matty
Member
Registered: Dec 1999
Location: brooklyn
Posts: 268 |
all right, i'm willing to eat a little crow. but not so much as you'd like, toby. without quoting your entire post, in no particular order:
nixon's ethics... i've got three (not 5) historians off the top of my head: kearns, schlesinger2, and greenberg. and i will admit that option b is the easier to stomach. i am not trying to pigeonhole you into being a blindnixonian, either. i'm the first to admit the guy was a great foreign affairs president. all i'm saying is the guy's election ethics are not clean. and you know what, i'll also admit that clinton's personal life is not clean either. but again, the difference remains (and this is whence the argument sprung): one has actually to do with elections, the other, well, doesn't. a political debate, by the way, so far as i know, takes more than one. you and i are more than one, this means i know and knew that i was part of the debate -- see the admitted soapbox line.
minority discontent... jesse jackson, and the naacp are alleging violation of the voter's rights act. nothing has yet gone to court, i wasn't there, i can't prove anything personally... however, as you have realized, i'm admittedly quick to jump on certain political bandwagons, and in this particular case, i'll side with jesse. sue me.
i'll guess again at your affiliation: browne... if i'm wrong, i'm curious, who is it?
electoral choice... i was talking u.s. constitution, not state constitution. admittedly that's the doc i read, not the individual state docs. of course, it looks like you used a bit of your own interpretation in reading the faq from which you posted the url: (bold is mine)
quote:
There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their States. Some States (24 plus DC at last count) require electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote. These pledges fall into two categories -- electors bound by State law and those bound by pledges to political parties.
The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties' nominees. Some State laws provide that so-called "faithless electors" may be subject to fines or may be disqualified for casting an invalid vote and be replaced by a substitute elector. The Supreme Court has not specifically ruled on the question of whether pledges and penalties for failure to vote as pledged may be enforced under the Constitution. No elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged.
Today, it is rare for electors to disregard the popular vote by casting their electoral vote for someone other than their party's candidate. Electors generally hold a leadership position in their party or were chosen to recognize years of loyal service to the party. Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of electors have voted as pledged.
again, i'm not saying they will do it, but under federal law, they can vote however they @$!&^%ing well choose. and as far as clinton's landslides: electoral votes are still the ones that count and here're the results:
1992 370 to bush's 168
1996 379 to dole's 159
in my book, more than twice as many votes counts as a landslide.
creative history... hmmm. history is what someone writes down... making it automatically subjective. i'm allowed my subjective views as well as you, or has something changed. i'm pretty sure neither of us was in the chamber at the moment of any presidential impeachment... in any case, i am finding myself, more and more, in what you might term an an oliverstonian world. i think it's closer to orwellian or huxleyan, but you caught me... i don't believe in the single bullet. when i say jonson was impeached for being a democrat, or clinton was impoeached for getting laid, i mean in a broader sense, that there are greater forces at work than those in the legal docket.
machine v. hand recount... by now i'm sure you've realized that a hand recount is a perfectly valid request under fla. law, and the shrub himself signed a bill into law in his very own home state saying that a hand recount is more reliable than a machine one. 'nuff said.
yet another recount will, of course, bring another tally. that's the issue, i believe. hand is subjective, machine is fallible, so where does one draw the line? i don't know.
i heard the baker conference, and that's what he said. simply.
look. as seen on a greater scale over this entire campaign, discussions like this can and will go round and round and nobody clearly wins. i admit fully that my views are skewed wildly to the left. i will find evidence to support my views, as you will yours. what's actually important to me, whether you believe it or not, is that the views get heard... i will believe what i want, as will you, and perhaps, never the twain shall meet (although, i imagine somewhere we do agree), but we're both being heard, and maybe as a result of these posts someone will stop and actually think about something instead of towing some line. before you jump on the ego flame, realize that i've admitted to hearing you. and maybe someone else will read this exchange and agree with you (more likely than agreeing with me, it seems  ...) i'm not gonna go round and round anymore. i think it's clear where i stand, and what my views are. i also think it's clear that i don't have fuzzy math as you've implied.
oh, and lanman, the shrub is a term i borrowed from david foster wallace, which he, in turn, borrowed from the techs on the straight talk express when he was following that campaign for rolling stone magazine. its meaning is never explicitly explained, but the way i figure it: a shrub is a little bush.
[Edited by matty on 11-13-2000 at 11:39 AM]
__________________
exit, pursued by a bear.
|
11-10-2000 10:46 PM
From Texas
Latest News
)
Email This Page to Someone! |
Receive updates to this thread
]