In a purely popular contest, a candidate could carry Massachusetts unanimously, and his opponent could get every other State by a margin of 100 votes.
Well good! Because if a guy can win 100% of MA and still have 49.999% of TX (and every other state) voting for him, then his nationwide popularity has been demonstrated, and he deserves the job.
That's a lot better than the alternative, which is a man with three million fewer votes and less widespread acceptance becoming President. I mean, seriously: what reason could there be for a candidate to take zero percent of the MA vote? No major canidate can be that unpopular in a single state without being truely warped. He probably wants to sell Massachusett babies as deli meat or something.
We could argue forever about what the right balance is between being the president of the people and being the president of the States
The idea that he's the President of the United "States" and not of the "United States of America" was obseleted even before Lincoln was born.
* one of God's days is much longer than one of our days
Once you start defending a writing by suggesting that its author is using different word definitions than everybody else, any declarative power of the work is quickly removed.
If "day" doesn't mean "day", then what else could be using different word meanings? "Life", "sin", "paradise", "murder", "love", "hell", "shall"?
Changing definitions is an argument from incomprehensibility. "Day" had a very well-defined meaning, even 4000 years ago. If Genesis was just an allegory, then what else is allegorical? Why, maybe when Jesus said that he will return to life, he didn't mean "life" life, but a "live on in your fond memories" life.
So, it's understandable why creationists reject your concept that days in Genesis were not really days; for it opens up the whole rest of the Bible to relativist reinterpretation.
The reason people don't use whitelists today is because it affects normal email flow.
Still an off-base objection. The whole motivation for hashcash is to prevent whitelisting from altering normal flow!
The large majority of legitimate email today is between ongoing correspondents (where by "legitimate" I mean "the reciever actually wants to read it"). Unsolicited email is very rare, outside of spam.
The hashcash provides a failsafe so that people not on the whitelist can still contact you by waiting an extra 3 seconds (as opposed to telephoning and asking to be whitelisted). When you reply to that initial email, a checkbox to whitelist the recipient will be activated by default, so all future messages come through fine.
its been kicking around for a *LONG* time.
True, but the age of an idea is not a measure of virtue. The strongest argument against hashcash is that statistical filters are already good enough to protect clients from spam, and that the cost of keeping them updated is less than altering the email infrastructure. (Only time will tell if Baynesian filters remain potent, but they're holding out so far)
Why not just use an "accepted sender" (white-list) to block out all of your spam?
Because it will also block unsolicited legitimate mail.
The whole point of hashcash (and other sender-pays solutions, whether the payment is in money or CPU time) is that it'll allow whitelist-based systems to operate without blocking "first contact" type emails from total strangers or long-lost friends.
But the mailing list server would have to take on additional load since they send mail to so many users.
No they wouldn't. Client-side whitelists would be an unavoidable part of any hashcash rollout. After all, flag days are untenable- there WILL be a transitional period when not all email software supports the protocol, and users will need a way to exchange messages during that time. The simplest workaround is to allow users to input a list of addresses they're willing to recieve from without an attached hash.
Given that such a system will exist, mailing list will certainly take advantage of it. When you sign up for a ML, it will instruct you to add the ML to your local whitelist. The only time the servers software will send hashed messages is when a previous non-hashed message has been rejected- and in that case, the body of the 2nd message will just be a repeated instruction to whitelist the ML, or your subscription will be cancelled.
2. Any State in which supreme power is held by the people or their elected representatives as opposed to by a monarch etc.
That definition is partly correct- lack of a monarch is a critical feature of a republic, but power held by the people is not. For example, the United Kingdom isn't a republic, but it would match that definition (Their monarch has non-supreme power, but she does exist).
I see that you picked definition #2, which suggests you are omitting information that doesn't support your viewpoint. If a word has many definitions with non-overlapping meanings, then it has little descriptive power.
"Democracy" means that ultimate power resides in the people living there. "Republic" means nothing, because many non-democratic dictatorial/aristocratic states are republics.
I believe the OED trumps reference.com.
It doesn't. In fact, the kitchen-sink approach of such non-abridged dictionaries is more likely to supply definitions that are wrong (or at least obseleted). But more importantly, genuine usage trumps everything. And a quick survey of an atlas will show that I'm right. "Republic" has for centuries been used to refer to both democratic and non-democratic nations, as long as they are non-monarchal.
Usage by English dictionaries, legal dictionaries, political scientists, and active politicians from George Bush to Ted Kennedy (and beyond) all support my definitions.
You consistently used that incorrect cApitalization.
Disregarding the results in the other 41 states is showing the bias of the person who put together those graphs.
It reveals nothing. Non-swing states are irrelevant to the choice of a president... and the voters there know this, which will influence how frequently they seek out pollsters. Or, if there existed some hypothetical election-tampering criminals, they wouldn't bother doing their business in non-swing states, where it would be impossible to help their candidate without being blatantly obvious.
Starting by deciding what you want to prove and then picking the data that supports it is an inherently bad methodology.
Ignoring data which can have no relevance is scientifically neutral.
The reason exit polls this election had such different accuracy than in 2000 is because they were conducted with an entirely different methodology, a change that was made in response to flaws that troubled the Bush-Gore vote. The old polls, however, had the advantage of age; because they'd been going on for a while, their accuracy could be compared across previous elections. The only way to calibrate the new method would've been to implement it piecewise, by still using the old system across X% of districts.
Actually, the slave states, wanted them counted as whole persons for representation
Yes, as I already mentioned, it was a compromise. But that doesn't change the fact that the 3/5ths clause increased the power of slave-holding states because, (as I already described), slaves, who are not legally people, wouldn't otherwise count towards the number of people in a state. "Indians" didn't count. Oxen didn't count. Organutans didn't count. In the abscense of this clause, slaves wouldn't count either.
They wanted 1, but they got 3/5, which is substantially more than 0. Therefore it was an increase, not a decrease as claimed above.
"Res publica" is vacuous too, and in any event, pulling out Latin roots provide the definitions of English words. If that were the case, then "agnostic" would mean "not believing in Gnosticism", when instead it means "undecided as to the existence of deities"
Any statement such as "republic/democracy == good/bad" is rather vacuous.
No. "Republic = good" and "republic = bad" are flat-out false, while "democracy = good" is true and "democracy = bad" is false.
For example, what happened in the *other* 41 states?
The answer should be obvious: They weren't swing states, so there was <1% probability of an unpredictable election result, so they didn't really matter. When voters in California, Texas, and New York cast their presidential ballots, it's just a formality.
you conservatives to actually stop being decieved conned stupid irrational non-educated sheepish bible thumpers
Oh, come on now. That's only 99%. There's also Karl Rove and all the other coniving, smart, rational, educated, sheperdish Bible-quoters who get the actual benefit from decieving the Republican voting blocks. There can't be a lie without liars!
Demographically, an internet poster is more likely to be one of the rich that benefits from Republican economic policy (while using social policy to ensure election victories). So he probably wasn't fooled- he's just trying to fool you.
The better question here is, why are you trying to suggest a rape victim should be forced to carry the offspring of her attacker?
I hope that after getting 10+ similar responses, you've finally noticed* that all those people weren't suggesting that rape victims should be forbidden to have abortions, but rather that your perspective (that abortion is murder, but that it's OK in case of rape) is illogical.
(Although inconsistent, that is nonetheless the position of 95%+ of abortion-ban voters, with people like Alan Keyes standing out as exceptions)
(in the event the victim becomes pregnant in the first place-- in most cases you'd think they'd be given a "morning after" pill to keep her from getting pregnant)
That's an abortion! By the next morning, fertilization has occured and the egg is already growing. (Especially since those pills can still work for the next 2 days) The "bright line" has been crossed, and a new individual of homo sapiens has been created.
Well, technically, it's been "between [at least one] man and [at least one] woman" for thousands of years.
That "correction" is wrong. Marriage is between one man and one woman. You were trying to invoke the existence of polygamy, but that is covered by the simpler one man/one woman definition. ie, when a Mormon takes a 2nd wife, he is entering a second marriage, just without terminating the first- it's not like wife 2 is marrying wife 1! And if wife 2 were somehow polyandrous and already had husband B, then the two men would not become wedded to each other.
It's a nonexclusive pairwise link (although legally, many countries require marriage to be exclusive as well, which goes beyond the traditional and dictionary definitions)
No, she was probably just pointing out your most blatant self-contradiction.
I am talking about the fundamental rights of human beings, the primary one being to not be killed.
If you take that position, then you can't also appeal to "nature" and say that women are simply designed to bear children. That's contradictory- nature has no right to live.
You do realize, of course that the reason the 3/5th person clause was put into the Constitution was to weaken the power of the Slave holding states.
Backwards. It was to increase their power, and thereby entice them to enter a union with the more-populous northern states that otherwise might dominate federal voting. (In a similar way, the "Conneticut Compromise" gave smaller states extra power to attract their membership)
By making a slave count as 3/5th of a person, you have weakened the federal power of a slave holding state.
Livestock, such as cows, chickens, and slaves, count as zero people. Only the special exception embodied in that clause adds them to representative totals.
One cannot argue that slaves were already people anyway, because although biologically human, they were certainly not people under the eyes of the law. Otherwise typical slave-owner actions like bondage and beatings would be illegal kidnapping or felony assault.
Ok, so you use words without knowing their meanings.
At least some of the shit promised by Bush was realistic.
Kerry promised enlarged spending and high taxes, while Bush wanted increased spending and lower taxes. One of those perspectives is infinitely more realistic than the other, in that it at least recognizes minimal arthimetic.
because Bush is a fucking moron.
If you think he's stupid, then why did you just say he had more realistic ideas? Morons typically have trouble accurately planning for the future.
will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people,
Uh huh. Less exposure to communication, he says. In other words, banning political speech. Sorry pal, but the First Amendment has a little more legal weight than a Federalist Paper.
Democracy is bad.
No, democracies are fine, to the contrary of some long-dead authors who didn't even use the word to mean the same thing it does today (the Federalist Papers went against even 1750s dictionaries in their usage).
Republic is good.
Yeah. Like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Republic of China, and even Saddam Huessein's Baathist Republic of Iraq. All of them are good.
The word "democracy" means something; "republic" is nearly content-free. The only requirement for a nation to be categorized as a "republic" is to give no preferential status to royalty. Even hereditary dictators-for-life are acceptable, so long as they lack royal title.
They had a sort of demonstration with elections going OK in Afghanistan, which I thought was oddly not mentioned much by either side
It was mentioned by Bush in the debates. However, the Afgan elections did NOT go OK. There were more ballots cast than there are adults in that whole country!
Bush is a far better demagogue than Kerry. Demagogues are people with charisma, who can step in front of a crowd and fire them up with emotional appeals (that aren't necessarily rational).
Even Kerry's supporters admitted that he just isn't a very exciting guy. That's why the votes he got were mainly anti-Bush, and not pro-Kerry.
This article should be required reading by all participants in any discussion of reforming the Electoral College.
That's a fine article, but it doesn't support preserving the Electoral College.
The article's point is that that there is value in maximizing the power of each vote, and that a multi-stage tournament does this better than a single tally. (Basically, the more levels there are, the greater the chance that any particular vote will trigger a big swing in the outcome)
However, although the two-stage EC system creates more vote power than a popular vote would, it's not optimal in that regard. It would be easy to concoct a system which does much better than the EC on this score.
Furthermore, the EC is unfair, while popular voting is fair. And, a hypothetical 3rd system could be designed to take both the EC's vote power and be completely fair (meaning that although votes are maximized, no voter is a priori more powerful than another).
But then the Democrats stuffed Dean down a mineshaft and decided to go with Kerry.
Sticking with Dean would've meant an even bigger loss yesterday.
Bush's majority win demonstrates that the public feels his actions on Iraq were basically correct. Kerry supported that invasion in general, but opposed it on details of execution... while Dean was completely against any military action there.
The people don't like to feel stupid- the idea that they supported a man with horribly bad plans offends them. Because Kerry was closer to Bush, he had a better chance of taking away Bush voters.
A Democrat who steps away from NAFTA and the WTO (unlike John Kerry or Bill Clinton), can win.
Clinton and Bush supported NAFTA and the WTO, and they both won...
But if the Democrats as a party want to win, they need more Sen. Millers, not more Sen. Kerrys, running for national office.
If you can't beat em, join em? If the Democrats were to act like Zell Miller, then their popularity would sink even further. The existing base would desert, and right-wingers would stick with the original Republican party, instead of the nascent clones.
The general consensus is that there isn't any proof for either side of the argument,
No, the concensus is that gods don't exist, and that all religions are lies.
In a worldwide survey asking each living human if each individual religion is true or false, no religion will ever get a majority asserting its correctness. Therefore, the people agree: all religions are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
In a purely popular contest, a candidate could carry Massachusetts unanimously, and his opponent could get every other State by a margin of 100 votes.
Well good! Because if a guy can win 100% of MA and still have 49.999% of TX (and every other state) voting for him, then his nationwide popularity has been demonstrated, and he deserves the job.
That's a lot better than the alternative, which is a man with three million fewer votes and less widespread acceptance becoming President. I mean, seriously: what reason could there be for a candidate to take zero percent of the MA vote? No major canidate can be that unpopular in a single state without being truely warped. He probably wants to sell Massachusett babies as deli meat or something.
We could argue forever about what the right balance is between being the president of the people and being the president of the States
The idea that he's the President of the United "States" and not of the "United States of America" was obseleted even before Lincoln was born.
* one of God's days is much longer than one of our days
Once you start defending a writing by suggesting that its author is using different word definitions than everybody else, any declarative power of the work is quickly removed.
If "day" doesn't mean "day", then what else could be using different word meanings? "Life", "sin", "paradise", "murder", "love", "hell", "shall"?
Changing definitions is an argument from incomprehensibility. "Day" had a very well-defined meaning, even 4000 years ago. If Genesis was just an allegory, then what else is allegorical? Why, maybe when Jesus said that he will return to life, he didn't mean "life" life, but a "live on in your fond memories" life.
So, it's understandable why creationists reject your concept that days in Genesis were not really days; for it opens up the whole rest of the Bible to relativist reinterpretation.
So much for giving credit for prior work.
And did you see "Passion of the Christ"? It TOTALLY copied the torture scene in "Braveheart". What a rip!
The reason people don't use whitelists today is because it affects normal email flow.
Still an off-base objection. The whole motivation for hashcash is to prevent whitelisting from altering normal flow!
The large majority of legitimate email today is between ongoing correspondents (where by "legitimate" I mean "the reciever actually wants to read it"). Unsolicited email is very rare, outside of spam.
The hashcash provides a failsafe so that people not on the whitelist can still contact you by waiting an extra 3 seconds (as opposed to telephoning and asking to be whitelisted). When you reply to that initial email, a checkbox to whitelist the recipient will be activated by default, so all future messages come through fine.
its been kicking around for a *LONG* time.
True, but the age of an idea is not a measure of virtue. The strongest argument against hashcash is that statistical filters are already good enough to protect clients from spam, and that the cost of keeping them updated is less than altering the email infrastructure. (Only time will tell if Baynesian filters remain potent, but they're holding out so far)
Why not just use an "accepted sender" (white-list) to block out all of your spam?
Because it will also block unsolicited legitimate mail.
The whole point of hashcash (and other sender-pays solutions, whether the payment is in money or CPU time) is that it'll allow whitelist-based systems to operate without blocking "first contact" type emails from total strangers or long-lost friends.
But the mailing list server would have to take on additional load since they send mail to so many users.
No they wouldn't. Client-side whitelists would be an unavoidable part of any hashcash rollout. After all, flag days are untenable- there WILL be a transitional period when not all email software supports the protocol, and users will need a way to exchange messages during that time. The simplest workaround is to allow users to input a list of addresses they're willing to recieve from without an attached hash.
Given that such a system will exist, mailing list will certainly take advantage of it. When you sign up for a ML, it will instruct you to add the ML to your local whitelist. The only time the servers software will send hashed messages is when a previous non-hashed message has been rejected- and in that case, the body of the 2nd message will just be a repeated instruction to whitelist the ML, or your subscription will be cancelled.
2. Any State in which supreme power is held by the people or their elected representatives as opposed to by a monarch etc.
That definition is partly correct- lack of a monarch is a critical feature of a republic, but power held by the people is not. For example, the United Kingdom isn't a republic, but it would match that definition (Their monarch has non-supreme power, but she does exist).
I see that you picked definition #2, which suggests you are omitting information that doesn't support your viewpoint. If a word has many definitions with non-overlapping meanings, then it has little descriptive power.
"Democracy" means that ultimate power resides in the people living there. "Republic" means nothing, because many non-democratic dictatorial/aristocratic states are republics.
I believe the OED trumps reference.com.
It doesn't. In fact, the kitchen-sink approach of such non-abridged dictionaries is more likely to supply definitions that are wrong (or at least obseleted). But more importantly, genuine usage trumps everything. And a quick survey of an atlas will show that I'm right. "Republic" has for centuries been used to refer to both democratic and non-democratic nations, as long as they are non-monarchal.
Usage by English dictionaries, legal dictionaries, political scientists, and active politicians from George Bush to Ted Kennedy (and beyond) all support my definitions.
eVoting
You consistently used that incorrect cApitalization.
Disregarding the results in the other 41 states is showing the bias of the person who put together those graphs.
It reveals nothing. Non-swing states are irrelevant to the choice of a president... and the voters there know this, which will influence how frequently they seek out pollsters. Or, if there existed some hypothetical election-tampering criminals, they wouldn't bother doing their business in non-swing states, where it would be impossible to help their candidate without being blatantly obvious.
Starting by deciding what you want to prove and then picking the data that supports it is an inherently bad methodology.
Ignoring data which can have no relevance is scientifically neutral.
The reason exit polls this election had such different accuracy than in 2000 is because they were conducted with an entirely different methodology, a change that was made in response to flaws that troubled the Bush-Gore vote. The old polls, however, had the advantage of age; because they'd been going on for a while, their accuracy could be compared across previous elections. The only way to calibrate the new method would've been to implement it piecewise, by still using the old system across X% of districts.
Actually, the slave states, wanted them counted as whole persons for representation
Yes, as I already mentioned, it was a compromise. But that doesn't change the fact that the 3/5ths clause increased the power of slave-holding states because, (as I already described), slaves, who are not legally people, wouldn't otherwise count towards the number of people in a state. "Indians" didn't count. Oxen didn't count. Organutans didn't count. In the abscense of this clause, slaves wouldn't count either.
They wanted 1, but they got 3/5, which is substantially more than 0. Therefore it was an increase, not a decrease as claimed above.
as words: basically, government of the people.
No, that is simply not the definition of republic.
"Res publica" is vacuous too, and in any event, pulling out Latin roots provide the definitions of English words. If that were the case, then "agnostic" would mean "not believing in Gnosticism", when instead it means "undecided as to the existence of deities"
Any statement such as "republic/democracy == good/bad" is rather vacuous.
No. "Republic = good" and "republic = bad" are flat-out false, while "democracy = good" is true and "democracy = bad" is false.
For example, what happened in the *other* 41 states?
The answer should be obvious: They weren't swing states, so there was <1% probability of an unpredictable election result, so they didn't really matter. When voters in California, Texas, and New York cast their presidential ballots, it's just a formality.
you conservatives to actually stop being decieved conned stupid irrational non-educated sheepish bible thumpers
Oh, come on now. That's only 99%. There's also Karl Rove and all the other coniving, smart, rational, educated, sheperdish Bible-quoters who get the actual benefit from decieving the Republican voting blocks. There can't be a lie without liars!
Demographically, an internet poster is more likely to be one of the rich that benefits from Republican economic policy (while using social policy to ensure election victories). So he probably wasn't fooled- he's just trying to fool you.
The better question here is, why are you trying to suggest a rape victim should be forced to carry the offspring of her attacker?
I hope that after getting 10+ similar responses, you've finally noticed* that all those people weren't suggesting that rape victims should be forbidden to have abortions, but rather that your perspective (that abortion is murder, but that it's OK in case of rape) is illogical.
(Although inconsistent, that is nonetheless the position of 95%+ of abortion-ban voters, with people like Alan Keyes standing out as exceptions)
(in the event the victim becomes pregnant in the first place-- in most cases you'd think they'd be given a "morning after" pill to keep her from getting pregnant)
That's an abortion! By the next morning, fertilization has occured and the egg is already growing. (Especially since those pills can still work for the next 2 days) The "bright line" has been crossed, and a new individual of homo sapiens has been created.
Well, technically, it's been "between [at least one] man and [at least one] woman" for thousands of years.
That "correction" is wrong. Marriage is between one man and one woman. You were trying to invoke the existence of polygamy, but that is covered by the simpler one man/one woman definition. ie, when a Mormon takes a 2nd wife, he is entering a second marriage, just without terminating the first- it's not like wife 2 is marrying wife 1! And if wife 2 were somehow polyandrous and already had husband B, then the two men would not become wedded to each other.
It's a nonexclusive pairwise link (although legally, many countries require marriage to be exclusive as well, which goes beyond the traditional and dictionary definitions)
Is that it? Your best answer?
No, she was probably just pointing out your most blatant self-contradiction.
I am talking about the fundamental rights of human beings, the primary one being to not be killed.
If you take that position, then you can't also appeal to "nature" and say that women are simply designed to bear children. That's contradictory- nature has no right to live.
Damn, I feel old now. That kid is now like 12...
And how old are the grandkids?
You do realize, of course that the reason the 3/5th person clause was put into the Constitution was to weaken the power of the Slave holding states.
Backwards. It was to increase their power, and thereby entice them to enter a union with the more-populous northern states that otherwise might dominate federal voting. (In a similar way, the "Conneticut Compromise" gave smaller states extra power to attract their membership)
By making a slave count as 3/5th of a person, you have weakened the federal power of a slave holding state.
Livestock, such as cows, chickens, and slaves, count as zero people. Only the special exception embodied in that clause adds them to representative totals.
One cannot argue that slaves were already people anyway, because although biologically human, they were certainly not people under the eyes of the law. Otherwise typical slave-owner actions like bondage and beatings would be illegal kidnapping or felony assault.
That's what "demagogue" means to me,
Ok, so you use words without knowing their meanings.
At least some of the shit promised by Bush was realistic.
Kerry promised enlarged spending and high taxes, while Bush wanted increased spending and lower taxes. One of those perspectives is infinitely more realistic than the other, in that it at least recognizes minimal arthimetic.
because Bush is a fucking moron.
If you think he's stupid, then why did you just say he had more realistic ideas? Morons typically have trouble accurately planning for the future.
will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people,
Uh huh. Less exposure to communication, he says. In other words, banning political speech. Sorry pal, but the First Amendment has a little more legal weight than a Federalist Paper.
Democracy is bad.
No, democracies are fine, to the contrary of some long-dead authors who didn't even use the word to mean the same thing it does today (the Federalist Papers went against even 1750s dictionaries in their usage).
Republic is good.
Yeah. Like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Republic of China, and even Saddam Huessein's Baathist Republic of Iraq. All of them are good.
The word "democracy" means something; "republic" is nearly content-free. The only requirement for a nation to be categorized as a "republic" is to give no preferential status to royalty. Even hereditary dictators-for-life are acceptable, so long as they lack royal title.
They had a sort of demonstration with elections going OK in Afghanistan, which I thought was oddly not mentioned much by either side
It was mentioned by Bush in the debates. However, the Afgan elections did NOT go OK. There were more ballots cast than there are adults in that whole country!
Kerry was a BS artist, and a demagogue to boot.
Do you even know what "demagogue" means?
Bush is a far better demagogue than Kerry. Demagogues are people with charisma, who can step in front of a crowd and fire them up with emotional appeals (that aren't necessarily rational).
Even Kerry's supporters admitted that he just isn't a very exciting guy. That's why the votes he got were mainly anti-Bush, and not pro-Kerry.
This article should be required reading by all participants in any discussion of reforming the Electoral College.
That's a fine article, but it doesn't support preserving the Electoral College.
The article's point is that that there is value in maximizing the power of each vote, and that a multi-stage tournament does this better than a single tally. (Basically, the more levels there are, the greater the chance that any particular vote will trigger a big swing in the outcome)
However, although the two-stage EC system creates more vote power than a popular vote would, it's not optimal in that regard. It would be easy to concoct a system which does much better than the EC on this score.
Furthermore, the EC is unfair, while popular voting is fair. And, a hypothetical 3rd system could be designed to take both the EC's vote power and be completely fair (meaning that although votes are maximized, no voter is a priori more powerful than another).
But then the Democrats stuffed Dean down a mineshaft and decided to go with Kerry.
Sticking with Dean would've meant an even bigger loss yesterday.
Bush's majority win demonstrates that the public feels his actions on Iraq were basically correct. Kerry supported that invasion in general, but opposed it on details of execution... while Dean was completely against any military action there.
The people don't like to feel stupid- the idea that they supported a man with horribly bad plans offends them. Because Kerry was closer to Bush, he had a better chance of taking away Bush voters.
See what voting for hatred gets you?
Dean was even more dramatically a Bush-hater.
A Democrat who steps away from NAFTA and the WTO (unlike John Kerry or Bill Clinton), can win.
Clinton and Bush supported NAFTA and the WTO, and they both won...
But if the Democrats as a party want to win, they need more Sen. Millers, not more Sen. Kerrys, running for national office.
If you can't beat em, join em? If the Democrats were to act like Zell Miller, then their popularity would sink even further. The existing base would desert, and right-wingers would stick with the original Republican party, instead of the nascent clones.
The general consensus is that there isn't any proof for either side of the argument,
No, the concensus is that gods don't exist, and that all religions are lies.
In a worldwide survey asking each living human if each individual religion is true or false, no religion will ever get a majority asserting its correctness. Therefore, the people agree: all religions are wrong.