A 59 or 60 Plymouth Fury tends to stick in the memory! They are kind of like that date you had in high school with the “bad girl”….taken only once, but you remember her forever…..

(you also remember the “good girls” forever too! I married mine!)

Geez, Michael, 40 years is a long time to remember things, isn’t it?

As to the pushbutton automatic transmission I had quite a few incidents where I pushed the wrong button. I was a street drag racer in those years and when you were shifting in a race it was quite easy to hit reverse at the wrong time. How I made it out of that period without killing myself, or injuring others I don’t know. Sorry for the rambling of a guy whose gotten long in the tooth, but your comments brought me back.

“I thought it was a 61 Plymouth coupe, with a three speed manual on the column.” -Michael Spindell

In the summer of 1967 I owned a pale blue 60 Plymouth Fury (with the huge tailfins) white interior, push-button transmission up to the left of the steering wheel. Only problem, the P (or it may have been the R) button would stick in the depressed position, but you could reach under the dash and pop it back out. My friends were all driving little brit and italian sports cars but I prided myself on my lumbering tuna boat.

Apropos of nothing…just a good memory.

I guess we’ve all suffered these type of attacks from benighted souls who’ve absorbed the agitprop and spew it out mindlessly. I feel more sorry for them than angry at them. It is pathetic to live your life without examining and reexamining your own beliefs. It seems to be a matter of lack of confidence in one’s own reasoning process and that bespeaks a sad upbringing, perhaps more than a lack of intelligence.
To put it another way, I first realized that I might be starting to get wisdom when I began to understand how little I knew.

He has yet to make the connection between him feed them and their pelting his car with niblets.

(Oh yes I did)

I am sensitive on this issue, having been accused of same in circumstances you outlined above, so that’s probably why I didn’t get the irony–sorry about that. And I agree with Mespo that Niblet is needlessly provacative. This wears thin quickly. I know he represents the veiwpoint of many of our fellow citizens, so I wish he would make an argument instead of trying to start one.

Thanks for hearing me out.

Jill

Observing willful ignorance and suffering needless provocation will do that to you, you know.

So, we have seen that the woman on the street in Wyoming, the least populous state, has little incentive to change the EC since its vote would be reduced to one-third its former strength. Similarly, the woman on the street in NY has even less incentive to change it, since the winner gets all of its EC votes, giving its vote powerful national impact.

This resistance to change is not the will of some shadowy ruling elite, but just a practical political horse trade. Many dislike the undemocratic nature of the EC, but it survives primarily because it has proven to be nearly impossible to form a broad consensus for an alternative. Secondarily, each side had enough of a stake in its present form to resists any change that would hurt its position.

I think niblet is uncivil, ignorant and makes countless stupid statements but that doesn’t make him like a terrorist. I think we should be very careful about using that word to describe others, especially in the stazi like environment we live in.

Jill

How about that lot in Florida that is water-front, water-back and water-topped?

Huh? The Democrats polled 241,000 in Utah in 2004. If they poured in money, staff and appearances and boosted their vote by 10 percent, they got—24,000 votes. Even an unbeleivable 20 per cent gain nets only 48,000 votes.

If they poured that effort into NY, a 10 percent gain nets—430,000 votes! If the GO P put that effort into NY, a 10 percent gains gets them 296,000 votes!

There are certainly tens of thousands of votes out there in the small states. But there are hundreds of thousands in the big states.

After selling the small states on direct elections, I plan to sell them Betamax, eight-track tapes, and whole-life insurance.

Niblet,
I find it interesting that you are so disparaging and dare I say unpatriotic when it comes to the US. If you don’t believe in the Constitution then you don’t believe in our country. If you don’t believe in our country then what do you believe in? You disparage liberals, so I guess you consider yourself to be a conservative. I don’t think there are many conservatives like you who don’t believe in the basic structure of our country. If there are, then we are in dire trouble because we are threatened by people, like yourself, who consider themselves to be above, or outside the system. I wouldn’t like to believe it about you, but you could well be a terrorist with that attitude, since they also don’t believe in our system of government.

Excuse me?

I’m sorry, but I don’t recall Article III or Amendment XII conferring any subject matter jurisdictional power upon the Supreme Court to issue a certain Stay on 12/9/2000.

In fact, if I recall correctly, Article IV’s guarantee of a ‘Republican Form Of Government,’ said form of government being expounded upon in Federalists 47 & 51 etc., prohibited the Court’s action and gave that accumulation of so much power in so few hands a specific name…

While I agree with my fellow posters above that due to the disproportionate weight of small state vs. large state votes, the E.C. will be with us for a long, long time.

The EC also ensures the continuance of the vaunted two party system, which I think suppresses new viewpoints and the ability of this country change substantively. Partisanship has become similar to rooting for ones’ favorite sports team and has denied the exchange of ideas fostered by vigorous debate. I support the effort towards direct popular vote, but I’m perplexed as to how we get there.

You always lay out your arguments very well. Both you and rcampbell make good points.

Jill

I have a lot of issues with the 2000 election, but if we assume the high ground and set aside suggestions of impropriety, we see the founders’ intent played out. In that election we saw the electoral votes of states like Wyoming and the Dakaotas having considerable weight in the outcome. Granted, these were not among the original states, but I believe the founders, especially those from the smaller or more rural states of the time like Vermont, Delaware or South Carolina, sought to protect the interests of those states and those voters’ ballots from being negated by the larger population areas of Philadelphia and New York by agreeing to level the playing field somewhat. One can almost hear the arguments at the Constitutional Convention about “fairness” and “undue influence of large states”. It would appear they reached a compromise that provided sufficient fairness to those concerns that it endures.

Now, it takes 3-4ths of the states to ratify a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the College. So the 13 smallest states, out of pure self interest, will never vote to eliminate their triple vote in the College. They effectively have a veto.

So why do you say that the Electoral College is preserved for and by the nation’s ruling elite? It would be preserved by the people of the 13 smallest states if an amendment were ever to pass Congress. How are you going to persuade them to give up their advantage? How would they poossibly benefit, since their popular votes would be counted one-for-one, not three-for-one?

It is also doubtful if their state legislatures would ever even bother to vote on the proposed amendment within the time limit for ratification. (Maybe you should require ratification by state conventions if you are drafting an amendment).

Further, any amendment would have to get at least 67 votes in the Senate, giving 34 Senators, representing the 17 smallest states, an effective veto in Congress. The amendment may never make it to the states.

By the way, DC, just like the smallest states, gets 3 electoral votes, far out of proportion to its population. But its voters have absolutely no say whatsoever in any step of the approval of proposed dconstitutional amendments, in either Congress or in the ratification process, in yet another denial of democracy.

Finally, while Clinton may have opposed the College in 2000, no one ever changed that system, so right now she is simply playing the cards she has been dealt under the rules chosen by the dealer. That’s politics. Big deal!