Have you ever actually tried to USE one of the ethics hotlines? Any actual complaints won't be investigated. Calling the hotline is NOT anonymous and basically puts you on a watch list of employees to be fired.
Yes, the senate and electoral college were designed to do so. We got duped into nerfing the senate reflecting the power of the states already in the name of democracy by direct election of senators. Now Progressives want to do the same thing to the electoral college.
I'm sorry, was 3rd party votes more than the margin of victory in any state much less a swing state that could have influenced the election?
No, shitty decisions by Democrats was the reason Trump won. And if Hillary had won, the reason would have been shitty decisions by Republicans. Third party voters are not to blame for the shitty major parties continuing to win. That blame rests with the people who keep voting for the shit those two parties keep serving them.
Well if Americans actually hated the two options enough to be willing to vote 3rd party, maybe neither of those two shitty options would have gotten an overwhelming majority of electoral votes and they could have picked a more reasonable candidate from outside of the options.
Yep, kind of hard to complain about the popular vote not counting in the general election while having a primary that not only allocates based on state results but also has super delegates who don't give two shits about the voters at all.
No, you can't conclusively say that if it was by popular vote Clinton would have won. All you can say is that if you run an electoral race, Clinton had more popular votes. If you ran a popular race, the voting outcomes could be very different than they were. You can't change the rules of a game and assume the players would make the same moves... It's like saying that if the queen was the piece that determined victory in chess you would have won against that grand master who sacrificed his queen. Well not really, you just don't want to admit you lost...
That is the point of a democracy... Good thing our government wasn't designed to be one of those. The electoral college was designed to prevent an overwhelming popular vote from a minority of states electing the president without getting input from the less populous states. Seems to be working...
I was able to play Clash of Clans on the Eurostar in the Chunnel. I was pretty impressed with that. But yeah, cell data was spotty in urban London which is pretty sad... But I normally have T-Mobile in the USA, so I'm used to it!
"Except in every other democracy in the world." 1) The USA is a Constitutional Republic, not a direct democracy. 2) There are plenty of other governments in the world that hold democratic elections that don't choose their executive leader by popular vote.
"No, people do not vote based on the rules of the EC system. People casting their vote is no different under the EC than out from under it." [Citation Needed] Plenty of people vote strategically... I know I do. I vote for 3rd parties with no reservations in Georgia because I know their electoral votes are unlikely to be influenced by my vote. But I used to live in Ohio where I might have made a different voting decision. Additionally, if the electoral college didn't matter, I would vote for 3rd parties without any strategy because the state results wouldn't matter. I also know of many people who participate in "vote trading" across state lines. Penn Jillette is one well known vote trader who exchanged one vote for Hillary in Nevada for over a dozen votes for Gary Johnson in California.
You postulating that people vote without regard for the rules of the election is naive and absurd and you offer no evidence to support your position.
"But moving from away from the EC to popular vote would also be an improvement , and is the first step to improving our system," I disagree. The electoral college has an important historical purpose to thwart the FPTP popular election. That is one of the intents of the electoral college. I would greatly prefer we throw out the electoral college along with the FPTP voting system, but I'm not going to advocate for one without the other. If we are spending political capital to change the voting system, we might as well fix it right rather than potentially make it worse as a compromise.
Oh I can tell the difference. My problem is that both sides have ZERO problems with the flawed and undemocratic electoral process when they win, in fact they defend it as the most sacred part of our Constitution. They only bitch and moan when they lose. If they actually spoke about changing the electoral process BEFORE an election or heck, even during a midterm, well before candidates are even established for the Presidential race, I will be all over supporting it.
You complain about the system after the results and you are just a whiner. Fix the system before the election because the system is broken, not after the election because you lost.
How can you watch that stupid special ops crap more than once? Heck I couldn't even stomach it the first time. I skipped over after they ran the same joke way past the punchline. To quote Monty Python, "GET ON WITH IT!!!"
The 2nd episode was just plain bad... 3rd and 4th are showing promise again. Hammond in the Challenger had me laughing so much! And yes, the killing celebrities bit got old in the 1st episode and is just stupid. We get it already.
In 20-30 years, no human will be driving any commercial vehicle. Uber is just using "independent contractors" as a crutch until self driving cars replace all taxis.
Do people vote strategically based on the rules of the election? If they do, then the results of the election cannot be interpreted on how they would play out under a different set of rules. If we DID elect based on the popular vote and re-ran under those rules, the results would likely be drastically different. Talking about what the popular vote results were in an electoral based race is just as stupid as discussing who got the most forward yardage in a football game. Interesting to statistics buffs, but in no way relevant to picking a winner.
You are smoking something... The electoral college primarily exists to reduce the chances of mob rule. The power of State governments (which our country is founded upon) but for stupid "democracy" reasons got nerfed when the Senate became just another House of Representatives that was horribly not representative of the population. The states no longer have any power in government aside from the governors and state legislatures who attempt to not comply with federal law (which is proving pretty effective in the case of pot).
The popular vote is irrelevant. It's a fun statistic, but it has no bearing on the outcome. If the popular vote determined the president, the voting outcome would have been drastically different because people vote based on the rules of the system. You don't score football by net yardage gained, you score it by points. Stop trying to change the rules after the fact.
I am a libertarian and I don't like Trump any more than any liberal, but I sure as hell am not going to advocate for a worse system of first past the post, single vote, popular elections.
Right. This whole "popular vote" bullshit is akin to the ass kissing student complaining that they didn't get the best score on the test because they wrote the longest essay. I'm sorry, the grading scale isn't based on popular votes, it's based on electoral ones. You gotta win the votes that count... The votes that don't count are kind of irrelevant to any discussion.
Here's a hint, the majority of fossil fuels in the USA doesn't come from the Middle East. Almost all coal and natural gas is domestically produced or imported from Canada (lots of military spending there...). Well over half of the oil we use in the US is now domestically produced as well. http://needtoknow.nas.edu/ener...
Also, that exhaust pumped into the atmosphere is mostly CO2 which isn't known to cause any medical problems in concentrations found in the atmosphere. You might have had a point when TEL was still in use.
Well I guess we are all getting subsidies then because you dump your waste into the atmosphere as well. Also, it's not really the oil and gas companies that are dumping their waste into the air, it's the consumers of the fuel...
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And with the right selection of cities, you'd need even less area to get the plurality in a popular vote contest. What's your point?
Have you ever actually tried to USE one of the ethics hotlines? Any actual complaints won't be investigated. Calling the hotline is NOT anonymous and basically puts you on a watch list of employees to be fired.
That's a lot of money to tell someone "Please turn if off and back on again and we'll see if that fixes the problem."
Yes, the senate and electoral college were designed to do so. We got duped into nerfing the senate reflecting the power of the states already in the name of democracy by direct election of senators. Now Progressives want to do the same thing to the electoral college.
I'm sorry, was 3rd party votes more than the margin of victory in any state much less a swing state that could have influenced the election?
No, shitty decisions by Democrats was the reason Trump won. And if Hillary had won, the reason would have been shitty decisions by Republicans. Third party voters are not to blame for the shitty major parties continuing to win. That blame rests with the people who keep voting for the shit those two parties keep serving them.
Well if Americans actually hated the two options enough to be willing to vote 3rd party, maybe neither of those two shitty options would have gotten an overwhelming majority of electoral votes and they could have picked a more reasonable candidate from outside of the options.
Yep, kind of hard to complain about the popular vote not counting in the general election while having a primary that not only allocates based on state results but also has super delegates who don't give two shits about the voters at all.
No, you can't conclusively say that if it was by popular vote Clinton would have won. All you can say is that if you run an electoral race, Clinton had more popular votes. If you ran a popular race, the voting outcomes could be very different than they were. You can't change the rules of a game and assume the players would make the same moves... It's like saying that if the queen was the piece that determined victory in chess you would have won against that grand master who sacrificed his queen. Well not really, you just don't want to admit you lost...
Actually two states do it differently. Maine and Nebraska...
That is the point of a democracy... Good thing our government wasn't designed to be one of those. The electoral college was designed to prevent an overwhelming popular vote from a minority of states electing the president without getting input from the less populous states. Seems to be working...
I was able to play Clash of Clans on the Eurostar in the Chunnel. I was pretty impressed with that. But yeah, cell data was spotty in urban London which is pretty sad... But I normally have T-Mobile in the USA, so I'm used to it!
"Except in every other democracy in the world." 1) The USA is a Constitutional Republic, not a direct democracy. 2) There are plenty of other governments in the world that hold democratic elections that don't choose their executive leader by popular vote.
"No, people do not vote based on the rules of the EC system.
People casting their vote is no different under the EC than out from under it." [Citation Needed] Plenty of people vote strategically... I know I do. I vote for 3rd parties with no reservations in Georgia because I know their electoral votes are unlikely to be influenced by my vote. But I used to live in Ohio where I might have made a different voting decision. Additionally, if the electoral college didn't matter, I would vote for 3rd parties without any strategy because the state results wouldn't matter. I also know of many people who participate in "vote trading" across state lines. Penn Jillette is one well known vote trader who exchanged one vote for Hillary in Nevada for over a dozen votes for Gary Johnson in California.
You postulating that people vote without regard for the rules of the election is naive and absurd and you offer no evidence to support your position.
"But moving from away from the EC to popular vote would also be an improvement , and is the first step to improving our system," I disagree. The electoral college has an important historical purpose to thwart the FPTP popular election. That is one of the intents of the electoral college. I would greatly prefer we throw out the electoral college along with the FPTP voting system, but I'm not going to advocate for one without the other. If we are spending political capital to change the voting system, we might as well fix it right rather than potentially make it worse as a compromise.
Oh I can tell the difference. My problem is that both sides have ZERO problems with the flawed and undemocratic electoral process when they win, in fact they defend it as the most sacred part of our Constitution. They only bitch and moan when they lose. If they actually spoke about changing the electoral process BEFORE an election or heck, even during a midterm, well before candidates are even established for the Presidential race, I will be all over supporting it.
You complain about the system after the results and you are just a whiner. Fix the system before the election because the system is broken, not after the election because you lost.
How can you watch that stupid special ops crap more than once? Heck I couldn't even stomach it the first time. I skipped over after they ran the same joke way past the punchline. To quote Monty Python, "GET ON WITH IT!!!"
Perhaps, but maybe I just identified with his giggling grins lighting up the back tires...
The 2nd episode was just plain bad... 3rd and 4th are showing promise again. Hammond in the Challenger had me laughing so much! And yes, the killing celebrities bit got old in the 1st episode and is just stupid. We get it already.
In 20-30 years, no human will be driving any commercial vehicle. Uber is just using "independent contractors" as a crutch until self driving cars replace all taxis.
Do people vote strategically based on the rules of the election? If they do, then the results of the election cannot be interpreted on how they would play out under a different set of rules. If we DID elect based on the popular vote and re-ran under those rules, the results would likely be drastically different. Talking about what the popular vote results were in an electoral based race is just as stupid as discussing who got the most forward yardage in a football game. Interesting to statistics buffs, but in no way relevant to picking a winner.
Actually, it's currently whoever gets 48%ish of the vote and dropping...
It's horrifying to imagine a candidate not accepting the results of an election. Wait? We lost? The election was rigged I tell you!
You are smoking something... The electoral college primarily exists to reduce the chances of mob rule. The power of State governments (which our country is founded upon) but for stupid "democracy" reasons got nerfed when the Senate became just another House of Representatives that was horribly not representative of the population. The states no longer have any power in government aside from the governors and state legislatures who attempt to not comply with federal law (which is proving pretty effective in the case of pot).
The popular vote is irrelevant. It's a fun statistic, but it has no bearing on the outcome. If the popular vote determined the president, the voting outcome would have been drastically different because people vote based on the rules of the system. You don't score football by net yardage gained, you score it by points. Stop trying to change the rules after the fact.
I am a libertarian and I don't like Trump any more than any liberal, but I sure as hell am not going to advocate for a worse system of first past the post, single vote, popular elections.
Right. This whole "popular vote" bullshit is akin to the ass kissing student complaining that they didn't get the best score on the test because they wrote the longest essay. I'm sorry, the grading scale isn't based on popular votes, it's based on electoral ones. You gotta win the votes that count... The votes that don't count are kind of irrelevant to any discussion.
As opposed to the barely tested teen drivers learning how to drive in hazardous conditions while playing Pokemon Go?
Here's a hint, the majority of fossil fuels in the USA doesn't come from the Middle East. Almost all coal and natural gas is domestically produced or imported from Canada (lots of military spending there...). Well over half of the oil we use in the US is now domestically produced as well. http://needtoknow.nas.edu/ener...
Also, that exhaust pumped into the atmosphere is mostly CO2 which isn't known to cause any medical problems in concentrations found in the atmosphere. You might have had a point when TEL was still in use.
Well I guess we are all getting subsidies then because you dump your waste into the atmosphere as well. Also, it's not really the oil and gas companies that are dumping their waste into the air, it's the consumers of the fuel...