Good work. Funny stuff, this.

f

I forget who, but either Cheney or Rumsfeld himself authored the bill ending the Vietnam draft, back when one of them were in the House of Representatives.

The fact is that if you live in a state where the polls are not even close, your vote does not count. Contrary to what you hear on reputable news sources like MTV and Rock the Vote.

California, New York, and Texas are not even close races, the candidates don't go there or spend money there, and all those electoral votes are going to who's leading now.

Switching from electoral to popular voting will benefit Democrats and Republicans in each of these 3 states - make the candidates go to these states and pander and beg for votes. Like they are supposed to.

No, don't call off the dogs or any such thing. The dogs and blogs are part of the vigorous debate.

--|PW|--

DSV, please pardon me for saying so, but that's an awfully dumbassed thing to say.

When you go vote on November 2, you're not participating in a national election. You're participating in one of 50 state elections. (Plus one for the District, yes, yes.) Your vote counts exactly as much as anybody else's in your state.

The "your vote does not count" rhetoric is just a rewording of the "one vote never made a difference" brouhaha that was so popular in the 1970s. It was stupid then and it's stupid today.

Besides, the fact that one vote hardly ever makes the difference is good. It's a sign that we have a consensus. The more lopsided the election, the healthier our society.

Close elections result in the kind of mindless claptrap that we've seen over the past four years. To hell with that. Give me a nice, boring landslide any day.

If we ever ditch the whole "federal republic" idea and decide to abolish the constitutions of the several states, you can bring up the "let's just hold a national election instead" idea again.

DSV: The ONLY vacuum around here is between your ears!

For FOUR years we've had to put up with "selected, not elected" because Bush came up on the short end of the popular vote.

EVERYONE'S vote counts for that exact reason! Do not give the Democrats four more years to whine about the popular vote and the electoral college. I don't care what state you live in, or how lopsided the results look for your candidate--get out and vote! The College exists for a reason, and that reason may be challenged but it is NOT invalidated by modern communications technology. So lets not give the Dems an excuse to break it.

Man, I admit that I've been testy lately, but you guys are rough. I disagree with DSV's statement, but it usually takes at least a two posts for me to straight-up gut someone like a chicken.

Sheesh.

I think we all just need to be held until November 3rd.

Don't you think the reason they changed the signature is to avoid any issue with losing their non partisan status???? They wouldn't be want to be known a partisan hacks,now would they?

Bill,I will give you a cyber hug if you will just answer me.

Testy indeed.

Don't you think the reason they changed the signature is to avoid any issue with losing their non partisan status????

Yes.

And if you use the term "cyber hug" again, I'm declaring a fatwa on you.

Hey! Your the one who asked to be held.

And I meant answer my e-mail.

I just got trackbacks. I linked you at my blog on this story. How come it doesn't show as a trackback?

One nice benefit of the electoral college is that in an extremely close election, it narrows the field of uncertainty.

With only about a half-million votes separating the two candidates, if the 2000 election had been decided by the popular vote, lawyers would have hit every precinct in the United States. As it is, my state, Maryland, wasn't that close. Mr. Gore got all the electoral votes. Oh well. But because it wasn't close, Maryland was off the table. In a popular election with sub-1% difference between the candidate, it pays to go looking for extra votes for one's candidate, or votes to be deleted from the other guy's candidate, in every single state, every single precinct.

Thus, the electoral college helps to bring about a final conclusion, according to the rules, in an orderly fashion. Only someone who REALLY LOVED what happened in Florida last time would wish to multiply that 50-fold with a direct popular election of the president.

That's just one good reason to keep the Electoral College. There are others.

As I read recently, the howling the D's did after Florida 2000 will pale in comparison to what we'll hear should the EC come out tied and the issue goes to Congress. Moot point, though, as Bush will win decisively.

Re: The Draft...

I have a forum-acquaintance (and mostly a right-winger) who makes a compelling argument that we will see a return of the draft next year. I don't necessarily buy his complete argument, but I don't know enough to argue his points. I'll condense his views here...

My acquaintance has spooled himself up as an amateur macro-economist. He sees that the country's and world's money supply has greatly increased recently. This money supply bubble will burst (Imagine another '29 Crash--only larger) and the world will be forced to return to a gold standard. The war in Iraq was begun not because of WMDs or mass graves or whatever else most of us talk about. It was begun because Saddam had begun to trade his oil for Euros instead of Dollars. [Note that the two big players in the EU are France and Germany. Their hands are dirty with Oil-for-Food dirt, but this issue is window-dressing.] The EU has been attempting to make the Euro a competing currency for the world's trade. The war was fought to prevent the challenge to the dollar standard the world uses today.

My acquaintance also has seen that the House of Saud has begun to buy up property in Switzerland. He speculates that they're buying their mountain chalets to have a place to run to when their house of cards falls apart. The instability of a fallen Saudi Arabia will require that we place many troops there. This will also coincide with taking Iran down to thwart their nuclear ambitions. All this military adventuring will require troops...more than an all-volunteer military will be able to field.

So there you have it: Huge Crash Coming. A Giant War in the Mideast [Anyone else play Risk?]. And a Draft.

Who else wants to be cheered up?

One of the Democrats voting FOR the draft bill was California Representative Pete Stark, claiming that the draft was the best means to make sure that "Americans of every background will serve our country, not just the poor and disadvantaged as it is today."

Well...guess who's "poor and disadvantaged" and who's under-represented in the military?

http://careporter.blogspot.com/2004/10/draft-rumors-and-under-represented.html

Re draft - A point not stressed enough: the Rumsfeld military transformation absolutely has NO PLACE for a draft. (Granted the Hill is not legislating all the changes the SecDef wants, but the direction is clear and change is taking place - read Franks, f.i.)

The new military is to have fewer troops but they are to be much better (and longer) trained and of much higher quality (of commitment, education, mind-power), that is, the opposite of what a draft would bring in.

The idea that the Bush military would want to draft unwilling shlocky suburban youth is laughable -- what would they do with them? If the need does arise for more troops, the military has only to slightly increase the monetary incentive. And that's not because it wants to attract poor kids who just need the money but because there is a pool of qualified kids out there who would like to join but find the differential in private sector pay a bit too great to sacrifice at this point -- so just raise the pay and the military can get whatever troop level it needs.

Of course all bets would be off in a Kerry Admin since he would likely so mismanage things, take the military backwards, and alienate current and would-be troops that a draft may indeed be on the table.

The Democrats dishonesty on the Bush/draft issue is frightening as well as repelling.

"Switching from electoral to popular voting will benefit Democrats and Republicans in each of these 3 states - make the candidates go to these states and pander and beg for votes. Like they are supposed to."

In a popular vote election a teeny tiny state like mine wouldn't matter at all (it is New Hampshire), but with the electoral college, those 4 electoral votes mean a lot this year to both candidates, so not only does my vote "count" it counts pretty well. In a popular vote election, with less than 2 million citizens in the whole state, the candidate wouldn't even think about visiting NH or caring what we think.

I like the electoral college-I think it was a brilliant idea, because it means the candidates have to address every states concerns to some degree.

As for the draft-our military is a more proffessional military, most jobs take 6 months to 2 years for training (my dh was in a job that took two years from boot camp to being qualified to serve on a ship), the face of the military has changed. Back in draft days, the intent was to churn out soldiers as fast as possible, and hope they survived, now the jobs require far more technical training, and take longer, and they want to retain them.

Our military is designed for proffessional volunteers, I don't see anyone in congress taking this political nose dive, it is a no winner for all of them.

Thinking RTV is non-partisan is wishful thinking. One of the links on their home page is to http://www.mypollingplace.com/
which is sponsored by Election Protection, http://www.electionprotection2004.org/, and an effort by many organizations, the lead sponsor is "People for the American Way".

Cassandra, at I Love Jet Noise (http://joatmoaf.typepad.com/i_love_jet_noise/2004/10/as_election_nea.html), has a good post on this topic, and she includes (near the bottom) the name and phone number of the Political Director of "Rock the Vote" (wg).

You fools! It's not Rangel's signature. Click on this link and go to the PDF entitled "Dissenting Views on H.Res. 776, Resolution of Inquiry on Medicare":  http://www.house.gov/waysandmeans_democrats/democratic_views/index.shtml

If you go to Page 6, you can clearly see Rangel's signature and it's not EVEN CLOSE. Keep finding those ghosts to scare your right-wing friends about. It will only help defeat George W. Bush.