It’s I site where I can document the reasons to elect Chris Dodd, at least as I see them. They may not be good reasons to elect a Senator, but they are the reasons. So feel free to head on over and give it a look.

These days the talk isn’t about whether Barrack Obama will win and the democrats will pick up seats, but whether the democrats will get a supermajority. The idea of either political party getting what they want without and check on them is scary.

A supermajority means they can react quickly. Why is that bad? Because our politicians are slaves to opinion polls and perceived public opinion. They’re not big on actually working through a problem or thinking about the implications of their actions. I remember my elementary school history and the theory that the founding fathers designed our government to be inefficient and it still makes sense to me today.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece gives their take (a conservative one) on what absolute democrat control would mean. It’s clear the republicans won’t control either the house or Senate so a republican President would at least bring back some of the inefficiency we need.

Since all those Senate races are out of my control I’m not sure if I should reconsider my statement that I could never vote for today’s McCain. I’m thinking that since my vote doesn’t count anyway, I’ll vote McCain as an empty gesture. But why vote, I can keep 1/2 hour of my life instead.

He was pro term limits when they benefited him (harder to run against an incumbent). Now that he’d had to leave his position of power he’s anti-term limits (well, for now – more on that in a moment).

He’s says it’s:

….to give the people of New York a fuller choice…

Really? In 1993 voters endorsed a tow-term limit. In 1996 the rejected a referendum (led by the city council) to extend the limit to three terms. So this time Mayor Bloomberg gave the people what they wanted by not bothering to ask them and ignoring the results the last time the were asked. As the NY Times City Room blog put it:

…a plan that was hatched with a handful of fellow billionaires and business moguls…

Who made the decision? Fifty one city council members, 35 of which were at the limit and can now run again.

Not all of the Mayor’s typical cronies supported the term limit extension so the Mayor bought the support of a key crony. There was one billionaire that that stuck to his principles until the Mayor was able to buy his support by agreeing to let the guy sit on a committee to examine term limits after the election and put the question to the voters (gee, maybe they were right the first two times). There are those who feel this guarantees the return of the two-term limit. Me, I see a fourth term. They are using the crutch that these aren’t ordinary times and the “crisis” demands Bloomberg remain.

So, New York City government is in the hands of the billionaires. Term limits when we don’t like the guy (or gal) and no term limits when one of us is in there. I guess just spending a lot of money in a campaign is too risky.

If the government requires manipulation to keep someone in (or out), whatever the reason, then it’s a failure. What happened may be legal, but New Yorkers should reclaim their city by voting against the current mayor, no matter who runs against him.

As for the people who support lifting the term limits now – it’s the height of hypocrisy then return term limits later.

What is the mission of this website? Most broadly, to accumulate and analyze polling and political data in way that is informed, accurate and attractive. Most narrowly, to give you the best possible objective assessment of the likely outcome of upcoming elections.

The site analyzes the past accuracy of the source polls and current trends to come up with their own numbers.

People who live in small-town America are “real Americas”, I guess the rest of us are faking it.

And when northern Virginia begins to poll in favor or Obama they aren’t the real Virginians.

To help us all out, the Daily Show has a quiz so we can learn if I’m a real American (you need to watch the end of the previous clip as the “third crazy lady”) will set the stage for the quiz.:

I have to return to that third crazy lady. To say that members of the Senate and House are anti-America is ludicrous. They may be incompetent, they may be corrupt, they may have views you oppose, but that doesn’t make them anti-American.

This isn’t negative campaigning, its a campaign of division and hate.

I’m registered as unaffiliated but have voted for the Republican Presidential candidate as far back as I can remember (even last time when it was tough and a reluctant vote) but I won’t be able to do it this time. I had hoped that John McCain would be the McCain of old and avoid a political party’s natural tendency to go to the extreme. Instead his candidacy is giving voice and support to to the fringe and I have no doubt he’d continue to do so to keep their support when he’s in office.

I’m just grateful the Democratic candidate isn’t Hilary.

Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole?

While I would have guessed Republicans, isn’t that the conventional wisdom? But obviously Mr. McCall found otherwise or he wouldn’t have anything to publish. But the results are even more shocking than expected. Are are still shocking after excluding Herbert Hoover’s depression era presidency.

The two best Presidents:

1. Democrat Bill Clinton – up 15.2%
2. Republican George H.W. Bush (the first Bush President) – up 11%

As with any statistics there’s all sorts of ways to interpret or try to poke holes in them but check it out.

via Daring Fireball

The money quote from the article:

…voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”

To top it off, in our current environment the term “every vote counts” is the big lie.

They also site a paper by Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter who analyzed 56,000 Congressional and state-legislature elections. The median margin of victory in these elections was 22 and 25 percent respectively. Also from the article:

Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.

And what happens of that one vote does need to be counted? The decision is taken out of the hands of the voters. In the 2000 election the results were decided by the seven Supreme Court justices. They voted along political party lines, which at least gives the appearance of bias.

The aftermath of the 2000 election also blows the every vote counts theory out of the water. One report, by NORC determined that the winner would be different depending upon the method used to interpret the ballots. Not that picking the method would have helped a candidate since the recount rules requested by each candidate would have shown the other candidate to win.

They weren’t even fighting over votes by all of us. They were fighting over electoral votes. They only wanted to recount the votes that would then get them those prize electoral votes. Once all was said and done it’s generally considered that Gore got more votes than Bush. So this means not only do votes not count, if they are counted they’re marginalized.

In the past when I voted the winner was always a foregone conclusion so I always voted for the loser or one of the 3rd party candidates. Now I don’t think it’s worth a trip to the polls.

Isn’t staying home and sitting it out the smart thing to do?