More evidence of how moderate republicans vote on matters like this:
Snowe had initially backed Republican leaders by voting "nay" on the procedural motion to force a final vote. But once it became clear that the GOP had more than enough votes to win, Snowe switched her vote to "yea."
I don't accept the implied premise that Democrats didn't do exactly the same thing.
Ok, then, prove my premise wrong, don't just accept it as wrong. Show me an instance (from recent times, if you can) of a Democratic Senator threatening to stop a filibuster through procedural tactics that require only a simple majority vote to pass. That is what the Republicans threatened. Lott was for it, as was Frist.
Acutally, no, my complaint is really against Republican lawmakers. Never have I seen a group more live up to the motto "Do as I say, not as I do" -- so duplicitous, so hypocritical, so self-righteous it makes me sick to my stomach. Never have I seen a group have such a large set of rules for themselves, with another set for everyone else. Am I always happy with the Democrats? No, but that's because I think they don't go far enough.
Party unity has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I was talking about how hypocritical Republicans were, when just a couple years go, they were decrying the filibuster, but now that the shoe is on the other foot, they've embraced it as their new favorite legislative tactic. They've done this so well, and the media has been hesitant to call it what it is - filibustering on the part of the Republicans - they have people thinking that you need 60 votes to pass something in the senate. They're changing the way people think the senate works.
But, to address your point... Yes, certain "moderate" Republicans are given the ok by the Republican Senate leaders to go against the party so they can go back to their states and tout how moderate and independent they are. As long as the number allowed to go against the party are kept under the threshold for getting votes past cloture, they can have it both ways... vote for cloture and not have to vote for or against the legislation. Also, while you can assume, you don't know how they would have voted if the legislation moved forward. In the past, Specter has voted for cloture, but then against the legislation. These 6 Republicans did not vote to strengthen or reinstate habeas, they voted for ending the debate on the habeas legislation so it could be considered for a "regular" vote.
Look at the list of Republicans voting with the Democrats: Hagel has always been a moderate Republican, who's not seeking reelection in 2008. Sununnu and Smith are up for reelection in 2008 in Democratically-leaning states. Snowe is a moderate Republican. Specter has a record for standing up for the basic constitutional matters... at least in cloture votes. Lugar surprises me, actually. He's not a moderate... I guess I don't know enough about him to know why he voted the way he did.
You can't determine party unity based on one vote. It's something that has to be determined over a series of votes. But, yes, this session Democratic Senators (and House members) have higher party unity scores than they have in the previous session, while Republican party unity scores have gone down a bit. I think that has more to do with mood of the country and the swing of the pendulum than anything else.
When the Democrats were in the minority and there was even a hint of a filibuster by the Democrats, Republicans went crazy, and threatened to invoke the nuclear option, which would have basically shut down the senate.
Now that the Republicans are in the minority, they can and have threatened to filibuster. But because IOIYAR, no one's making a stink about it, and you even have the press reporting that these bills "didn't pass", or "Democrats failed to pass", or "Republicans blocked", which makes it sound like they got less than 50 votes in the senate, but they didn't pass their cloture votes, which is an agreement to stop debating a bill that needs 60 votes to pass. If the cloture vote doesn't pass, the debate can continue... In other words, a filibuster can take place.
So, in essence, the Republicans are threatening to filibuster on lots of things (this habeus legislation, Iraq-related bills, etc, etc), and therefore requiring a successful cloture vote to move the legislation forward, and raising the necessary vote threshold for anything to pass up to 60. The Republicans are voting to not allow legislation to be considered... They are not interested in giving the legislation a "fair shake" or an "up or down" vote.
Of course 2-3 years ago, that was reason enough to threaten to force a shutdown of the senate, but IOIYAR.
On Debian, give update-rc.d a look. I searched for the rc-update man page, and, while update-rc.d doesn't show the current run levels for a service like rc-update does, it does make it easy to add or remove services to the different runlevels.
Yes, cows do have a better digestive system than humans, and can get energy from plants humans cannot digest. However, the efficiency argument still holds, because of the amount of land that is devoted to feeding cattle. According to this chart, almost 70% of the cereal grains grown in the US are used to feed livestock. This website says 90% of all cropland in Nevada is used for cattle feed.
If we were all to stop eating meat, we would save so much land we wouldn't have to turn to the cows to exploit other plant resources that we cannot digest on our own.
The debian version is 0.16, but the sourceforge version is 0.11, and the version on the project's homepage is 0.6. The last debian version was uploaded in June of this year. The others were released in 2001, so I guess the debian version is the only one still being actively developed (or released anyway).
I don't have a lot of experience with this package. I've only tried it a couple times, but so far so good.
Your scenario is this: Bushite in swing state promises to vote for Nader, and Naderite in Bush state promises to vote for Bush.
This isn't what VotePair is doing. VotePair is a partisan effort to oust Bush. Their goal is to match up Kerry supporters in states were Bush is way ahead with 3rd party supporters in swing states. They're not looking to do anything else. A Naderite promising to vote for Bush wouldn't be the result of a pairing from VotePair. Poke around on their site and see if you can find anywhere to pick to promise to vote for Bush.
I forgot to say the the prisoner's dilemma doesn't apply, because there isn't a big payoff if the third party supporter defects. The person they would most like to vote for isn't going to win anyway.
I think vote pair did a good job minimizing the benefits of defecting.
I don't see a whole lot of room to abuse this the way it is set up. They are targeting 3rd party supporters in swing states (a) and Kerry supporters in states were Bush is favored heavily (b).
So your options to game the system are to pose as either a (a) or (b). If you pose as (a), you'll be paired with a (b), so (b) would be expected to vote for your choice of 3rd party candidate, and you would be expected to vote for Kerry. If you instead vote for Bush, well then you've wasted your time signing up, because you could have accomplished the same thing by voting for Bush in the first place. Either way the outcome is another vote for Bush. The vote for a 3rd party candidate which would have gone to Kerry is happening in a state were Bush is guaranteed to win anyway. No harm done.
If you pose as (b), you'd be getting (a) to vote for Kerry in a swing state, while you'd be voting for Bush in a state heavily favored for Bush. The net effect would be giving Kerry a vote in a swing state he wouldn't have received if you hadn't signed up. This option clearly doesn't make any sense for a Bush supporter.
So your only option to game the system would have the net effect of increasing the votes for 3rd party candidates in states heavily favored for Bush.
I think invalidated is the wrong word here. Your vote would still be counted in the final tally, so it wouldn't be invalidated. It may not fully reflect the choices you want to make, but that doesn't mean it won't be counted. My previous votes haven't fully reflected my wishes, but they were still counted. I wouldn't say my previous votes have been invalidated.
Also, there is no "weighted value" concept going on here. The winner of a Condorcet style election is based on the final pairwise matrix sum. It's not determined on winning percentage. Losses don't count against a candidate, either. So if you don't vote for certain candidates, their pairwise matrix sum will be less than if you did rank them. Your intention is to make it less likely for the candidates you didn't vote for to be elected. By diminishing their pairwise matrix sum, you have done just that.
Your vote wouldn't be invalidated using the Condorcet method, as you suggest. Your vote would mean that you have no preference between the remaining candidates, and have no preference for the remaining candidates. From Election Methods: Voters are not required to fully rank the entire list. For example, the vote (D,B) indicates that the voter has no preference between A and C. You may be thinking of a Borda count: In the most common form of the Borda system, each voter must rank all the candidates; truncation is not allowed.
I'm not sure how a strongly supported candidate can be marginalized. If the candidate is marginalized, then he has lost support. Can you give an example of a strongly supported candidate that loses to a less supported candidate using the condorcet methond, but not in another voting system (Approval, IRV)? Picking random votes doesn't count as an example because randomly choosing votes can't distinguish between the most popular candidates and the least popular candidates.
I believe his decision to broadcast the movie on tv disqualified it from winning the award for Best Documentary. The movie could still be in the running for Best Picture.
I won't get into whether it has a chance to win Best Picture or not...
The actual pdf report points out that between July 15th and September 16th, out of 83 political jokes on The Daily Show, 9 were directed at Bush, and 9 were directed at Kerry (page 8). Seems pretty balanced to me. Letterman was just about the same (20 Bush / 21 Kerry). Leno was a bit skewed (97 Bush / 76 Kerry), but, not being a fan of Leno, I would expect him to take the easy route when hunting for a joke.:)
How can you say he was a disgrace to his father's memory? Do you know Glick's father personally?
O'Reilly went off on Glick, because that's what he does. He doesn't want to interview or have a civil discussion with some of his guests. It's more beneficial to him if he incites them and makes them come off looking like jerks or idiots because he gets them so riled up and flustered. Maybe Glick just figured that out and didn't want to play Bill's game.
According to Glick, after the interview Bill completely lost his shit. He slammed his fist on the table and shouted "Get out! Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces!" In a radio interview, Glick later explained the lesson that Al Franken and innumerable other O'Reilly Factor guests would have benefited greatly from:
"O'Reilly's not there to debate. He's there to intimidate, he's there to bait his [guests]. And that's why, when he said that stuff about my Dad, the reason why I was calm is not because that wasn't hurtful or outrageous, it was because that's exactly what he wants to do. He wants to push your buttons."
they've come up with nothing except a misspeak on Bill's part
If he misspoke once, and then corrected himself, after becoming aware of the mistake that's one thing. But when he repeatedly says he won a Peabody award (which he never did), instead of a Polk award, and makes no effort to correct the situation when it is pointed out to him, I don't think you can put that down to just plain misspeaking.
What is your definition of a swing state, then? Every list of swing states I've seen online (eg. wikipedia) list both MN and WI.
I live in Madison, WI, and in the last week we've seen (or will see this weekend): Bush's wife, Edwards' wife, Kerry, Nader, and Cobb -- all in Madison (or a suburb). Cheney's and Bush have been in the state at least 3 times each (all on separate occasions).
Also, are you sure about Bush having a lock in MN?
www.electoral-vote.com has Kerry up by 9% in the latest statewide poll. Minnesota is the state with the longest running streak of voting for the Democratic candidate in the Presidential election. If there would be any reason for Bush to stay out it would be because he DOESN'T have a lock on it.
I disagree. We are a republic because we have "a political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president", but we also are "a political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them." (definitions from dictionary.com)
In the presidential election, I think of the electorates as the officers or representatives responsible to us. Granted, their "term" is awfully short, but we vote for them nonetheless. We don't vote for the president, we vote for the electorates (our representatives), who then are responsible for voting for the president.
There is no provision in the West Virginia code that controls what an elector does at the Electoral College or provides any punishment for faithless electors.
This happend in West Virginia in 1988, and it was postulated that this might happen in 2000, because Gore won the popular vote.
Only about half of the states bind electorates to their candidates -- through their state constitutions.
Part of the reason for the electoral college is because us "common folk" aren't smart enough to vote for the president on our own. Instead we vote for people (electorates) who vote for the president. This is one of the reasons why we're a republic, or a representative democracy.
So, in computer-speak: it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Anyone wishing to vote in the state of Wisconsin, where they are required to register, has three options to register:
<snip>
3. AT THE POLLING PLACE ON ELECTION DAY: If you wish to register to vote at your polling place, you must bring proof that you have lived at your present location for 10 days preceding the election. For purposes of voter registration, a form of identification constitutes acceptable proof of residence if it includes:
A current and complete name, including both the given and family name; and
A current and complete residential address, including a numbered street address, if any, and the name of a municipality.
If you cannot supply acceptable proof of residence, your registration form can be substantiated and signed by one other elector who resides in your municipality, corroborating your residency information. The corroborator must then provide acceptable proof of residence.
Re: scream from the crowd.. was The 'mike' wasn't
on
Joe Trippi Interviewed
·
· Score: 1
I posted this earlier, but since everyone wants to talk about it:
This site has a video of what the speech sounded like from the crowd.
"The scream" is all but inaudible. In case you can't hear it, "the scream" happens at about 1:14 into the video.
Slashdot Mirror
Acutally, no, my complaint is really against Republican lawmakers. Never have I seen a group more live up to the motto "Do as I say, not as I do" -- so duplicitous, so hypocritical, so self-righteous it makes me sick to my stomach. Never have I seen a group have such a large set of rules for themselves, with another set for everyone else. Am I always happy with the Democrats? No, but that's because I think they don't go far enough.
Party unity has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I was talking about how hypocritical Republicans were, when just a couple years go, they were decrying the filibuster, but now that the shoe is on the other foot, they've embraced it as their new favorite legislative tactic. They've done this so well, and the media has been hesitant to call it what it is - filibustering on the part of the Republicans - they have people thinking that you need 60 votes to pass something in the senate. They're changing the way people think the senate works.
But, to address your point... Yes, certain "moderate" Republicans are given the ok by the Republican Senate leaders to go against the party so they can go back to their states and tout how moderate and independent they are. As long as the number allowed to go against the party are kept under the threshold for getting votes past cloture, they can have it both ways... vote for cloture and not have to vote for or against the legislation. Also, while you can assume, you don't know how they would have voted if the legislation moved forward. In the past, Specter has voted for cloture, but then against the legislation. These 6 Republicans did not vote to strengthen or reinstate habeas, they voted for ending the debate on the habeas legislation so it could be considered for a "regular" vote.
Look at the list of Republicans voting with the Democrats: Hagel has always been a moderate Republican, who's not seeking reelection in 2008. Sununnu and Smith are up for reelection in 2008 in Democratically-leaning states. Snowe is a moderate Republican. Specter has a record for standing up for the basic constitutional matters... at least in cloture votes. Lugar surprises me, actually. He's not a moderate... I guess I don't know enough about him to know why he voted the way he did.
You can't determine party unity based on one vote. It's something that has to be determined over a series of votes. But, yes, this session Democratic Senators (and House members) have higher party unity scores than they have in the previous session, while Republican party unity scores have gone down a bit. I think that has more to do with mood of the country and the swing of the pendulum than anything else.
No... it's because of the concept of IOIYAR - It's Ok If You're A Republican.
When the Democrats were in the minority and there was even a hint of a filibuster by the Democrats, Republicans went crazy, and threatened to invoke the nuclear option, which would have basically shut down the senate.
Now that the Republicans are in the minority, they can and have threatened to filibuster. But because IOIYAR, no one's making a stink about it, and you even have the press reporting that these bills "didn't pass", or "Democrats failed to pass", or "Republicans blocked", which makes it sound like they got less than 50 votes in the senate, but they didn't pass their cloture votes, which is an agreement to stop debating a bill that needs 60 votes to pass. If the cloture vote doesn't pass, the debate can continue... In other words, a filibuster can take place.
So, in essence, the Republicans are threatening to filibuster on lots of things (this habeus legislation, Iraq-related bills, etc, etc), and therefore requiring a successful cloture vote to move the legislation forward, and raising the necessary vote threshold for anything to pass up to 60. The Republicans are voting to not allow legislation to be considered... They are not interested in giving the legislation a "fair shake" or an "up or down" vote.
Of course 2-3 years ago, that was reason enough to threaten to force a shutdown of the senate, but IOIYAR.
On Debian, give update-rc.d a look. I searched for the rc-update man page, and, while update-rc.d doesn't show the current run levels for a service like rc-update does, it does make it easy to add or remove services to the different runlevels.
If we were all to stop eating meat, we would save so much land we wouldn't have to turn to the cows to exploit other plant resources that we cannot digest on our own.
According to deadoraliveinfo, he's still kickin'
The debian version is 0.16, but the sourceforge version is 0.11, and the version on the project's homepage is 0.6. The last debian version was uploaded in June of this year. The others were released in 2001, so I guess the debian version is the only one still being actively developed (or released anyway).
I don't have a lot of experience with this package. I've only tried it a couple times, but so far so good.
This isn't what VotePair is doing. VotePair is a partisan effort to oust Bush. Their goal is to match up Kerry supporters in states were Bush is way ahead with 3rd party supporters in swing states. They're not looking to do anything else. A Naderite promising to vote for Bush wouldn't be the result of a pairing from VotePair. Poke around on their site and see if you can find anywhere to pick to promise to vote for Bush.
I think vote pair did a good job minimizing the benefits of defecting.
So your options to game the system are to pose as either a (a) or (b). If you pose as (a), you'll be paired with a (b), so (b) would be expected to vote for your choice of 3rd party candidate, and you would be expected to vote for Kerry. If you instead vote for Bush, well then you've wasted your time signing up, because you could have accomplished the same thing by voting for Bush in the first place. Either way the outcome is another vote for Bush. The vote for a 3rd party candidate which would have gone to Kerry is happening in a state were Bush is guaranteed to win anyway. No harm done.
If you pose as (b), you'd be getting (a) to vote for Kerry in a swing state, while you'd be voting for Bush in a state heavily favored for Bush. The net effect would be giving Kerry a vote in a swing state he wouldn't have received if you hadn't signed up. This option clearly doesn't make any sense for a Bush supporter.
So your only option to game the system would have the net effect of increasing the votes for 3rd party candidates in states heavily favored for Bush.
May not be exactly what you want, but I kind of like it.
Also, there is no "weighted value" concept going on here. The winner of a Condorcet style election is based on the final pairwise matrix sum. It's not determined on winning percentage. Losses don't count against a candidate, either. So if you don't vote for certain candidates, their pairwise matrix sum will be less than if you did rank them. Your intention is to make it less likely for the candidates you didn't vote for to be elected. By diminishing their pairwise matrix sum, you have done just that.
- Bush
- Badnarik
Your vote wouldn't be invalidated using the Condorcet method, as you suggest. Your vote would mean that you have no preference between the remaining candidates, and have no preference for the remaining candidates. From Election Methods: Voters are not required to fully rank the entire list. For example, the vote (D,B) indicates that the voter has no preference between A and C. You may be thinking of a Borda count: In the most common form of the Borda system, each voter must rank all the candidates; truncation is not allowed.I'm not sure how a strongly supported candidate can be marginalized. If the candidate is marginalized, then he has lost support. Can you give an example of a strongly supported candidate that loses to a less supported candidate using the condorcet methond, but not in another voting system (Approval, IRV)? Picking random votes doesn't count as an example because randomly choosing votes can't distinguish between the most popular candidates and the least popular candidates.
I won't get into whether it has a chance to win Best Picture or not...
The actual pdf report points out that between July 15th and September 16th, out of 83 political jokes on The Daily Show, 9 were directed at Bush, and 9 were directed at Kerry (page 8). Seems pretty balanced to me. Letterman was just about the same (20 Bush / 21 Kerry). Leno was a bit skewed (97 Bush / 76 Kerry), but, not being a fan of Leno, I would expect him to take the easy route when hunting for a joke. :)
CNN reported that Stewart was "seemingly taken aback" by the repeated "stoned slackers" comments.
O'Reilly went off on Glick, because that's what he does. He doesn't want to interview or have a civil discussion with some of his guests. It's more beneficial to him if he incites them and makes them come off looking like jerks or idiots because he gets them so riled up and flustered. Maybe Glick just figured that out and didn't want to play Bill's game.
At least that's how Glick puts it.
According to Glick, after the interview Bill completely lost his shit. He slammed his fist on the table and shouted "Get out! Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces!" In a radio interview, Glick later explained the lesson that Al Franken and innumerable other O'Reilly Factor guests would have benefited greatly from:
If he misspoke once, and then corrected himself, after becoming aware of the mistake that's one thing. But when he repeatedly says he won a Peabody award (which he never did), instead of a Polk award, and makes no effort to correct the situation when it is pointed out to him, I don't think you can put that down to just plain misspeaking.
I live in Madison, WI, and in the last week we've seen (or will see this weekend): Bush's wife, Edwards' wife, Kerry, Nader, and Cobb -- all in Madison (or a suburb). Cheney's and Bush have been in the state at least 3 times each (all on separate occasions).
Also, are you sure about Bush having a lock in MN?
www.electoral-vote.com has Kerry up by 9% in the latest statewide poll. Minnesota is the state with the longest running streak of voting for the Democratic candidate in the Presidential election. If there would be any reason for Bush to stay out it would be because he DOESN'T have a lock on it.
In the presidential election, I think of the electorates as the officers or representatives responsible to us. Granted, their "term" is awfully short, but we vote for them nonetheless. We don't vote for the president, we vote for the electorates (our representatives), who then are responsible for voting for the president.
Only about half of the states bind electorates to their candidates -- through their state constitutions.
Part of the reason for the electoral college is because us "common folk" aren't smart enough to vote for the president on our own. Instead we vote for people (electorates) who vote for the president. This is one of the reasons why we're a republic, or a representative democracy.
So, in computer-speak: it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Here's a snippet from Wisconsin's rules for registering:
This site has a video of what the speech sounded like from the crowd.
"The scream" is all but inaudible. In case you can't hear it, "the scream" happens at about 1:14 into the video.
HTH
"The scream" is all but inaudible. In case you can't hear it, "the scream" happens at about 1:14 into the video.
HTH