POLITICS <== Post Your Dumb Opinions Here

by **Woody** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:21:01

* The patient expresses an idea or belief with unusual persistence or force.
* That idea appears to exert an undue influence on his or her life, and the way of life is often altered to an inexplicable extent.
* Despite his/her profound conviction, there is often a quality of secretiveness or suspicion when the patient is questioned about it.
* The individual tends to be humorless and oversensitive, especially about the belief.
* There is a quality of centrality: no matter how unlikely it is that these strange things are happening to him, the patient accepts them relatively unquestioningly.
*An attempt to contradict the belief is likely to arouse an inappropriately strong emotional reaction, often with irritability and hostility.
* The belief is, at the least, unlikely.
* The patient is emotionally over-invested in the idea and it overwhelms other elements of his psyche.

by **jerseyhoya** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:21:08

dajafi wrote:This thread has all the moral weight of a 12 year-old sociopath who tortures animals out back the old homestead.

Moral fibre? I invented moral fibre! Pappy O'Daniel was displaying rectitude and high-mindedness when that egghead you work for was still messing his drawers!

by **meatball** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:22:46

You can find connection between everything if you try hard enough.

Good thing I'm writing a text on logical fallacies...ptk has given me enough examples to fill each chapter. Don't worry, I'll include you on the dedication page.

by **dajafi** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:24:19

jerseyhoya wrote:
dajafi wrote:This thread has all the moral weight of a 12 year-old sociopath who tortures animals out back the old homestead.

Moral fibre? I invented moral fibre! Pappy O'Daniel was displaying rectitude and high-mindedness when that egghead you work for was still messing his drawers!

Well played, sir.

by **mpmcgraw** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:25:11

Philly the Kid wrote:I don't have time. But as requested, I put a quick search on Google and found this within seconds... it at least starts to point at the many kinds of things that may have been going on. There are connections between seeming disconneceted things.

And I'm by no means some fringe paranoid in my views, there are millions who share similar views. We're not all making it up or believing fairy tales.

just to get started

You have the time to write almost 3,000 short stories on here, but you can't post a few links?

by **jerseyhoya** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:28:27

dajafi wrote:
jerseyhoya wrote:
dajafi wrote:This thread has all the moral weight of a 12 year-old sociopath who tortures animals out back the old homestead.

Moral fibre? I invented moral fibre! Pappy O'Daniel was displaying rectitude and high-mindedness when that egghead you work for was still messing his drawers!

Well played, sir.

Yeah, I do enjoy how the politics thread has basically become just like every other thread on here. Sorta makes it more fun to read though.

Oh, and Ted Stevens said full steam ahead on his reelection campaign. The trial is to start September 24th. Someone shoot me.

by **dajafi** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:35:08

jerseyhoya wrote:
dajafi wrote:
jerseyhoya wrote:
dajafi wrote:This thread has all the moral weight of a 12 year-old sociopath who tortures animals out back the old homestead.

Moral fibre? I invented moral fibre! Pappy O'Daniel was displaying rectitude and high-mindedness when that egghead you work for was still messing his drawers!

Well played, sir.

Yeah, I do enjoy how the politics thread has basically become just like every other thread on here. Sorta makes it more fun to read though.

Oh, and Ted Stevens said full steam ahead on his reelection campaign. The trial is to start September 24th. Someone shoot me.

I wouldn't sweat it. My guess is he'll win the primary and then someone will say "You either drop out, or we make sure your son goes to jail too, and that he'll have a rapist cellmate." Begich is probably going to win the seat, but is it really that much of a difference between 55 Dem Senators and 56?

Also, did Charles Durning play Pappy O'Daniel?

by **jerseyhoya** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:38:21

I guess, but the whole 60 thing becomes more real every time one of these solid red states falls.

And yes he did. Great part in a great movie.

by **Shore** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:39:08

Philly the Kid wrote:
FTN wrote:Is that site unbiased, would you say?

Is Fox unbiased? I consider Fox worthless and nothing but a propoganda tool. I don't know anything about the site, who made it, who's behind it, what other agenda they might have. But i saw in the headings on the one page, a variety of issues that were in play. Idon't know if the links go to credible data or not. They might.... it was just a starting point for some framework....

Dude... the site is "BushCheated04.com".

by **drsmooth** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 16:40:50

Shore wrote:
Woody wrote:holy quote warkakke

"Warkakke" is, perhaps, the single funniest word ever posted at BSG. Or the internets in general.

I found it funny even when I mis-read it as "war-cake"

admittedly it's better in the original

by **Philly the Kid** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 17:25:47

Shore wrote:
Philly the Kid wrote:
FTN wrote:Is that site unbiased, would you say?

Is Fox unbiased? I consider Fox worthless and nothing but a propoganda tool. I don't know anything about the site, who made it, who's behind it, what other agenda they might have. But i saw in the headings on the one page, a variety of issues that were in play. Idon't know if the links go to credible data or not. They might.... it was just a starting point for some framework....

Dude... the site is "BushCheated04.com".

theres a lot out there

by **VoxOrion** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 17:36:08

So there is someone left reading Rolling Stone!

by **pacino** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 17:39:02

EVERYDAY IM HUSTLIN!!!!!!!!!

by **Philly the Kid** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 18:20:21

I have spent 10-15minutes and am already overwhelmed with the range of articles, info, and referenced studies pointing to the unreliability of e-voting, Diebold in particular, and numerous issues of disenfranchisement. These come from a wide spectrum of sites/sources. Here are but a few, if would like, I'll keep em coming one after another after another. Eventually, whether you like cheatbush04 or rollingstone, or the nation, or johns hopkins reseachers -- there should be something that 'reasonable people' could claim to be amiss and dangerous at a minimum, and likely corrupt, intentional and exploited in a worst case.

Let's talk e-voting:

there

is

"It would be far easier for someone to fix an election by modifying the software at Diebold's installation or elsewhere before it is delivered to election offices to install on all the machines," concluded the Johns Hopkins report.

a lot

"Things can't be as bad as I've heard rumors about them being," Thompson recalled thinking before he delved in.

In fact, he was wrong. He found two holes that were so gaping they could have allowed someone to secretly throw an election.

out there

"It was worse than I could ever have imagined," he said. "It was really egregious."

More recently, reports commissioned by elections officials from California and Ohio have found serious vulnerabilities in products made by virtually every e-voting manufacturer. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, the state's top elections official, responded by decertifying machines made by the industry's four biggest vendors.

But in most states, e-voting is as widely used as ever. And that's not likely to change anytime soon, given that states have spent billions of dollars buying the gear, the panelists said. With so many machines in use that contain known vulnerabilities, the most important safeguard states can take is to audit election results.

That means states must use systems that return a receipt that voters can use to verify that their votes were recorded as cast. It also requires that state officials routinely audit a statistically significant sample of votes against the receipts to verify the validity of an election.

At the moment, Wagner said, only about one-third of the states do this.

Yes, we warned you the assessment was bleak. And we meant it.

more more

even college kids know

bad for business

And a nice teaser on

disenfranchisement

Instead, Florida state elections officials and hired data crunchers used computers to target thousands of voters, many of whom were then purged from the voter rolls without reason. And many thousands more saw their votes thrown out as a result of error-prone voting machines and poorly designed ballots, the results of an underfunded and chaotic electoral system.

In all, some 200,000 Floridians were either not permitted to vote in the November 7 election on questionable or possibly illegal grounds, or saw their ballots discarded and not counted. A large and disproportionate number were black.

by **pacino** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 18:28:05

Your last post isn't bad or all that crazy, but your view is largely discredited on this board because of many of your held views. Just who's in the secret cabal again?

by **Laexile** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 18:41:15

I went through the websites. I think ptk has successfully proven that someone could commit fraud on the Diebold machines. Granted, I said that a few pages ago, but he provides a lot of evidence. None of the articles provide any evidence that someone did tamper with any machines or who might have done so. While computer tampering isn't always detectable, it often is. I have a friend who is a forensic computer technician. He has an excellent success rate.

There are definitely irregularities in elections. I'd guess that in a few of them someone actually disenfranchised people. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it has happened. The burden of proof is higher than that. I'd guess that some people will try to cheat in this fall's election. Jumping between that and 1 or 5 or 10% of the votes are rigged is a huge leap.

Your burden of proof to confirm your beliefs is very low. Your burden of proof to disprove them is impossible.

by **dajafi** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 19:34:49

The NYT had one today:

2. The 2006 Congressional Race in Florida’s 13th District — The machines said that Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes. But in Sarasota County, a Democratic area, up to 18,000 ballots, about 13 percent of the total cast, did not record a vote for Congress. That is extraordinarily high; in Republican Manatee County, only 2 percent of ballots didn’t contain a vote for Congress.

Sarasota’s low vote may have been because of a bad ballot design, which made the Buchanan-Jennings race hard to find. But the Jennings campaign said it received hundreds of complaints that the machines would not accept a vote for Ms. Jennings, or recorded a vote for her as a vote for Mr. Buchanan.
...
3. Alabama’s 2002 Race for Governor — Former Gov. Don Siegelman has been in the news because it appears that federal prosecutors may have put him in prison for political reasons. The controversy has brought attention to the odd way he lost the governorship.

Mr. Siegelman went to sleep on election night thinking he had won. But overnight, Republican Baldwin County reported that a glitch had given Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, about 6,000 extra votes. When they were subtracted, Republican Rob Riley won by roughly 3,000 votes.

James Gundlach, a professor at Auburn University, crunched the numbers and concluded that Mr. Siegelman lost because of “electronic ballot stuffing,” possibly by an operative who accessed the computers and “edited” the results, though others dispute his analysis

.

Their first example was the 2002 senate and gubernatorial races in Georgia, both of which were also won by Republicans. I don't think that's as strong a case, but take a look and judge for yourself.

I assume Republicans have made similar charges in hairsbreadth-close races they lost; maybe the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election, though if memory serves the issue there wasn't hacking but alleged ballot-stuffing in poor Seattle precincts.

My overall point is that it's certainly possible to screw with results. But it's not easy, and given that every state runs its own elections, it's really tough to do on a wide scale.

by **VoxOrion** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 20:11:52

by **VoxOrion** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 20:17:03

by **VoxOrion** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 20:17:46

Notice how I'm trying to change the subject?

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