[Osx-nutters] 300 million..

[David Cake]

At 12:37 PM -0400 20/10/06, Jim Rankin wrote:
>On 10/19/06, Roger Howard <rogerhoward at rogerroger.org> wrote:
>>Everything else aside, in this coming election little means more to me
>>than national leadership, so I will be working and praying for a
>>Democratic majority. Nothing can bring the Bush Administration into check
>>more than that. I won't be voting based in any direct way on a specific
>>issue; I'll be voting to restore some balance and separation of powers,
>>which I'd think you'd agree with - the one thing generally standing in the
>>way of the kind of wild abuse you even seem to tacitly acknowledge this
>>Administration gets away with is the presence of an effective opposition.
>>Right now they are unchecked, and we are in a huge mess for it.
>
>I've been thinking a good heuristic is to always vote against the
>party in power in every election.

	Well, its a better heuristic than always voting for the party 
in power at every election, and there is a definite electoral 
advantage to incumbency, so a few people effectively to that.
	In Australia, which has no president, so the prime minister 
always has a majority in the house (except in very unusual 
circumstances - the only one I can think of that wasn't immediately 
followed by an election was the wartime government of national 
unity), but there is a noted tendency for voters to like to vote for 
one party in the lower house and a different one in the upper (sadly, 
not at the moment), and for different parties in the state and 
federal systems (completely the case at the moment).
	But, you know, thinking about who is best to vote for in a 
given situation would always be better than an overly simple 
heuristic.
	Cheers
		Davi