I'm really down on the Rep....they no longer are the party for fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, freedoms and rights, and smaller government.
Other than when they run for office, when have Republicans actually done the work to make those "Conservative" values into real policies?
That's how to become a professional lobbyist. To become a successful lobbyist, you've got to get a job with a lobbying firm (or department in a corporation) that has a lot of money. A real lot of money. That money, and the corporate people who spend it on operations and bribes, is where the influence comes from. The individual lobbyists are just the way the money gets from the rich people to their political assets.
Congress can override his veto. That's what makes Congress more powerful than a president: Congress can make laws which direct the government without the president's cooperation. While the president cannot make laws, or execute actions contrary to laws, without Congress.
Of course, laws and the Constitution often mean nothing to Bush. He runs on a Unitary Executive theory, more than any "Conservative" or other political "ideology". But with a rubberstamp Republican Congress, Bush has been able to get away with monopoly power unopposed. Now we will see what happens when he defies Congress and the Constitution, facing an opposition party that he has turned into the most polarized party in our lifetimes.
I was thinking about that, too. It occurs to me that the power of the intimidation can be lessened by allowing other votes to override. Allow an other mailed vote to override by assertion, mailed either earlier or later. Maybe even with a request for an investigation of the intimidation. Then the intimidation can create a worthless vote, and the overriding vote can create a count, and perhaps work against the intimidator, though real intimidation will be safe.
It's still not going to remove the statistical effect of intimidation. But the question is which system is more accurate, not which is perfectly accurate. Those practical considerations must control which we choose, as we have now seen demonstrated all the time. Especially with digital machines. Their role is probably at most to offer unofficial estimates. Simple "scribes", which generate physical ballots which are more countable than ones produced by people manually, and a nonbinding, unofficial estimate that keeps immediate-gratification addicts coming to polls so they can watch returns later that night. The actual official count should be done only by people with competing interests overseeing each other, leaving physical evidence to recount, and consider for criminal charges later.
Voting, like everything else in life, is communication between people. That aspect is the only way to organize it to be accurate. The machines have a role only in making that communication better. Making the vote reflect communication primarily between machines is a program for disaster.
I pulled a bunch of metal levers in a booth here in NYC. I've never heard of any tampering with those "iron maidens", in all my years of voting in NY since the 1980s. I have faith in them that's reinforced every time I pull the big red lever back to commit the votes, and hear them actually going into the tape inside.
In 2008 they'll all be replaced with digital devices, as per the HAVA law Bush's Republican Congress pushed on America. Faith no more.
I'm looking at voting by mail until those digital devices are out of the picture, or worthy of my vanishingly small capacity for faith.
I was thinking the same thing about voter intimidation. And the points about the invalidation are real. Though the buying can be partly mitigated (though, statistically, not nearly eliminated) with overrides.
The intimidation seems fixable only with traditional voting in public, alone in a supervised booth. To overcome the inconvenience, the booth should issue receipts good for a day off (with two weeks notice) any time until the next election, as a federal holiday. Now, if those days off were tradeable, we might see double-digit increases in voter turnout.
Is there any evidence that the pipeline from the mailbox to the counter has any but theoretical vulnerability? All of Oregon and many other districts/fractions have voted by mail for years, so there would be some evidence already if that were a significant risk.
Thanks. That's one of the nicer compliments I could expect from what is an essentially cynical take on voting: it convinces people we are each part of the process, even though we're each only a tiny part.
I just went through jury duty this week, too - I feel like Citizen of the Month. The most interesting part of jury duty was seeing just how reasonable it is to do things that way. I expect that most of the people who complain about "out of control juries" just rarely or never serve on juries. Like many who complain about voting rarely/never vote.
Just like most who send our troops to war rarely or never serve in the military. But I digress - as is my right as an American;).
On the other hand, Vote by Mail lets people "oversee" the person filling out the ballot before it goes in the inner "secret" envelope. Husbands, mothers, priests, union bosses, vote buyers.
Going to a public polling place, where poll workers can make sure each person votes privately, helps ensure people vote their own way. Sure, their "significant others" can still try to beat them into voting "the right way", but only the voter truly knows what vote they cast when cast alone, but in public.
Once we can fix that problem, Vote by Mail offers more answers than questions.
Even more important than your share of the decisionmaking, which is small, is the "buy-in" by you to the government that is chosen. Even if your choices lose, if you vote you at least had your say, and are more likely to say it's a relatively fair process. And of course participation by you, along with everyone else, helps ensure that the public's requirements are part of the system. Per person, the inclusion of your whole person in the process is bigger than your contribution to the decision.
Otherwise, just the "special people" would vote, only their kind of voting process would go on, and only they would be part of the system that rules them for the next year or two or four or six. And eventually that cut-out part of the people would become ungovernable.
Elections are orderly revolutions. Why should disorderly revolutions have all the fun of ignorant masses deciding the rulers?
Vote By Mail is the answer. To broken/crooked voting machines in polling places, at least. Then we've got to make sure the machines that count the votes aren't broken/crooked. But there's so much fewer of them, not operating in realtime, that it becomes a manageable IT problem rather than an IT nightmare.
We should probably replace the counting machines with humans, picked from random volunteers and OK'd (and monitored) by each party on the counted ballots, recorded on videotape. One step at a time.
When the tech is used directly by the people to communicate with each other, like live blogging from the voting in Ohio, it puts power in people's hands, which can outweigh all the tech power used against the people.
I think there will also be an exodus from SuSE, while also a migration to it, by different kinds of people. That's one kind of "two-tier Linux market".
Actually, my sloppiness was more semantic than logical. RedHat and IBM represent a defense, while anarchy is the wildcard is really something else.
This move by MS and Novell will really add a lot of energy to developments in Linux. The shakeup will probably benefit MS at least in the short term, but probably make Linux a lot stronger after that, by selecting for the stronger distro models.
Microsoft has all kinds of SW patents in its portfolio. MS will sue all the other distros than Novell's for patent infringement, driving everyone to SuSE. Then it will pull the plug on Novell, exactly the way it did on NetWare, when MS folded all NetWare's features into Windows NT.
The only defense is RedHat and IBM, and possibly other corps with money to fight MS attacking their Linux distros their future OS strategies all depend upon. Maybe Oracle is bought in to Linux enough that it too will defend a Linux version. RedHat is new and bubbly enough that I'm not surprised they're vulnerable to this attack, and maybe Oracle could tell that, too. But IBM should have known that its defense from SCO, which was a defense against Microsoft's proxy, was too close an alliance with Novell. I'm surprised IBM didn't protect themselves from this Microsoft attack through Novell. But then, MS has always made all its biggest victories by attacking IBM's blind spots.
The other defense is anarchy. Tens of thousands of Linux developers, and tens of millions of users, all across the world, just ignoring MS patent attacks on their distros. If that works, it could also undermine the very patent weapon Microsoft and others wield to destroy SW progress. If they bit off more than they can chew, MS could very well be doing us all a big favor, by destroying itself and patent regime in which it makes its crooked living.
Vigilanteism usually reacts in the mode in which it was incited. So I'm not surprised that people in the info biz, like programmers, are so casual about violating these kinds of bonds, like piracy and enthusiasm for open source. What's the patent version of building a gallows? Is it contributing to Linux?
Oh, and it's even worse - Republicans are scamming the vote everywhere they can, like in Maryland, where they'll probably lose anyway. I hope a lot of them go to jail, even though they'll overload the courts.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that the Patriot Acts were passed by Bush's rubberstamp Republican Congress. So public discussion without opposition was a show.
Other than when they run for office, when have Republicans actually done the work to make those "Conservative" values into real policies?
That's how to become a professional lobbyist. To become a successful lobbyist, you've got to get a job with a lobbying firm (or department in a corporation) that has a lot of money. A real lot of money. That money, and the corporate people who spend it on operations and bribes, is where the influence comes from. The individual lobbyists are just the way the money gets from the rich people to their political assets.
Congress can override his veto. That's what makes Congress more powerful than a president: Congress can make laws which direct the government without the president's cooperation. While the president cannot make laws, or execute actions contrary to laws, without Congress.
Of course, laws and the Constitution often mean nothing to Bush. He runs on a Unitary Executive theory, more than any "Conservative" or other political "ideology". But with a rubberstamp Republican Congress, Bush has been able to get away with monopoly power unopposed. Now we will see what happens when he defies Congress and the Constitution, facing an opposition party that he has turned into the most polarized party in our lifetimes.
He can't veto Impeachment Articles.
I was thinking about that, too. It occurs to me that the power of the intimidation can be lessened by allowing other votes to override. Allow an other mailed vote to override by assertion, mailed either earlier or later. Maybe even with a request for an investigation of the intimidation. Then the intimidation can create a worthless vote, and the overriding vote can create a count, and perhaps work against the intimidator, though real intimidation will be safe.
It's still not going to remove the statistical effect of intimidation. But the question is which system is more accurate, not which is perfectly accurate. Those practical considerations must control which we choose, as we have now seen demonstrated all the time. Especially with digital machines. Their role is probably at most to offer unofficial estimates. Simple "scribes", which generate physical ballots which are more countable than ones produced by people manually, and a nonbinding, unofficial estimate that keeps immediate-gratification addicts coming to polls so they can watch returns later that night. The actual official count should be done only by people with competing interests overseeing each other, leaving physical evidence to recount, and consider for criminal charges later.
Voting, like everything else in life, is communication between people. That aspect is the only way to organize it to be accurate. The machines have a role only in making that communication better. Making the vote reflect communication primarily between machines is a program for disaster.
I pulled a bunch of metal levers in a booth here in NYC. I've never heard of any tampering with those "iron maidens", in all my years of voting in NY since the 1980s. I have faith in them that's reinforced every time I pull the big red lever back to commit the votes, and hear them actually going into the tape inside.
In 2008 they'll all be replaced with digital devices, as per the HAVA law Bush's Republican Congress pushed on America. Faith no more.
I'm looking at voting by mail until those digital devices are out of the picture, or worthy of my vanishingly small capacity for faith.
I was thinking the same thing about voter intimidation. And the points about the invalidation are real. Though the buying can be partly mitigated (though, statistically, not nearly eliminated) with overrides.
The intimidation seems fixable only with traditional voting in public, alone in a supervised booth. To overcome the inconvenience, the booth should issue receipts good for a day off (with two weeks notice) any time until the next election, as a federal holiday. Now, if those days off were tradeable, we might see double-digit increases in voter turnout.
Is there any evidence that the pipeline from the mailbox to the counter has any but theoretical vulnerability? All of Oregon and many other districts/fractions have voted by mail for years, so there would be some evidence already if that were a significant risk.
MS will grant Novell a "limited license" on its patents. And then sue the non-Novell distros.
Thanks. That's one of the nicer compliments I could expect from what is an essentially cynical take on voting: it convinces people we are each part of the process, even though we're each only a tiny part.
;).
I just went through jury duty this week, too - I feel like Citizen of the Month. The most interesting part of jury duty was seeing just how reasonable it is to do things that way. I expect that most of the people who complain about "out of control juries" just rarely or never serve on juries. Like many who complain about voting rarely/never vote.
Just like most who send our troops to war rarely or never serve in the military. But I digress - as is my right as an American
On the other hand, Vote by Mail lets people "oversee" the person filling out the ballot before it goes in the inner "secret" envelope. Husbands, mothers, priests, union bosses, vote buyers.
Going to a public polling place, where poll workers can make sure each person votes privately, helps ensure people vote their own way. Sure, their "significant others" can still try to beat them into voting "the right way", but only the voter truly knows what vote they cast when cast alone, but in public.
Once we can fix that problem, Vote by Mail offers more answers than questions.
Even more important than your share of the decisionmaking, which is small, is the "buy-in" by you to the government that is chosen. Even if your choices lose, if you vote you at least had your say, and are more likely to say it's a relatively fair process. And of course participation by you, along with everyone else, helps ensure that the public's requirements are part of the system. Per person, the inclusion of your whole person in the process is bigger than your contribution to the decision.
Otherwise, just the "special people" would vote, only their kind of voting process would go on, and only they would be part of the system that rules them for the next year or two or four or six. And eventually that cut-out part of the people would become ungovernable.
Elections are orderly revolutions. Why should disorderly revolutions have all the fun of ignorant masses deciding the rulers?
Actually, previewing before posting is the answer - to broken posts.
Vote by Mail is the answer to the question of how to vote.
Vote By Mail is the answer. To broken/crooked voting machines in polling places, at least. Then we've got to make sure the machines that count the votes aren't broken/crooked. But there's so much fewer of them, not operating in realtime, that it becomes a manageable IT problem rather than an IT nightmare.
We should probably replace the counting machines with humans, picked from random volunteers and OK'd (and monitored) by each party on the counted ballots, recorded on videotape. One step at a time.
The tech is, as usual, neutral. It's the technocrats, the people controlling the machine, who determine whether it helps or hurts us.
When the tech is used directly by the people to communicate with each other, like live blogging from the voting in Ohio, it puts power in people's hands, which can outweigh all the tech power used against the people.
Like even more fraudulent Republican robocalls harassing voters, this time in Nebraska?
I got a music funny video in my email today that's entirely dependent on info technology, and which is all about voting.
Why spend good money on rigging machines, when you can just stuff the ballot boxes by hand?
I think there will also be an exodus from SuSE, while also a migration to it, by different kinds of people. That's one kind of "two-tier Linux market".
Actually, my sloppiness was more semantic than logical. RedHat and IBM represent a defense, while anarchy is the wildcard is really something else.
This move by MS and Novell will really add a lot of energy to developments in Linux. The shakeup will probably benefit MS at least in the short term, but probably make Linux a lot stronger after that, by selecting for the stronger distro models.
Microsoft has all kinds of SW patents in its portfolio. MS will sue all the other distros than Novell's for patent infringement, driving everyone to SuSE. Then it will pull the plug on Novell, exactly the way it did on NetWare, when MS folded all NetWare's features into Windows NT.
The only defense is RedHat and IBM, and possibly other corps with money to fight MS attacking their Linux distros their future OS strategies all depend upon. Maybe Oracle is bought in to Linux enough that it too will defend a Linux version. RedHat is new and bubbly enough that I'm not surprised they're vulnerable to this attack, and maybe Oracle could tell that, too. But IBM should have known that its defense from SCO, which was a defense against Microsoft's proxy, was too close an alliance with Novell. I'm surprised IBM didn't protect themselves from this Microsoft attack through Novell. But then, MS has always made all its biggest victories by attacking IBM's blind spots.
The other defense is anarchy. Tens of thousands of Linux developers, and tens of millions of users, all across the world, just ignoring MS patent attacks on their distros. If that works, it could also undermine the very patent weapon Microsoft and others wield to destroy SW progress. If they bit off more than they can chew, MS could very well be doing us all a big favor, by destroying itself and patent regime in which it makes its crooked living.
Vigilanteism usually reacts in the mode in which it was incited. So I'm not surprised that people in the info biz, like programmers, are so casual about violating these kinds of bonds, like piracy and enthusiasm for open source. What's the patent version of building a gallows? Is it contributing to Linux?
When you pay a blackmailer to leave you alone, even if they do, you've paid them to stay alive long enough to bother someone else.
And when the cops won't stop them, they're unstoppable.
That's the kind of lame bug we used to joke about the Soviet Union equipment designing.
Oh, and it's even worse - Republicans are scamming the vote everywhere they can, like in Maryland, where they'll probably lose anyway. I hope a lot of them go to jail, even though they'll overload the courts.