Breakfast Links: Spying, Mind Control & Colbert
This is madness. (This IS THE UNITED STATES!) Ahem. Three small US telephone companies (AT&T, Qwest and Verizon) are refusing to answer Congress’ questions to them about the what Bush and his administration received from them. Apparently the Director of National Intelligence invoked state secrets privilege. That seems to me like a governmental way of calling no talksies.
“Our company essentially finds itself caught in the middle of an oversight dispute between the Congress and the executive relating to government surveillance activities,” AT&T Inc. General Counsel Wayne Watts said in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee
It’s a good thing our government is built around checks and balances and no branch has more power than the next. Oh wait.
If spying on your calls wasn’t bad enough, you know what? Now the goverment can read your mind and torture you remotely! That piece is breaking the news wide open that the government is using Directed Energy Non Lethal Electromagnetic and Neurological Weapons to read the minds and torture US citizens where necessary without even being near them. Man. That sucks. Now where’d I put all that tinfoil…
All this badness is clearly stemming from our wonderful executive branch. You know? So… how do we fix it? That’s right, we vote in Stephen Colbert to the presidency! Yup, he’s announced that he’s officially considering whether he will announce that he’s running. He’s already perfected that most presidential skill of saying nothing that sounds like something! It’d be worth it just to get him into some debates, I just don’t know which party I’d rather he run for. Hrm.. I think at this instant I’m leaning for Republican. What do you think?
October 17th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Yeah considering his show it’d be more fun for him to run as a Republican. But I think he said he’d run as both so he could lose twice. Plus I think he’s only running in South Carolina.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Good times. I hope he does it. Somehow his fakeness would add a lot more realness to the debates. :)
October 17th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Remember the constitution? ugh, good times, good times.
October 17th, 2007 at 11:12 am
NOOOO!
Since his faux republican persona is designed to appeal to liberals he will have the Nader effect!
October 17th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Don’t worry. I don’t think he’ll get in the actual presidential race. :)
October 17th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
lol, the Nader Effect. Like anyone voting for Ralph was gunna vote Democrat or Republican.
October 17th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nader_effect
October 17th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
“However, Nader himself and many of his supporters argue that most Nader voters would have chosen another minor party candidate, or refrained from voting altogether, had he not been on the ballot.”
October 18th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Did you just quote Ralph Nader as the argument against the Nader effect?
October 18th, 2007 at 11:08 am
No, I quoted the article you linked. Plus, he is smarter than you and he combined, so I wouldn’t argue.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Quite simply, the Nader effect is a way of Democrats to blame somebody for their failure to put someone decent up against the worst candidate to ever run, and loosing to him. Hey, can’t be your fault right? Gotta be someone else’s.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Yes, your quote from the article is what Nader himslef says.
But here’s the short of it:
Bush won Florida by 537 Votes (no, thats not a typo).
Ralph Nader got 97,421 votes in Florida.
Ralph Nader was the farthest left of the candidates.
And i dont have to remind anyone that as went Florida, so went the election.
Its not a matter of looking for blame as most will happily admit that Ross Perot had the opposite effect in the 80’s.
October 18th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Those numbers don’t mean anything if they stand for votes that would have otherwise not been there at all. You can sit there and argue all you want that they would have gone against Bush, but the fact is we will never know, and I highly doubt any of them would have voted for either large party, if at all.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:01 am
it just math. you could be correct for 96,000 of them and Gore STILL would have won. you may somehow still disagree, but you calculator will not.
also, the numbers get even worse in states like New Hampshire.
heres the other way to look at it.
You have a close race between the liberal and conservative parties. The conservative candidate gets all the conservative votes. the liberal party has two candidates that the vote is split between.
who wins?
October 19th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Howie: You’ve got some math problems, and some civics problems.
First things first: Gore won the statewide balloting by a half million votes (http://presidentelect.org/e2000.html). I’m not aware of any honest study of the 2000 election that doesn’t end up declaring Gore winner. It was because Gore was greedy and demanded a recount only in the counties he thought he’d win that the Supreme Court ultimately had the legal basis to stop the recount. If he had simply asked for a statewide recount, he’d have been President instead of Nobel Laureate Gore.
Now, let’s say your numbers are correct, and that Bush won by 537 votes. Gore should have mopped the floor with Bush. The economy was great, it was before 9/11 and Bush seemed confused and dumb and not particularly qualified to be president. But Gore ran a silly, cowardly campaign. He didn’t even win his own state, or Arkansas, home of his still wildly popular boss. Winning either state would have thrown it for him. Even Walter Mondale won his own state!
There are any number of fringe candidates who had more votes than the plurality you claim Bush had in Florida. David McReynolds, East Village legend and perennial War Resisters League/Socialist Party candidate got 327 votes in Florida, the Socialist Workers Party candidate got 551 votes, and Workers World candidate Monica Moorhead got 1,728 votes (source: Nation e-mails). Were they, too, spoilers?
Now, to the civics: Having a “lesser of two evils” election (Gore isn’t and wasn’t a liberal) is barely distinguishable from having an election where there’s only one candidate. Worse, having both of these candidates come through thoroughly undemocratic, monolithic political parties (which are really just big corporations themselves) yields even less difference between the candidates, and even less actual democratic choice.
Do we really want, then, to take your argument to its logical extreme, and drive all third party candidates out of the process and leave the process to the two pro-war, pro-corporate power parties? Even if we only did this when the elections were close, could we still, without shame, call ourselves a representative democracy?
October 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Unfortunately, I think we are past that point already. Like you said, both parties are practically twins. Nader would have been an obvious choice if there were any sort of uncluttered view of the candidates. His whole life has been watching the watchmen, perfect right? Not when you have 2 parties spending billions to make themselves the only games in town. Someday poverty and health will be a special interest group.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:47 am
slow down there kirk. im not arguing with any of those points. i think my second post mentioned that the nader (spoiler) effect worked the other way with perot in the 80s. im not saying its morally or ethically right, wrong democratic or undemocratic. nor am i suggesting gore ran a great campaign. my point is simply that according the the official final numbers, naders campaign, taking the 97,000 most liberal votes, of which only a tiny fraction of would have easily pushed florida into gores camp had he not run.
i would like nothing more to believe that gore was the winner in florida and im not suggesting that the recounting was exactly a brilliant strategy, but all the studies you want wont reverse that now.
this argument is getting a little long in the tooth, so my final statement will be that the nader (spoiler) effect exists weather or not it determined the winner in florida or what it says about the viability of anything more than a 2 party system.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:48 am
also, all things being equal, i would agree with poyla and have preferred to see nader elected.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
[...] NYC. (via maxhubris) He flips. his. lid. That’s how they roll in Shaolin. Man. He’s no Colbert, but he’d get my vote. [...]