Sen. Hillary Clinton today, speaking about the Michigan and Florida primaries in January, said, “The results of those primaries were fair and they should be honored.”
Excuse me? How was the Michigan primary fair? Barack Obama wasn’t even on the ballot! How does that constitute a fair election? That sounds more like the approach some Eastern Bloc country would use. Any Hillary supporters out there care to explain what’s fair about a ballot that doesn’t list all the candidates?
In Florida, both candidates were on the ballot but neither had campaigned there and the voters knew in advance that their votes wouldn’t count. That hardly sounds like a a legitimate, “fair” election either. How many people stayed home because they didn’t think their vote would count? How many would have voted differently if there had been an active campaign in Florida?
Meantime, the nation is abuzz as both Florida and Michigan try to come up with acceptable plans for “do-over” elections, on the assumption that somebody somewhere will declare such do-overs valid. Just today, Florida officials announced a) that they would have a mail-in vote, and then, b) that their voters didn’t want a mail-in vote.
If either state employs a method other than what their voters are accustomed to, all sorts of unforeseen variables will be introduced and render any result “abnormal.” Not the least of these is the voters’ perception of the candidates on the day of the do-over versus what their perception might have been on the normal election date. There is no way to accurately re-create what might have been.
This brings us back to the original premise that the rules were set before the game started, and the players agreed to abide by them. The only fair thing to do now is abide by those rules, not try to rewrite them in the middle of the game.
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??? It looks like the UN or whoever will have to send observers to the US to see that there is no cheating. —
For years I have been reading nothing but US newspapers. I learnt English that way. However, after reading a few dozen blogs, all my ideas about your country had to be dumped. Little houses in New York; lazy drunks in distant villages; does nobody live in a flat? do they all live in houses? Are even the big cities surrounded by little streets and houses only 2 storeys high? Do many people live on large spaces that look like farms? Is everybody divorced? The other day I read a mother who spoke about “my homeless daughter”. !!
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LOL. Great idea! Send in the observers. We certainly don’t seem to be doing very well on our own.
Whatever housing you want, the U.S. has. Suburban sprawl is rampant. Developments of individual private homes (1-3 stories), spread for miles out from the dense inner cities. That can leave a lot of the underprivileged living in the inner cities, which is part of the reason why people who can afford it, or who want newer housing, prefer the suburbs. Others prefer living in apartments near the central city, where business and entertainment are concentrated. We have developed this way because we have so much open space in the central and western parts of the country. There is less land and more dense population in the Northeast, and more people there live in apartments or flats and use public transportation. Small family farms, so common when I was young, are dying out as corporate farming takes over. Divorce has become common; I think the statistics now say 50% of marriages end in divorce. The country is so large and so diverse, it’s really difficult to generalize about anything. -30-
Hey Windy,
Looks like everybody is swapping out blogs for new ones. I have to agree with you on this one. Hillary seems to have pulled a fast one on this. The rules that the Democrat party has for the primaries are utterly confusing to me. I’m surprised anyone can understand them. And possibly that is what Mrs. Clinton is counting on.
I believe there are no lengths to which Hillary is willing to go in order to capture the candidacy from the DNC – and I still think she will find a way to pull it off. The Clintons are not ones to be denied what they feel they are entitled to or want.
WC
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She’s like that robot in “The Terminator .” Crush her, short out her circuits, cut off her head, throw her into molten metal… she just keeps coming. How did Arnold finally stop that thing, anyway? I’ve forgotten.
-30-
My husband is from Ohio. In his immediate family there are three nurses, three university teachers, a builder and there is even a NASA engineer there. However, I never think of them when I read the papers. Somehow, I do not remember them as “Americans”.
The strangest feature about life there is the religion thing. I thought that in Switzerland (where I am from) religion tends to be a taboo, whereas here in Spain (where I now live and work) it is a loud political scarecrows, but not really taken serious, except to annoy your enemies.