Gads, I wish they still taught Civics in American schools.
I agree that having a non-partisan election system would be good, but your whole argument for it here is based on the ignorant notion that the Florida Secretary of State had any real control over the election. The only influence Harris had over the whole process was to certify the known vote counts on the latest possible date on which she was statutorily required to do so.
The choice of the voting machines: County Election Commission (Democrat in the contested counties).
The design of the "butterfly ballot"? County Election Commission (Democrat in the contested counties.)
Misleading election instructions in Palm Beach? County Election COmmission (Democrat).
And remember that the methods they were using to count the votes was rejected by the Supreme Court by 7-2, not 5-4 -- the 5-4 was in the remedy phase.
So, yeah, bi-partisan commissions would be a good thing. You go selll the idea to the county machines in Cook County and Palm Beach.
I'll tell you a little secret -- not much of a secret -- about this. If the machine is clearly showing the check mark going wrong, it's a bug, not a conscious attempt to manipulate the vote.
A long time ago I was a Republican election judge in a Democratic machine county. We were using the punched-card ballots, which get an undeserved bad rap -- they have a lower proportion of bad ballots than the traditional paper ballot.
However, that year the machine candidate for the House was 3000 votes (about 10 percent) behind after 90 percent of the votes were counted.
The Election Commission discovered "computer problems". There's a delay, and afterwards -- voila! -- the votes are re-run and it turns out that the machine candidate has the big margin.
The point? It's not the machines you have to trust: it's the County Election Commission you have to trust.
The topic has disappeared from the Kerry web site recently (along with Richard Clarke and the "restorehonesty.com" content), and the mirrors are plces that don't get much respect. But here is at least one story on it from someone on Kerry's side; here is a story quoting from a Kerry speech in May 2003.
No, you dim bulb. The Democrat County Clerk runs the elections. The Demo party controls the county government. It's only Demos who are proposing a draft (and even they won't vote for it!)
What do you think? Karl Rove's Mind Control Rays are making the Democrats do these things?
That's a "defacto draft" in the same way that Master Card sending you a bill is "defacto extortion". When you join the military, you are forming a contract -- voluntarily, since we have an all-volunteer military. "Stop-loss" is an explicit part of the contract, and unless they've changed things a whole lot since I first saw the contract, they go to some lengths to make sure you understand it when you sign it.
If you're actually worried about a draft, though, you might want to check out Kerry's plan for mandatory national service.
Go read the draft thread. Never know what you might learn.
Sorry, poopsie, but it was the county clerk who had to make the decisions on the votes too. The Secretary of State in Florida had no control over how that was done. That's one reason the three different counties had three different standards.
For a complete explanation, I refer you back to the draft thread, but the short explanation is that a draft won't help get more troops that could be used: being a soldier, even an infantry grunt, is a skilled job that takes more than a year of training. And the military is still turning recruits away.
The US is #11. #22 comes because they are assigning ordinals to countries that have exactly the same rating, ie, Switzerland is 1 but so are 8 others... but they still give New Zealand #9.
I wish I could claim it was an active attempt to slant it, but in fact it's probably because most reporters nowadays are dumber than dirt and have no observable education in anything except "pyramid organization" and how to avoid the libel laws.
Yes, it looks like the Democratic Party's operatives have screwed up again.
Check it out: the "butterfly ballot"? A Democrat County Clerk designed it. Broward County? Heavily Democrat, county government controlled by Democrats.
Hell of a scam: screw up as much as you want -- just blame it on the Republicans.
(The draft? Charlie Rangel (D) proposes it -- and they're still flogging the notion that it's Bush planning for a draft.)
Perhaps. But in Cleveland, they've been finding people re-registering to vote 20 years after their deaths; at last count, four counties in Ohio have registered 5-10 percent more voters than their otal voting age population -- and remember that not everyone who is of voting age is eligible to vote.
Proof of fraud? No. But it's a helluva lot more suspicious than a list of 1800 questionable registrations.
Yeah, those are reliable sources: one says, instead of truck drivers, translators (hint: that means "talks other languages"), the other one is guys saying "mysterious guys in black hoods did nasty things, give me money."
Read what I said, ninny: "Saddam's other connections to Islamic fascist terrorism were not just well-documented, but overt...."
Not al Qaeda, other Islamic fascists. In fact I named them: abu Nidal, the guy who pushed a poor old cripple off a ship to drown; Palestinian bombers, who got $25,000 to blow themselves up.
Exactly my point. "Saddam had no connection with al Qaeda" -- wrong, check the 9/11 commission and Senate Intelligence Committee report. They said "had no *direct, operational* connection." But they document a number of connections, and Saddam's other connections to Islamic fascist terrorism were not just well-documented, but overt, open, eg, the $25,000 bounty to suicide bombers in Israel.
"WMD were the sole justification under int'l law" -- also wrong, especially since the state of hostility still existed between the US and Iraq and Iraq was in multiple egregious violations of the cease fire (eg, firing on planes patrolling the no-fly zone.)
And "Saddam had no substantial WMD or WMD programs" -- except that the Duelfer report actually contradicts this: Saddam had substantial programs, and was making a major effort to maintain the infrastructure to resume WMD production as soon as the sanctions could be removed.
So, what the report is saying is that anyone who read the actual reports, instead of following the media's very high level and shallow reporting, is marked as not being in touch with reality.
like the study that claimed Fox News viewers were delusional, this one will turn out to count as "in touch with reality" people who say "Saddam had no connection with terrorism" and count people who say "WMD were the sole justification for the Iraq War" as "in touch with reality."
Get a fucking grip, folks. Republicans aren't cretins, and Democrats aren't nuts, and these sorts of studies invariably turn out to demonstrate that the person doing the study is Better, Faster, Stronger, and Prettier than the Dread Other People.
The mice have formed a loose coalition to demand that the cat respect their wishes and wear a bell; King Canute has demanded that the tides cease to turn; and Al Gore has asserted that he's the real President, Electoral College be damned.
I'm still curious, though: were you opining without knowing the topic, or were you promulgating error knowingly?
In any case, though, it's a good question, but the underlying facts are the same: we don't have a military that can make good use of big hordes of semi-trained cannon fodder, and thus aren't likely to draft them. Most likely would be a continuing policy of using diplomacy -- the real kind, where the people against the US interests know there's a down side to continued intransigence -- to elicit real changes, and a place-by-place application of force in the most effective way available. This would be much more likely to be special operators of some sort. My guesses, and they're only guesses, I don't have any access to OPLANS or the like, would be:
Syria: continued pressure and sanctions, possibly armed action against Syrian positions in Lebanon, but more likely by air power than ground forces.
North Korea: continued multilateral pressure; no one in the area thinks the current conditions in the DPRK are a good thing, and China, Japan, and Russia have lots stronger motivation for finding a way to calm "Mr Ron'ry" down. And frankly, the DPRK can't continue starving the populace forever.
Sudan: Sadly, this is one that's likely to go on as it has, at least for a while: the PRC pretty clearly considers it to be in its interests not to let any little genocides get in the way of an oil deal. (Can you say "Blood for Oil"? This would be a good time for that complaint.)
Iran: this is the hard one. I'm glad I don't have to make the actual decisions, but I think there's a real good chance it's solving itself. The mullahs are becoming increasingly repressive, which is a good sign that conditions are getting increasingly out of hand. I'd be amazed if we were not supporting the forces of freedom somehow. The rest of the question (eg, Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities?) I just don't have good information about.
All of these cost money and make demands on the special operators (who, really, just can't be drafted) but don't use big troop masses.
The underlying assumption, however -- that Afghanistan and Iraq are "quagmires" -- is a very poorly thought out one as well. If you look more deeply at the real reports from both places, they indicate not an extended and successful insurgency, but one that is increasingly limited in scope, and in Iraq in particular, one that has just about worn out whatever welcome it had from the population.
Wow. That's possibly the stupidest comment, with the most logical fallacies per sentence, that I've ever seen on Slashdot.
First off, seeing as we're arguably at the end of an ice age (one of the interpretations of the warming data), the result may well be that we start growing wine grapes in Canada and England -- they didn't call the last stretch like that the "Little Climatic Optimum" for nothing. So we could be heading toward a "garden paradise".
(More like, we're heading for a time in which things Will Be Different From Today. This sort of thing happens, and we'll have to find a way to cope, or die, just like the dinosaurs.)
More to the point though, you didn't read what I said very well: If it's not anthropogenic, its not clear we can do anything about it. The whole Kyoto argument is that we're causing the problem and what we do can fix it. If we're not causing the problem -- it it is, for example, the result of a long term cyclical change in solar output -- then doing things to reduce CO2 output might be very expensive but have no effect.
The question of whether it's anthropogenic -- that is, caused by humans -- is increasingly looking like it must be answered in the negative, though.
(My favorite recent one is the suggestion that Mars has been experiencing global warming in the recent past too.)
If it's not anthropogenic, there's real reason to question whether we can do anything about it, even neglecting the question of whether we should Björn Lomberg makes a pretty good argument that we'd do a lot more good spending the money it would cost to do Kyoto on clean safe water supplies in Africa and Asia.
Slashdot Mirror
Gads, I wish they still taught Civics in American schools.
I agree that having a non-partisan election system would be good, but your whole argument for it here is based on the ignorant notion that the Florida Secretary of State had any real control over the election. The only influence Harris had over the whole process was to certify the known vote counts on the latest possible date on which she was statutorily required to do so.
The choice of the voting machines: County Election Commission (Democrat in the contested counties).
The design of the "butterfly ballot"? County Election Commission (Democrat in the contested counties.)
Misleading election instructions in Palm Beach? County Election COmmission (Democrat).
And remember that the methods they were using to count the votes was rejected by the Supreme Court by 7-2, not 5-4 -- the 5-4 was in the remedy phase.
So, yeah, bi-partisan commissions would be a good thing. You go selll the idea to the county machines in Cook County and Palm Beach.
I'll tell you a little secret -- not much of a secret -- about this. If the machine is clearly showing the check mark going wrong, it's a bug, not a conscious attempt to manipulate the vote.
A long time ago I was a Republican election judge in a Democratic machine county. We were using the punched-card ballots, which get an undeserved bad rap -- they have a lower proportion of bad ballots than the traditional paper ballot.
However, that year the machine candidate for the House was 3000 votes (about 10 percent) behind after 90 percent of the votes were counted.
The Election Commission discovered "computer problems". There's a delay, and afterwards -- voila! -- the votes are re-run and it turns out that the machine candidate has the big margin.
The point? It's not the machines you have to trust: it's the County Election Commission you have to trust.
... and it gets read by the public.
And what did you bloody well expect, children?
Thanks.
The topic has disappeared from the Kerry web site recently (along with Richard Clarke and the "restorehonesty.com" content), and the mirrors are plces that don't get much respect. But here is at least one story on it from someone on Kerry's side; here is a story quoting from a Kerry speech in May 2003.
No, you dim bulb. The Democrat County Clerk runs the elections. The Demo party controls the county government. It's only Demos who are proposing a draft (and even they won't vote for it!)
What do you think? Karl Rove's Mind Control Rays are making the Democrats do these things?
That's a "defacto draft" in the same way that Master Card sending you a bill is "defacto extortion". When you join the military, you are forming a contract -- voluntarily, since we have an all-volunteer military. "Stop-loss" is an explicit part of the contract, and unless they've changed things a whole lot since I first saw the contract, they go to some lengths to make sure you understand it when you sign it.
If you're actually worried about a draft, though, you might want to check out Kerry's plan for mandatory national service.
Go read the draft thread. Never know what you might learn.
Caught one.
Sorry, poopsie, but it was the county clerk who had to make the decisions on the votes too. The Secretary of State in Florida had no control over how that was done. That's one reason the three different counties had three different standards.
For a complete explanation, I refer you back to the draft thread, but the short explanation is that a draft won't help get more troops that could be used: being a soldier, even an infantry grunt, is a skilled job that takes more than a year of training. And the military is still turning recruits away.
The US is #11. #22 comes because they are assigning ordinals to countries that have exactly the same rating, ie, Switzerland is 1 but so are 8 others ... but they still give New Zealand #9.
I wish I could claim it was an active attempt to slant it, but in fact it's probably because most reporters nowadays are dumber than dirt and have no observable education in anything except "pyramid organization" and how to avoid the libel laws.
Yes, it looks like the Democratic Party's operatives have screwed up again.
Check it out: the "butterfly ballot"? A Democrat County Clerk designed it. Broward County? Heavily Democrat, county government controlled by Democrats.
Hell of a scam: screw up as much as you want -- just blame it on the Republicans.
(The draft? Charlie Rangel (D) proposes it -- and they're still flogging the notion that it's Bush planning for a draft.)
Perhaps. But in Cleveland, they've been finding people re-registering to vote 20 years after their deaths; at last count, four counties in Ohio have registered 5-10 percent more voters than their otal voting age population -- and remember that not everyone who is of voting age is eligible to vote.
Proof of fraud? No. But it's a helluva lot more suspicious than a list of 1800 questionable registrations.
Ohio has counties with 30,000 more registrations than there are people, and we're talking about 1200 questionable registrations in Florida.
Folks, JOHN KERRY is Bush's cousin. What meaning, if any, do you imagine this has?
Right, so now rent-a-cops are mercenaries.
Look up the fancy words before you use them if you don't know what they mean.
Yeah, those are reliable sources: one says, instead of truck drivers, translators (hint: that means "talks other languages"), the other one is guys saying "mysterious guys in black hoods did nasty things, give me money."
Calling truck drivers "mercenaries" is either an idiot mistake or ... nah, no "or". It's an idiot mistake.
Read what I said, ninny: "Saddam's other connections to Islamic fascist terrorism were not just well-documented, but overt...."
Not al Qaeda, other Islamic fascists. In fact I named them: abu Nidal, the guy who pushed a poor old cripple off a ship to drown; Palestinian bombers, who got $25,000 to blow themselves up.
Exactly my point. "Saddam had no connection with al Qaeda" -- wrong, check the 9/11 commission and Senate Intelligence Committee report. They said "had no *direct, operational* connection." But they document a number of connections, and Saddam's other connections to Islamic fascist terrorism were not just well-documented, but overt, open, eg, the $25,000 bounty to suicide bombers in Israel.
"WMD were the sole justification under int'l law" -- also wrong, especially since the state of hostility still existed between the US and Iraq and Iraq was in multiple egregious violations of the cease fire (eg, firing on planes patrolling the no-fly zone.)
And "Saddam had no substantial WMD or WMD programs" -- except that the Duelfer report actually contradicts this: Saddam had substantial programs, and was making a major effort to maintain the infrastructure to resume WMD production as soon as the sanctions could be removed.
So, what the report is saying is that anyone who read the actual reports, instead of following the media's very high level and shallow reporting, is marked as not being in touch with reality.
Here's the searchable 9/11 Commission report.
Here's the searchable Senate intel report.
Kere's the Duelfer report.
Read the real sources. Don't believe what anyone tells you until you check them.
like the study that claimed Fox News viewers were delusional, this one will turn out to count as "in touch with reality" people who say "Saddam had no connection with terrorism" and count people who say "WMD were the sole justification for the Iraq War" as "in touch with reality."
Get a fucking grip, folks. Republicans aren't cretins, and Democrats aren't nuts, and these sorts of studies invariably turn out to demonstrate that the person doing the study is Better, Faster, Stronger, and Prettier than the Dread Other People.
The mice have formed a loose coalition to demand that the cat respect their wishes and wear a bell; King Canute has demanded that the tides cease to turn; and Al Gore has asserted that he's the real President, Electoral College be damned.
By the way, here is the SECDEF's own response on the draft question.
I'm still curious, though: were you opining without knowing the topic, or were you promulgating error knowingly?
In any case, though, it's a good question, but the underlying facts are the same: we don't have a military that can make good use of big hordes of semi-trained cannon fodder, and thus aren't likely to draft them. Most likely would be a continuing policy of using diplomacy -- the real kind, where the people against the US interests know there's a down side to continued intransigence -- to elicit real changes, and a place-by-place application of force in the most effective way available. This would be much more likely to be special operators of some sort. My guesses, and they're only guesses, I don't have any access to OPLANS or the like, would be:
Syria: continued pressure and sanctions, possibly armed action against Syrian positions in Lebanon, but more likely by air power than ground forces.
North Korea: continued multilateral pressure; no one in the area thinks the current conditions in the DPRK are a good thing, and China, Japan, and Russia have lots stronger motivation for finding a way to calm "Mr Ron'ry" down. And frankly, the DPRK can't continue starving the populace forever.
Sudan: Sadly, this is one that's likely to go on as it has, at least for a while: the PRC pretty clearly considers it to be in its interests not to let any little genocides get in the way of an oil deal. (Can you say "Blood for Oil"? This would be a good time for that complaint.)
Iran: this is the hard one. I'm glad I don't have to make the actual decisions, but I think there's a real good chance it's solving itself. The mullahs are becoming increasingly repressive, which is a good sign that conditions are getting increasingly out of hand. I'd be amazed if we were not supporting the forces of freedom somehow. The rest of the question (eg, Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities?) I just don't have good information about.
All of these cost money and make demands on the special operators (who, really, just can't be drafted) but don't use big troop masses.
The underlying assumption, however -- that Afghanistan and Iraq are "quagmires" -- is a very poorly thought out one as well. If you look more deeply at the real reports from both places, they indicate not an extended and successful insurgency, but one that is increasingly limited in scope, and in Iraq in particular, one that has just about worn out whatever welcome it had from the population.
Wow. That's possibly the stupidest comment, with the most logical fallacies per sentence, that I've ever seen on Slashdot.
First off, seeing as we're arguably at the end of an ice age (one of the interpretations of the warming data), the result may well be that we start growing wine grapes in Canada and England -- they didn't call the last stretch like that the "Little Climatic Optimum" for nothing. So we could be heading toward a "garden paradise".
(More like, we're heading for a time in which things Will Be Different From Today. This sort of thing happens, and we'll have to find a way to cope, or die, just like the dinosaurs.)
More to the point though, you didn't read what I said very well: If it's not anthropogenic, its not clear we can do anything about it. The whole Kyoto argument is that we're causing the problem and what we do can fix it. If we're not causing the problem -- it it is, for example, the result of a long term cyclical change in solar output -- then doing things to reduce CO2 output might be very expensive but have no effect.
God knows you're right. (Can you say "Oil for Food"?)
But then the overall cost of Kyoto is amazingly large, and the effects are pretty small too.
But if the anthropogenic model of global warming is wrong then the cost-benefit ratio for Kyoto is infinitely bad: lim n->0 lots of money/n .
The question of whether it's anthropogenic -- that is, caused by humans -- is increasingly looking like it must be answered in the negative, though.
(My favorite recent one is the suggestion that Mars has been experiencing global warming in the recent past too.)
If it's not anthropogenic, there's real reason to question whether we can do anything about it, even neglecting the question of whether we should Björn Lomberg makes a pretty good argument that we'd do a lot more good spending the money it would cost to do Kyoto on clean safe water supplies in Africa and Asia.