I’m stealing this from Eli Rabett wholesale.
Confess: Did you know before this moment that big elections loom in Germany (September 22) and Australia (September 7)?
Eli’s post:
In an ueber weird commercial the German Metalworkers Union puts up on YouTube what may be the single greatest get out the vote ad ever.
A rough transcript of the text to juice up the Aussies out there who also have an election coming up, even though they have to vote.
0:05 Germany chills out
0:13 All the important stuff in 2013 has been decided
0:30 Really, already decided?
0:48 On September 22 the cards will be mixed again
0:51 (Merkel) This government has been the most successful in Germany since the reunification . .
0:57 (Steinbrueck SDP) This government thinks that they can slide through . .
1:00 (FDP = libertarians) Only one thing can beat the, the FDP itself
1:04 National election 2013
1:07 Problems there are aplenty
1:12 No joy from a lousy job?
1:16 Too few nursery places? R. Tol appears
1:23 Rather retire earlier?
1:29 Better education?
1:36 Equality?
1:38 It’s not so easy, first you have one house, and then another
1:40 You can never have enough
14:2 Right now we have an asocial market economy, not a social one
1:46 You have a voice, use it
1:56 September 22 is the election
2:01 It’s close
2:07 It’s difficult
2:11 It’s gonna be dirty
2:17 Unexpected coalitions will emerge
2:25 It’s time to beat on the table
2:32 Push!
2:39 Onwards to the election!
2:46 Vote!!
2:51 So, let’s discuss this a bit further
Maybe you’ll watch the G20 meetings with a little different perspective?
Who was the genius behind that compilation (file under “highest and best use of weird internet videos this year”)? Can we hire her or him for the Texas elections next year?
It’s from the German Metalworkers Union, IG Metall. Justification enough to revitalize America’s labor movement. Rich Trumka, are you paying attention?
More:
- Merkel wins narrow victory over Social Democrat rival in pre-election TV clash (theguardian.com)
- Hidden by glowing stats, Germany’s poor struggle (thenewstribune.com)
- Angela Merkel lines up with David Cameron to rein in Brussels – and to defeat Germany’s new eurosceptic party (conservativehome.blogs.com)
- Germany’s Merkel taunts opponents over euro crisis (kansascity.com)
- The Undecided: How Merkel Could Lose (spiegel.de)
- G20 major economies
- German election blog at Der Spiegel
- Sydney Morning Herald, “Another Steinfeld election for Australia”
- Merkel’s necklace gets its own Twitter account (thelocal.de)
A good get-out-the-vote (GOTV) poster, according to some design critics. GRA 217/Intro to Design
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I smell a sock puppet.
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The Big State apologist cometh.
Right. To solve the problems created by massive government – he preaches … even bigger government.
Ed has a clone.
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Now that the anti-science, superstition-based initiative presidency is over, we need Manhattan projects to boost us out of this Grotesque Depression. First we must provide free advertising-based wimax wireless internet to everyone to end land line monopolies. Renationalize the telephone companies like 1917 and the DTV fiasco and internet under a renationalized post office. It’s not enough to make Boston-NY-Washington high spped, we need to connect the Boston end to Pittsburg, Chicago and Minneapolis and the Washington end to Charlotte, Birmingham and Texas. Because bovine flatulence is the major source of greenhouse gases, we must develop home growable microbes to provide all of our protein. We must finally join the metric system and take advantage of DTV problems to create a unified global standard for television and cellular instead of this Anglo Saxon competitive waste. We must address that most illness starts from behavior, especially parents. Since paranoid schizophrenia is the cause of racism, bigotry, homelessness, terrorism, ignorance, exploitation and criminality, we must provide put the appropriate medications, like lithium, in the water supply and require dangerous wingnuts who refuse free mental health care to be implanted with drug release devices. Churches should be licensed to reduce supersition and all clergy dealing with small children should be psychiatrically monitored to prevent molesting. We need to psychiatrically regulate the preachers and teachers that produce these creatures. Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh were the ultimate superstition based initiatives. Folks wouldn’t have to go to bigoted superstitious gatherings like churches if labor unions had more family dances, afterschool activities and even owned sports teams to build loyalty! Aborting future terrorists and sterilizing their parents is the most effective homeland security. Pregnancy is a shelfish, environmentally desturctive act and must be punished, not rewarded with benefits, preference and leave. Widen navigation straits (Gibraltar, Suez, Malacca, Danube, Panama, Hellspont) with deep nukes to prevent war. To fund this we must nationalize the entire financial, electrical and transportation system and extinguish the silly feudal notion that each industry should be regulated by its peers. Technology mandates a transformation of tax subsidies from feudal forecloseable debt to risk sharing equity. Real estate and insurance, the engines of feudalism, must be brought under the Federal Reserve so we may replace all buildings with hazardous materials to provide public works. Collectors, bounty hunters and private investigators are mercenaries operating on the edge of the law. Insects, flooding and fire spread asbestos, lead and mold which prematurely disables the disadvantaged. Disposable manufactured housing assures children are not prematurely disabled and disadvantaged. The only reason one engages in atomistic, shelfish small business is to avoid rules. Even Milton Friedman showed that small business creating jobs is unprovable because of survival bias (J Eco Lit, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 2129-2132). In today’s complex New Industrial State (J K Galbraith), you do a better job if you are a large contractor because you have all kinds of compliance controls in place and superior information than if you are on you own. Because feudalism is the threat to progress everywhere, we must abolish large land holdings by farmers, foresters or religions and instead make all such large landholding part of the forest service so our trees may diminish greenhouse gases. We must abolish this exploitative idea of trade and monopoly and make every manufactured disposable cottage self sufficient through the microbes we invent.
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Indeed, you are adept at dodging.
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Black Flag said:
My citizen side is fighting hard to stop me from saying “Whew! Dodged another one.”
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Of course you can’t vote them out of office.
Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee = both are the same but the shirt they wear.
Obama is Bush who was Clinton who was Bush who was Reagan…
All love war, big government spending and lavish lifestyle.
The system is rigged – the only ones who seek power over other people are those that wish to power over other people.
The only way to end the system is to stop playing their game.
Vote! Hell no way!
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You could vote such people out of office, if you were concerned about it. That’s what voting is all about.
But you, claiming the system is rigged, leave it alone. Who is at fault?
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Oh Eddy, you are so funny to complain about focusing on faults (what you call imaginary are fact, regardless if you were ignorant of it) whilst you pretend your focus on what you -bizarrely- see as his virtue stands alone!
Sorry, Teddy was a murderous megalomaniac who promoted the wanton slaughter of human beings. You admire such men and they make you proud to be American.
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No surprise to any of us that you make radical, most often false assumptions on the base of very little data, nor that you choose to focus on the faults of others rather than their virtues, even imagining faults where they don’t exist.
No doubt you find everyone lacking in virtue, even Socrates. How about Narcissus? Is your home devoid of mirrors?
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Teddy, who was a megalomaniac, warmonger, Statist, who loathed Jefferson and all that he stood for, a man Mark Twain said “was totally insane”, who after an argument with a girl friend soothed himself by shooting and killing his neighbor’s dog.
He argued and pushed the Presidency to become, quote, “”There inheres in the presidency more power than in any other office in any great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern time” and pushed for presidential usurpation of Constitutional powers by saying “”I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands”
There is no surprise to me, you love Teddy. I’m sure the disaster he wrought upon the Philippines in his day makes joy in your heart what the wrought the US wreaks upon Iraq today.
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Mencken was a cynic his whole life, and a hoaxster, though unlike Black Flag, he repented his hoaxes. Mencken was an observer.
Contrast that with Teddy Roosevelt, who was as good a writer as Mencken, but a man with a bias to action over observation. Teddy was a great cowboy, a great lawyer, a legendary reformer police commissioner, a war hero and peace hero — winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Memorial Prize for Peace, master of war and ending it.
Teddy urged different action than Mencken:
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Ilya Somin’s
Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.
Due out in early October, Ilya’s book promises to be a compelling and creative explanation of how public-choice analyses – not least those of Bryan Caplan – reveal as misguided the modern notion that democracy discovers and enforces some vague phantom called “the will of the People.”
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Mencken insight:
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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Poor Ed,
When stuck, you must fall back on Non sequitur.
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But only on those angels who insist on dancing on the heads of pins. O, those poor pins!
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“I do not increase violence in society.”
But you do, Ed.
“I have no wish to increase violence.”
That may be true, but your means betray you.
You support government edicts on non-violent men that by the threat of violence upon them, they must surrender their property to you, for your benefit.
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I do not increase violence in society. I have no wish to increase violence.
I don’t know what causes you to make up fantastic tales about other people. It’s inappropriate.
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Ed,
You do not improve society by increasing its violence.
You wish to increase violence in society as you believe it benefits you.
In search for your selfish wants, you undermine society by the means you choose to obtain them
You are the problem, and the solution is not to support more of your means, but withdraw from it.
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Those who are not actively working to improve things are speed bumps to progress you give lip service to.
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“The old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand, for the times, they are a-changin’.”
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You betcha, Ed!
As Carlin quipped, at least I’m not the reason its a mess – you’re the reason and its ALL …YOUR….FAULT. :0
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You’re free to NOT vote, too. Feel free to exercise your right not to vote, anytime, and often.
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Poor Ed, you’d be funny if you weren’t so sad.
Obama promised to get the troops home …. 100 days…into his first term.
Clue to Ed: they ain’t home yet, now in 2nd term.
Now he wants another war … oh yeah, he won the peace prize.
That’s what YOUR vote got you, Ed, though you’ll most certainly pretend it away.
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The best you can do, Ed, is pretend your vote has meaning.
It certainly would satisfy small brains into thinking you’re doing “something”, even if it is -at best- futile and -at worse- immoral.
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Under our Constitution, you’re free to believe any fool thing you wish, no matter how false.
First Amendment protection doesn’t make any belief true, nor even relevant.
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Every election is a fraud, Ed.
The belief that by a vote every few years for someone you don’t know on an issue manufactured of whom whose promises are not kept… makes a “difference” is a fraud of incredible proportions of that man’s mind upon himself.
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No one should be President, period.
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The fraud is not the irrelevant miscounting, double counting or not counting of votes.
The fraud of voting is believing you can steal from your neighbor as long as enough people wave their hand in the air in agreement.
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To quote: Every election is a fraud, no surprise there.
So you admit that George W Bush should never have been president and that there should be no republicans in Congress?
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George W Bush spent 5 years looking for voter fraud, BF, and out of 200 million votes cast in that time period he found all of 86 cases.
Not 86 million, not 86,000…..86. As in 14 less then an hundred.
And your side wants to claim that voter fraud is this omnipresent thing that actually affects elections? Oh please. What affects election is the electioneering and election fraud your party routinely engages in now since it’s realized that it’s getting hosed demographically and can’t win honestly anymore.
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Claims of fraud in U.S. elections are highly overblown, to the point of being whole cloth hallucinations.
Quit drinking whatever you’re drinking for a while, and sober up.
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Every election is a fraud, no surprise there.
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On the side topic of voting..well the state of Florida found actual voter fraud.
Of course it was committed by Republicans. Oops
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/two-voter-fraud-cases-close-with-meager-findings/2139886
In another inquiry, involving Strategic Allied Consulting, a vendor for the Republican Party of Florida, an arrest was made of a man who stole the identity of a former girlfriend’s ex-husband. He admitted to fraudulently filling out two voter registration forms.
I should like to bring it to the teabaggers attention that “Strategic Allied Consulting” is owned by one Nathan Sproul.
Who has been found to have engaged in voter/election fraud going all the way back to the 2004 election. And yet that doesn’t stop the GOP from hiring him over and over and over and over again. He’s worked for them in every election since 2004 and he’s engaged in shenanigans every single time.
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Nah, didn’t see your name there, either.
And, if you do, I can see why the country is a mess – you’re clueless. (wink)
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I didn’t say I was on the list. I said I make it. You complained that you have no input into who is on the list. I do it for you. You’re welcome.
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Didn’t see your name on the Presidential Ballot, the Senate ballot, the Congress ballot, the Governor’s ballot nor the State Senate Ballot.
Didn’t see your name anyway, except here.
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I doubt it.
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I make the list. You’re welcome.
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Oh, the idiocy – you and your constant need to apply labels to everyone.
You think I’m a teabagger??? Obviously you read few of my posts here.
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You are naive.
You do not select the candidates, Ed. They are provided to you in a list. “Peas or Carrots for dinner, Ed”
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To quote: Even in your case, the futility remains the same.
You do not select the candidates – they are vetted well long before you even know their names. You are picking from a list that, whoever is on that list, will not stray from the status quo.
Oh the irony of that coming from a teabagger…
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I select the candidates. You can, too — but you have to get involved early in the process, and work. Citizenship is a privilege, but it comes with duties, and some of the duties actually require action.
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Even in your case, the futility remains the same.
You do not select the candidates – they are vetted well long before you even know their names. You are picking from a list that, whoever is on that list, will not stray from the status quo.
Absolutely, you are NOT part of that vetting process.
It is analogous to someone saying “carrots or peas, which one for supper?” – which naturally excludes all other veggies from your choices.
To believe otherwise, Ed, makes you naive.
(Exception: local (ie: city) politics)
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I’m in that select group that picks the candidates. My vote counts — more if you don’t vote. You should learn how the system works.
Sometimes you can even bend it to work for people, for the good — that is, in my case, for me.
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If voting was so important, it would be banned.
It is utterly pointless.
First, you do not pick the candidates. They are chosen for you from a very select and vetted group of candidates.
Second, you do not pick the issues. They are created for you in an attempt to polarize the group-think into false dichotomies, either of which guarantees the same solution – more government.
Third, even if the candidate you did not select -but you voted for- on an issue they manifested for you -which offers the same ends- he doesn’t even have to do what he promised. He can do whatever he wants on any issue regardless of what he said during the campaign and you have no recourse.
So, your vote picks a person you did not chose based on his position on a situation not of your making of which he does not even need to do what he promised.
And you think voting is important.
You are naive.
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