Re:what the electoral college REALLY means...
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 1
I can guarentee you that if the electoral college is abolished, the midwest will NEVER see another presidential candidate come through again. They will hit California, New York, New England, and maybe larger cities in Florida and Pennsylvannia and that would be that. Hell, Gore already PROVED that even with the electoral college. He had New England, New York, and California completely locked up. With only a handful of states he was dead even in electoral votes with Bush who had almost the entire rest of the country behind him. Is that fair? No. A president MUST be elected by all states equally and not bow down to the unwashed masses in the brainwashed liberal stronghold big city regions.
Re:Problems with the system
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Why even have anonymity in the voting process? The list of issues and people you voted for should be boldly displayed on a running web page with your name on it. Be proud of who and what you vote for! Intimidation and coersion to change your vote for any reason is illegal. You should not be pressured for any reason to vote one way or another. You should also be happy to proclaim who you voted for without fear of reprisal.
Well, if MS would just port IE5.5 to other platforms and it was just as fast as on Win2k I'd be one REALLY happy camper. For all my bitching about MS's monopoly, they put out one really snazzy excellent browser. Netscape doesn't even hold a candle to it anymore. If we were to compare, Netscape 4.76 is at about IE 3.0 level of sophistication. I hate to admit it, but Win2k makes for the absolute best web browsing platform. You've got IE5.5 and tons of cool multimedia plugins (media player, quicktime, realplayer 8, flash, etc, etc.) and don't exist on any other platform (maybe Macs). We can bitch and moan all we want, but people ARE using these multimedia tools on their sites extensively now. Gone are the days when there was a "text-only" option to check to get rid of the graphics. Now you're lucky if you can turn off the streaming audio and video and you interact entirely with a flash app. Ah well. I guess we can keep trying but MS has the advantage of cash and a dedicated full time development team on their side.
Well, no offense, but the browsing may be faster than NS 4.7 but so was the crashing. I have never had a version of Mozilla that I have been able to use constantly (same session) for more than a few hours without it segfaulting at some point or another and crashing. If Netscape hasn't done some vast improvements over Mozilla's code there is no way in hell I'll be putting it on any of my machines and I certainly won't be letting my mother install it on hers. She complains enough about Netscape 4.76 crashing.. the last thing I need to do is introduce MORE bugs since I end up being her tech support. *sigh*.:-P
Not yet at least. There are still millions of ballots unaccounted for or absentee ballots that need to be counted. As CNN reported, in 1996, there were 3-4 million votes outstanding but Clinton was projected the winner. He eventually ended up with 400k more votes than he had on November 7th. Bush could technically still win the popular vote since the difference is only 200k votes.. a statistically insignificant amount. What is that.. less than a fifth of a percentage point difference between Gore and Bush? I'm suprised the popular vote isn't listed as "too close to call" as well. Nixon and JFK had a wider margin between them as a percentage than Gore and Bush do right now!
Only problem in your stellar theory are those precincts where there are the most complaints going on are presided over by democratic election officials (they are largely democratic areas). Sorry, but your conspiracy theory doesn't hold any water. If anything, the pro-Gore election officials would have been the ones punching Gore's name on Buchanan tickets. I think a person a few threads up showed the Reform Party got 10x as many votes in West Palm Beech in 1996. Is it really that hard to imagine that maybe there WERE 19000 people voting for Buchanan and the liberal officials fscked the ballots? No, I don't believe that either. I believe in the integrity of the system and I will stand by that. It is weird though that almost exclusively these ballot boxes they mysteriously find that weren't turned in tend to be all for Al Gore. How on Earth did they miscount 750+ votes that were for Gore in West Palm? In another county they accidently forgot to count over 400 votes for Gore. Where are these ballots coming from?? Why weren't they counted accurately in the first place? Are democratic officials stuffing the voting machines?
Apparently the other 6 million+ people in Florida and nearly 100 million people across the nation didn't have any problem punching the hole. Perhaps West Palm beach is just inhabited by an irregular amount of idiots or blind people.
What pisses me off is someone (I think Daley) suggested that they look at those 19,000 ballots that were double punched and look at the rest of the ballot to see if they were trying to vote a straight democratic ticket (i.e. people are stupid and will generally vote along party lines). Something so assanine shouldn't even be suggested much less attempted! I seriously don't think this'll end until the democrats get the results they are expecting which is stupid. Someone always has to lose.. deal with it. Bush has won. We can't keep voting until you get the results you want.
If a person is incapable of interpretting a ballot they should ask for assistance. Period. If they can't understand the intructions they should not be voting. It says on the ballot to punch ONE hole or it will be discarded. This isn't a game. There are no do-over's. I don't get do-overs on my final exams at the university, why should people expect a do-over on a vote? I can guarentee you my exams were harder than interpretting this lame ballot.
If you are incapable of properly interpretting the ballot, you should ask an election official for assistance! If you double punch your ballot (even though it clearly says on it if you do this your ballot will be discarded) you deserve what you get. You can get another ballot if you make a mistake! If there is one principle in American law that stands the test of time, it is that ignorance is not an excuse for breaking the law and it shouldn't be an excuse for improperly filing a ballot. From looking at that ballot, it is similar to the judges section on our cuyahoga county ballots here in Ohio. It was confusing at first until you actually READ the ballot. After that you can clearly see the arrows pointing to the names. If you are unable or unwilling to take the time it takes to doublecheck your answers and verify that you are actually voting for the correct person then you SHOULD NOT BE VOTING!
Stupidity, ignorance, and irresponsibility on the part of the voter is NOT a reason to call another election or invalidate it. What I want to know is, this ballot format was used in 1996 as well. How many mistakes were made in that election since no one bothered to bring it down to the wire since Clinton had a blowout? You clearly can't have a revote since you'll have the Nader voters jumping ship to Gore and screwing the revoting in favor of Gore anyway. This is an election to determine the president of the united states. This isn't some bullshit golf match where you can call "do-over!!!" after slicing into the pond. You make your choices on the ballot and you submit it. Done. If your ballot was wrong after you left the polling place and you failed to check it, that is YOUR OWN DAMNED FAULT!
I'm sick of lazy people looking for any and all excuses to keep the voting going until they get the outcome they want to see. That's not how it works and it's making a mockery of our elections. In closing, I think it is time for the federal government to spend even a fraction of the $100+ million that was spent on this campaign to ensure every single precinct in the United States is equipped with computerized balloting by 2004. This simply must NOT be allowed to happen again. We can't have our presidential election hang in limbo for stupid paper ballots to be counted, recounted, hand counted, stuffed, counted again, etc. Like I said, in Cuyahoga County in Ohio we had these stupid punch card ballots but right next door in Lake county they have entirely computerized balloting with touch screens. Touch your candidate and it lights up. Touch one of the others and that lights up and the first candidate unlights. There's NO WAY to vote for more than one. Then when you're satisfied with your ballot you click the submit button, it tells you it's going to submit it and that your vote is final, boom. Your vote is cast, your count is entered into a database, and the tally is instantaneous. No need to fuck around with millions of paper ballots, no chance of stuffing the ballot boxes, no chance of mistakes. We MUST implement this system nationally to ensure we never have a replay of this 2000 election fiasco in Florida. Note, I'm not saying Internet voting either... that's too open to fraud right now. I'm just saying, replace those little shitty voting stands with small cheap embedded computers with touch screens to handle the voting. They don't have to be general purpose computers... I'm sure someone can make a really cheap electronic voting machine that is much more infallable than today's setup.
What? You wouldn't pay $4000 to get a clearer broadcast TV signal? For shame! Perhaps we can finally see those M.A.S.H. reruns in all their film-recorded splendor. Anyway, my 32" Toshiba TV is *fine* for me. I don't know why the government is demanding that broadcasters switch to purely HDTV. I have NO need for it. The little television I do watch looks fine to me. Besides, with a clearer picture that'll just be more inspiration to pirate the entire show right? I could be selling pirated copies of "Everybody Loves Raymond" to the Chinese with all the commercials easily digitally-edited out on my computer. Where is the MPAA to stop this madness! We all know what happened with CD's and now DVD's! Giving people clearer formats just inspires them to pirate more.;-)
Why? So we can see Oprah's wrinkles and zits that don't show up on regular TV? Seriously, what on Earth is on TV that we really need to have cleared up? I've got DSS with a hundred basic channels and yet I can still never find anything to watch. 99% of the time I end up flipping off the boob tube after 5 minutes of turning it on and walking back and getting on the net to do something. The only thing TV has going for it in my opinion is being a high bandwidth non-interactive push medium useful for things like watching election results when websites get overloaded!;-)
Which is why I'm curious... why aren't they calling it??? Last time I checked he was over 20000 votes ahead. That's a LOT more than in several other states where the difference was less than 6000 votes. I realize that Oregon is all mail in ballots but still. They should be able to extrapolate that Bush will win that state.
That sucks. Thankfully my polling place wasn't very crowded at all. Went to lunch from work, went to my polling place at noon, and walked right in. There were about 5 people total there voting. hehe. The primary was the same way. I can't even imagine people waiting in a line.:-P
I agree. If you don't understand the ballot you have every right to ask an official to help you interpret it. I know our ballots were VERY confusing as far as the local judges races went. I was going down the left side of the book without noticing there was a right side to the ticket. Fortunately they chose to put the presidential candidates on the first page only on the left side so there was no confusion. That doesn't make the election results any less valid though. Voters shouldn't go racing through the ballot.. I took well over 7-10 minutes checking my choices to ensure I was voting for who I felt were correct. You only need to do this at most once a year.. you should at least take the time to check your answers!
I'm sorry for the democrats out there. There is a very slim chance they might win a recount but from what I've read of the history, recounts RARELY ever affect the turnout of an election. For all intents and purposes, the recount is just an exercise to satisfy the democrats out there. Bush won the state fair and square and won the 271 electoral votes needed to become President of the United States. I would probably be bitching too if the roles were reversed and Al Gore was up by 1700 votes though too. It's wishful thinking but I wouldn't keep your hopes up. This will go down in the history books folks.
I think this has to be the closest election in American history if we judge it on the fact that we're relying on 1700 votes in Florida as the deciding factor and not the popular vote (~250k with Gore leading in that case.. still, that's only.27% of the voting population.. a VERY slim statistical lead if anything). It all basically comes down to Nader though. He got what he wanted and made a name for himself. He also cost the democratic party the ticket to the Whitehouse.
If Nader had not run Gore would have given his victory speech early last night and we'd be looking at another 4 years of the same old bullshit.. Republican congress, Democratic President, nothing gets done and it's politics and partisan bickering as usual. Now we have a very interesting ordeal. The senate is VERY close now and a moderate Republican or Democrat here or there could swing issues back and forth.
I think you'll find the government under Bush to take a much more moderate stance than we can ever remember in recent memory. There aren't going to be any blatantly anti-abortion justices that get appointed to the supreme court because they'll never get through the Senate confirmation so don't worry about it pro-choice people. Bush isn't going to take the chances of doing that either because he'll be wanting to gain popular support amongst moderates so he will not try to have Roe-Vs.-Wade overturned.. at least, not unless he wins in 2004 as well. A lame duck Republican President with a Republican congress can be a liberal's worst nightmare.:-)
Exactly. Remember, this is the *United States* of America. IMHO the federal government has been grabbint way too much power for itself from the states in the last hundred years and I think we need to turn that around. States should be where major issues are decided and it only need to be brought to a Federal level when it requires interstate interaction. Health, welfware, and education for example should be a state issue. The military defense of the nation is a federal issue. Interstate highways are a federal issue, airtraffic control regulations are interstate and are a federal issue, etc.
Well, unfortunately who would you have suggested we vote for? Bush was the republican nominee (don't blame me, I voted for McCain in the primaries). I'm sure as hell not going to vote for ol' baby-killing tax-and-spend Al Gore and his band of merry liberal pot-head cronies. Geez. I say deal with it America. We (Republicans) had to live through years of torture when democrats controlled the congress and the executive branch so I hope you guys get to have a taste of what that's like.
What country do you come from then? In America we believe in capitalism. The same system that built this nation should also reward its participants. Why on earth should I rollover and accept having nearly half of my income stolen from me by a bloated government? I have over 40 years until I will be able to retire yet I pay much of my taxes into social security.. a program which directly subsidizes the current generation of retirees as a wealth transfer from the current generation of workers. In the future this pyramid scheme will collapse as the baby boomers retire and I know for absolute certain that if we stay the course now with Al Gore and do not do something to radically change the entitlement (privatize, etc) I will NOT ever by able to enjoy the benefits of the program. It just won't exist anymore. You don't think I have a stake in how my taxes are used? How dare you assume that anyone that actually gives a shit about how THEIR hard earned income is spent by the federal government is a greedy asshole. If anyone, the greedy asshole is Uncle Sam.
Can someone please wake me up when this whole mess is over? This is worse than a tie game in the 25th inning in the seventh game of the world series. ELECT SOMEONE ALREADY!
Bush is still up by 2000 votes on Florida with 100% of the precincts reporting and several thousand military absentee ballots yet to come in. I can guarentee you at least 75% of those military ballots will be for George W. Bush (in case you can't imagine, our proud men and women serving in the armed forces HATE Bill and Al!). So that leaves it up to a miscount of several thousand votes. The count is unlikely to drastically change unless the democrats in Florida perpetrate a little election fraud to shift the count their way. Otherwise we're going to have a President elected by the electoral college without winning the popular vote.. something that hasn't happened in what.. over a hundred years in 1888? This was a strange race indeed. As someone that voted for Bush, I can say that ALL of the candidates sucked ass this year and I think they're all wasting our time. Let's kick the Presidents out and have Cheney and Lieberman take office!
Aw screw it man! WHO CARES? There will be plenty of moderation to go around next month... break out the party favors! We've got 4 years of good times ahead.. well, hopefully. What Gore failed to mention is the economy was starting to taper off this year as evidenced by the tech stocks crashing. I'm sure the Republicans will be blamed for that even though it happened a year before they took office.;-)
Wooooo!!! Republican President, Republican Senate, Republican House, and soon to be Republican nominated Supreme Court justices. It is a GREAT day for the Republican party. Oh my god.. this is AWESOME. I have renewed faith in the democratic process in this country.
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I can guarentee you that if the electoral college is abolished, the midwest will NEVER see another presidential candidate come through again. They will hit California, New York, New England, and maybe larger cities in Florida and Pennsylvannia and that would be that. Hell, Gore already PROVED that even with the electoral college. He had New England, New York, and California completely locked up. With only a handful of states he was dead even in electoral votes with Bush who had almost the entire rest of the country behind him. Is that fair? No. A president MUST be elected by all states equally and not bow down to the unwashed masses in the brainwashed liberal stronghold big city regions.
Why even have anonymity in the voting process? The list of issues and people you voted for should be boldly displayed on a running web page with your name on it. Be proud of who and what you vote for! Intimidation and coersion to change your vote for any reason is illegal. You should not be pressured for any reason to vote one way or another. You should also be happy to proclaim who you voted for without fear of reprisal.
Well, if MS would just port IE5.5 to other platforms and it was just as fast as on Win2k I'd be one REALLY happy camper. For all my bitching about MS's monopoly, they put out one really snazzy excellent browser. Netscape doesn't even hold a candle to it anymore. If we were to compare, Netscape 4.76 is at about IE 3.0 level of sophistication. I hate to admit it, but Win2k makes for the absolute best web browsing platform. You've got IE5.5 and tons of cool multimedia plugins (media player, quicktime, realplayer 8, flash, etc, etc.) and don't exist on any other platform (maybe Macs). We can bitch and moan all we want, but people ARE using these multimedia tools on their sites extensively now. Gone are the days when there was a "text-only" option to check to get rid of the graphics. Now you're lucky if you can turn off the streaming audio and video and you interact entirely with a flash app. Ah well. I guess we can keep trying but MS has the advantage of cash and a dedicated full time development team on their side.
Well, no offense, but the browsing may be faster than NS 4.7 but so was the crashing. I have never had a version of Mozilla that I have been able to use constantly (same session) for more than a few hours without it segfaulting at some point or another and crashing. If Netscape hasn't done some vast improvements over Mozilla's code there is no way in hell I'll be putting it on any of my machines and I certainly won't be letting my mother install it on hers. She complains enough about Netscape 4.76 crashing.. the last thing I need to do is introduce MORE bugs since I end up being her tech support. *sigh*. :-P
Not yet at least. There are still millions of ballots unaccounted for or absentee ballots that need to be counted. As CNN reported, in 1996, there were 3-4 million votes outstanding but Clinton was projected the winner. He eventually ended up with 400k more votes than he had on November 7th. Bush could technically still win the popular vote since the difference is only 200k votes.. a statistically insignificant amount. What is that.. less than a fifth of a percentage point difference between Gore and Bush? I'm suprised the popular vote isn't listed as "too close to call" as well. Nixon and JFK had a wider margin between them as a percentage than Gore and Bush do right now!
Do we get more karma if we vote for the popular guy? Will the votes be meta-moderated to ensure there's no fishy business going on? :)
Only problem in your stellar theory are those precincts where there are the most complaints going on are presided over by democratic election officials (they are largely democratic areas). Sorry, but your conspiracy theory doesn't hold any water. If anything, the pro-Gore election officials would have been the ones punching Gore's name on Buchanan tickets. I think a person a few threads up showed the Reform Party got 10x as many votes in West Palm Beech in 1996. Is it really that hard to imagine that maybe there WERE 19000 people voting for Buchanan and the liberal officials fscked the ballots? No, I don't believe that either. I believe in the integrity of the system and I will stand by that. It is weird though that almost exclusively these ballot boxes they mysteriously find that weren't turned in tend to be all for Al Gore. How on Earth did they miscount 750+ votes that were for Gore in West Palm? In another county they accidently forgot to count over 400 votes for Gore. Where are these ballots coming from?? Why weren't they counted accurately in the first place? Are democratic officials stuffing the voting machines?
Apparently the other 6 million+ people in Florida and nearly 100 million people across the nation didn't have any problem punching the hole. Perhaps West Palm beach is just inhabited by an irregular amount of idiots or blind people.
What pisses me off is someone (I think Daley) suggested that they look at those 19,000 ballots that were double punched and look at the rest of the ballot to see if they were trying to vote a straight democratic ticket (i.e. people are stupid and will generally vote along party lines). Something so assanine shouldn't even be suggested much less attempted! I seriously don't think this'll end until the democrats get the results they are expecting which is stupid. Someone always has to lose.. deal with it. Bush has won. We can't keep voting until you get the results you want.
If a person is incapable of interpretting a ballot they should ask for assistance. Period. If they can't understand the intructions they should not be voting. It says on the ballot to punch ONE hole or it will be discarded. This isn't a game. There are no do-over's. I don't get do-overs on my final exams at the university, why should people expect a do-over on a vote? I can guarentee you my exams were harder than interpretting this lame ballot.
Stupidity, ignorance, and irresponsibility on the part of the voter is NOT a reason to call another election or invalidate it. What I want to know is, this ballot format was used in 1996 as well. How many mistakes were made in that election since no one bothered to bring it down to the wire since Clinton had a blowout? You clearly can't have a revote since you'll have the Nader voters jumping ship to Gore and screwing the revoting in favor of Gore anyway. This is an election to determine the president of the united states. This isn't some bullshit golf match where you can call "do-over!!!" after slicing into the pond. You make your choices on the ballot and you submit it. Done. If your ballot was wrong after you left the polling place and you failed to check it, that is YOUR OWN DAMNED FAULT!
I'm sick of lazy people looking for any and all excuses to keep the voting going until they get the outcome they want to see. That's not how it works and it's making a mockery of our elections. In closing, I think it is time for the federal government to spend even a fraction of the $100+ million that was spent on this campaign to ensure every single precinct in the United States is equipped with computerized balloting by 2004. This simply must NOT be allowed to happen again. We can't have our presidential election hang in limbo for stupid paper ballots to be counted, recounted, hand counted, stuffed, counted again, etc. Like I said, in Cuyahoga County in Ohio we had these stupid punch card ballots but right next door in Lake county they have entirely computerized balloting with touch screens. Touch your candidate and it lights up. Touch one of the others and that lights up and the first candidate unlights. There's NO WAY to vote for more than one. Then when you're satisfied with your ballot you click the submit button, it tells you it's going to submit it and that your vote is final, boom. Your vote is cast, your count is entered into a database, and the tally is instantaneous. No need to fuck around with millions of paper ballots, no chance of stuffing the ballot boxes, no chance of mistakes. We MUST implement this system nationally to ensure we never have a replay of this 2000 election fiasco in Florida. Note, I'm not saying Internet voting either... that's too open to fraud right now. I'm just saying, replace those little shitty voting stands with small cheap embedded computers with touch screens to handle the voting. They don't have to be general purpose computers... I'm sure someone can make a really cheap electronic voting machine that is much more infallable than today's setup.
What? You wouldn't pay $4000 to get a clearer broadcast TV signal? For shame! Perhaps we can finally see those M.A.S.H. reruns in all their film-recorded splendor. Anyway, my 32" Toshiba TV is *fine* for me. I don't know why the government is demanding that broadcasters switch to purely HDTV. I have NO need for it. The little television I do watch looks fine to me. Besides, with a clearer picture that'll just be more inspiration to pirate the entire show right? I could be selling pirated copies of "Everybody Loves Raymond" to the Chinese with all the commercials easily digitally-edited out on my computer. Where is the MPAA to stop this madness! We all know what happened with CD's and now DVD's! Giving people clearer formats just inspires them to pirate more. ;-)
Why? So we can see Oprah's wrinkles and zits that don't show up on regular TV? Seriously, what on Earth is on TV that we really need to have cleared up? I've got DSS with a hundred basic channels and yet I can still never find anything to watch. 99% of the time I end up flipping off the boob tube after 5 minutes of turning it on and walking back and getting on the net to do something. The only thing TV has going for it in my opinion is being a high bandwidth non-interactive push medium useful for things like watching election results when websites get overloaded! ;-)
Which is why I'm curious... why aren't they calling it??? Last time I checked he was over 20000 votes ahead. That's a LOT more than in several other states where the difference was less than 6000 votes. I realize that Oregon is all mail in ballots but still. They should be able to extrapolate that Bush will win that state.
That sucks. Thankfully my polling place wasn't very crowded at all. Went to lunch from work, went to my polling place at noon, and walked right in. There were about 5 people total there voting. hehe. The primary was the same way. I can't even imagine people waiting in a line. :-P
I agree. If you don't understand the ballot you have every right to ask an official to help you interpret it. I know our ballots were VERY confusing as far as the local judges races went. I was going down the left side of the book without noticing there was a right side to the ticket. Fortunately they chose to put the presidential candidates on the first page only on the left side so there was no confusion. That doesn't make the election results any less valid though. Voters shouldn't go racing through the ballot.. I took well over 7-10 minutes checking my choices to ensure I was voting for who I felt were correct. You only need to do this at most once a year.. you should at least take the time to check your answers!
I think this has to be the closest election in American history if we judge it on the fact that we're relying on 1700 votes in Florida as the deciding factor and not the popular vote (~250k with Gore leading in that case.. still, that's only .27% of the voting population.. a VERY slim statistical lead if anything). It all basically comes down to Nader though. He got what he wanted and made a name for himself. He also cost the democratic party the ticket to the Whitehouse.
If Nader had not run Gore would have given his victory speech early last night and we'd be looking at another 4 years of the same old bullshit.. Republican congress, Democratic President, nothing gets done and it's politics and partisan bickering as usual. Now we have a very interesting ordeal. The senate is VERY close now and a moderate Republican or Democrat here or there could swing issues back and forth.
I think you'll find the government under Bush to take a much more moderate stance than we can ever remember in recent memory. There aren't going to be any blatantly anti-abortion justices that get appointed to the supreme court because they'll never get through the Senate confirmation so don't worry about it pro-choice people. Bush isn't going to take the chances of doing that either because he'll be wanting to gain popular support amongst moderates so he will not try to have Roe-Vs.-Wade overturned.. at least, not unless he wins in 2004 as well. A lame duck Republican President with a Republican congress can be a liberal's worst nightmare. :-)
Exactly. Remember, this is the *United States* of America. IMHO the federal government has been grabbint way too much power for itself from the states in the last hundred years and I think we need to turn that around. States should be where major issues are decided and it only need to be brought to a Federal level when it requires interstate interaction. Health, welfware, and education for example should be a state issue. The military defense of the nation is a federal issue. Interstate highways are a federal issue, airtraffic control regulations are interstate and are a federal issue, etc.
Well, unfortunately who would you have suggested we vote for? Bush was the republican nominee (don't blame me, I voted for McCain in the primaries). I'm sure as hell not going to vote for ol' baby-killing tax-and-spend Al Gore and his band of merry liberal pot-head cronies. Geez. I say deal with it America. We (Republicans) had to live through years of torture when democrats controlled the congress and the executive branch so I hope you guys get to have a taste of what that's like.
What country do you come from then? In America we believe in capitalism. The same system that built this nation should also reward its participants. Why on earth should I rollover and accept having nearly half of my income stolen from me by a bloated government? I have over 40 years until I will be able to retire yet I pay much of my taxes into social security.. a program which directly subsidizes the current generation of retirees as a wealth transfer from the current generation of workers. In the future this pyramid scheme will collapse as the baby boomers retire and I know for absolute certain that if we stay the course now with Al Gore and do not do something to radically change the entitlement (privatize, etc) I will NOT ever by able to enjoy the benefits of the program. It just won't exist anymore. You don't think I have a stake in how my taxes are used? How dare you assume that anyone that actually gives a shit about how THEIR hard earned income is spent by the federal government is a greedy asshole. If anyone, the greedy asshole is Uncle Sam.
Can someone please wake me up when this whole mess is over? This is worse than a tie game in the 25th inning in the seventh game of the world series. ELECT SOMEONE ALREADY!
Bush is still up by 2000 votes on Florida with 100% of the precincts reporting and several thousand military absentee ballots yet to come in. I can guarentee you at least 75% of those military ballots will be for George W. Bush (in case you can't imagine, our proud men and women serving in the armed forces HATE Bill and Al!). So that leaves it up to a miscount of several thousand votes. The count is unlikely to drastically change unless the democrats in Florida perpetrate a little election fraud to shift the count their way. Otherwise we're going to have a President elected by the electoral college without winning the popular vote.. something that hasn't happened in what.. over a hundred years in 1888? This was a strange race indeed. As someone that voted for Bush, I can say that ALL of the candidates sucked ass this year and I think they're all wasting our time. Let's kick the Presidents out and have Cheney and Lieberman take office!
Aw screw it man! WHO CARES? There will be plenty of moderation to go around next month... break out the party favors! We've got 4 years of good times ahead.. well, hopefully. What Gore failed to mention is the economy was starting to taper off this year as evidenced by the tech stocks crashing. I'm sure the Republicans will be blamed for that even though it happened a year before they took office. ;-)
Wooooo!!! Republican President, Republican Senate, Republican House, and soon to be Republican nominated Supreme Court justices. It is a GREAT day for the Republican party. Oh my god.. this is AWESOME. I have renewed faith in the democratic process in this country.
The famous headline was: "Dewey defeats Truman!" Made famous mostly because of the photograph of Truman holding up the newspaper while smiling. :-)