I'm sure you've heard this one before...
Vice President Dick Cheney has been dropping F-bombs on Democratic Senators. Since this is a family weblog, I won't explain what F-bombs are, except to hint that they involve gratuitous use of the word 'fuck'. Like 'Fuck yourself.'
The best part?
As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the "Defense of Decency Act" by 99 to 1.
Cute, eh?
On a not-terribly-related note, here is a partial transcript of an exchange in my living room several nights ago.
"Reagan made ketchup a vegetable.""Then time made Reagan a vegetable."
In other not-terribly-related news, Monday's the Canadian election! Just to make sure you get the idea, yet another Tory MP has come out in favour of bigotry. Just in case you'd forgotten that, y'know, the Conservative Party of Canada hates gays and stands for repressive backwards-looking Bush-felching, and that Stephen Harper is perfectly willing to override the Charter of Rights.
For those of you keeping score, the polls seem to be showing...
SES-CPAC:
Ipsos-Reid:
Despite having pulled slightly ahead in the polls, the Liberals are still projected to win fewer seats than the Conservatives, because Canadian elections are a bit silly. In some ways, it makes sense to run things this way: Canada is split up into hundreds of ridings, and each riding elects one MP, in a first-past-the-post fashion. This seems like an obvious way to do things, if you want your MPs to be local (and who doesn't), accountable to local people and concerned about local things. However, there is a problem. That problem is the party system. Political parties are organised so as to impose cohesion on their members. Liberal MPs will, by and large, toe the official Liberal Party line. Conservative MPs will toe the Conservative Party line. So MPs really aren't as local as all that, when all is said and done. And party discipline opens the door to some horribly undemocratic politics.
For example, suppose the Fruit Party won 49% of the vote in every single riding, while the Nut Party won 51% of the vote in every single riding. Then despite the Fruit Party winning over almost half the populace, the Nut Party would end up with every single seat in Parliament. This clearly does not reflect the will of the people. And while, as far as I know, nothing this extreme has ever happened, this phenomenon does make itself felt. Take the NDP. Right now, Ipsos-Reid is projecting that the NDP's current polling numbers, 17%, would translate into 24 seats. There will be 308 seats total in the Commons after the election, unless I'm mistaken. 17% of 308 seats is 52 seats. And the SES-CPAC numbers would give the NDP 65 seats. However you slice it, the NDP is getting dicked here. It's a quantisation effect. Canada is partitioned into ridings coarsely enough that a significant number of voters are, in effect, being disenfranchised: the composition of Parliament does not accurately reflect the will of the populace. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are projected to win about 115 seats based on the Ipsos-Reid numbers, whereas their 31% of the vote would naively translate into only 95 seats. There is a very real chance of Canada being saddled on Monday with a Conservative government supported by less than a third of the population.
Given how entrenched the party system is, it seems only reasonable to change the electoral process to ensure that parties' strength in the Commons reflects their strength with the public. Is proportional representation the answer? I don't know; I'm a mathematician. What do you want from me? But Jack Layton and the NDP are pushing for it...And Paul Martin might consider it...And the Bloc supports it...And so does the new-ish Green Party. (David 'Nutjob Conspiracy Theorist Obsessed With Shapeshifting Reptilians' Icke hates them and accuses them of being tools of a Jewish conspiracy, and links them to Satanic ritual abuse and paedophilia. Which is pretty much par for the course for Icke.)
First-past-the-post really only seems reasonable in an election where every candidate is expected to function autonomously, rather than as a cog in some political machine. And legislatures are great big fat coggy machines.
Crooked Timber is a good place to look for more discussion of voting systems...Like this. Or there's this oldish posting on Kieran Healy's blog.
Last but not least, Chris Morris' Jam includes the phrase 'You were born dead through your own ass.'
Think about that for a moment.
Posted by aloysius at June 25, 2004 02:08 PM | TrackBack |