Harry very workmanlike and Tom doing your surgical elegance as always but there is one thing you are both missing IMHO. That is that the rules of all of this is not about fairness, who got the most votes, enfranchisement or disenfranchisement.
Gore lost because he was in a game not an election. He was playing by game rules with a former sports exec. Obviously not a very good one since he missed and traded Sammy S. the homerun prodigy but good enough to beat a regular politician who would have whopped his dad, who is also a regular pol with a background in elite espionage. (Did you know that William Buckley's National Review was initially funded by the CIA?) I would encourage you both and all of the list to read Frank Parry's articles on Colon Powell at consortiumnews.com. It seems I have blamed Ollie North all of these years for the "people of color" genocide of Iran Contra in Guatemala when the faceless bureaucrat had dark stars not white birds on his uniform.
There is a new old bunch back in town and they are as retrograde as you get but they do play game theory better than the Democrats who still have their feelings on their sleeves. They claim to be economists and business people but everyone who "knows the C major scale" ain't Bach.
Clinton's intelligence and international standing has helped keep this bubble afloat. And it is a bubble, but the market is a crap shoot and that is just the rules. Like any casino, there will always be losers and the winners justify their gains by demeaning (dummies) the losers. At least the casinos admit that a loser is not bad but just a loser. The market vilifies.
When our little group played the market, we ultimately benefited more from donations and lecture fees than from investments even though we had an expert on our board. I hear a lot of experts crying these days about the Nasdaq.
Now that the new U.S. President is playing things down, the natural bounce of the bubble has lost resiliance. Does any of that have to do with his "sitting" on it? They call it "con-fidence" and the international markets are interdependent with us, as you all know. Remember what happened to the healthy U.S. economy when we had that bust in Asia?
I hope this new Treasury Secretary is better at helping the nation then he has been with helping Knoxville where Alcoa is a large part of the economy. They don't even have decent transportation to and from the city since deregulation hit. He has not saved the city that has nurtured his company all of these years, but will he save or even continue the market?
When you consider someone's professionalism you should also consider the quality of their imagination in their play. This new/old crowd loves to "sing" but their teachers turn away when asked who "trained" Joe DiGenova or Cal Thomas to croon. Ashcroft lost his seat to a dead man. I wonder if any of that had to do with his bass in that International TV show at the Kennedy Center a few years back?
Since the mid-West conservatives talked the liberal business people in NYCity into cutting the sports ("bad! competitive!" liberals are such suckers) and performing arts programs out of the schools in NYCity, in favor of teaching ghetto children to be Doctors and mathematicians, Texas has become the game theory center of the world. Even today NYCity TV stations put down Texas for continuing their competitive "obsession" with the sports world while Jerry Falwell touts private education as the "competition" for Public Schools.
Put the sports, arts and academic contest between public schools back and you will have more competition than those private schools could ever handle. My old high school on the reservation showed that. The years we won the state public school arts and academic competitions are the same years that we placed our students in national orchestras, sports teams, companies and legal firms all across America.
So who refused to pay for the typing competitions our senior year in high school? Business people aligned with fuzzy liberal thinking about violence (like both Gore and Bush on Rap music). Crime went down in Picher because everyone was convinced that it "takes a village" to keep children out of jail. I thought business people were community activists when I left my home town. I found out that was not so on the outside.
PS an opera ticket to the opening night gala in Houston costs $5,000 a seat while you can pick up a ticket in socialist Germany for a few dollars. What ARE they educating their poor children for, trans-national sophistication?
The part I love the best is how these "new/olds" hate Hillary who stayed with her husband through thick and thin while they preach family values and trade spouses with impunity. My brother-in-law would call me a Republican supporter of family values since I've been divorced and remarried. The TV Republican blond brigade even faults Hillary for staying with "that man." It is all very confusing for a poor country boy from the "rez" in NE Oklahoma. Maybe they didn't have enough lead and zinc in their meals so they can figure out the "rule of law" on that. Or maybe it is just rationalizing the coming dark cloud.
Happy Holidays!
REH
Timework Web wrote:
On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Harry Pollard wrote:> This looks like Plan B.
Harry, my take on the prez elections is that the system is thoroughly
compromised from the get-go -- a collaborative work of the Dems and the
Repugs. This goes back to the selection of candidates and the funding of
campaigns and extends to media coverage and exclusion of third party
candidates from debates. It pertains to the LONG STANDING tradition of
obstructing minority voters, a tradition Bill Rehnquist
zealously participated in back in his poll watching days in Arizona.If the Supremes had ruled the other way, they would have had to
cobble together an equally improbable tower of legal contradictions. The
Fla. supreme court rulings were no doubt loaded with legal contraditions
and leaps of logic as you relate -- AS WAS THE RULING by the Fla sec. of
state. The one clear fact is that there was enough ambiguity and confusion
right down the line to allow just about everybody in an official capacity
to serve their own partisan interests. "Rule of law"? MY FOOT!Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island
(604) 947-2213
