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| 4/7 |
| 2004/3/29 [Politics/Domestic/President/Clinton] UID:12897 Activity:very high |
3/28 Let's take some perspective on Dick Clarke. He was the counter-
terrorism point man through 4 presidents. His ideology, whatever
it may be, obviously wasn't offensive enough for Reagan to appoint
and Bush I to keep. So he voted for Gore. Big fucking deal. He
voted for the VP of the administration that gave him his ear. This
somehow discredits him? Does it not disturb you that his suggestions
and recommendations were abandoned by Bush II? Because he "wrote a
book," his experience is negated? mumble mumble emperor mumble mumble
clothes... --scotsman
\_ It disturbs me that some disgruntled book writer gets so much
positive media attention which plays up his role as if he had
actually had a successful track record and plays down the timing
of his book and his bitter demotion and exit from government.
\_ The only people putting this view of the man forward is the
Bush admin and Bill Frist. You're buying a whole lot. How
many people will they be able to convince you are slimeball
opportunists?
\_ He has a positive track record-- during the Reagan, Bush I, and
Clinton years, no foreign terrorist organization committed an
act of terrorism on American soil. From what it sounds like,
he was demoted for wanting to do his job effectively instead
of pushing the Iraq invasion.
\_ Dude. Remember the first WTC attack? That was during Clinton.
\_ In the first few weeks of his presidency. And led
to his increased watchfulness on OBL. Clarke's point
is that the numbers just weren't high enough for Bush
to take it as seriously as he should have.
\_ Dude. I guess you didn't hear his testimony at the
hearings? The one where he says the Bush Admin wasn't
doing anything about terrorism, even the plan that
was put together under Clinton? Not following their
OWN plan INSTEAD of Clinton's, they were doing
not a thing. Nuthin. Nada.
\_ Chill. I was noting that the first WTC happened under
Clinton. Your attempt to change subjects and ignore
facts has failed. Try again later.
\_ I was actually fortunate enough to meet someone who worked in the
upper echelons of the White House during the Clinton and Bush 2
administration. She said something very similar to what Clarke
said. Basically, Bush really wanted to distance himself from
anything remotely "Clinton" related. Things like Middle East
Peace and Terrorism were Clinton obsessions and so Bush really
wanted to distance himself from them.
\_ Clinton? Focussed on terrorism and the middle east? Clinton
pushed so hard in the middle east that there's a fair argument
to be made that he's partially responsible for the current
uprising (at least the start of it). On terrorism? What was
done after the *first* attack on the WTC? After the Cole? After
2 US embassies in Africa? Nothing. Nothing happened. BC went
on TV and made pretty speeches but there was no intelligence
action, no military action, no diplomacy either in the UN or
country-country. Nothing. "I feel your pain". BFD. If I was
the new President I'd want to distance myself from previous
failure also.
\_ Clinton did plenty of things after every attack
mentioned Your contention that he did "nothing" is a big
fat Republican lie:
http://www.bartcop.com/clinton-terrorism-truth.htm
\_ I just thought that Bush Jr. and his neocons were too busy
start another Cold war, with Russia and China at their
crosshair. The scrap of Ballistic Missle Treaty, dumping
billions on missile defense just couple examples of where is
Bush Jr's priority lies. This is an example of how Bush and
his *STUPID* ideology put entire nation in danger... and he
got high approval rating as result. -kngharv
\_ You do realize that the Soviet's were never in
accordance with the ABM treaty right? It was
meaningless gesture on the part of the NATO (U.S.).
How is theatre missile defense a bad idea? The Airborne
Chemical Laser will be operation in a few years.
\_ And yet, the most likely nuclear attack is a smuggled
in dirty bomb. I'm sure your laser is real cool dude.
\_ This commission is one big let's cover each others asses. That
said I base my opinion in actions not words. Clinton had
eight years, 5 attacks do something, anything. Instead in
every foreign policy arena he simply kicked the can down the
road. What was Clinton's pinacle of foreign policy success?
Kosovo - where we effectively gave muslim insurgents a Balkan
base by bombing Christian Serbs?
I remember repeatedly posting links in 2000 about BC's 'diversity
quilt' policy at the CIA. When Woolsey was head of the CIA
he met with Bill Clinton alone twice, TWICE, in the span of two
years; other administrations this would be weekly. And this
was after the first WTC bombing. The running joke in
Washington was that the Cesna aircraft that crashed into
the White House was Woolsey trying to get a meeting with
Clinton. Sorry. You can whine, spin, and cry all you want but a
review of leftist policy the past 30 years is completely
damning. I've said it before: BC was too busy raising money
from Chicom's and jerking off the Oval Office sink - we now
now see the legacy of the Baby Boomer's quintessential
representative. BC's only anti-terrorism 'success' was immolating
the 'religious fanatics' in Waco.
Clarke was an integral part of BC administration - based on
his testimony is directly culpable.
\_ So you believe spurning our allies and sinking massive
resources into nation building is a foreign policy success?
\_ Good duck! When someone says something and you try to turn
it around and point a finger elsewhere without disputing any
of it, you should understand that you're granting everything
they say is true. Little one-off quips like this are weak.
\_ Pot, kettle... Your answer to the question of Clarke's
credibility, and the terrifying nature of his character-
ization of this administration was "Clinton was a do noth-
ing, sex-mongering hippie". 4 presidents. 4. --scotsman
\_ Way to avoid the question...
\_ The best part was where you define "stopping Milosevic's
genocide" as "giving the muslims a Balkan base". Shine on,
don't ever change.
\_ So you swallow CNN's propaganda wholesale. Fine -
Enjoy your dream world. Even a cursory search
on google for Islam Kosovo Albania is alarming.
\_ The Balkans are a sump. Unfortunately, you are both
right. Rather, I'd give Clinton & co. credit for
helping to prevent an Islamic takeover in Bosnia. -John
\- Helo, I think the way the back and forth went
about "he's fishing for a job in the kerry campaign"
was great, i.e. when Clarke said in front of Congress
"I wont take the job". What some of the slow witted
democratic supporters should have said "Hey, isnt
Condi Rice et al also fishing for a job in the
Bush Admin." I think the "could 9/11 have been
prevented" part of this is a huge distraction.
There is saying "dont make weak arguments your
opponents can win" and 'split the difference' since
it's hard to make the case "well that's not the
important matter" ... they should have kept hammering
in the iraq fiasco. the dems still dont get how to
play dirty. Dan Qualye has no political career/
power now because of low politics. You should
try to do the same to Scalia for example. Lots
of people are talking about whether Cheney is a
liability now etc. --psb
\_ Rice *has* a job and she'll be keeping it. She
doesn't need to sit quietly somewhere after being
demoted for incompetence and then retire just after
her 30th year in government (gotta get that next
big pension hike) and write a book in the middle of
an election from out of nowhere. I find it really
sickening that you want politics to be even dirtier
than they already are. There's a reason the % of
people who vote in this country is so dismal.
\_ You are right -- there is a reason so few
people vote in the US, but it is not because of
dirty politics. It's because of the asinine
pluralality-majority voting system we use.
\_ Are you refering to our Federalist
voting system designed to thwart
dictatorship by the majority?
\_ No, i'm referring to plurality-majority
voting systems (sorry about the typo):
http://tinyurl.com/3c2mq
http://tinyurl.com/36k4w (fairvote)
\_ I wouldn't say is opinion is wothless except he's so OBVIOUSLY
playing partisan politics NOW. I mean, here he is on the one
hand complaing that Bush didn't care enough about terrorism
(like good old Clinton did) and on the other saying Bush told
them to kill Bin Laden at the first opportunity and such.
In other words he says "Bush cared less, did more. BTW Bush
bad." Uhhh right man. Whatever. Besides the plot was almost
entirely underway by the time Bush took office. The fixes
would have had to have been instituted under Clinton to have
done any good. What the heck is with this "On September 9th
I tried to tell Bush that we should pay more attention to
Al-Quieda." Maybe so, but BIG FREAKING DEAL! Little late
by then, don't cha think?
\_ No, he said very little of what you attribute to him here. It's
good to know that your lack of attention to details will assure
\_ I didn't realize Scott McLellan had a csua account. [Delete me
again, and watch your little screed disappear.]
on google for Islam Kosovo Albania is alarming.
helping to prevent an Islamic takeover in Bosnia. -John
me of a job for quite a while. Thank you. |
| 4/7 |
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| www.bartcop.com/clinton-terrorism-truth.htm As counterterrorism and foreign policy professionals and veterans of the NSC staff in the years proceeding September 11, we have heard our share of misstatements and conspiracy theories about terrorism. But nothing quite compares to Richard Miniters book Losing Bin Laden, which includes a number of erroneous allegations about the Clinton administrations counterterrorism record, many of which were then published in this newspaper. Let us address a few: First, Mr Miniter recycles old, false Sudanese claims that the Clinton White House declined access to Sudans intelligence files on al Qaeda and that an unnamed CIA official declined an offer from Sudan in 1996 to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States. No one should believe these allegations by Mr Miniters source, Fateh Erwa a Sudanese intelligence officer known for his penchant to deceive that there was an offer to hand bin Laden over to the United States. Certainly, no offer was ever conveyed to any senior official in Washington. Had the Sudanese been serious about offering bin Laden to the United States, they could have communicated such an offer to any number of senior Clinton administration officials. It did not happen. Mr Miniter also claims that Sudan repeatedly tried to provide voluminous intelligence files on bin Laden to the CIA, the FBI, and senior Clinton administration officials and would be repeatedly rebuffed through both formal and informal channels. Absurd. In fact, it was precisely the other way around. On multiple occasions, and in venues ranging from Addis Ababa to Virginia, Washington, New York and Khartoum, the United States aggressively pressed the Sudanese to prove their alleged commitment to cooperating on terrorism, by severing their close ties with known terrorists, arresting specific individuals and providing specific intelligence information to us. Yet, despite frequent promises of cooperation, presumably in the hopes of getting off the terrorism list and out from under United States sanctions, the Sudanese consistently failed to deliver. This should come as no surprise, because Sudan in the mid-90s was one of the most hard-core terrorist states in the world. Its fiercely militant leader, Hassan Turabi, turned Sudan into a sanctuary, training base and active supporter for a range of Islamic terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda. That Mr Miniter so willingly credits bogus claims from the Sudanese regime a regime the Bush administration has rightly kept on the terrorism list, that has done nothing to bring an end to their domestic slave trade, and has only recently begun to engage seriously in international efforts to bring an end to a civil war that has killed over two million Sudanese citizens is deeply troubling. Another charge in the book is that President Clinton failed to retaliate immediately after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 despite the fact that responsibility for the attack was clear. Mr Miniter cites this as part of his overall and unsubstantiated theory that Mr Clinton refused to wage a real war on terrorism. When the USS Cole was hit in October 2000, al Qaeda was a prime suspect. But other terrorist groups and states which had attacked us before were also potentially responsible. It was appropriate that Mr Clinton wanted conclusions from his chief intelligence and law enforcement agencies before launching broad retaliatory strikes on al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. Definitive conclusions from the CIA and FBI on who was behind the Cole were not provided to Mr Clinton for the remainder of his term. Even without conclusions from the FBI and CIA on the Cole, bin Laden and his lieutenants were still hunted to the last day of Mr Clintons presidency for al Qaedas 1998 attacks on our two embassies in Africa. And if the Clinton administration dropped the ball in responding to the Cole bombing, why didnt the incoming Bush administration pick it up in January, 2001? Mr Miniter also alleges that in the spring and summer of 1998 the Clinton administration was deadlocked over the decision to conduct a special forces mission near a bin Laden camp. Mr Miniter suggests that the president did not want to overrule Pentagon concerns over risks because he could not stomach sending thousands of troops into harms way. Mr Clinton was, in fact, ready and willing to undertake a special forces or other paramilitary assault on bin Laden, particularly after our missile attacks on bin Laden in the summer of 1998, and often pressed his senior military advisers for options. But Mr Clintons top military and intelligence advisers concluded that a commando raid was likely to be a failure, given the potential for detection, in the absence of reliable, predictive intelligence on bin Ladens whereabouts. Mr Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the United States military involving using force against bin Laden and al Qaeda. As President Bush well knows, bin Laden was and remains very good at staying hidden. For eight years the Clinton administration fought hard to counter terrorism, and while we didnt accomplish all that we hoped, we had some important successes. The current administration faces many of the same challenges. Confusing the American people with misinformation and distortions will not generate the support we need to come together as a nation and defeat our terrorist enemies. |
| tinyurl.com/3c2mq -> www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/BeginnningReading/plurality.htm Congress were at one time elected in multi-member districts-often small two or three seat districts. Ten states still use some of these districts for state legislative elections. Today, however, at-large voting is used primarily in local elections, primarily municipal elections. Typically an entire town or city is considered to be one large district, and all candidates for office run together against each other. In at-large voting, all the candidates for office run in one large multi-member district - usually the entire city. Voters have the same number of votes as the number of seats to be filled. Below is a ballot that would be used in a city election in which the members of a five-person city council would be chosen. All candidates for the five seats are on the ballot and voters cast five votes for the candidates they prefer. The following table illustrates how the votes might be distributed and the winners chosen. At-Large Ballot At-Large Voting Results There are several variations of at-large voting. In one of them that is used in Seattle and several other cities, the at-large seats are numbered and specific candidates vie for these individual seats. So candidates A and B would vie for seat one, candidates C and D for seat two, and so on. All the voters in the city cast one vote for their preferred candidates in each of these races, and the candidate with the plurality wins. In another variation, some cities use the numbered seats, but also have a residency requirement. Candidates for a particular seat must live in a certain area or district of the city. Again all the voters in the city are able to vote for each of the seats. At-large voting gives good representation to the largest political group or party. It is also designed to ensure that city councilors represented the interests of the city as a whole, not the special interests of particular neighborhood districts. Like SMDP, it also encourages a two-party system and single-party legislative majorities. In addition, since there are no districts, this voting systems eliminates the possibility of gerrymandering. In particular, this system tends to be the worst at representing racial and political minorities. It allows a majority of the voters to win all the seats on the city council, thus shutting out these minorities from representation. Note that in the election described above, the Republican voters are in the majority and so are able to elect all the city councilors. Finally, at-large voting, in its most common form, fails to ensure that all neighborhoods in the city are represented. Two-Round Runoff Voting The two-round system TRS is a majority voting system. Majority systems are currently used less commonly than plurality systems. They require candidates in single-member district elections to garner a majority of the votes to win legislative office. TRS requires a runoff election between the two top candidates if no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the general election. This system is designed to solve one of the obvious problems of plurality voting: the possibility of electing a candidate that was supported only by a minority of the electorate in the district. Only two countries in Western Europe use TRS for legislative elections, France and Monaco. Several developing countries that came under French influence also use this system, including Mali, Togo, Chad, Gabon, and Haiti. In the United States, TRS is used in a number of jurisdictions, mostly on the local level and mostly in the South. Runoffs first came into use here at the beginning of the twentieth century when parties began to have primaries. These primaries often attracted more than two candidates and the resulting winner would sometimes garner much less than a majority of the vote. Today, runoffs are also used in some United States cities that have non-partisan elections, again primarily because such contests are more likely to draw more than two candidates. In order to ensure that the winning candidate receives a majority of the vote, this system uses two rounds of voting with polling taking place on two separate days. Ballots are identical to those used in plurality voting see above, and voters mark them in the same way. In the first round, all candidates are listed on the ballot and voters indicate their preference of one of them. All these votes are then added up and if a candidate receives a majority of the vote 50 1 vote, that candidate is declared elected. If no one receives a majority, the field is cut down to the top two candidates who received the highest number of votes, and a runoff election is held. The second election is typically held several weeks after the first. The winner is the candidate who gets the most votes, which is inevitably a majority, since there are only two candidates running. The two-round runoff system is only a slight modification of the single-member district plurality system, and it is really only designed to address one of its problems - the possibility of a plurality winner - which it does eliminate. It also does well in encouraging a two-party system and single-party legislative majorities. However, it is still a winner-take-all voting system and so it shares all the basic problems of this approach to voting, including the misrepresentation of parties, manufactured majorities, gerrymandering, high levels of wasted votes, and denial of fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women. In addition, it brings with it two more problems: the added expense of a second election, and the lower voter turnout that usually plagues those second elections. Instant Runoff Voting Instant runoff voting is also known as IRV, and majority preferential voting. In Australia, where this system is used to elect their lower house of parliament, it is called the alternative vote. Like two-round voting, this majority system a minor variation of single-member district plurality voting that was developed to ensure that the winning candidate enjoys the support of the majority of the voters in the district. It was also thought to be an improvement over the two-round system because it does not require a separate election-it provides an instant runoff. In IRV voting, like plurality voting, all candidates are listed on the ballot. But instead of voting for only one candidate, voters rank the candidates in the order of their preference. It is an AccuVote ballot, which allows ballots to be scanned and tabulated by computer. It is similar to marking answers on the standardized tests used in schools. On this ballot, voters fill in numbered boxes to indicate their ranking of the candidates. The mark a 1 for their most preferred candidate, a 2 for their second preference, and so on. Instant Runoff Ballot The counting of the ballots is also different from plurality voting. If a candidate receives over 50 of the first choice votes, he or she is declared elected. If no candidate receives a majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The ballots of supporters of this defeated candidate are then transferred to whichever of the remaining candidates they marked as their number two choice. It is as if you told the supporters of the last place candidate, Your candidate cannot possibly win, so which of the remaining candidates would you like your vote to go to? After this transfer, the votes are then recounted to see if any candidate now receives a majority of the vote. The process of eliminating the lowest candidate and transferring their votes continues until one candidate receives a majority of the continuing votes and wins the election. In this hypothetical election, there are 100,000 votes cast and no candidate receives over 50 of the vote in the first round. So the lowest candidate-Royce-is eliminated and his ballots are transferred to their second choices. |
| tinyurl.com/36k4w -> www.fairvote.org/plurality/index.html Plurality Winners in American Elections October 2003 We have assembled a great deal of information about the growing frequency and impact of victories in American primary and general elections which are won with less than 50 of the vote meaning won by a plurality rather than a majority of votes cast. Most American states have had governors who have won elections with less than 50 of the vote since 1990. In the three presidential elections since 1988, most states awarded all of their electoral votes to a candidate who was opposed by most voters in that state. A significant number of congressional seats were won by mere pluralities. Presidential Elections Presidential Elections and Plurality Wins in Selected Years; |