Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 339 Editor's Choice: 9
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that's great
[Read the article: Scary screeds about Maureen Dowd, written by threatened men]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm awfully relieved, I was pretty sure I had expired a few years back.
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so much for biologically based gender differences
[Read the article: Unhappily ever after]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Basically, the article states that women, given the same chances at career success as men, will make similar decisions and behavioral choices as men, even to the point of not getting pregnant. Rather than spin this as some kind of horrible problem, it's more of a victory for the human spirit. Reminds me of how the research a few years back that showed that unmarried women over a certain age could now manage to find perfectly happy lives without getting married, unlike in the past, got spun by the media into a picture of these vast herds of old maids pining over their lost chances to trap a husband, foolishly squandered in search of finding fulfilment in the workplace, instead of an MRs. degree.
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"Men who are very successful don't marry career women", as if they had the choice.
[Read the article: Unhappily ever after]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Men who are very successful don't marry career women. They may fck them, but they won't marry them"
And successful career women wouldn't be dumb enough to marry these lowlifes, would they? They may fck them, but they won't marry them.
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don't blame the jews
[Read the article: How bad is he?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OT I know, but I'm sick of this. Just because Joe Lieberman and other conservative (politically) Jews backed (some of) Bush's plays doesn't change the fact that American Jews voted against him 60-40. What next? Blame a political shift among blacks for his election, and point to Condi Rice as evidence?
It's because of infighting among progressives that we can't have nice things.
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Don't drink the rightwing "Bush really did win in 2000" koolaid
[Read the article: How bad is he?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"A larger consortium of news organizations, including the USA Today, the Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, the Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, under stricter standards for vote counting, Bush won, and under looser standards, Gore won. [12] However, a Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request."
Wikipedia articles are periodically hijacked by nutballs, both left and right. That aside about overvotes is the key to the whole election; there were a huge number of overvotes, most of which were absolutely clear in their preference for Gore; most often, the oval for Gore filled in in addition to "Gore" written in in the space confusingly marked "Write-in candidate's name here". So many so that if all the "dimpled chads" etc. were counted for Bush Gore would still have won. Yet, those were thrown out because to the machine, they were "overvotes", marked twice. As for the actual story reported by the Miami Herald, etc., in direct contrast to the above,
"But a Herald-commissioned analysis of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537. It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword ''the will of the people.'' It is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who
should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes.
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''What you're providing evidence for, however speculative, is that more people showed up on election day for Al Gore,'' [Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies] said. ''But I'd also state that in our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter. Only legal votes matter.''"
-Miami Herald, Dec. 3, 2000
"But if the recount had been held under new vote-counting rules that Florida and other states now are adopting--rules aimed at recording the intentions of as many voters as possible--Democratic candidate Al Gore probably would have won, although by an even thinner margin, the study found. The study provides evidence that more Florida voters attempted to vote for Gore than for Bush--but so many Gore voters marked their ballots improperly that Bush received more valid votes."
-LA Times, Nov. 12, 2001
"Ultimately, the lesson is the system we had in [Florida] caused so many people to misvote that the real result of the election isn't known. But it does seem likely that more people intended to vote for
Gore than for Bush."
- Doug Pardue of USA Today, Associated Press, 11 May 2001
"...we know that more Floridians intended to vote for Al Gore than George Bush on November 7, 2000."
-Vincent Bugliosi
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Sick sick sick
[Read the article: Bush's brain found lacking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Once again we see that "street smart" is just a "politically correct" word for psychopath.
If there are no lengths to which you will go, no depths of degradation you will not plumb, you have a terrific advantage over those who do have moral limitations. Most people have a solid sense of morality and adjust to this fact, but clearly the Bush administration in general does not, and can't understand why they should not be allowed to torture prisoners at will; and Rove is their poster boy.
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nagging worry
[Read the article: The GOP's tortured logic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, we see that between the demands to be allowed to torture, to spy on people at will, to eliminate all checks and balances, etc. the general plan is to increase the authority of the Presidency to absolutist levels, beyond any limitations. But they can't all be stupid enough to see that there's a good chance that someday there will be a Democrat president again; maybe even in a couple of years, to whom they will be handing over this apparatus.
Why aren't the boosters of the Imperial Presidency more worried about their legacy? They're not all so completely stupid that they can't see that their turn will end someday, are they? Is there any reason why they're not worried that the next president will be free to bug their phone lines on the grounds that he suspects them of treason? Do they know of any reason why our expectations that there might someday be a Democrat elected President are wrong?