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Originally posted by SergeantX:
I wonder what they think they've won?

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Originally posted by Connorflynn
I think Bush realizes he is working towards a legacy and can't pull the BS he did his first term.
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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:

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Originally posted by Connorflynn
I think Bush realizes he is working towards a legacy and can't pull the BS he did his first term.
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I sincerely hope you're right. However, I can't help flashing back to 2000 and me telling my girlfriend , "It's not that bad. How much could Bush do in four years anyway?"

In regards to the video link... I don't really have much to say. I gave it a try, at least until I got halfway through and assumed that it was just going to be redundant laughter for the last three minutes. It didn't do much for me (I am in the target demographic ). Although it did fit under my political-fallacy category of "Viewing Political Parties as Sporting Teams - My Team Wins, Your Team Loses, That's All That Matters".

As a liberal independent I'm still trying to figure out how to interpret this election. This past Monday the electors voted and the numbers are all totaled so I've finally gotten around to analyzing the results. There are a couple of things that pop out at me: the poor showing of third party candidates and the population density/geographic area divide.

It's hard for me to do any type of comparison with elections before 1996 since I get all my data off the web. I did look at the Pacific region (Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and California) for the past three elections on a county by county basis (except for Alaska, which doesn't break down the numbers like that and excluding Washington for 1996 since I couldn't find those numbers - in other words, the analysis is very slipshod ). One thing that stood out was the drastic decline in support for third party candidates. I don't know if 1996 was an anomaly with Perot and Nader but a non-trival percentage of the popular vote (between 5 and 20 percent for most counties) went to third party candidates. This dropped in 2000 but was still a healthy percentage. This year, third party support was positively anemic. It was very disappointing to see those numbers (My personal belief is that we would be better off with no national political parties but instead large numbers of regional political parties working in coalitions on the national level). I hope that we've bottomed out and that third party support will rise in the future but with the electoral system set up the way it is there's really no way a third party candidate can be elected to a national office (just my opinion).

The second thing that jumped out at me was the county map of the US. The red-blue picture is very impressive. That's a whole lotta red. Granted, many of those counties that voted red are large in area with sparse population, but that's still a lot of red. I personally prefer some of the other variations that also vary the size of the county by the population (such as some of the maps found at http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/ or http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ ). My personal favorite is this map:

And I found it humerous to click through the selections at the following site: http://www.topalli.com/blue/intro.html (you'll have to wade through some juvenile partisan name calling and the sporting section on baseball and football champions isn't fair at all when you think about where the majority of teams are located).

But at the end of the day... that's a whole lotta red.



There are three kinds of people: fighters, lovers, and screamers.

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Originally posted by Anarko:

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
I wonder what they think they've won?

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Duh, four more year!

http://www.georgewbush.com/



The United States of Bush

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Originally posted by SignyM:
The most accurate map I saw was a cartograph (Expandings areas of large populaiton, shrinking areas of smaller population) by county of the PERCENT of voters who voted one way or another. (If the percentage was near 50% it was purple). What I saw was a whole lot of purple and SOME areas of read and SOME area of blue.

Besides... and I know I'm going to take flak for this- Bush didn't win. I think he stole the election again. There are some pretty compelling statistical irregularities out there in the e-votes in "contested" counties. Unfortunately, since the Diebold machines leave no paper trail, it's extremely difficult to verify the vote. It seems we care more about our ATMs than we do about our vote.

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Originally posted by Bojesphob:
If you look at ANY election we've had for the last 200 years, you'd find a lot of "irregularities".

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Originally posted by rue:
The problem is that the obvious statistical irregularities (Bush gained in count over exit polls in ALL of the contested states) do not seem to be triggering the necessry studies. No one would like to snuff studies more than the Bush admin.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
The most accurate map I saw was a cartograph (Expandings areas of large populaiton, shrinking areas of smaller population) by county of the PERCENT of voters who voted one way or another. (If the percentage was near 50% it was purple). What I saw was a whole lot of purple and SOME areas of read and SOME area of blue.

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excerpted from the Introductory of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" available online at http://www.bartleby.com/130/
Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
Ah yes. I expect to see many more examples of demonization over the next many years.

This first thing that popped into my head on viewing this post was the phrase, "tyranny of the majority".

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Originally posted by Geezer
I must admit that I'm kind of puzzled why John Cleese's "NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE" is just whacky fun, but this is "demonization" and "Tyranny of the Majority". They both are supposed to be humorous twitting of one side or the other about the election. And to my taste, both were worth a chuckle but were a little long.

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Originally posted by Anarko:

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
I wonder what they think they've won?

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Duh, four more year!

http://www.georgewbush.com/



The United States of Bush

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Originally posted by smurfkiller:
I'd like to remind all of your Republicans of the words of a great man, Malcolm Reynolds "I may have been on the losing side, doesn't mean I was on the wrong one."

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