I've noticed that WinAmp and Real Player both have browser windows incorporated into them. Are these basically framing in whatever my default browser is, are they their own minibrowser, or what? Do these run IE by default?
Around February and March of 2001, roughly 8-10 weeks after a Jan 20 inaugural, weren't there plenty of tensions concerning the Taiwan straights, Korea and weapons programs, and other similar things that might have called for a hightened readiness? Whether your agree or disagree with improved readiness in response the China/Korea arena of tension, please note these tensions were under various sorts of strategic responses from Clinton and before, are part of a long term US strategic interest, Bush had quite openly told the electorate which elected him to office that he was going to take the US into a more assertive posture (so it was no surprise to anyone paying attention to the news really) and the meetings Bush had with Chinese and Korean leaders about this time would indicate posturing going on by all parties, in the usual course of these things, which often takes the form of putting militaries on heightened alert.
Nothing about heightened readiness because of China/Korea tensions (a major point of Bush's campaign, you may recall) should be surprising, or indicate a secret war-lust.
Perhaps low level army troops simply wouldn't absorb the implications of these events, free beer not being dispensed to troops in reward for reading the newspaper, and that is why no one bothered to inform you. Higher level army personnel probably did not need to be told why heightened readiness was desirable - they simply read the newspapers during campaigns and around the time of the increased readiness.
"Can we keep the political stuff out of slashdot"
Not really. Supress it here and it will emerge elsewhere. Besides, when does political begin and other choices in life, including about technology and technological society, end?
The source of info on Uranium AVAILABLE FOR ENRICHMENT (whether or not dubbed yellowcake) seems to be the IAEA itself, not Professor Dombey (note spelling for Googling purposes- spelling flame not intended). Dombey's claim is that there are reasonable grounds to doubt IAEA's sense in treating whatever type of uranium in Iraq as somehow safe because of whatever measures they think have safegaurded it - it is of an enrichable class, and further there is evidence of enrichment actually occurring (depleted uranium) despite claims to the contrary. That the enrichment actually occuring depends on interpreting reports about the source of some depleted uranium indicates this topic is apt for further inquiry, but doesn't gut it's importance.
If you had scads of money and prior warning that hostiles will rain missiles down on you when you greenlight attacks on them, wouldn't you choose to have back up dialysis machines and a stockpile of supplies?
Criminal laws (polic enforce) as well as civil laws (you must file suit) in the US vary by state, as pointed out in another thread. However,...
>
B.S. in all 50 states, at least as to civil liability, and in most other nations also. Criminal liability may vary, but places with stronger criminal laws against secret surveillance, such as California, would make the activity described criminal.
>
Again, BS in all 50 states as to civil liability. You can't exploit someone elses personality (identifying features, individual reputation, etc.) without at least implied consent maliciously or for profit except in certain exceptional cases that mostly involve journalists and important public interests.
>
CITATION? (Describe the name of the case, or court and date it occured in.) Thanks.
>
Nonsense. If the police don't help, take the bozo to your state's version of small claims court (might be called justice court or such) and use its procedures to find out information about what may have been done with the information obtained, as well as whatever else that court might be able to do to help you. Of course getting a lawyer to take your case could get you even better results, but usually the cost of that can be handled only if there's money to be recovered from the bozo.
>
If you make me wade through your pointless drivel, and then tag on at the end that it's a joke, I'm still going to treat it like the drivel it is. That's the price of getting a "5" mod enticing me to read your pointless drivel.
Sheesh - the net may be full of prepubsecent pranksters, but should Slashdot be?
http://scientistsandengineersforchange.org/index .p hp
which is apparently Mr. Cerf's (and other's) website on this issue, is "Science isn't being given enough money." I wonder if these boys and girls realize that Joe Undecided typically takes that kind of approach as admission that this is a special or vested interest speaking, angry that it is being put on a diet after previously being given more generous portions of public funds. Scientists saying "Candidate A is bad because he doesn't give scientists enough money" might carry more weight than drug companies saying "Candidate A is bad because he won't support paying for drugs at the prices we want", but the essential self-interest involved in the opinion speaks loudly.
An illustration that scientists remain human and thus subject to their own delusions about themselves is the site's describing their movement as a "growing consensus". A consensus refers to agreement prevailing among all the parties concerned, and there are vastly more scientists in the US than the 60-some signatories on this site. A small slice with an opinion and an overwhelmingly larger portion with no expressed opinion does not constitute any variety "consensus" in the first place. If 90 fans of kiwi tarts all agree that kiwi tarts are great while 200+ million other Americans have no expressed opinion on the matter, there is no sensible reference to the American "consensus" on kiwi tarts, whether "growing" or otherwise. There is only a consensus among those 90 kiwi tart fans. The bizarre use of "growing consensus" ought to have alerted these people to the idea that they risk being accounted among the spin doctors, but they seem blind to their own illusions under the more generous assessment.
Yup - it was a pretty even match for pretty evenly matched candidates. I don't know that Gore would have done any better or worse than Bush in dealing with the poorly expected events that came to dominate Bush's term.
If the mass opinion of what the public welfare is and requires is so split, we may take it that much more needs to be known about the issues. If that's true about the issues, good job electorate! Of course, human nature being what it is, in our own minds and small circles we like to believe we, in particular, are well ahead of the masses in perceiving the realities and correctly divining the public welfare that the masses are slower to realize. We might be tempted to think, then, that a premature clarity in electoral opinion is a good thing, when actually it may just be a lack of empirical sense and laziness on the part of the electorate to go around handing decisive mandates where no such mandates so cut and dried ought to be handed out to anyone just yet.
Sometimes you have to let events clarify matters, even if that's agonizingly slow. Clarity where clarity isn't warranted is not desirable.
Of course there will be loud wails of protest about another closely contested election, but so what? It is mostly a near professional political class and a set of fringe advocacy groups that got so steamed about Gore-Bush, not mainstream America. Mainstream America dang well knew it decided Gore-Bush on a near toss-up basis, so what was the great tragedy which of the two the election was decided in favor of in the end. It isn't like Pat Buchanan or Jerry Brown was suddenly handed power from out of nowhere.
In the US electoral theory, a fair and valid election is one in which a sufficiently large number of competent people's opinions or estimates of what the public welfare is and requires are collected, so as to counteract the shortsightedness and biases of mere mortals who, being fewer in number, have less chance of accurately perceiving this.
Lately an idea has sprung up that every breathing person of age should vote to make an election valid, but this ideal is not well linked to the idea that a large enough body of people have a better chance of correctly determining the public welfare. It is a very poorly thought through political ideal.
Except for the one embarassing run in with the cult of Scientology when Slashdot was confronted with force majeur, I've never seen Slashdot try to censor anything its readers deem worthy of saying to others.
Get up on your hind legs and bray if you've got something to say. Don't trash Slashdot.
Perhaps under one state's law, but not all. States have the power to inquire into US citizenship when filling various jobs, appointing people to juries, registering them to vote, etc. If Oregon chooses not to, that's Oregon's business.
Regretably I posted to this thread and then the story this is on-topic for popped up after all when I finished posting.
Hey Sys Dude CoyboyNeal, how about a little help in moving this thread to the Carter story threads? Or am I stuck here?
The US constitutional right to vote is governed by the various state's rules of who is a qualified voter. The main constitutional rule is that qualified voters must be classified as such or disqualified as such upon lines of "equal protection" of the laws of that state. "Equal protection" means that the way people are classified has at least a rational basis, and if it involves a very important matter, involves an important or compelling government interest. A few special rules for specifically federal elections also apply - no state can deny voting in a FEDERAL election to a person on the basis of age if that person is at least 18, for instance, but voting is a political right mostly determined by what state one has chosen to live in.
The US theory of the electorate is that by spreading ultimate power over decision making over a broad enough set of people, they will more likely accurately perceive the public welfare and how to best attain it, whereas restricting such decisions to too few people much involves their own innate biases and human limitations and is less likely to accurately perceive the what the public welfare requires. The US Constition only demands and assures "a republican form of government" in each state, and further that a common scheme applying to all equally be used to determine political participation (aka "equal protection"). It is mostly up to the various states to set up a scheme of political participation of its citizens, though the states have largely copied each other closely in this.
Many US states determine that convicted felons (felony - a serious offense, usually classified by possible incarceration for a term longer than 1 year) are not qualified to vote, unless the governor approves a petition which restores full civil rights to the felon. Some US states do NOT determine that convicted felons are unqualified to vote once discharged from custody. I don't know of any state that disqualifies a voter for conviction of a misdemeanor or mere infraction, though they are criminal offenses. Most US states suspend voting for a person during a period under which they are under court ordered protection because of severe mental impairment.
This grows out of traditional voter qualifications for "competency". People too young or too feeble minded are excluded from voting because they are not thought "competent" to responsibly exercise this power. Felons are similarly regarded as not competent to discharge an important governmental function, that of deciding upon laws and officers of government, because of demonstrated moral turpetide and callous indifference to the welfare of society by their felonious acts.
It isn't rational to deny voting on the basis of color or creed or a lot of other characteristics which do not rationally indicate ability to decide a matter of public welfare, but it is thought rational and very important to deny voting to people without traits of mental power sufficient to comprehend the issues or with a character demonstrating antisocial and vicious tendencies. Why should the vote of a pedophile be equal to the vote of another on the question of whether sexual exploitation of children should be illegal? What commitment to public welfare, rather than personal depravity, is expected from the pedophile on this question? Why should a vote on a question of public health and safety have equal contributions from citizen A who will contemplate the matter according to his or her experience and vote, and citizen B who has already demonstrated that health and safety interfer with killing people when you are mad enough at them to want to kill them?
(And in Chicago and other strongholds of the Democratic machine, whether you are qualified to vote via Democratic party apparatchiks casting your ballot for you after you are dead depends on how long you've been dead, according to popular myth.)
I have no objection to anyone observing US elections and reporting on them, but hardly see how the linked coalition can help improve them. "People for the American Way" is essentially a left-wing Hollywood dominated group that does a good job of putting the grass-roots beard on left-wing Hollywood points of view. A look at the list of coalition participants on the linked page shows a roster of the more active left-wing and left-wing extremist advocacy groups in the US at this time. To suppose this group is going to improve electoral procedures, rather than beat the drum about a "vast right wing conspiracy" hindering electoral integrity, is pretty naive.
As made clear from other posts about this story, the outcome of the US November elections is going to be a media circus with no end of lurid allegations about it no matter what actually happens, and the People for the American Way are likely to be in the vangaurd of mud-slingers no matter what actually happens.
Oh, unless of course Kerry seems to win. What would be the point of undermining the prestige of his presidency when it turns out the ignorant prols managed to vote in a manner that their Hollywood left-wing betters thought best afterall?
I completely agree that WWII Switzerland remained a democratic nation and the manner of government enjoyed proper ratification. It was clearly a wartime government greatly different from its peacetime norms, though, obviuosly including in the manner in which it conducted essential sovereign affairs of a sensitive nature.
I question whether referendum is the ultimate democratic expression, where referendum requires a legislative referral of a question to the voters, while under initiative processes the idiots voting on the law can directly be the authors of the idiocy. The initiative process, which many US states have in addition to referendum, is even closer to ultimate democratic expression (and vastly more humorous). If the European Union were to adopt initiative processes at a federal level, to counteract the tendency of idiot bureaucrats making rules from their ivory tower, the comedic complications would be endless. I don't wish the initiative system as part of government on any large mass of people.
At the US Federal level the closest thing to a referendum is the process of adopting or rejecting amendments to the constitution. Such amendments must be approved by the various state legislatures, rather than directly by individual voters, but a contentious amendment may be debated for years and the state legislators may readily campaign on whether they would vote to approve or reject a particular amendment. This is, indeed, not as direct as the Swiss process of referendum on federal questions.
The legal question of greatest relevance in Mr. Keyes proposal to ban polling under some circumstances is this:
What is a "poll"?
If I ask myself what my own opinions are and then announce them, have I conducted a poll? Have I conducted a poll if I ask one other person to join with me in making a public endorsement and publishing it?
The activity of quantifying opinion begins with the first significant quantity - which I suggest is "1".
>
Umm - not Iceland with the rule of the Althing since about the 1100s? Not Switzerland?
Granted, Iceland became a colony of Denmark, but it had a long long history of democratic rule before then. Switzerland became ruled by a duly appointed/elected junta in WWII, but there seemed to be widespread common consent to this as a matter of national survival so there seems to be the requisite continuity, accounting for wartime exigencies. It's theocratic phase, much earlier, was not country wide.
If you are going to count interruptions, don't forget that the US in Reconstruction, or at and after the time of the death of Reconstruction, suffered a certain amount of democratius interruptus while sorting out whether the million pound Federal gorilla or state power was to be the predominant political influence - a struggle that was won by the million pound gorilla and has remained a stable victory to this day. All hail King Kong - his farts truly dooooo smell sweet.
The essence of this thread is:
Is American democracy as advertised, or does it warrant scrutiny.
Plenty of the comments are on point. Narrower issues miss the point.
(1) Freedom of movement. For the million-pound-gorilla to force someone to show up at a certain place means controlling their choice of movement.
(2) The alternative, such as everyone on an absentee ballot, means compelled expression of views.
But what exactly would be the penalty for not voting anyhow? Would there be defenses available to the charge of not voting - such as "didn't have time to check the debates and issues", "was sick at the time", or "I felt it important to make a statement about the meaninglessness of this process?"
If you can compel voting, can you compel voting for only candidates listed on the ballot?
Do you then have the right to monitor what the voter does in the balloting booth to see if they actually did vote for any candidate at all?
If the system accidentally forces someone to vote more than once under the compulsory voting scheme (don't even think this is ruled out!) who is punished for that: voter or the government official involved?
Instead of introducing amendment after amendment why not rewrite it from scratch every hundred years or so?
When even the dribbling amendment process doesn't get too many amendments passed, why would such a process be thought to be doable without grave questions about the actual popular consent to the new version?
Further, why limit it to every 100 years? Why not every 10 or every 1 year, if the question is the age of the document?
The virtue of the US Constitution alteration by amendment is that there is little question whether broad public consent to the new version was achieved by the amendment process and by the failure of new suggestions to be adopted but rather becoming failed amendments. This is likely to be absent where you have single Consitutional Conventions intended to rewrite the whole thing, with the usual morons marching outside the convention site, the usual spin doctors at work, the usual ratings hoopla from the "news reporters" covering it, etc etc.
Europe is decades too late in instituting monitoring of US elections.
JFK's daddy already purchased a Presidential election from the Chicago mob, and "Landslide Lyndon" showed he was no slouch in this art.
Oh, but wait. They were lefty democrats. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along. Move right along until it is a Republican who is awarded a disputed election, based on the ballots tallied, and THEN start to monitor.
Yeah.
But if this attention can do anything to wipe out this idiotic unauditable electronic voting, I'm for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The $64,000 question: will it tell you which of those reds and blues around you will bother to show up at the polls on election day?
I've noticed that WinAmp and Real Player both have browser windows incorporated into them. Are these basically framing in whatever my default browser is, are they their own minibrowser, or what? Do these run IE by default?
Around February and March of 2001, roughly 8-10 weeks after a Jan 20 inaugural, weren't there plenty of tensions concerning the Taiwan straights, Korea and weapons programs, and other similar things that might have called for a hightened readiness? Whether your agree or disagree with improved readiness in response the China/Korea arena of tension, please note these tensions were under various sorts of strategic responses from Clinton and before, are part of a long term US strategic interest, Bush had quite openly told the electorate which elected him to office that he was going to take the US into a more assertive posture (so it was no surprise to anyone paying attention to the news really) and the meetings Bush had with Chinese and Korean leaders about this time would indicate posturing going on by all parties, in the usual course of these things, which often takes the form of putting militaries on heightened alert. Nothing about heightened readiness because of China/Korea tensions (a major point of Bush's campaign, you may recall) should be surprising, or indicate a secret war-lust. Perhaps low level army troops simply wouldn't absorb the implications of these events, free beer not being dispensed to troops in reward for reading the newspaper, and that is why no one bothered to inform you. Higher level army personnel probably did not need to be told why heightened readiness was desirable - they simply read the newspapers during campaigns and around the time of the increased readiness.
"Can we keep the political stuff out of slashdot" Not really. Supress it here and it will emerge elsewhere. Besides, when does political begin and other choices in life, including about technology and technological society, end?
The source of info on Uranium AVAILABLE FOR ENRICHMENT (whether or not dubbed yellowcake) seems to be the IAEA itself, not Professor Dombey (note spelling for Googling purposes- spelling flame not intended). Dombey's claim is that there are reasonable grounds to doubt IAEA's sense in treating whatever type of uranium in Iraq as somehow safe because of whatever measures they think have safegaurded it - it is of an enrichable class, and further there is evidence of enrichment actually occurring (depleted uranium) despite claims to the contrary. That the enrichment actually occuring depends on interpreting reports about the source of some depleted uranium indicates this topic is apt for further inquiry, but doesn't gut it's importance.
If you had scads of money and prior warning that hostiles will rain missiles down on you when you greenlight attacks on them, wouldn't you choose to have back up dialysis machines and a stockpile of supplies?
"What a fucked up country. Normally the rights of a picture of a person belong to that person, especially when it comes to distribution."
Please be aware that you are responding to a troll who got a "5" mod for reasons best known to neuropsychiatrists.
Good answer. Best of luck on exams.
Criminal laws (polic enforce) as well as civil laws (you must file suit) in the US vary by state, as pointed out in another thread. However, ...
>
B.S. in all 50 states, at least as to civil liability, and in most other nations also. Criminal liability may vary, but places with stronger criminal laws against secret surveillance, such as California, would make the activity described criminal.
>
Again, BS in all 50 states as to civil liability. You can't exploit someone elses personality (identifying features, individual reputation, etc.) without at least implied consent maliciously or for profit except in certain exceptional cases that mostly involve journalists and important public interests.
>
CITATION? (Describe the name of the case, or court and date it occured in.) Thanks.
>
Nonsense. If the police don't help, take the bozo to your state's version of small claims court (might be called justice court or such) and use its procedures to find out information about what may have been done with the information obtained, as well as whatever else that court might be able to do to help you. Of course getting a lawyer to take your case could get you even better results, but usually the cost of that can be handled only if there's money to be recovered from the bozo.
>
If you make me wade through your pointless drivel, and then tag on at the end that it's a joke, I'm still going to treat it like the drivel it is. That's the price of getting a "5" mod enticing me to read your pointless drivel.
Sheesh - the net may be full of prepubsecent pranksters, but should Slashdot be?
One of the major themes of
x .p hp
http://scientistsandengineersforchange.org/inde
which is apparently Mr. Cerf's (and other's) website on this issue, is "Science isn't being given enough money." I wonder if these boys and girls realize that Joe Undecided typically takes that kind of approach as admission that this is a special or vested interest speaking, angry that it is being put on a diet after previously being given more generous portions of public funds. Scientists saying "Candidate A is bad because he doesn't give scientists enough money" might carry more weight than drug companies saying "Candidate A is bad because he won't support paying for drugs at the prices we want", but the essential self-interest involved in the opinion speaks loudly.
An illustration that scientists remain human and thus subject to their own delusions about themselves is the site's describing their movement as a "growing consensus". A consensus refers to agreement prevailing among all the parties concerned, and there are vastly more scientists in the US than the 60-some signatories on this site. A small slice with an opinion and an overwhelmingly larger portion with no expressed opinion does not constitute any variety "consensus" in the first place. If 90 fans of kiwi tarts all agree that kiwi tarts are great while 200+ million other Americans have no expressed opinion on the matter, there is no sensible reference to the American "consensus" on kiwi tarts, whether "growing" or otherwise. There is only a consensus among those 90 kiwi tart fans. The bizarre use of "growing consensus" ought to have alerted these people to the idea that they risk being accounted among the spin doctors, but they seem blind to their own illusions under the more generous assessment.
Yup - it was a pretty even match for pretty evenly matched candidates. I don't know that Gore would have done any better or worse than Bush in dealing with the poorly expected events that came to dominate Bush's term. If the mass opinion of what the public welfare is and requires is so split, we may take it that much more needs to be known about the issues. If that's true about the issues, good job electorate! Of course, human nature being what it is, in our own minds and small circles we like to believe we, in particular, are well ahead of the masses in perceiving the realities and correctly divining the public welfare that the masses are slower to realize. We might be tempted to think, then, that a premature clarity in electoral opinion is a good thing, when actually it may just be a lack of empirical sense and laziness on the part of the electorate to go around handing decisive mandates where no such mandates so cut and dried ought to be handed out to anyone just yet. Sometimes you have to let events clarify matters, even if that's agonizingly slow. Clarity where clarity isn't warranted is not desirable. Of course there will be loud wails of protest about another closely contested election, but so what? It is mostly a near professional political class and a set of fringe advocacy groups that got so steamed about Gore-Bush, not mainstream America. Mainstream America dang well knew it decided Gore-Bush on a near toss-up basis, so what was the great tragedy which of the two the election was decided in favor of in the end. It isn't like Pat Buchanan or Jerry Brown was suddenly handed power from out of nowhere.
Seems we all need to acknowledge that the Youth International Party was right along: Pigasus for President!
In the US electoral theory, a fair and valid election is one in which a sufficiently large number of competent people's opinions or estimates of what the public welfare is and requires are collected, so as to counteract the shortsightedness and biases of mere mortals who, being fewer in number, have less chance of accurately perceiving this. Lately an idea has sprung up that every breathing person of age should vote to make an election valid, but this ideal is not well linked to the idea that a large enough body of people have a better chance of correctly determining the public welfare. It is a very poorly thought through political ideal.
Except for the one embarassing run in with the cult of Scientology when Slashdot was confronted with force majeur, I've never seen Slashdot try to censor anything its readers deem worthy of saying to others. Get up on your hind legs and bray if you've got something to say. Don't trash Slashdot.
Perhaps under one state's law, but not all. States have the power to inquire into US citizenship when filling various jobs, appointing people to juries, registering them to vote, etc. If Oregon chooses not to, that's Oregon's business.
Regretably I posted to this thread and then the story this is on-topic for popped up after all when I finished posting. Hey Sys Dude CoyboyNeal, how about a little help in moving this thread to the Carter story threads? Or am I stuck here?
Relax.
The US constitutional right to vote is governed by the various state's rules of who is a qualified voter. The main constitutional rule is that qualified voters must be classified as such or disqualified as such upon lines of "equal protection" of the laws of that state. "Equal protection" means that the way people are classified has at least a rational basis, and if it involves a very important matter, involves an important or compelling government interest. A few special rules for specifically federal elections also apply - no state can deny voting in a FEDERAL election to a person on the basis of age if that person is at least 18, for instance, but voting is a political right mostly determined by what state one has chosen to live in. The US theory of the electorate is that by spreading ultimate power over decision making over a broad enough set of people, they will more likely accurately perceive the public welfare and how to best attain it, whereas restricting such decisions to too few people much involves their own innate biases and human limitations and is less likely to accurately perceive the what the public welfare requires. The US Constition only demands and assures "a republican form of government" in each state, and further that a common scheme applying to all equally be used to determine political participation (aka "equal protection"). It is mostly up to the various states to set up a scheme of political participation of its citizens, though the states have largely copied each other closely in this. Many US states determine that convicted felons (felony - a serious offense, usually classified by possible incarceration for a term longer than 1 year) are not qualified to vote, unless the governor approves a petition which restores full civil rights to the felon. Some US states do NOT determine that convicted felons are unqualified to vote once discharged from custody. I don't know of any state that disqualifies a voter for conviction of a misdemeanor or mere infraction, though they are criminal offenses. Most US states suspend voting for a person during a period under which they are under court ordered protection because of severe mental impairment. This grows out of traditional voter qualifications for "competency". People too young or too feeble minded are excluded from voting because they are not thought "competent" to responsibly exercise this power. Felons are similarly regarded as not competent to discharge an important governmental function, that of deciding upon laws and officers of government, because of demonstrated moral turpetide and callous indifference to the welfare of society by their felonious acts. It isn't rational to deny voting on the basis of color or creed or a lot of other characteristics which do not rationally indicate ability to decide a matter of public welfare, but it is thought rational and very important to deny voting to people without traits of mental power sufficient to comprehend the issues or with a character demonstrating antisocial and vicious tendencies. Why should the vote of a pedophile be equal to the vote of another on the question of whether sexual exploitation of children should be illegal? What commitment to public welfare, rather than personal depravity, is expected from the pedophile on this question? Why should a vote on a question of public health and safety have equal contributions from citizen A who will contemplate the matter according to his or her experience and vote, and citizen B who has already demonstrated that health and safety interfer with killing people when you are mad enough at them to want to kill them? (And in Chicago and other strongholds of the Democratic machine, whether you are qualified to vote via Democratic party apparatchiks casting your ballot for you after you are dead depends on how long you've been dead, according to popular myth.)
I have no objection to anyone observing US elections and reporting on them, but hardly see how the linked coalition can help improve them. "People for the American Way" is essentially a left-wing Hollywood dominated group that does a good job of putting the grass-roots beard on left-wing Hollywood points of view. A look at the list of coalition participants on the linked page shows a roster of the more active left-wing and left-wing extremist advocacy groups in the US at this time. To suppose this group is going to improve electoral procedures, rather than beat the drum about a "vast right wing conspiracy" hindering electoral integrity, is pretty naive. As made clear from other posts about this story, the outcome of the US November elections is going to be a media circus with no end of lurid allegations about it no matter what actually happens, and the People for the American Way are likely to be in the vangaurd of mud-slingers no matter what actually happens. Oh, unless of course Kerry seems to win. What would be the point of undermining the prestige of his presidency when it turns out the ignorant prols managed to vote in a manner that their Hollywood left-wing betters thought best afterall?
I completely agree that WWII Switzerland remained a democratic nation and the manner of government enjoyed proper ratification. It was clearly a wartime government greatly different from its peacetime norms, though, obviuosly including in the manner in which it conducted essential sovereign affairs of a sensitive nature. I question whether referendum is the ultimate democratic expression, where referendum requires a legislative referral of a question to the voters, while under initiative processes the idiots voting on the law can directly be the authors of the idiocy. The initiative process, which many US states have in addition to referendum, is even closer to ultimate democratic expression (and vastly more humorous). If the European Union were to adopt initiative processes at a federal level, to counteract the tendency of idiot bureaucrats making rules from their ivory tower, the comedic complications would be endless. I don't wish the initiative system as part of government on any large mass of people. At the US Federal level the closest thing to a referendum is the process of adopting or rejecting amendments to the constitution. Such amendments must be approved by the various state legislatures, rather than directly by individual voters, but a contentious amendment may be debated for years and the state legislators may readily campaign on whether they would vote to approve or reject a particular amendment. This is, indeed, not as direct as the Swiss process of referendum on federal questions.
The legal question of greatest relevance in Mr. Keyes proposal to ban polling under some circumstances is this: What is a "poll"? If I ask myself what my own opinions are and then announce them, have I conducted a poll? Have I conducted a poll if I ask one other person to join with me in making a public endorsement and publishing it? The activity of quantifying opinion begins with the first significant quantity - which I suggest is "1".
> Umm - not Iceland with the rule of the Althing since about the 1100s? Not Switzerland? Granted, Iceland became a colony of Denmark, but it had a long long history of democratic rule before then. Switzerland became ruled by a duly appointed/elected junta in WWII, but there seemed to be widespread common consent to this as a matter of national survival so there seems to be the requisite continuity, accounting for wartime exigencies. It's theocratic phase, much earlier, was not country wide. If you are going to count interruptions, don't forget that the US in Reconstruction, or at and after the time of the death of Reconstruction, suffered a certain amount of democratius interruptus while sorting out whether the million pound Federal gorilla or state power was to be the predominant political influence - a struggle that was won by the million pound gorilla and has remained a stable victory to this day. All hail King Kong - his farts truly dooooo smell sweet. The essence of this thread is: Is American democracy as advertised, or does it warrant scrutiny. Plenty of the comments are on point. Narrower issues miss the point.
(1) Freedom of movement. For the million-pound-gorilla to force someone to show up at a certain place means controlling their choice of movement. (2) The alternative, such as everyone on an absentee ballot, means compelled expression of views. But what exactly would be the penalty for not voting anyhow? Would there be defenses available to the charge of not voting - such as "didn't have time to check the debates and issues", "was sick at the time", or "I felt it important to make a statement about the meaninglessness of this process?" If you can compel voting, can you compel voting for only candidates listed on the ballot? Do you then have the right to monitor what the voter does in the balloting booth to see if they actually did vote for any candidate at all? If the system accidentally forces someone to vote more than once under the compulsory voting scheme (don't even think this is ruled out!) who is punished for that: voter or the government official involved?
Instead of introducing amendment after amendment why not rewrite it from scratch every hundred years or so? When even the dribbling amendment process doesn't get too many amendments passed, why would such a process be thought to be doable without grave questions about the actual popular consent to the new version? Further, why limit it to every 100 years? Why not every 10 or every 1 year, if the question is the age of the document? The virtue of the US Constitution alteration by amendment is that there is little question whether broad public consent to the new version was achieved by the amendment process and by the failure of new suggestions to be adopted but rather becoming failed amendments. This is likely to be absent where you have single Consitutional Conventions intended to rewrite the whole thing, with the usual morons marching outside the convention site, the usual spin doctors at work, the usual ratings hoopla from the "news reporters" covering it, etc etc.
Europe is decades too late in instituting monitoring of US elections. JFK's daddy already purchased a Presidential election from the Chicago mob, and "Landslide Lyndon" showed he was no slouch in this art. Oh, but wait. They were lefty democrats. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along. Move right along until it is a Republican who is awarded a disputed election, based on the ballots tallied, and THEN start to monitor. Yeah. But if this attention can do anything to wipe out this idiotic unauditable electronic voting, I'm for it.