TNH fills in later an advantage of those monsters: the curtain, so nobody can see how you vote. My precinct used these until recently; now there's a scannable ballot, filled in on a high table with a flimsy 3-sides-of-a-square plastic screen. I don't know the official size of precincts here, but it's small enough that the next one over (including half of my one-block street) has the same polling place.
Daryl@36: I think JESR is describing an uncommon situation; I suspect more common is 1-1.5 polls (average per year), which is infrequent enough for people to forget what to do. Boston has more due to Clinton and an odd law: the schedule was reset to have full-term elections to replace the mayor he appointed to be legate to the Vatican, rather than let the acting mayor (who ended up winning) rule until the next scheduled election or elect a short-term replacement. So we had city council (2 years) ~primary and general last year, and will have state and Federal primary and general (mix of 2-, 4-, and 6-year -- governor is 4 years, opposite phase to President) this year and council and mayoral (4-year) next year. It's still not enough -- at the last election there weren't enough ballots delivered to some sites.
re platting: despite being part of one of the oldest cities on the continent, the area around me was platted for home lots only in 1925; IIRC, before that it was stockyards.
Durbin@105: Your explanation does not make sense mathematically; the majority of votes are in a handful of states. There is a modest multiplier effect from the 2-votes-for-existing rule, but it's not that large; e.g., Bush would have beaten Kerry even without it. As for paying attention to farmers: some would say we have far too much of that now, others would sugggest farm \corporations/ are getting too much representation -- cf the ethanol boondoggle, a present for ADM.
dido@342: The hint points to possibilities, but I'm not making anything fit even with a computerized dictionary. Annoying, since I reread those 6 years ago, but memory fades.
Well, I knew my Latin was rusty, but I should have done better than 1,2(*),3,6 (and 7, which I could read but not assign --- shameful considering how many times I've gone to read something else, taken one of those volumes just to skim, and come up for air an hour later).
*I really did figure it before getting to the obvious bit that Bill Higgins pointed to; there ought to be \something/ analogous and usable, even if it looks a bit like Herb "Populus iamdudum defutatus est" Denenberg.
And if we're doing mistranslations, my favorite is "Cave canem": Beware, I may sing.
Mary@161: Boynton gets \half/ the credit; I know of the composer and think he finally found his level....
Steve@76: the half-price tickets booth in Times Square. Usually doesn't bring theater down to movie prices, but sometimes it's close. http://www.newvictory.org is a theater that does shows kids and grownups can appreciate -- I saw The Wolves in the Walls there. I second AHT's recommendation; there are more sedate listings, but Time Out (from the bit I've seen, and greater knowledge of the London original) is more likely to point out naked emperors and bring up hidden gems).
Gursky@105: Can you find Land of Unreason? The Blue Star? (I assume you know that NESFA has reprinted the complete Harold Shea stories.)
Chris@148: Did that line strike you as it did me as being the worst cross-character bit in the movie? Way too much of his best-known part leaking through....
dido@216: I don't see guesses on this (maybe due to my blindness), but it nags that I ought to recognize -- rot13'd answer? hints?
diatryma@256: that's obnoxious, but so is an alleged Credo beginning -"I believe in a God who will smite my enemies..."- (IIRC it was a translation of a Schubert collection of ~hymns that was for some reason called a mass.)
Debbie@71 (& subsequent): which 13 states and which 34 senators would you \rely/ on not to ban gay marriage, given the current score on referenda? My UUSWAG is that abortion is less at risk, but how many would vote against an amendment to nibble it away, and then another, . . .? The country that almost passed the ERA is a generation behind us -- a generation of a deliberate, coldblooded process of kedging the country to the right; I'm beginning to think Twain was correct.
Fragano@687: there's \much/ worse; there were some very ... strange ... minds wandering around Usenet back then. "I float like an ornithopter, and sting like a hunter-seeker...."
Keir@87: if the Green vote on confidence matters, how did Labour assemble a government in the first place? Either they have a majority without the Greens, or they're going down Real Soon Now -- at least in a standard parliamentary government; your 93 suggests that somehow a government can form without a majority if the minorities can't get it together, which is ... unusual.
If you lot don't stop punning on Dune, I'm going to have to pull out the proposed cast list for the 1980's movie. Sample: the reverend mother Helen Mohiam is played by Joan Rivers: "Can we tawk? You wanna tawk? Here, stick your hand in this box!"
Keir@58: The Greens have wrung various policy concessions out of Labour, while remaining out of government.
How?
So in the US, your choice of party is very constrained, especially in very liberal or conservative areas,
For presidential elections, perhaps. But the tripartite system means that representatives can shift with the area's politics -- Massachusetts' last few Republican representatives were rather to the left of some then-Democrats. (The same applies to governors -- MA's 1990-96 was a Republican so liberal that the Republican chair of the Senate committee on ambassadorial appointments wouldn't even schedule his hearing.)
BTW, my apologies for the term "crank"; it was excessive.
Keir, Sica: once you've chosen crank party X as most reflecting your views, what odds do you have that they'll have a particle of influence? Unless they're near the plurality party (or unless the plurality party is desperate to assemble a majority -- see Israeli Labor and some of the deals they've made with people I consider religious fruitcakes), it seems to me that you've made your pure choice with about as much effect as a {Nader,Buchanan}-in-2000 voter. I know it's not a perfect analogy, but I don't see the proportional system offering substantial advantages. \No/ representational system is perfect, or even near ideal; each has wins and losses. IMO, the defects of the U.S. system are magnified because one party has figured out just how much its owners can win if the party commits enough fouls.
#285: as conservative economists love to tell us, redistribution is not generation. (Do read the Hamilton if you haven't--he tosses all the optimism of his previous novels and makes the result at least as plausible.)
Dave: If new policy is voted in the party room, the opportunity to dissent comes there.
Am I missing something, or is there no opportunity in there for the electorate to affect party policy? In this country it is generally considered an advance in democracy that party policy is not (totally) decided in closed rooms and is not binding on people running under the party banner; the former is not even republican, and the latter assumes a homogeneity the U.S. lacks. (cf albatross@2. Example: that Romney is a worse weathervane than Talleyrand is despicable; that there is great latitude in what defines a party position is a necessity in this country.)
The process also relates to the U.S. not being a parliamentary democracy; leaders are chosen more directly and on their own positions, which they are expected to work for as a matter of principle rather than obedience to a party line.
Note that we've already disagreed about the relative merits of ]presidential[ and parliamentary democracies; I don't expect either of us to convince the other. I don't even need my own words to mock the parliamentary system when W. S. Gilbert did it better:
When in that House M. P.'s divide,
If they've a brain and cerebellum, too,
They've got to leave that brain outside,
And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.
It is true that carving up the potential nominee of your own party may be a bad thing; this is why most candidates are careful about it in public (and why some commit the sabotage in private, cf. McCain in SC in 2000 -- although that could be less calculation and more a messianic conviction that \this/ step will guarantee the prize without side effects). But differentiation is appropriate and IMO preferable to the behind-the-scenes choice you suggest; if the party can change its position and require everyone to go along on pain of expulsion, can the members be truly said to represent their constituents at all?
Dave Luckett: The Algebraist was Banks's attempt at modern space opera, which IMO is a \very/ acquired taste. The Culture books are different -- usually shorter and less tangled (not short and straight, but tA was a monster); you shouldn't judge Banks solely on this book. Try reading the author's notes referenced in #321; I think you'll find his attitudes somewhat agreeable.
albatross@26: that's a crude and partial summary of the arguments; you omit, for instance, the commonly-cited fact that all the ID proposals amount to a poll tax.
#280: "geek" is not a sufficient word for those two. I gave up shortly after the respondent said "95% confidence interval".
281: That's easy to explain after the performances in SW 2&3; Vader is still a petulant kid with no judgment and a "My dad can beat your dad" attitude. Further, he's still just the student, and probably such a difficult one that Palpatine has often regretted choosing him. Even before taking the throne, Palpatine had some idea of when the Force was useful and when something more broadly impressive was necessary; AFAICR the Force has never been shown to be wholesale (if it were, \one/ Jedi could have performed the rescue in #3 instead of getting most of them slaughtered), let alone of the scale to blow up a planet.
The analogies and counter-analogies to the current candidates' political stances "are left as an analysis for the student". (For a counterbalance, read Wolfe's latest on the economics of piracy, or Hamilton's Fallen Dragon on the corporate analogy and its difficulties; destruction is easy, but making it pay is at best very difficult.)
albatross@247: the question is how many of the Hillary-haters are in categories (a) and (b)? My suspicion is not many; there's a virulence about the rhetoric which belies the capacity to make a choice, suggesting instead that the haters are hoping to drag people to their end of the plank. I think it's anybody's guess whether HRC will lose more votes from the right-wing rhetoric Wingate is somehow missing than she will win from the {un,mis}polled turnout she got in NH.
mary@176: your report of more urban votes for Clinton lines up with a discussion on NPR; a pollster said it looked like more poor people voted for Clinton and admitted that polling doesn't adequately represent more people -"because more of them don't respond"-.
various on Hillary-haters: IMO, what they hate is that she might actually make something happen. cf the nasty comments about Roosevelt (at least nobody can call HRC a traitor to her class), or the hatred directed at WJC (IMO) because he was just as effective a schmoozer as Reagan, thereby undercutting Republicans who could only do well against old pols, policy wonks, geeks, ...
Xopher@208: the evidence was clear that Bush was lying by the time of the resolution; see for instance the alleged centrifuge tubes. IMO, no Democrat has an excuse for voting in favor -- but the real debit against HRC is she still won't admit that history has made it clear she voted the wrong way.
Wingate@215: your claim that the two sides have different standards for scandal does not hold up even to the facts Terry presented. Care to try again?
re the FBI not examining who squelched the investigation of questionable pilot trainees: was it squelching or simple incompetence? Today's NPR news included a report of at least one top-secret wiretap that was shut down because the office running it was massively behind ($10e5?6?) on its phone bill, and it wasn't the only one that was deep in the hole.
Serge@87: It's not a matter of fright; I'd guess that the mobsters who play in casinos rather than running them mostly don't play the slots. Most of the rules about slot machines are a matter of state law, since the states see an interest in making the games look fair; there's no obvious financial win to fair elections.
Jim@98: IIRC, "likely" reflects what the pollees say, not how they were chosen. Which suggests that even more people were lying to pollsters, or got interested very late, or got encouraged by the record warm weather, or . . . .
albatross@163: Romney was gov for only 4 years; he was the Repub's emergency replacement for a nonentity seatholder after he made a splash with the 2002 winter Olympics. AFAIK he knows squat about foreign policy -- witness the way he laced into Huckabee for having the nerve to speak mild truths about Bush's Iraq policy. His best-known managerial experience was in a venture-capital firm, which says nothing about his ability; I don't know whether the Olympics took a guess based on his father+religion+"experience" (i.e., he knew how to order people to make bricks out of straw and some of them figured out how), or saw some actual management experience I've lost track of.
Elizabeth@5: if she died because of a bomb, it's easy to claim that it was a jihadi's fault. As we've seen (e.g., the notorious NYCPD case), hitting someone with a pistol is hard even when their whole body is exposed; the reported cause of death is head shots, which suggests an expert pistol shooter, who is much more likely to be a member of the notorious Pakistani security service (the one that was inter alia supporting the Taliban, and that still is reported to have many people more sympathetic to Islamic radicals than the rest of Musharraf's government does).
There are a lot of factoids, reports, etc. in the above -- but Musharraf knows that U.S. perceptions affect how much money he gets to misuse, and has obvious reasons for the CYA-looking claims he's come up with, regardless of the actual facts.
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