Originally Posted By wahooskipper Donny, I'm not sure you want to source information that was put together by Katharine Harris, Republican. Now, if you want to talk about FACTS you can take a look at the study paid for and undertaken by Florida and national newspapers that basically said that the requested methodology of both parties to perform the recounts would not have resulted in a Gore win but that other methodologies NOT requested by either party may have made a difference. Either way, it is hardly a fight worth having 11 years after the fact. You don't hear Gore complaining that the election was stolen from his so I think the rest of us should take his lead.
Originally Posted By Mr X I agree. I'm pretty much over it (thought what a mess in the meantime!), but when someone like Donny brings up that TRUE CONTROVERSY (Wahoo and other intelligent conservatives will certainly agree), as something comparable to the birther crap? PULEEZE.
Originally Posted By Donny just look under Official Results My point is Florida did call the election for Bush. Now Back to the fact that it's probably a safe bet we knew more then 50 / 50 Osama was in there. I will say in the aftermath we will probably find out we were sruvailing him to see where the couriers were going and coming from and other useful info but with 9 wives and how many kids you cant tell me we didnt know somthing.
Originally Posted By Labuda "Let me say I think we knew with 99.9 % that Osama was in that house." So how is it you think that when the President himself has admitted it was more like 55%?
Originally Posted By Mr X In fairness, and for clarification purposes, President Obama said he thought it was 55/45 in terms of mission success. Broken clock Donny is correct in saying that they were PRETTY SURE (I dunno about the 99% part) that it was in fact bin Laden living there.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>Either way, it is hardly a fight worth having 11 years after the fact. You don't hear Gore complaining that the election was stolen from his so I think the rest of us should take his lead.<< Right on. My understanding was a statewide recount would have resulted in a Gore victory, but that neither party was requesting that. A recount even under the most favorable of Democratic conditions in the contested counties still had Bush winning, IIRC. But I haven't read about it for years. This strikes me as a case against the electoral college. Times have changed; let's go to nationwide popular vote.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper There are only two things keeping us for a popular vote: The Republican Party and The Democrat Party A popular vote would be the first step to making the two parties irrelevant and as much as they hate when the other guy wins...the will NOT allow someone other than one of the two of them to win.
Originally Posted By Labuda What would it take to ditch the Electoral College? Would that be an Amendment to the Constitution?
Originally Posted By davewasbaloo I agree that voting reform is the way forward. Electorial college sucks, and is outmoded given the way the demography has changed.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper I guess an argument FOR the Electoral College can still be made in regards to the population centers having too much say over the process but I guess it just doesn't pass the smell test anymore.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>I guess it just doesn't pass the smell test anymore.<< I don't think it does. The opposite of that argument is actually true; Democrats almost never campaign in New York or L.A. because they'll most likely get the state. Instead they spend all their time in small places like Iowa, New Hampshire, Indiana, etc, that tend to be more contested. This is also true on the Republican side. Utah never has candidates here, since it'll always go Republican - so much for small places being "protected." Instead, if you have a popular vote, a candidate might schedule a stop-over in Salt Lake if they think it can help them swing a few more popular votes their way. Greater population centers should get more attention - there's more people there and they tend to impact the country on a greater level. And in the Internet age, most of the other arguments are moot as well.
Originally Posted By Mr X I think there is room for it overall, in Senatorial elections for example and possibly for primaries, but for a general Presidential election, I just don't see why 1 vote = 1 person doesn't make the most sense. If that were true, the fiasco in 2000 would never have happened! And I find it amusing that Donny considers THAT somehow democratic.
Originally Posted By Mr X ***"besides the fact that the first time around he wasn't even democratically elected" ahhhhhhhhh the democrat version of the birther movement.*** Your own words, dude.
Originally Posted By skinnerbox You did make the claim, Donny. You said Gore wasn't elected democratically, which simply isn't true. Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The electoral college has been rendered irrelevant for the past five or six decades, given modern telecommunications. The "one person = one vote" election is the most democratic process. It's time to finally ditch the electoral college, once and for all.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <I haven't seen a story yet that said the enhanced interrogation tactics played NO part in the eventual killing of bin Laden.> I have. In fact, I posted one in a different thread. A good number of experts here (including people who were in on the investigation of various Al Qaeda members) even say that the torture may well have DELAYED our getting bin Laden. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...642.html" target="_blank">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...642.html</a> Some excerpts: "Torture apologists are reaching precisely the wrong conclusion from the back-story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, say experienced interrogators and intelligence professionals. Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago. But that sequence of events -- even if true -- doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly. "I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006. It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post. "We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said." (snip) ""By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish," said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002." (snip) "The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003," Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, told The New York Times." (snip) The link between the Bush-era interrogation regime and bin Laden’s killing, then, appears tenuous -- especially since two of the three detainees in question apparently provided deceptive information about the courier even after being interrogated under durress. "It simply strains credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That's just not the case," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Story continues below Advertisement But for Alexander, Kleinman and others, the key takeaway is not just that the torture didn't work, but that it was actually counterproductive. "The question is: What else did KSM have?" Alexander asked. And he’s pretty sure he knows the answer: KSM knew the courier’s real name, "or he knew who else knew his real name, or he knew how to find him -- and he didn’t give any of that information," Alexander said. Alexander’s book, "Kill or Capture," chronicles how the non-coercive interrogation of a dedicated al Qaeda member led to Zarqawi’s capture. "I’m 100 percent confident that a good interrogator would have gotten additional leads" from KSM, Alexander said. "Interrogation is all about getting access to someone’s uncorrupted memory," explained Kleinman, who as an Air Force reserve colonel in Iraq in 2003 famously tried, but failed, to stop the rampant, systemic abuse of detainees there. "And you can’t get access to someone’s uncorrupted memory by applying psychological, physical or emotional force." Quite to the contrary, coercion is known to harden resistance. "It makes an individual hate you and find any way in their mind to fight back," and it inhibits their recall, Kleinman said. Far preferable, he said, is a "more thoughtful, culturally-enlightened, science-based approach." "I never saw enhanced interrogation techniques work in Iraq; I never saw even harsh techniques work in Iraq," Alexander said. "In every case I saw them slow us down, and they were always counterproductive to trying to get people to cooperate." (snip) "Carle’s upcoming book, "The Interrogator," chronicles his growing doubts about his orders from his superiors. "The methods that I was urged to embrace, I found first-hand -- putting aside the moral and legal issues, which we really cannot put aside -- from a practical and a tactical and a strategic sense and a moral and legal one, the methods are counterproductive," he said. "They do not work," he added. "They cause retrograde motion from what you’re seeking to accomplish. They increase resentment, not cooperation. They increase the difficulty in assessing what information you do hear is valid. They increase the likelihood that you will be given disinformation and have opposition from the person that you’re interrogating, across the board." Carle said the detainee he worked with regressed when coerced. "All it did was increase resentment and misery," he said." (snip) "These guys (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo) are trying to save their reputations, for one thing," Alexander said. "They have, from the beginning, been trying to prevent an investigation into war crimes." "They don’t want to talk about the long term consequences that cost the lives of Americans," Alexander added. The way the U.S. treated its prisoners "was al-Qaeda’s number-one recruiting tool and brought in thousands of foreign fighters who killed American soldiers," Alexander said. "And who want to live with that on their conscience?" Much more, including a chronology, at the link.
Originally Posted By skinnerbox <<"Carle’s upcoming book, "The Interrogator," chronicles his growing doubts about his orders from his superiors.>> I've heard Carle during interviews on talk radio. The guy is amazingly knowledgable about this stuff. He is probably the single best source for what is effective and what's not. If he claims that torture is counterproductive, then no other "expertise" is required. He is the expert, and our government should give him their undivided attention and incorporate his knowledge and experience into their interrogation practices.
Originally Posted By Labuda Thanks for the link to the HuffPost article, D - I read it the other day and LOVED it.
