Wait wait wait. I missed this the first time I read your post. You said:
Again, the republicans call themselves the "Moral Majority" and are the primary backers of anti-paedophile laws. They've profited greatly by doing this, but have opened themselves up to this brand of criticism in doing so.
OK, first, no, the GOP does not call itself that. The Moral Majority is a completely separate and independent group. It is not the GOP.
Second, you are actually telling me that the Republicans open themselves up to criticism by backing anti-pedophile laws?
So Democrat Gerry Studds bonking a minor page is not as bad as Republican Foley merely having cybersex and flirting, because the Republicans backed anti-pedophile laws?
That tells me you think it is worse to be a hypocrite than it is to have sex with a minor.
Okay, for the sake of the arguement, let's assume you're right: it wasn't crystal clear in my post that such accusations might turn out to be incorrect. Even in this case, the fact that Foley is a republican is still relevant because the controversy surrounding the extent to which his party's leadership was involved.
Sure. And until you have an actually good idea of how much that is, it's irresponsible to imply they did anything wrong (as the Democrats have been doing nonstop). All we have ANY evidence of is that the GOP leadership faced some allegation, but it was a very weak one, and not nearly enough to take action against him on. The most you could say -- again, from what we have evidence of -- is that maybe they should have investigated it further.
And let's say the Democrats knew this for some time and sprung it as an October surprise (not saying they did, but someone (you? I forget) brought it up): doesn't that mean the DEMOCRATS themselves would be culpable for knowing he was doing this, and letting pages serve under him in the weeks/months since they found out? Hm...
I don't watch the show, I just know it's about people pulled from the past into the future. If you continue this point as a form of attack, I'm going to just ignore it.
"Attack"? You said something incorrect, I corrected it. If you think that's an "attack," you're in the wrong place.
Considering that Republicans are the ones pushing the racist bills, yes.
False. There is not a single racist bill the GOP is pushing.
And I don't know what you mean about affirmative action... affirmative action is by definition racist.
Notice that the KKK publically supported Bush in the 2004 election.
And Jhon pointed out, that's a really stupid argument, even if it's true. Communists and other people with horrific ideologies support the Democrats. This is a combination of the ad hominem and straw man logical fallacies: the genetic fallacy.
Oh, and as to habeas corpus... you are ignorant, and so are the people feeding you this stuff. I should write up something on it, but basically, there are two different things, Constitutional habeas corpus, and stautory habeas corpus. What was "removed" were habeas corpus rights that did not exist in our law until the last few decades. They are new, passed by Congress. Constitutional habeas rights have nothing at all to do with the recent Congressional action.
It goes on the describe some of the terrible experiences that voters had on election day. So I really don't know what you're talking about. This report clearly confirms what RFK was talking about in his article in Rolling Stone.
No. You either don't understand the article, or you don't understand the paper you read. RFK's claim is that there a. was intentional voter suppression, and b. that it was sufficient to swing the election from Kerry to Bush. There is no evidence that any significant voter problems were caused intentionally, and the evidence shows that more people actually voted for Bush (according to the Democrats' own expert).
You may want to ignore the Democrats' own expert whose work the Democrats' own report is based on... he said, uncategorically, that the actual polls were more accurate than the exit polls and that more people voted for Bush.
Don't take my word for it. Take the word of the Democrats' own expert who did a lot of the work behind the report RFK was basing his article on.
In his words:
RFK's article is misconceiving, socially damaging and simply wrong---much like his previous one on autism and vaccines. RFK selectively cites the DNC report. More voters supported Bush in Ohio in 2004 than Kerry. There is no scientific evidence that they did not. There were some irregularities (such as the allocation of voting machines), but they were not large enough to change the outcome. Bush won in 2004; Democrats have to admit that he really did if they are to fix their electoral problems much like how an alcoholic first has to admit that s/he has a problem.
Ah for fucks sake. If I'm mis-using it, that means that I didn't notice my error for whatever reason.... and? How am *I* supposed to know you don't mean what you say? And yet you still blame me for it. How does that make any sense?
You refuted nothing
You made two claims. One was that there are a majority of Democrats (which you later changed to plurality). That claim was at first false, and then when you look at the actual unreliable data, it's shown to be insignificant. This I proved, conclusively.
Your second claim was based on the first false claim: that because of the significant difference between the parties, this is evidence the GOP is playing dirty tricks. Except of course, the difference is NOT significant. So the conclusion did not follow from the actual evidence.
Then, realizing you are left with nothing, you simply lace your reply with obscenities.
A few posts up I wrote what I meant by majority. And yes, majority was the wrong word. Instead of trying to win by semantic tricks, you should have just pointed out the misuse. No big deal.
No. You have it ass-backwards. I had no clue you were misusing it. It is your job to point that out.
Meanwhile, you've proven to be a whiny bitch with your hair splitting.
Dude. I directly refuted your main point, and your subordinate points. There is no evidence in the data to support your claim that the GOP is trying to keep the Democrat votes down. None. Whatsoever. As to 1994, the difference between GOP and Dem was 31 to 34 percent. That's nothing. There's no basis in that number for saying that Republicans are trying to keep the Democratic vote down since there are "more Democrats."
even though I've laid out the facts in black and white.
Except, of course, that you did not provide a single fact to back up a single claim you made.
Now, a separate post: the last one was devoted with the actual debunking of your factual claim. And herein I debunk your other claims.
If you want to claim victory based on some semantic laxity in my using the term majority...
It's not a mere semantic issue. You were attacking me for denying that Democrats have a majority. I took that word literally when you used it.
I know you think your point is beyond that, but your attacks on me for denying facts were based on my denial of your use of the word "majority," specifically, and in the notion that the Census had any data itself about party affiliation.
Your crying is completely irrelevant to my original point in that Republicans are fewer in number than Democrats, so Republicans resort to both a superior GOTV effort, AND an unAmerican dirty-tricks campaign designed to make it harder for people who are traditionally Democrats to vote.
My other problems with what you said flow from the fact that neither party is close to a majority: it only makes sense to say the GOP is trying to kill of the Democratic vote if the Democrats really do have a majority, or a very big plurality. They have neither. What's true is that independents make up a bigger group than either the Democrats or Republicans, and independents tend to vote more Republican. Those are facts. And I see no reason to believe these mythical so-called "dirty tricks campaigns" would be more likely to kill of the votes of "people who are traditionally Democrats" (which was a mere 34 percent in 1994) as independent voters, who are themselves more likely to vote Republican.
The GOTV effort is a huge deal, yes. But a. there's no evidence whatsoever that the GOP engages in more "dirty tricks" than the Democrats, and b. there's no evidence whatsoever that should a campaign exist, it would be likely to help the Republicans, who have something to gain in pulling in more independent voters (maybe not in 2006, but moreso than not over the last decade).
No, you didn't. You made assertions. "Adults" know the difference.
1) There's more Democrats than Republicans. That's a fact.
That was not your assertion. Your assertion was a. Republicans are not a majority and b. Democrats are a majority. It's not a simple matter of which has more, but which has more than 50 percent. It's common knowledge that slightly more Americans self-identify as Democrats, but more independents vote Republican.
2) The Census reports it. That's a fact.
No, it is not a fact. It does not exist, as I will show below. Further, what data does exist does not show Democrats are a majority.
3) Pollsters report it. That's a fact.
You never once mentioned pollsters until now. Why now say that you did? And incredibly, hilariously to me, you actually just link to two separate representations of essentially the same data. It's not "the Census and pollsters," it's a single source.
Since one of us has to be a man, and the other a child, I'll be the grownup here and point out that the Census data up till 1995 is graphed here
Except, of course, if you actually read the data, it does not show what you pretend it shows.
Look at the actual data the graph is based on. It shows that -- for example, in 1994 -- a mere 15 percent of Americans were strong Democrats, and 19 percent weak Democrats. I'll be the adult and do the math: that's 34 percent. As opposed to 31 percent for Republicans. Neither is a majority.
The other 13 percent for Dems and 12 percent for Republicans comes from "Independent Republicans/Democrats," which basically means "oh I tend to favor that party more than the other one, but I am independent." Those independents, in the words of the people who actually gathered and reported the data (which is NOT the Census!), are that they are "leaners." They "lean" toward one party, but do not really identify with that party. You include them as "people [who] identify as Democrats." But they aren't: they identify as independents who lean toward the Democrats.
The actual question they ask is:
Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what? (IF REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT) Would you call yourself a strong (REP/DEM) or a not very strong (REP/DEM)? (IF INDEPENDENT, OTHER [1966 AND LATER: OR NO PREFERENCE]:) Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican or Democratic party?
And further, they explain:
LEANERS - Codes 3,5: 'Leaners' have included (all years): A. Rs who responded 'independent' to party identification and who responded with the mention of a major party when asked if s/he felt closer to either major party; B. Rs who responded to the party identification question with the mention of a minor party but who said they felt closer to one major party; C. Rs who responded to the party identification with 'no preference' but who said they felt closer to one major party.
So the person self-identifies as an independent, and THEN says they lean one way or the other. In no case are people who, in your words, "identify as Democrats" included in these numbers. Look at the dataset if you like. Search the file anes_cdf_var.txt for the code VCF0301 to see the question asked, and the explanation of the data.
Also, this *is not Census data.* I will assume you just made an error and are not lying here, because the link you provided does not note this fact. But this data the Census Bureau provides does not come from the Census itself. Read the footnote (which was not on the link you provided, but is on the one I provided above). "Source: Center for Political Studies, University of Michi
Folks, this is a perfect demonstration of how Republicans lie and try to dodge factual information.
Um... you provided no factual information.
Notice that all he's done is say that he doesn't believe what I'm saying, state that it's his opinion that I'm wrong
No, I state as a matter of fact you are wrong. It is utter rubbish for you to assert Democrats are a majority of the population. It's been decades since either party has had more than fifty percent of the population.
On the other hand, I'm referring to US Census data.
No, you're not.
I'm not going to hold his dick while he looks it up. He's a big boy, he can do it himself.
I can't look it up because it doesn't exist.
What's really going on here is now that I call your bluff, you attack me, because you know you can't find it.
You know Pudge, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
Back at ya.
Republicans are the minority, Democrats are the majoriy. (sic)
False. That's not been true, in any sense, in many years. By the same standard you claim the Republicans are a minority (less than half the actual country), so too are the Democrats, since a substantial number of Americans vote substantially across party lines. Neither party is, in the sense you claim, a "majority."
Of course, in the only actually meaningful sense -- you know, that is, who gets elected -- the Republicans are a majority. But the Democrats are not a majority in any sense.
Republicans cast most of the votes, Democrats don't vote in nearly the numbers that Republicans do.
I don't believe that's true, and there's no actual facts to prove it.
If you still insist on arguing that your opinion overrides the facts, I refer you to the US census data.
Oh yes, please, try to show me where U.S. Census data backs your claims. I'd love to see you try.
I don't know why you're quibbling about whether people are just saying that they are Democrats, or if they are actually Democrats.
I don't know why you think I am.
It's not relevant to my point.
What is relevant is the fact that Republicans have not been a minority in this country, in any reasonable sense of the word "minority," for over a decade.
We're not debating about the efficacy of the strategy of supressing voting rights; I'm describing and clarifying the reasoning behind supression of voting rights.
Except that you are making up "facts" that don't exist to "prove" your point.
By minority, I mean that more people identify as Democrats than as Republicans.
That's not a useful measurement, since self-identification (especially where one refuses to self-identify) does not accurately measure perspective, viewpoint, agreement, support, and so on. What matters is how those people vote, and in recent years, independents have favored Republicans.
As far as the free state ID goes, I haven't decided if that's a good idea or not.
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.
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.
You can't change your story when it's permanently recorded for all to see...
The question I responded to had a conditional that you selectively cut out, that makes all the difference. Nice deception there. My statement about "if I were a Democrat and he a Republican" included the part that you conditionally based your question on. How do you not get that?
Despite your final claim that it's "an incredibly embarrassing coincidence," your wording stongly implies that you may believe otherwise or that it would be rational to believe otherwise.
Riiiiight. I state, in no uncertain terms, that "I think it is merely an incredibly embarrassing coincidence," and in your mind I am leaving the door open to a conspiracy. You're a looney.
So, you're claiming that you didn't make a big deal about it -- but if you had, it wouldn't have been front-page news anywhere only because you're a Rep and not a Dem?
Nope, I am not claiming that at all. I said that part of the difference between Republican and Democrat is precisely that the Republicans are less likely to make a big deal out of it.
Maybe you didn't make a big deal out of it because it's an obvious flaw in electronic voting and according to the link you provided, you seem to be pimping e-voting?
Nope. If that had been the case, I wouldn't have talked to the reporter about it, and I would have tried to place the blame on the auditor's office instead of noting to the reporter that the machines themselves have problems. Try again?
And reading your journal, you hint that it may be some grand conspiracy
No, I do not. Indeed, the Elections Manager thanked me for being even-handed in my piece, and for not trying to attack anyone or impugn their motives.
and in the interview, you state "The touch-screen voting machines are more accurate and less prone to fraud and error than using paper ballots, Nandor said."
Let me ask this statistically logical question: How often have their been two consecutive presidential elections were the 'popular' vote was greate for the losing party.
Not sure offhand. It happens occasionally. Not sure if it has ever happened two elections in a row. You seem to be implying that it happened recently; but Bush won the so-called "popular vote" in 2004. Had Kerry managed to win Ohio, and nothing else changed, Bush would have won the "popular vote" and lost the election, but that's not what happened. Bush actually won the "popular vote" in 2004 by a fairly wide margin (3 million votes). For contrast, Gore "beat" Bush by about 500,000.
(Oddly, the same Democrats who complained about the difference between the "popular vote" and the electoral college in 2000 raised no such issue in 2004 as they complained about Ohio.)
Here's a follow up question based on the frequency of that event occuring in the past does it not suggest a statistical likelyhood that the results in one of those two elections were baked?
No, it does not. Flip a coin; it lands on heads. Flip again; lands on heads. Is there a problem with the coin?
In a very close "popular" election, the chance of the loser "winning" the "popular vote" is practically a coinflip, because there is no strong correlation between the "popular vote" and the electoral college vote when you get the "popular vote" close enough. It depends too much on in which states those votes are concentrated and to what degree.
Last statisticaly logical question: Is it more or less likely that the victor in an election wins by a margin of thousands or hundreds when they win?
Predictively speaking, neither. Looking at the past, elections are usually won by fairly large margins, generally speaking. But that says nothing about what the next election might look like.
My main point here is it is very likely there was cheating going on and likely rampant cheating at that.
No past statistics suggest this. It is just as likely, statistically speaking, that the country is simply split down the middle on these issues, as it is that there is any cheating going on. Statistics don't suggest either way, as best I can tell. I do not hold to the school of thought that we can determine levels of cheating from how much something deviates from past experience. The Red Sox beat the Yankees in four straight games after being down three-to-zero in the 2004 playoffs. It had never happened before in the history of baseball. That doesn't suggest the Sox or Yankees cheated (although the Yankees did cheat in one game, but that was a game the Sox won, and they got caught anyway).
Now, anomalies can be a cause to dig deeper to find out if cheating happened. As I noted in my debunking of RFK Jr.'s article about cheating in Ohio in 2004, there were certainly anomalies there, but you can't just jump to "therefore there was cheating." You need to then actually find actual evidence of cheating, or else it remains a mere anomaly.
A well... guess I picked a bad example... but I honestly can't believe that one party does crooked things and the other doesn't. Frankly, I distrust both sides... and that was my point.
Right. And it was my point, as well.
Nice debunking... I admit I got bored reading that insanely long article and was struggling to finish it, let alone fact check it.
Yeah, I heard about the whole thing on Colbert one night and thought, "no, that can't be true," so I went ahead and actually looked for his references. Unfortunately for him, I found them.:-)
*sigh*... it would be nice if you could just depend on stuff printed at a fairly popular outlet to actually be fact checked. But I guess that would be too much to ask...
Sometimes, it is. Frankly, I would be much more likely to trust this article if it were some other writer in some other periodical, though. RFK Jr. is a virulent Bush-hater who has a history of making things up (like blaming Bush for Katrina... not for the poor response, but for the fact that the hurricane existed), and Rolling Stone too has a long history of complete BS articles against Bush and Republicans (like an article they had not long ago claiming historians were judging Bush to be the worst President ever, when no historian worth listening to would ever even attempt to make such a judgment until at least 10-20 years after he left office, let alone while he was still in office).
There are some people and media outlets I just automatically dismiss out of hand, by default. RFK Jr., Rolling Stone, Media Matters are a few. Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann are up there too. People like Hannity and Rush and Franken and Medved are pretty high on the list too, though not as high.
There are some far more reliable partisan outlets and individuals. For example, The New Republic and National Review, on the left and right, and many of their writers are heavily biased, but usually (at least, say, 95 percent or so of the time) trustworthy in their matter-of-fact statements (where trustworthy means not just accurate in fact, but also devoid of false implication).
Slashdot Mirror
Wait wait wait. I missed this the first time I read your post. You said:
Again, the republicans call themselves the "Moral Majority" and are the primary backers of anti-paedophile laws. They've profited greatly by doing this, but have opened themselves up to this brand of criticism in doing so.
OK, first, no, the GOP does not call itself that. The Moral Majority is a completely separate and independent group. It is not the GOP.
Second, you are actually telling me that the Republicans open themselves up to criticism by backing anti-pedophile laws?
So Democrat Gerry Studds bonking a minor page is not as bad as Republican Foley merely having cybersex and flirting, because the Republicans backed anti-pedophile laws?
That tells me you think it is worse to be a hypocrite than it is to have sex with a minor.
Okay, for the sake of the arguement, let's assume you're right: it wasn't crystal clear in my post that such accusations might turn out to be incorrect. Even in this case, the fact that Foley is a republican is still relevant because the controversy surrounding the extent to which his party's leadership was involved.
...
Sure. And until you have an actually good idea of how much that is, it's irresponsible to imply they did anything wrong (as the Democrats have been doing nonstop). All we have ANY evidence of is that the GOP leadership faced some allegation, but it was a very weak one, and not nearly enough to take action against him on. The most you could say -- again, from what we have evidence of -- is that maybe they should have investigated it further.
And let's say the Democrats knew this for some time and sprung it as an October surprise (not saying they did, but someone (you? I forget) brought it up): doesn't that mean the DEMOCRATS themselves would be culpable for knowing he was doing this, and letting pages serve under him in the weeks/months since they found out? Hm
I don't watch the show, I just know it's about people pulled from the past into the future. If you continue this point as a form of attack, I'm going to just ignore it.
... affirmative action is by definition racist.
"Attack"? You said something incorrect, I corrected it. If you think that's an "attack," you're in the wrong place.
Considering that Republicans are the ones pushing the racist bills, yes.
False. There is not a single racist bill the GOP is pushing.
And I don't know what you mean about affirmative action
Notice that the KKK publically supported Bush in the 2004 election.
And Jhon pointed out, that's a really stupid argument, even if it's true. Communists and other people with horrific ideologies support the Democrats. This is a combination of the ad hominem and straw man logical fallacies: the genetic fallacy.
Is this the 4400 and you're from Civil War times
No one from The 4400 came from earlier the 20th century.
when the Democrats and Republicans were reversed from what they are now?
No, they weren't.
Or are you just a moron?
You really think the Republicans are racist, and the Democrats are not? If so, well, that's pretty damned sad.
Oh, and as to habeas corpus ... you are ignorant, and so are the people feeding you this stuff. I should write up something on it, but basically, there are two different things, Constitutional habeas corpus, and stautory habeas corpus. What was "removed" were habeas corpus rights that did not exist in our law until the last few decades. They are new, passed by Congress. Constitutional habeas rights have nothing at all to do with the recent Congressional action.
It goes on the describe some of the terrible experiences that voters had on election day. So I really don't know what you're talking about. This report clearly confirms what RFK was talking about in his article in Rolling Stone.
No. You either don't understand the article, or you don't understand the paper you read. RFK's claim is that there a. was intentional voter suppression, and b. that it was sufficient to swing the election from Kerry to Bush. There is no evidence that any significant voter problems were caused intentionally, and the evidence shows that more people actually voted for Bush (according to the Democrats' own expert).
You may not want to admit it
... he said, uncategorically, that the actual polls were more accurate than the exit polls and that more people voted for Bush.
You may want to ignore the Democrats' own expert whose work the Democrats' own report is based on
*shrug*
In his words:
Republicans suppress the minority vote to keep Democrats home.
False.
I proved it
Also false. Not only did you not prove it, you did not present anything which, even if true, could have possibly proved it.
Also, Pudge supports a racist party.
No; I am a not a Democrat.
How does it feel that someone like me is disgusted by you?
I don't understand the question. I have no feeling on the matter, and cannot imagine why I would, or if I did, what it could possibly be.
Pudge just wants to stubbornly ignore the facts that I posted
Also false. Indeed, the only "facts" you posted, I directly addressed, and proved them to be, in fact, not facts.
Ah for fucks sake. If I'm mis-using it, that means that I didn't notice my error for whatever reason. ... and? How am *I* supposed to know you don't mean what you say? And yet you still blame me for it. How does that make any sense?
You refuted nothing
You made two claims. One was that there are a majority of Democrats (which you later changed to plurality). That claim was at first false, and then when you look at the actual unreliable data, it's shown to be insignificant. This I proved, conclusively.
Your second claim was based on the first false claim: that because of the significant difference between the parties, this is evidence the GOP is playing dirty tricks. Except of course, the difference is NOT significant. So the conclusion did not follow from the actual evidence.
Then, realizing you are left with nothing, you simply lace your reply with obscenities.
*shrug*
A few posts up I wrote what I meant by majority. And yes, majority was the wrong word. Instead of trying to win by semantic tricks, you should have just pointed out the misuse. No big deal.
No. You have it ass-backwards. I had no clue you were misusing it. It is your job to point that out.
Meanwhile, you've proven to be a whiny bitch with your hair splitting.
Dude. I directly refuted your main point, and your subordinate points. There is no evidence in the data to support your claim that the GOP is trying to keep the Democrat votes down. None. Whatsoever. As to 1994, the difference between GOP and Dem was 31 to 34 percent. That's nothing. There's no basis in that number for saying that Republicans are trying to keep the Democratic vote down since there are "more Democrats."
even though I've laid out the facts in black and white.
Except, of course, that you did not provide a single fact to back up a single claim you made.
Now, a separate post: the last one was devoted with the actual debunking of your factual claim. And herein I debunk your other claims.
...
If you want to claim victory based on some semantic laxity in my using the term majority
It's not a mere semantic issue. You were attacking me for denying that Democrats have a majority. I took that word literally when you used it.
I know you think your point is beyond that, but your attacks on me for denying facts were based on my denial of your use of the word "majority," specifically, and in the notion that the Census had any data itself about party affiliation.
Your crying is completely irrelevant to my original point in that Republicans are fewer in number than Democrats, so Republicans resort to both a superior GOTV effort, AND an unAmerican dirty-tricks campaign designed to make it harder for people who are traditionally Democrats to vote.
My other problems with what you said flow from the fact that neither party is close to a majority: it only makes sense to say the GOP is trying to kill of the Democratic vote if the Democrats really do have a majority, or a very big plurality. They have neither. What's true is that independents make up a bigger group than either the Democrats or Republicans, and independents tend to vote more Republican. Those are facts. And I see no reason to believe these mythical so-called "dirty tricks campaigns" would be more likely to kill of the votes of "people who are traditionally Democrats" (which was a mere 34 percent in 1994) as independent voters, who are themselves more likely to vote Republican.
The GOTV effort is a huge deal, yes. But a. there's no evidence whatsoever that the GOP engages in more "dirty tricks" than the Democrats, and b. there's no evidence whatsoever that should a campaign exist, it would be likely to help the Republicans, who have something to gain in pulling in more independent voters (maybe not in 2006, but moreso than not over the last decade).
No, you didn't. You made assertions. "Adults" know the difference.
1) There's more Democrats than Republicans. That's a fact.
That was not your assertion. Your assertion was a. Republicans are not a majority and b. Democrats are a majority. It's not a simple matter of which has more, but which has more than 50 percent. It's common knowledge that slightly more Americans self-identify as Democrats, but more independents vote Republican.
2) The Census reports it. That's a fact.
No, it is not a fact. It does not exist, as I will show below. Further, what data does exist does not show Democrats are a majority.
3) Pollsters report it. That's a fact.
You never once mentioned pollsters until now. Why now say that you did? And incredibly, hilariously to me, you actually just link to two separate representations of essentially the same data. It's not "the Census and pollsters," it's a single source.
Since one of us has to be a man, and the other a child, I'll be the grownup here and point out that the Census data up till 1995 is graphed here
Except, of course, if you actually read the data, it does not show what you pretend it shows.
Look at the actual data the graph is based on. It shows that -- for example, in 1994 -- a mere 15 percent of Americans were strong Democrats, and 19 percent weak Democrats. I'll be the adult and do the math: that's 34 percent. As opposed to 31 percent for Republicans. Neither is a majority.
The other 13 percent for Dems and 12 percent for Republicans comes from "Independent Republicans/Democrats," which basically means "oh I tend to favor that party more than the other one, but I am independent." Those independents, in the words of the people who actually gathered and reported the data (which is NOT the Census!), are that they are "leaners." They "lean" toward one party, but do not really identify with that party. You include them as "people [who] identify as Democrats." But they aren't: they identify as independents who lean toward the Democrats.
The actual question they ask is:
And further, they explain:
So the person self-identifies as an independent, and THEN says they lean one way or the other. In no case are people who, in your words, "identify as Democrats" included in these numbers. Look at the dataset if you like. Search the file anes_cdf_var.txt for the code VCF0301 to see the question asked, and the explanation of the data.
Also, this *is not Census data.* I will assume you just made an error and are not lying here, because the link you provided does not note this fact. But this data the Census Bureau provides does not come from the Census itself. Read the footnote (which was not on the link you provided, but is on the one I provided above). "Source: Center for Political Studies, University of Michi
Folks, this is a perfect demonstration of how Republicans lie and try to dodge factual information.
... you provided no factual information.
Um
Notice that all he's done is say that he doesn't believe what I'm saying, state that it's his opinion that I'm wrong
No, I state as a matter of fact you are wrong. It is utter rubbish for you to assert Democrats are a majority of the population. It's been decades since either party has had more than fifty percent of the population.
On the other hand, I'm referring to US Census data.
No, you're not.
I'm not going to hold his dick while he looks it up. He's a big boy, he can do it himself.
I can't look it up because it doesn't exist.
What's really going on here is now that I call your bluff, you attack me, because you know you can't find it.
You know Pudge, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
Back at ya.
Republicans are the minority, Democrats are the majoriy. (sic)
False. That's not been true, in any sense, in many years. By the same standard you claim the Republicans are a minority (less than half the actual country), so too are the Democrats, since a substantial number of Americans vote substantially across party lines. Neither party is, in the sense you claim, a "majority."
Of course, in the only actually meaningful sense -- you know, that is, who gets elected -- the Republicans are a majority. But the Democrats are not a majority in any sense.
Republicans cast most of the votes, Democrats don't vote in nearly the numbers that Republicans do.
I don't believe that's true, and there's no actual facts to prove it.
If you still insist on arguing that your opinion overrides the facts, I refer you to the US census data.
Oh yes, please, try to show me where U.S. Census data backs your claims. I'd love to see you try.
I don't know why you're quibbling about whether people are just saying that they are Democrats, or if they are actually Democrats.
I don't know why you think I am.
It's not relevant to my point.
What is relevant is the fact that Republicans have not been a minority in this country, in any reasonable sense of the word "minority," for over a decade.
We're not debating about the efficacy of the strategy of supressing voting rights; I'm describing and clarifying the reasoning behind supression of voting rights.
Except that you are making up "facts" that don't exist to "prove" your point.
By minority, I mean that more people identify as Democrats than as Republicans.
That's not a useful measurement, since self-identification (especially where one refuses to self-identify) does not accurately measure perspective, viewpoint, agreement, support, and so on. What matters is how those people vote, and in recent years, independents have favored Republicans.
As far as the free state ID goes, I haven't decided if that's a good idea or not.
Me neither. But I lean that way.
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.
You seem to think you have a point or something here. Think harder.
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.
You can't change your story when it's permanently recorded for all to see...
The question I responded to had a conditional that you selectively cut out, that makes all the difference. Nice deception there. My statement about "if I were a Democrat and he a Republican" included the part that you conditionally based your question on. How do you not get that?
Despite your final claim that it's "an incredibly embarrassing coincidence," your wording stongly implies that you may believe otherwise or that it would be rational to believe otherwise.
Riiiiight. I state, in no uncertain terms, that "I think it is merely an incredibly embarrassing coincidence," and in your mind I am leaving the door open to a conspiracy. You're a looney.
So, you're claiming that you didn't make a big deal about it -- but if you had, it wouldn't have been front-page news anywhere only because you're a Rep and not a Dem?
... and? That is absolutely true.
Nope, I am not claiming that at all. I said that part of the difference between Republican and Democrat is precisely that the Republicans are less likely to make a big deal out of it.
Maybe you didn't make a big deal out of it because it's an obvious flaw in electronic voting and according to the link you provided, you seem to be pimping e-voting?
Nope. If that had been the case, I wouldn't have talked to the reporter about it, and I would have tried to place the blame on the auditor's office instead of noting to the reporter that the machines themselves have problems. Try again?
And reading your journal, you hint that it may be some grand conspiracy
No, I do not. Indeed, the Elections Manager thanked me for being even-handed in my piece, and for not trying to attack anyone or impugn their motives.
and in the interview, you state "The touch-screen voting machines are more accurate and less prone to fraud and error than using paper ballots, Nandor said."
Yes
No.
Yes.
You made a claim.
Correct, in direct response to a similar claim.
You can't back it up when requested to do so.
Incorrect.
Saying you won't back it up until the post you replied to is a cop-out, a spin, a squirm, and just lame
Incorrect. It is none of the first three. Whether it is "lame" is subjective, and you are entitled to your opinion.
Either back it up or admit you can't.
No.
Saying you won't until some other claim is justified means absolutely nothing
Obviously incorrect. That you don't understand what it means is not my problem.
and, frankly, makes it obvious you haven't a proverbial leg to stand on.
Also incorrect.
Let me ask this statistically logical question: How often have their been two consecutive presidential elections were the 'popular' vote was greate for the losing party.
Not sure offhand. It happens occasionally. Not sure if it has ever happened two elections in a row. You seem to be implying that it happened recently; but Bush won the so-called "popular vote" in 2004. Had Kerry managed to win Ohio, and nothing else changed, Bush would have won the "popular vote" and lost the election, but that's not what happened. Bush actually won the "popular vote" in 2004 by a fairly wide margin (3 million votes). For contrast, Gore "beat" Bush by about 500,000.
(Oddly, the same Democrats who complained about the difference between the "popular vote" and the electoral college in 2000 raised no such issue in 2004 as they complained about Ohio.)
Here's a follow up question based on the frequency of that event occuring in the past does it not suggest a statistical likelyhood that the results in one of those two elections were baked?
No, it does not. Flip a coin; it lands on heads. Flip again; lands on heads. Is there a problem with the coin?
In a very close "popular" election, the chance of the loser "winning" the "popular vote" is practically a coinflip, because there is no strong correlation between the "popular vote" and the electoral college vote when you get the "popular vote" close enough. It depends too much on in which states those votes are concentrated and to what degree.
Last statisticaly logical question: Is it more or less likely that the victor in an election wins by a margin of thousands or hundreds when they win?
Predictively speaking, neither. Looking at the past, elections are usually won by fairly large margins, generally speaking. But that says nothing about what the next election might look like.
My main point here is it is very likely there was cheating going on and likely rampant cheating at that.
No past statistics suggest this. It is just as likely, statistically speaking, that the country is simply split down the middle on these issues, as it is that there is any cheating going on. Statistics don't suggest either way, as best I can tell. I do not hold to the school of thought that we can determine levels of cheating from how much something deviates from past experience. The Red Sox beat the Yankees in four straight games after being down three-to-zero in the 2004 playoffs. It had never happened before in the history of baseball. That doesn't suggest the Sox or Yankees cheated (although the Yankees did cheat in one game, but that was a game the Sox won, and they got caught anyway).
Now, anomalies can be a cause to dig deeper to find out if cheating happened. As I noted in my debunking of RFK Jr.'s article about cheating in Ohio in 2004, there were certainly anomalies there, but you can't just jump to "therefore there was cheating." You need to then actually find actual evidence of cheating, or else it remains a mere anomaly.
A well... guess I picked a bad example... but I honestly can't believe that one party does crooked things and the other doesn't. Frankly, I distrust both sides... and that was my point.
:-)
... it would be nice if you could just depend on stuff printed at a fairly popular outlet to actually be fact checked. But I guess that would be too much to ask...
... not for the poor response, but for the fact that the hurricane existed), and Rolling Stone too has a long history of complete BS articles against Bush and Republicans (like an article they had not long ago claiming historians were judging Bush to be the worst President ever, when no historian worth listening to would ever even attempt to make such a judgment until at least 10-20 years after he left office, let alone while he was still in office).
Right. And it was my point, as well.
Nice debunking... I admit I got bored reading that insanely long article and was struggling to finish it, let alone fact check it.
Yeah, I heard about the whole thing on Colbert one night and thought, "no, that can't be true," so I went ahead and actually looked for his references. Unfortunately for him, I found them.
*sigh*
Sometimes, it is. Frankly, I would be much more likely to trust this article if it were some other writer in some other periodical, though. RFK Jr. is a virulent Bush-hater who has a history of making things up (like blaming Bush for Katrina
There are some people and media outlets I just automatically dismiss out of hand, by default. RFK Jr., Rolling Stone, Media Matters are a few. Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann are up there too. People like Hannity and Rush and Franken and Medved are pretty high on the list too, though not as high.
There are some far more reliable partisan outlets and individuals. For example, The New Republic and National Review, on the left and right, and many of their writers are heavily biased, but usually (at least, say, 95 percent or so of the time) trustworthy in their matter-of-fact statements (where trustworthy means not just accurate in fact, but also devoid of false implication).