This has gotten a little off track here, as the actual article was theoretically about Bloomberg.

Here is the question every Nader cost Gore the election person needs to ask themselves. How did Nader take votes away from Gore if, as they contend, Gore was a true liberal, a powerful leader, and wise tactician. It is not like people in Florida truly thought Gore had the state sewn up. The closeness of the race was made very very clear before hand. So why did people vote for Nader?

The answer comes to three camps.

1) People energized by revolution, these are the people who normally vote third parties, but realized with a name candidate the chance to at least make a dent in the two party system.

2) People who never voted before and likely wouldn't have voted had they not been energized by Nader to combat politics as usual.

3) People who found Gore a distasteful person, a faux environmentalist and a political hack, and who would have voted for any other person but Gore. Certainly some of these people might have held their nose and Voted for Gore, or they might have voted for any other Green or third party, or they might have simply opted to not vote, or they might have voted for Bush figuring at least he’d be easier to keep an eye on, or because they bought his western open spaces environmentalism pretense, in the end the numbers are impossible to know, and Gore’s loss of these votes had to do with Gore’s inability to win them, not someone else’s ability to take them.

I contend that few if anyone voting for Nader in Florida would have voted for Gore. Had anyone in Florida truly thought Gore was a viable alternative for themselves they would have voted for him, as they knew how close the vote was.

Gore did not energize those 90 some odd thousand votes, and those votes required someone to energize them. If Gore had, if he was a better leader, a stronger leader, a wiser leader, he would have done this; he would have taken on Nader up front, and removed the threat. He did not because at the end of the day Nader was right about him. He was a political dilettante lacking the conviction and direction to be president.

By 2004 Gore abdicated any right to lead by cowering to Bush, and refusing to run against him, undoing the long standing tradition of the popular vote winner reclaiming their denied prize and denying the second term to the usurper.

Nader cost Gore the election the same way that Bush cost Gore the Election and the Socialist Workers Party cost Gore the election. If Gore had wanted these votes all he needed to do was make an effort to claim them. He did not, and so he lost.

As to Bloomberg, he's a pragmatic technocrat, willing to buck popularity in order to achieve success, we could do worse, though we could probably do better to.

"I'm still not sure about all the things I think the ending implies, but I'm sure about one thing: David Chase isn't letting a has-been rock-star dictate terms to him. If Steve Perry wants to think he negotiated to spare us all the gory trauma of an on-screen slaughter, that's kinda sweet, but who in their right mind would ever think that kind of denoument was a possibility?" -- rollerboyz

The article didn't say Mr. Perry negotiated to prevent a whacking in the Sopranos, what it says is that Mr. Perry did not want his song used in a scene where Tony gets whacked, and refused to grant rights until he received assurances as to how the song would be used. By that argument David Chase volunteered the reality of the scene, not rewrote it to use the song. Clearly Mr. Chase has a great deal of respect for the song and the artists that created, otherwise he wouldn't have used it. Since music rights are a particularly sticky whicket in the television industry, any aspect of the granting of rights would have been stipulated in writing by the lawyers, and as such, the statement that Tony isn't whacked in scene is pretty much gauranteed.

Now of course, that doesn't mean Tony isn't dead, since the song was not used after the screen goes blank, and tony could have been whacked after the scene went black, but given the fact that no other aspects of the scene (when viewed dispasionatly) imply that Tony got whacked it is doubtful that he was.