a sham for the US public, and not for the world, since the rest of the world got to see the TV reports (funny how the US stations didn't carry them, hmmm ...) debunking his "findings" before he even presented them.
More like "Semi-Colin Powell" or "Up Your Colin Powell", since he's at best, a half-measure, and at worse, helped give everyone the shaft by presenting known lies as truth.
Kevin Smith on Prince
But won't those people that are allowed to vote likely vote for policies and laws that make it increasingly difficult for none-voters to qualify? Afterall the more people you allow to vote the less your vote is worth.
Colin Powell would have made a great vice-president for GWB in 2000 (or even a good presidential candidate), but now his reputation has been permanently tarnished by his association with the Iraq War and the Bush Administration in general. Since we are still in Iraq, I do not think his reputation will recover any time soon. Anyway, I do not think he would make a good Presidential candidate for Barack Obama. Let's face he (Powell) is black and so is Obama. It would be best to have a white guy to 'balance' the ticket.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Well the fact is that he told his bosses the truth, and they didn't want to hear it. They told him to go speak a pack of lies, and he did. You can feel free to hold that against him, following orders is no excuse and all that. That doesn't change the fact that in the employ of an administration that wanted to listen to his honest opinions, he would be a tremendous asset.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why should I let a illiterate imbecile who does not live in my country vote about my future?
Well, for one thing, US citizens who live outside the USA still have to file & pay US taxes. There was a little phrase that played a large role in US history: "no taxation without representation"
Maybe you should read up on it.
Why should I let a illiterate imbecile (snip) vote about my future?
On similar lines:
Why should I let a uncouth non-college-graduate vote about my future ?
If you aren't smart enough to get a PhD, how can you decide what good for the entire country ? We should allow only PhD's to vote.
The simple answer to that is because its not just your future they are voting for, its their own future too. If you live in city, should the president you elect not have any powers to make any changes in the rural areas ? Why should an urbanite decide a farmers future. etc. etc.
Any survey that says one of the primary party leaders would be the same person for either party is obviously in error.
Why? It reminds me of an example from a class I took once. Imagine you have a beach with two ice cream salesmen, for the exercise assume the customers are uniformly distributed, price is equal and they have no preference or loyalty. Now the theoretically optimal is obviously that they set up at 1/4 and 3/4, each getting half the beach and the customers walk as little as possible. But then, one of the ice cream salesmen decides to stand a little closer to the center, catching more than half. The other moves closer to compensate and so it goes. Eventually they'll stand right next to each other on the middle of the beach. With both fighting for the customers in the center, they'll become more and more equal until there's basicly no difference at all.
Try mapping it directly over to politics, with the customers as the voters and reps/dems as the icecream salesmen and the distance to the ice cream salesmen as the political distance. Everyone's fighting over the independent voters so both focus on what they want. I think what happened here is that you showed they're so close, if one is a little better at buzzword bingo it could "win" both sides. I think he should run for both parties, would be funny... Obama/Powell vs McCain/Powell, maybe it'd clue people in on how little choice they really have.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
People will say they want the person with the best tax policy, yet vote for the guy with the nicest shoes or looks like a hero. The Governator is only there because he dealt to the bad guys in the movies, not because of anything he's done in Real Life.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
IQs under 90 points - you don't get to vote. (...)
Elementary education IS free AND mandatory.
You are old enough to vote but couldn't find time to learn to read yet?
Literacy rate is 99%+, so presumably those who haven't learned it, can't. In a poorer country I'd slap you silly for saying that though, do you think kids that can't read:
a) Have been just partying through their teens and never got around to it
b) Been forced to work from child age, and never got a choice
and that they might like to have a say in for example what the law says about that?
P.S. You do realize IQ tests get recalibrated right? So you'd always exclude the bottom 25%, no matter how high we raised the education level, not nearly that many are actually mentally handicapped. Not to mention such ugly things that IQ tests can be taught - sure there's a limit but without training you won't reach it. You'll have people studying for the IQ test instead of the SAT test, and oddly enough well educated people will come out on top. That kind of bullshit has been tried before to claim african-americans are less intelligent, but it's bogus. Now you want to take away their vote over it? Hell, I'd probably pass if you set it well past 100 and I still think it's a stupid idea.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The honorable thing to do in that situation would have been to resign immediately. Either he did what he was told by his boss, against his conscience, or he lied consciously, or he was duped. Neither looks good on his resume.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The interesting thing is that qualities that make Powell an good candidate (intelligent, honest, outsider) are the same qualities that Obama seems to posess.
Maybe you should state it like this instead:
The interesting thing is that the qualities that I see in Powell that make him a good candidate are the same qualities that I see in Obama.
I would call the intelligence and honesty of both Obama and McCain into question. They are just good politicians.
Money is the root of all evil?
I disagree with those who dispute Obama's honesty, but I can't say that it's an illegitimate discussion to have; there is evidence (which I personally consider weak and uncompelling) which can be used to make a case to that effect.
On what reasonable grounds can Obama's intelligence be disputed? The man graduated from Harvard at the top of his class. He's a published author, and (in my view as a reader) a damned good one. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and if you're going to argue that Obama is unintelligent, you need to provide some support -- as the contrary evidence is quite compelling indeed.
When Condoleezza Rice took over the State Dept. after Powell's resignation, she found that State had been walled off from the rest of the administration. In order to find out anything or have any impact on what was happening in Iraq, she had to clandestinely circumvent both Donald Rumsfeld's and Paul Bremer's organizations and send her own unauthorized diplomats to Iraq. And this was Rice, one of Bush's trusted inner cabal (which is also the only reason she could get away with this).
How much more would Powell have been cut out of the loop of the inner workings of the Bush Admin and their desire to start a war which Powell was against? Why would they have shown him all the faults with the intelligence, knowing his opposition to the war and tendency to not be a yes-man (the whole reason he was so isolated) when they could instead just say "We're know you're against this, Powell, but here's our slam-dunk case that Saddam is an immediate threat and we just want you to present these facts to the U.N. as is your job."
I can't prove it. It's just given the obvious exclusion of Powell from the inner circle, Richard Clarke's consistent statements that Powell had argued against the war, the secrecy and readiness of the admins to withhold information, and even Powell's willing admission that regardless the U.N. speech is a permanent blot on his record, that he was in fact a victim of circumstances.
He did choose those circumstances, and stay in them far longer than one would think, for sure, and I think it's fair to hold that against him. War criminal complicit in the conspiracy? I just don't think so.
The enemies of Democracy are
The imaginary yellowcake in Niger would have come from the French company that mines it. Yes folks, the childish "freedom fries" slur was part of it IMHO. The ironic thing is that there already was quite a lot of yellowcake stockpiled in Iraq from the 1970s - what Saddam was lacking was a means to do anything with it. It really was a great big noise about a lie that would have been fairly irrelevant even if it was true.
But I, nor any white man I know, is racist.
Well, congratulations on yourself, but how do you know nobody you know is racist? You're white, so they aren't going to be racist against you. And if they know you consider yourself to proudly be non-racist, why would they reveal that to you? Or, maybe, you just don't know the right subset of the population, don't live in the right areas. Is where you live mono-cultural? As in nobody says anything bad about blacks because there aren't any around to bother them? Do you live in a truly integrated neighborhood/city? It seems like it's mostly in the conflict areas, white-dominated areas facing a minority 'incursion', where this happens...
Cus I've certainly met some of them. I've had people openly express their racism to me, under the assumption that I'd be sympathetic as another white man (which I mostly am). I've heard people openly slander blacks in their earshot, even store owners talking trash while black customers are in their store. From Chicago to New York to Texas, I've heard some vile, vile racism.
I can't say this nicely, I assure you I mean nothing personal, but it seems to me the only ones who say there is no anti-black racism in America are simply sheltered from it.
Not that this is ultimately a bad thing... I believe racism is learned, and the more people are simply not exposed to it, and grow up wondering how or why anyone could be racist, the better the next generation will be.
White Americans are, by and large, afraid of even being thought of as racist.
That doesn't mean they aren't. It means they're going to be much less likely to be openly racist unless they're safely among their friends. And even then, not always, but those are the worst cases. Your "average" racist is simply going to leave their mouth shut and wield their racism more subtly.
And given what I've seen and heard, I shudder to think of what would be said and done if there weren't such a huge stigma against it.
We can see the same thing, more obviously, with homophobia. It's starting to get less and less acceptable to be openly anti-gay, at least in the more progressive parts of society, while absolutely not the case in the less-progressive. But has this actually made all these people unwilling to gay-bash into non-homophobes, or has it just made them reluctant to express their discomfort and disgust? Isn't that the inherent joke of "not that there's anything wrong with that", a superficial statement of tolerance that immediately follows a vehement rejection of the very concept?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The enemies of Democracy are
Bullshit. Dems deserve blame because they have squandered congressional majorities, and went along with the bullshit (PATRIOT Act for one) the Reps brought to the table. Crying 'Poor us!' then passing totalitarian legislation anyway isn't an excuse from blame, its just being a group of pussies.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this "white America is overtly racist".
Well, white America is overtly racist. I know you talk about social chastisement for being a racists white but I've never met a white guy that wasn't popular for making a black joke every now and then. You really just need to quit pretending that there is any other case. It's just a fact of life. People that think that a few speeches by Martin Luther King and a couple of segregated schools can change the attitudes of a nation in a generation are utterly stupid. Being racist, in many people's eyes, is that they aren't allowed to call black people n---rs any more, and so, because they don't do that, they don't see themselves as racist...
except that...
More white people, if they see a black guy in a Lexus getting pulled over by the cops, will assume that the guy was doing drugs or is some kind of a gangster than a guy with a business or an advanced degree. If alone, they'll cross the street when they see more than one black guy.. if with a bunch of people, they'll sing Sweet Home Alabama and make that black guy go to another block. How is it in America that we have major corporations investing billions of dollars in building up data centers in places from the phillipines to india and you don't as much as even a server placed in an inner city?
There's plenty of white people too, that say that would prefer a white quarterback to their favorite NFL team. There's more to white America than a few suburban towns. All you have to do is take a drive through the civil war museums and you'll find that Confederate flags and merchandise sells on par with that of the Union. If you go into prisons, you immediately find that whites all band up into neo-nazi gangs, and, if there is a criticism of the right wing these days about religion, it is that christianity, with its message of peace, has been used to pollute the white race.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that we'd see confederate flags -everywhere-, should Obama get elected. Like he's seriously going to get a lot of votes in the South.. Come on... where's all the black NASCAR drivers? I see confederate flags more now, than I ever have before. I live in a mixed neighborhood and you have the white side of the street with guys flying the Stars and Bars and on the black side of the street you have a bunch of black guy dressed up like gangstas. People do not talk to each other -at all-, and its no different than it was when blacks and whites were throwing bricks at each other during the race riots of the early 1980s.
If there's any institution out there that is -not- racist, it is the membership of pro sports teams, and the US military. There's plenty of white soldiers that don't like blacks and plenty of whites that don't like black, but, when a black man saves a white man's life, and vice versa, things like race just don't matter, and, in this present war, there's an aweful lot of that going on.
This isn't to say that whites are all devils (Farrakhan joke deliberate), or that blacks are angels. It is to say that racism is far from dead in the USA and quite honestly I do not think it will ever be. There will never be a day where we do not have to have some sort of affirmative action in university or even in some workplaces. There will never be a day where we do not have to constantly police ourselves to ensure that people are not being judged on anything different than their ability. Racism isn't like a disease that you cure, its a chronic condition that requires persistent and determined management by the nation, the government, companies and finally the people.
This is my sig.
Obama is half-black and half-white. It's odd that many people forget that.
It's not that odd; it's just that in the US, 1/2 black + 1/2 white = 1 black.
The only racists I have ever met have been black, Mexican (ie, 1st or 2nd generation American inhabitants), and Asian (Chinese and Japanese). I once heard of a crazy motherfucker named Dewey, who was always talking about killing niggers, but he's the exception to the rule, and was chastised and shunned as a result.
Read this Katrina relief forum or comments to any online article about the poor, and then decide if white people are not (also) racist. It's prejudice to say that any group is more racist, and I've heard horrible things from all sides! It all depends on where you are and who you meet. I can't read comments on any newspaper site without encountering horribly disgusting racism. You must know some great people, because I've met *so* many racist people here (FL/GA/LA). Or perhaps many white people are just too chicken to speak the words in public--instead they rely on the veil of secrecy provided by online forums. It'd be great if more of the general populace could learn some empathy.
I supported the war because Iraq never honored their obligations of the armistice agreement that ended the first gulf war. I also his whipping Clinton around and defying UN resolution after resolution with no real consequences as a major motivating factor in what gave Al Qeada the balls to hit innocent civilians instead of sticking to military targets. We demonstrated time after time that we were all bark and not bite. I seriously think If Clinton would have went in after the first time inspectors were removed, 9/11 and other precursors that lead up to what we have today would have never happened.
Sure, but that isn't a sign of not using overwhelming force. The force just moved on. Perhaps too soon or inappropriately but they moved on. The fact is that the Iraqi army more or less disbanded themselves from the role of an organized force.
Again, the force moved on. It isn't a sign of not enough force as much as an improper use of the force. Those calls were made in the field by leaders pulling the trigger.
And there is the famous story about the soldier standing there watching it who said to a reporter that he couldn't do anything without orders. The munitions depots locations probably weren't well known until after they were raided but an essential part of the plan was to allow chaos for a short period of time before order was restored to reinforce the notion that the old regime isn't in power. Don't blame faults of the plans or management of the plans on a lack of force. The simply aren't the same things.
Lol.. Down to name calling because of your ignorance are we? First, we went in with overwhelming force. Second, because we didn't properly use that force or in hind site not effective use that force isn't the same thing as not having it. Basically, the troops went too fast for the military strategists to analyze the situation. We had a point of information overload where a report was literally outdated by the time it took to proof rad it and print it up. The command structure grew too small for the tasks and soldiers were waiting on orders because commanders were playing catch up. The mismanagement of phases and transitions to other phases of the plan as well as problems effecting the command efficiently doesn't mean we didn't have enough force nor did it mean that the force wasn't there.
You see, what you have complained about doesn't mean what you want it to mean. This is especially true when you follow the events that were going on in Iraq as we were going in. I know some people who were in the position of aggregating the battlefield reports and they verify the few news report
I'm guessing that whatever rules you dream up to exclude other people from voting will always be framed in such a way that they cannot be used to exclude yourself. Basically that is the definition of an "elitist jerk".
Of course if I were making the eligibility rules, "elitist jerks" would be the first ones I would exclude....doh!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.