A Forum for Grinches and Ho-Ho-Hoes

[bilmore]

Originally posted by mmm3587
I have read that all Harleys come from the factory with nice, quiet, non-polluting legal exhausts which meet federal standards, which are then immediately removed and discarded by the dealers in favor of the loud, polluting exhausts that people actually want.

No. You generally don't touch the factory mufflers at all. You burn your exhaust valves out if you do.

The factory mufflers are loud - very loud - but just inside the noise limits for all states. (You won't pass the "hospital zone" kind of limits, but . . .)

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Ever driven on a parkway? Usually pretty high quality.

I've also parked on a driveway!

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by bilmore
What price? I thought my decision to live in suburbia would be paid for through the gas tax, or tolls.

Exactly. I think Burger was saying I was saying that having a high gas tax or tolls unfairly punishes those who commute and are poor. Well, if they can't handle the commute, move closer to the job. If they can't afford to live near the job, neither can anyone else and the wages will rise.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
Christopher Hitchens has an article in this month's Vanity Fair (which can be found here) about voting irregularities last November in Ohio that's worth reading. A sampling of the odd events:

• In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be the president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more under- votes than Republican ones.
  
  In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the “glitch” had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.
  
  In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein-type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

And, by Hitchens' account, the irregularities overwhelmingly benefited Bush.

I had heard complaints about this stuff before, but always discounted them as the likely work of crackpots and wingnuts. Hitchens may be a crackpot -- a discussion for another day -- but he was a Bush supporter with no love for Kerry, so his account cannot be dismissed as sour grapes or partisan.

Of course, Ohio law provides for a recount, "which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many “vote hops” the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed." That Ohio's Secretary of State was the co-chair of the state Bush/Cheney campaign, and that Diebold's chair is a prominent Bush supporter "who proclaimed in 2003 that he was 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year'" -- these things certainly do not inspire confidence in the recount.

All of this is corrosive for democracy, and for the legitimacy of the government. There are many reasons for election glitches: Elections are complicated affairs, with lots of moving parts, and they take place episodically under the supervision of elected officials. Some error is inevitable, but what Hitchens describes is another thing altogether. There should be a serious, credible investigation of what happened, and -- no matter what an investigation reveals -- that reforms are needed to protect public confidence in voting.

Who can argue with this? On principle, it's hard. Although few seem to want to say it outright, Republicans don't seem to want to look very hard under these rocks because they've been winning recently. But that's exactly why they should care the most. Without antiseptic measures, these problems will fester and grow worse. And if Republicans are presiding over the government hit by the inevitable crisis of confidence, they will have the most to lose.

Feel free to comment here if you like.

Feel free to start protesting up in the State of Washington.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Feel free to start protesting up in the State of Washington.

I'm not interested in questioning the legitimacy of elections that have happened. I just think there need to be some changes so that no one is writing similar articles in early 2007 or 2009.

eta:

With a margin so small as the one in Washington, I suspect that the eventual result will be within any reasonable rate of error. You can't have millions of people go to polls and expect a perfectly accurate tally. There are simply too many things that can go wrong. All the more reason to try to works the kinks out in advance.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Decisions made by state governments about which road contractor to use are often -- surprisingly -- made on the basis of who knows whom, rather than who will make the bestest, cheapest roads.

(eta: My source for this, btw, is Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land.) [Actually, Lemann was my source for the point about the Robert Taylor homes -- re the roads, I was talking out of my ass, or something. -- t.s.]

I can't remember where I read this, but apparently roads in Europe are better built because the contractor who built the road is the one that has to go back and fix it if it falls into disrepair. I think they have a twenty to thirty year warranty.

I imagine we'd have to amend the bankruptcy code again here if we wanted to do something like that. Here, the road's maintenance reverts to the public entity and the contractor walks away with cash and no strings attached.

One of the major problems with the roads in Houston is cable. New expensive concrete road would be laid out at much pain in the ass to the public, and then it'd be torn up again because some fly-by-night ethernet company wanted to lay cable. Someone tried to amend the law to say that cable companies had to put the roads back in the condition they were in when they tore them up, but I don't see evidence of that.

For those keeping track at home, last weekend equipment showed up to tear apart the brand new road at the corner of my block. I don't know what they fucked up when they built it over the summer, but this was not the same crew that wooed me for nine months in 2004.

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
For those keeping track at home, last weekend equipment showed up to tear apart the brand new road at the corner of my block. I don't know what they fucked up when they built it over the summer, but this was not the same crew that wooed me for nine months in 2004.

Widening the street for the onslaught of male visitors beating a path to your door. According to my Houston Lack of Zoning News Monthly, March edition.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
I can't remember where I read this, but apparently roads in Europe are better built because the contractor who built the road is the one that has to go back and fix it if it falls into disrepair. I think they have a twenty to thirty year warranty.

We could do that, and it's been discussed, and bids are routinely put in reflecting such a warranty. And then they lose.

In the parts of Europe that do this, the bids are all priced to cover that warranty period, so the upfront cost for a mile of road is much higher. Drawback is, you're then stuck with that company for repairs, and, if they truly built a shoddy road, they're not really the ones you want to depend on for repair.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I just think there need to be some changes so that no one is writing similar articles in early 2007 or 2009.

This is the funniest sentence you've ever posted!

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Although few seem to want to say it outright, Republicans don't seem to want to look very hard under these rocks because they've been winning recently.

Republicans have been pointing and yelling at vote fraud for years. Historically, the proven cases have not been R's, but D's. Heck, in this last election, D's have come up with lots of scenarios which could be explained by fraud, but all of the actually-proven cases seem to be of D's. For an R to speak too loudly about vote fraud is to invoke the "you're denying us the vote" mantra. I would argue that we need pre-registration, state-supplied photo ID's at the polls, and no absentee ballots at all - but we're not gonna go there, because that would infringe on peoples' right to vote in other names, I guess.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by bilmore
Republicans have been pointing and yelling at vote fraud for years. Historically, the proven cases have not been R's, but D's. Heck, in this last election, D's have come up with lots of scenarios which could be explained by fraud, but all of the actually-proven cases seem to be of D's.

I'm almost as ill-educated on the history of American voting fraud as I am about the economic and political histories of Brazil, Laos and Burma, but let me just observe that this post gave me no small amount of reassurance that the heavens, at least, are in their proper alignment.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
Republicans have been pointing and yelling at vote fraud for years. Historically, the proven cases have not been R's, but D's. Heck, in this last election, D's have come up with lots of scenarios which could be explained by fraud, but all of the actually-proven cases seem to be of D's. For an R to speak too loudly about vote fraud is to invoke the "you're denying us the vote" mantra. I would argue that we need pre-registration, state-supplied photo ID's at the polls, and no absentee ballots at all - but we're not gonna go there, because that would infringe on peoples' right to vote in other names, I guess.

The things that you say we need don't do anything to address the problems described in Hitchens' article.

I don't have a problem with legitimate measures to prevent vote fraud. But I'm also not convinced that there is a big problem with people showing up pretending to be someone else. Hey, persuade me. And absentee ballots clearly have a risk of fraud to them, but they also are important for ensuring that people can vote.

Too often Republicans support measures purportedly aimed at vote fraud because they will also make it more difficult to vote, and because the populations whose vote is thereby suppressed most tend to vote for Democrats.

And from where I'm sitting the magnitude of the potential problems Hitchens describes vastly exceeds the sorts of problems you're talking about.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Hey, persuade me.

dude! you're on a roll! this is your funniest!

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
I can't remember where I read this, but apparently roads in Europe are better built because the contractor who built the road is the one that has to go back and fix it if it falls into disrepair. I think they have a twenty to thirty year warranty.

I imagine we'd have to amend the bankruptcy code again here if we wanted to do something like that. Here, the road's maintenance reverts to the public entity and the contractor walks away with cash and no strings attached.

One of the major problems with the roads in Houston is cable. New expensive concrete road would be laid out at much pain in the ass to the public, and then it'd be torn up again because some fly-by-night ethernet company wanted to lay cable. Someone tried to amend the law to say that cable companies had to put the roads back in the condition they were in when they tore them up, but I don't see evidence of that.

For those keeping track at home, last weekend equipment showed up to tear apart the brand new road at the corner of my block. I don't know what they fucked up when they built it over the summer, but this was not the same crew that wooed me for nine months in 2004.

Wear loose sweaters or even a mid-warmth coat to work each AM, and they'll get done and leave quickly.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Gattigap
I'm almost as ill-educated on the history of American voting fraud as I am about the economic and political histories of Brazil, Laos and Burma, but let me just observe that this post gave me no small amount of reassurance that the heavens, at least, are in their proper alignment.

My partner poll watched for Bush at an inner city Youngstown polling place. Suffice to say while Ty raises issues to try and make the Reps feel ashamed of 10000 or so votes, you guys should be ashamed of almost all yours.