Or, for incumbents, penance.


I think that is policy with provisional ballots generally, both for that reason and because the whole process could be streamlined by have a separate slot for them directly over a shredder. They are SUPPOSED to be used for people who ignorantly show up at the wrong precinct (more common than you might think; in my second election back in 1996 I just headed to the same place I voted in 1992, where the polling place had been set up just as before—for a different precinct; I found and reached the CORRECT one about 6PM, with an hour left to vote) or whose votes require validation too complex to be done on the spot. In practice, everything I have heard says they are pretty much just dumped without any verification attempts, let alone counting.

Of course, that is not much of an issue with electronic voting, but electronic voting WAS the issue in Cleveland in 2004, as you may recall. It is hard to imagine what Democratic county officials had to do with the Secy. of States failure to provide more than a small fraction of necessary voting machines. That is nearly as inexplicable as him believing he could be elected governor after that, but maybe he thought as long as he maintained Diebolds grip on OH voting he could not lose. In a sense, his loss tends to vindicate them, but Clevelands Democratic county government did not disenfranchise its voters in 2004, its Republican Secy. of State did, possibly to the extent of wrongly re-electing a president most of the country did not want. Tough to say whether it cost Kerry 150,000 or so votes, but Cleveland and Columbus (which encountered similar problems for SOME reason) might have. Bet Blackwell himself had no difficulty voting in Columbus.


It does vary by location, yes, but even by local standards there are plenty of relatively liberal rural regions and conservative urban ones.


After the eight page Rolling Stone article I just read filled with quotes from Reagan Republicans horrified at anti-tax RINOs dominating the party I am not sure there still is a Republican Party. I would post a new thread, but at the moment just find it too depressing, and do not want to hear Cannoli explain why eliminating all taxes actually IS moral and patriotic. Tax hikes on the poor to finance tax cuts for the rich were bad enough, but tax cuts FOR tax cuts is just terrifyingly bad math.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109

I know I am biased, but for the most part ignoring color and trying your hardest seems like something the GOP rarely rewards with success except for people born into a pretty successful position in the first place. I dunno, man; the GOP achieved a dominant role in national policy about the time we were born: Tell me how we are better off now. Unemployment is nearly twice what it was when I was born, CPI five times higher and the deficit about twenty times higher.

Someone once asked "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" and when I multiply that question by almost ten the only possible answer I see is "not only no, but HELL, no!" At least HE understood that if the new fangled "starve the beast" policy only spikes the deficit and slows growth it may justify tax HIKEs and closing loopholes. The modern GOP evidently feels that in the present crisis, tax cuts are not the cause of any problem, they are the SOLUTION to ALL problems.

Sorry if I am being too confrontational, but the people who used to run your party are publicly as exasperated with its fiscal policy as I, for the same reasons.


Honestly, that the country has become such a laissez-faire bastion the Democrats crony capitalism can pass for "liberal" is very disturbing. These days it is just two groups of insiders competing over who can best empty the nations wealth into the hands of its robber barons. The obvious answer is "the one that talks the best game on working class issues so the working class does not storm the Bastille," but it is still frightening and painful to endure. One day the BS will not fly and all Hell will break lose, to the detriment of ALL Americans, and in the interim the nations economic, strategic and diplomatic security is being annihilated. Unless we reverse course soon, we will wake up in America where about as many people own their own business or even HOME as owned their own farm after 1930. The Ownership Society looks a lot like an On Your Own Society, and the Democrats refusal to provide any alternative only increases rather than reducing the need for one.

OK, I will try to go back to letting wads be wads now; I did not mean to vent at you just because you are the nearest Republican, sorry. ' />


Yeah, I need to pop back there, too, if only to take my lumps for conflating Tim Ryan with Paul Ryan (I was tired and I needed the sleep. ' />) Yet if socialism is the best economic compromise to prevent communist/laissez-faire excesses, republicanism is the best government compromise to prevent dictatorial/democratic ones.


It was shoehorned, but there; the problem is the particular exemptions carved out for it conflict with the Constitutions general terms elsewhere. However, the Ninth and Tenth AMENDMENTS to the original document invalidate, rather than being invalidated by, the three-fifths compromise etc. just as the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments do. Even the Fifth does; unless one argues slaves were not people (at which even Jeff Davis would balk,) they were deprived liberty without due process.

Arguing emancipation on any basis BUT those legitimizes Southern claims the Civil War unconstitutionally infringed on state and property rights. Acknowledge people are not property and thus the Fifth Amendment required rather than prohibited emancipation is logically and morally correct; arguing the Union is insoluble and/or that foreign powers may not rest US military occupation has no such constitutional standing. State rights were not the problem any more than with segregation, any more than they are the solution with gay marriage or abortion now. The solution was and is that, just as state rights limit federal authority, individual rights limit state rights. Daniel Websters stirring "liberty and union" speech was nice oratory, but flies in the face of virtually every equally eloquent and far more logical word every Founding Father wrote on both union and secession. Without guarantees of the latter the Constitution would never have been ratified, so arguments ratification contingent on that right somehow relinquished it demonstrate a weak grasp of both the history and logic involved. It is precisely the kind of federal tyranny the Tenth Amendment was created to prevent; I know of no Constitutional clause (even now) prohibiting secession.

Sacrificing that vital bulwark of American liberty to end an infringement on that liberty was, shall we say, counterproductive, as well as unnecessary. The whole issue has been hopelessly muddled and contradictory ever since, with the same people and places alternately affirming state rights and claiming the Civil War revoked them de facto, as convenient. Meanwhile, within a decade of Civil War "victory" over slavery the South inaugurated a century of Jim Crow with Northern complicity. Americas biggest merchants were no more committed to liberating slaves with civil war in 1860 than they were to secession to avoid enforcing an embargo as part of an ongoing international war fifty years earlier: They were committed to MERCANTILE PROFITS, whether by ignoring an embargo against a nation at war with us (specifically, the one from which we won our hard fought independence, that sacked the capital and burned the White House even as MA et al. threatened secession over the embargo) or by ending the Souths cheap labor and high prices for raw materials.

Historically, American conservatism has been a very mercenary, autocratic and ugly thing almost from the start. Its greatest and founding members were Adams and Hamilton; the former made it a federal crime to criticize a member of the federal government, while the latter proposed at the Constitutional Convention America should install a new king in place of the one it had just renounced. Those alone ought to be enough to discredit the whole philosophy.


Well, but really, the principal difference between our government and theirs is in the President as a strong head of government rather than the House Speaker as one chosen by Congress. That, and the fact he can only be removed every four years rather than at any time. In terms of democratic principles, the British system has more, and that was largely true within a generation of the Revolutionary War. Again, the problem with Britain was not that it denied its citizens the franchise, but that it did not recognize its colonists as full citizens. However, and also once again, America did not and has not altered that, only whom it recognizes as colonists. That three-quarters of the 800 year democratic legacy to which Americans are heir comes from Britain only underscores the depth of that debt. I much prefer our more republican system, but "Royalist Dogs" was not a truly fair charge against Britain in 1776, and certainly not now.


All better? Sorry for the delay, and if sleep deprivation and disgust with what old school Republicans have to say of todays GOP fired me up a bit too much.