Political Discussion

Sooo.... he's da idea. Discuss politics. Be respectful. Don't demonize or ostrasize people... at least not other people writing here, if you want to mock politicians, go right ahead. So yeah... I'd love to hear rumors, facts, quotes, opinions, etc. and you can post links to political related sites in PoliticalLinks.

• personally, I place my faith in a little pocket monster. I want to ElectJigglypuffForPresident !

• Anybody hear Dubya's plans for schools?...
• Anybody remember Tipper's little "Parental Warning: Explicit Lyrics" escapade?
• Anybody else even here about the National Youth Convention? (they invited Nader and Bush when they were in philly... one of them showed, the other didn't... surprise surprise...
• National Youth Convention? What's it about? I'm always interested in stuff pertaining to youth (might have something to do with the fact that I am one..) ~Eryn
• Alakazaam! there's a link on the PoliticalLinks page.

Thanks for starting the political pages, Zack! I love politics. Personally I'm for Nader & the Green Party. They seem like the least-evil party out there and the Greens in my area have been doing some great local activism as well, which I've been involved in. I'm hoping Nader will win for President but I'm not sure if he will... but at least, even if he doesn't, he'll shake up the Republicrat system a little and maybe open a few eyes.

                      ~Eryn*

• heheh.. chuckle are you from california? Nader doesn't have a chance, mostly because the news media and the pundits have told everyone he doesn't. Pat Fucking Bucchannon has gotten more coverage. I've been especially disapointed with PBS, I think they're sucking up for funding, I really do, Talk of the Nation had a show about running mates a while back, before Gush and Bore had chosen, and Juan Williams stiffled conversation about Winona LaDuke (Nader's running mate, the only running mate who'd already been chosen at the time of the show) because, and this is damn close to a quote, "I don't know much about her and didn't think she would really make an impact." I'm thinking of voting for Nader anyway, because I don't see him as the lesser of the evils, I see him as the alternative to voting for the lesser of two evils. Moreover, I believe he would support reforming the election system to a version they have working several places in Europe, where you vote for your first choice, second choice, third choice, etc. When they count the votes they knock off the bottom guys, and then transfer all those votes to those people's second choices. It works well in Europe from what I've heard, and I believe there have been US court decisions supporting it as constitutional. No republicrat I've heard would touch that idea in a million years. If that was the system, underdogs could shock the system. Those of us a bit upset at the democrat's slide to the right could actually do something about it. I've heard Nader speek a couple times, he's sharp. He's the first politician I've heard who not only will speek to the issue posed in the question, but usually knows more about it than the person posing the question. He knows his stuff, and he's not afraid to say what he thinks on an issue. ~z~

Frankly, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more election discussion here and on the list. A lot of us are coming of voting age, and this is quite the election. I've been pretty immersed in it here at college. I got to watch the debate amidst about 40 of my peers. Dubya held a rally not five minutes walk from here. My friends Ryan and Ben were in the pressbox as representatives of the school newspaper. Ben's girlfriend Allison was in the crowd as a supporter, and I (Ryan's girlfriend) was in the crowd outside of the gates as a Green Party protestor, so I got pretty much all perspectives. I sadly missed seeing Gore when he came here, as I didn't hear about it until just before it happened and Ryan was sick at the time, but I am planning on seeing Nader in St. Petersburg this Thursday. I really want to know what other nbtscers think about voting for Nader though. Is Dubya scary enough to make you want to vote for Gore even if you prefer Nader?[0] (How scary do you find Lieberman? *shudder*[1]) Are all of you who are of voting age planning on voting, and if not, why not? What scares you most about the two major candidates? (Bush's pro-life position, Gore's approval of globalization, the whole ridiculous oil drilling bit...?). I'm strongly in favor of Nader and the Greens. I think if they can get more momentum built up[2], they stand a good chance in the future. Nader's regularly drawing crowds in the 10,000 range.

I do remember the Tipper/music thing. Do you remember that one of the things she wanted labeled was references to homosexuality? (on that note, National Coming Out Day is Oct 11! Don't forget!)

Julie(lipse

Election Reform

Proportional Representation:

(I'm quoting this from a flier I got at the phily shadow convention:)

• "PR Systems come in many forms and flavors. List-PR is one of the most common ones. List PR can be open or closed or inbetween. In closed-list-PR the party machinery creats a prioritized list of it'scandidates. People vote for parties. Parties are allocated quotas of seats in proportion to votes that they got. People do not get to vote for individual candidates. Therefore it is not very satisfactory unless parties created those lists with the help of seperate primary elections.
• In an open-list-PR system people would vote for candidates. These votes would also get counted as votes for the parties of the candidates' respective affiliations. Party votes would determine quotas of seats that each party is entitled to. And respective party lists are formed in descending order of votes of the individual candidates. Party-quotas are filled from the top of the party-lists."

Instant Runoff Voting.

(It got to badly writen so this is paraphrased from the same flier: )

• This is for single-seat offices, like the president. Voters rank the candidates in order of prefrence. If one candidate has more than 50% of the first choice votes, that candidate wins. If not, the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes get eliminated, those peoples votes get switched to their second choice, and the ballots are counted again. This is continued till one candidate has more than 50% of the vote.
• the advantages are 1) the winner always wins by majority, 2) no one candidate can "spoil" another's chances, 3) Voters can give their first preference to a candidate who they really care about without fear of wasting their vote.

IRV means well, and certainly the goals you state are very good. However, IRV does have problems. We discuss those problems in rather heated debates on the Election Methods list (http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em). You may also want to look at this URL for more discussion of Condorcet

http://electionmethods.org

The gist is that IRV can still cause the spoiler problem, and where it's in use in Australia, the voters have caught on. They don't vote for their top candidate first...they still vote strategically. Pairwise methods (such as Condorcet) don't have the same problems in most plausible scenarios.

Debates Hum... so... Bush wants to limit the debates to one on CNN, one on one of the non-cable networks, and one of the normal college ones. Gore wants three college ones, and wouldn't mind the other two as well. A bipartisan commision wants just the three college ones. Gore would get serious props from me if he'd support having third parties (and fourth and fifth parties) in the debates. That way they could have them even if Bush didn't show. ^gryn I should get some more info about this... I'd love this page to be a place we can exchange info and research... If someone wants to find out about this I'd love more details... what's the bipartisan org that is suggesting three debates and no third parties? Why isn't PBS running their own debates and inviting so many candidates they can still run it if bush backs out? Would Gore attend a large debate (with say, the green candidate, both reform candidates, and perhaps the libertarian, the socialist, etc)? Would Gore attend if Bush didn't? Hmmmm.... Debates should be sooo much bigger of a part of the process.

I'll make this another page, it's a very nice article from The New Republic Magazeen about the US military. It's long, but an easy read, and very interesting. ^~z~ HollowMilitary

Zack's Rant, Dec 11, day 34 of the election. sooo... the supreme court has to deside which is more important, the fact that desiding to extend a deadline for when they had to be done counting is changing a law after the election, or making sure actual human eyes recheck votes from a machine system that is obviously (and statistically damn near proven to be) flawed. CAN I SHOOT SOMEONE YET? you know, I don't think I'm being too biased here, having lost almost all wish to be associated with the demorcratic party, but I've really been surprised at how well the republican propaganda has worked in fucking with how people even view as what the issues should be. it's proving the old adage... "People are gulable idiots." I was talking to a middle aged friend of mine, who's always been a bit of a political rebel, but never felt like he reallyhad the guts to do much.... but he voted nader this year, and we were talking about that... we're both so damn happy about that... It felt so good, and it still does. or maybe even more so now. My grandfather has kept kinda asking me "do you regret it yet?" and I'm like, "hell, no! Regret not having voted for either of those power hungery, self-rightious, arrogant, son's-of-bitches? Hell no." If it wasn't obvious before the election that neither of these bums care more about the country than they're own egos, it is by now. and of course, there's the fact that the only thing my vote going for gore would have done (he one PA just fine without my help) would have been to increase gore's lead in the national popular vote. Which just goes to point out something no one other than the green party even wanted to bring up before all this happened, which is that one vote for president does not equal one vote forpresident. The smaller a state you live in, the more effect your vote has on the electoral college, because each state gets a vote just for being a state, and what's worse, the fewer people who actually show up to vote in your state, the more your vote counts for, do to the fact that the number of electors a state gets goes by population, not by how many people actually vote.

[0]I have a little something about the real effect a Nader vote has, thanks to the wonderfull thing we call the Electoral College. It's writen by somebody on Nader's staff or something, and it's pretty recent, I'll make a page for it soon called VotingNaderAndTheElectoralCollege. ~z~

[1]scary stuff about Leiberman? I haven't heard anything too bad, do tell! ~z~

[2]mementum? Yes, not to mention federal matching funds next time if they get enough votes this time. ~z~