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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (18661)	11/22/2000 2:27:06 AM
From: Dr. Id	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

This is an interesting perspective (to give the "porchers" another viewpoint...): Election from a third world perspective Interesting when you see yourself from another's perspective ... 1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA). 2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past. 3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother! 4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate. 5. Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy. 6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother. 7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error. 8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district. 9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions. 10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation. None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre-or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere." (A history professor from uppsala universitet in Sweden, called to tell me about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a phenomenon of the developing world.)

To: Sully- who wrote (18661)	11/22/2000 2:55:46 AM
From: jjkirk	Respond to of 65232

Hi Tim...You're on to something here... When I saw that the FL SC frequently used the term, 'The Will of the People', as justification for assuming the power over both the legislative & executive branches I finally understood why Gore almost immediately spoke of, 'The Will of the People' on election eve. Essentially it means that the Rule of Law is about to be sidestepped because we know better than you. Sorry but that is pretty scary. There is no balance of power among the three branches of government when you can ignore or rewrite the law under the guise of, 'The Will of the People.' That is usurping your powers. Ultimately, there are no laws, only ever changing dictums from those who hold the power to divine The Will of the People. ---------- "[Democratic government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." ALEXIS de TOCQUEVILLE (1805-1859). Democracy in America, 2.4.6, 1840, tr. Henry Reeve and Frances Bowen, 1862

To: Sully- who wrote (18661)	11/22/2000 8:52:08 AM
From: Jim Willie CB	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 65232

FoxNews cited legal backgrounds of FL Supreme Court not a single law school of serious reputation only one from decent 2nd tier the rest are nothing special they cited several, but not all seven justices George Washington Univ (good 2nd tier) Univ Florida Univ Miami Howard Univ Catholic Univ if I had guessed beforehand, I would have guessed at least one from Duke Univ or Univ North Carolina or Emery Univ these are the probably the best of the SouthEast Florida is (I repeat is) 1700 miles south of Harvard and 1500 miles south of Yale these guys are gonna be under enormous attack they not only usurped authority, but acted politically / Jim