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I promised you an election
I never promised that it would be fair…
(Mahmoud Ahmdinejad)
And here’s what we think of that.
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Cheezburger Network Blog
Who is this Steve Carrell you speak of?
he was in evan almight…didnt you see that? anyone else see that?
anyone?
no?
No but I did see Evan Almighty…. is that a prequel, sequel, or sqeakquel?
bitter troll forgot the y
to much caffeen can cause that
or not enough caffiene
or both!
que?
…OR a rose garden!
I beg your pardon?
Because along with the sunshine, there has to be a lot of rain, sometime!
My mother used to sing me that song when I was a child. I always hated that song.
This is very interesting. Tell us more about your mother.
A lover of folk music, my mother. It was the emotionally scarring cover photo of a John Denver record which caused me to permanently distrust grown men with bowl haircuts. Yeah, I’m talking about you, Captain Kangaroo.
*scribbles in notebook* Hmmm. This is very interesting. And this obsession with kangaroos, you still feel this?
Yes, you could say I’m obsessed with kangaroos…well, all marsupials, really. But then, who isn’t?!
You have to admire the evolutionary genius of having a pocket to carry your young — leaving both arms free!
I’m with you there SB, what kind of messed up Infraclass keeps their nipples hidden behind a fleshy mucus coated pouch?! That’s just not right.
Wait. An opossum’s nipples are placed just like a cat’s. Am I failing biology here? (Might upset my students.)
North and South American marsupials aren’t ‘real’ marsupials in most peoples minds. Their divergence from the group most common in Australia and competition with placental mammals has made them more akin to placental mammals in many ways.
Okay, but I still like the idea of a built-in kid carrier.
Frankenstein never scared me. Marsupials do, though…’cause they’re FAST…
All right. I am obviously not thinking of the same marsupials as everyone else. The only ones in our zoo are koalas, and ‘fast’ does NOT describe them. *confused*
{http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=8105024}
2 minutes into this clip is where that line is from
WIN! I love Christopher Walken!
I wish I had the ginormous, clanking gonads of cast-iron to wear a toupee that ugly. Donald Trump should be bowing down…
I think it points down to bring more attention to his schnoz.
This looks familiar too. Haven’t we seen this one before?
“SORT OF WANT”
Am I a bad person for chuckling at this?
your a bad person for laughing at a joke…SHAME ON YOU!!! WE WILL CLEANSE YOUR SOUL WITH FIRE!!!!
And some strangulation.
The rack! Don’t forget the rack!
I hear there’s lots of enriched plutonium in the rack.
now is not the time to talk about nice racks!
KILL IT WITH THE FRIGGEN FIRE!!!!
Nuke him from orbit, its the only way…
Lasers.
Sonic Lasers!
Sonic Fire Lasers!!
stay on target…
Luke, you’ve turned off your targeting computer. Is something wrong?
I keep hearing this voice in my head that’s telling me to trust the force and it’s scaring me and I turned off my computer because it’s making these weird beeping noises and I think my onboard R2 unit is trying to talk to me and for some reason this ghost keeps appearing in front of me and I’m scared and oh god…
Luke, this is Han-pew pew pew- Do i need to hold your friggen hand for everything? -pew pew-
Han!! PULL OUT PULL OUT PULL OUT!!!!!!!!!
-bitchslaps wedge- SILENCE…as the only actor to have a career after these films im big daddy…your lucky we let you live through them all wedge..
-whipsnap- hey, i bring a gift of peace…here is an ark…go ahead and open it
Doctah Jones! Doctah Jones! I am a hapless Asian stereotype and I can’t get up!
sorry shorty, but this is just about WWII and you look like your from japan..i know hong kong like us americans listen…into the “happy” camp with you
Get your hands of me before I hit you with an annoying white woman!
So, now, at the end you finally understand the power of the Dark Side!
*shoots squiggly blue stuff out his fingers-wow,…fun!*
Sith Pyro, you are.
“Okay, okay, I’ll import your democracy… So, how much is one of these voting machines and how many do I need to win?”
Silly non-American, you don’t need voting machines to rig an election.
5 supreme court justices is all you need, just ask Al Gore.
wish the supeream court would of turned over that ruleing and decided to make gore president after the first 2 years
Nope, the Supremes punted back to Florida before the clock ran out. Regardless of what you think of the outcome, it was Flor-ee-duh’s court, not the Supremes.
Ok something is seriously wrong with our country if we’re giving dated music groups the power to choose the election’s outcome for a whole state.
The Supremes = Diana Ross’ backup singers.
the Supremes = Nine justices serving on SCOTUS.
Subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.
However, now that you mention it, wouldn’t it be fun to swap them out?
(Commercial Voiceover) “We’ve replaced Diana’s backup singers with nine elderly jurists, let’s see if she notices.”
but it does make it easier wino -nods-
Only with the American voting machines, apparently the Brazilian ones are much harder to rig, or so I’m told.
cause you have crazy brazilians with those huge knives for the jungle watching each machine
So the solution to election fraud is machetes. Hmmm…. *goes to look for grinding stone*
Well, I’m guessing then that the Brazilian government doesn’t actually WANT them rigged. That’s just weird.
fair elections? pfft if thats what america would of wanted, ron paul would of been president years ago! nope fix the elections just like we fix the oscars. bill murrey not even in a movie this year? who scares! best supporting actor
Sadly I believe you. The reality is if either of our countries wanted fair, legitimate leadership bad enough, we would do something about it. It’s just easier to keep the somewhat broken system rolling along and put up with the annoyances and corruption than actually deal with the problems.
Kinda like people act with their computers, keep it running ’till its so infected, over loaded with spam and random photos/songs/video clips/movies etc. and riddled with useless applets that looked so ‘cute’ at the time that it takes 3 days from post to log-in, takes 2 hrs to load the Google search page and a sledgehammer, Office Space style, is the only solution to ‘fix’ it.
Well I’ll be damned, I spent ages the other day trying to work out how to explain what passes for a constitution on Britain, and you’ve just nailed it!
Some day we may get to the point that we try a ‘Constitutional Reformat’ but humans tend to be somewhat lazy, if you need proof pick any 100 in-use refrigerators and tell me how many are in desperate need of cleaning.
Hmm…I think I’ll buy stock in the machete company. Sounds more likely.
The problem is that Democracy is proven not to work (especially not in the UK.) We are prevented frombeing allowed to have a referendum on subjects that could affect us – The EU, etc. But when people complain the usual comment is “Your MP is your elected Member of Parliament, he makes the decisions in the best interest of his electorate.” Aye!! Bollocks they do. Anyone apart from an Independant (this includes minor parties such as the BNP, Monster Raving Loonies, Greens etc) is tied to whatever the leader of their Party wants. The peoples wishes do not even enter into it. If further complaints are made the usual comment is “Well you can always put your complaints through the ballot box at the next election”, and again Aye Right!! The next election could be anything up to five years away and the ruling party could (as is usual if they are trying to protect their scrawny necks) do something marvellous towards the end of their term in power which could overturn all the unpopular opinion. (Thatcher did this in 1982, she won the next election through her actions in the Falklands war) and also by the time the next election comes round it could be too late to do anything and the people will not have any power to do anything since power to change things goes through their elected members of Parliament and so on and so on!!) Look at what happened with the Fuel Tax Dispute in the UK. People complained the only way they could by protesting. The Government looked down their noses at the protesters and did bugger all.
Did you know there was once a headline in the papers that read “82% of people in the dark on EU Treaty. 89% want a referendum on EU Treaty”
Sometimes I am *glad* the people don’t get a say in running this country.
Politicians are broadly divided into two kinds: those whose political ideology leads them to seek power in order to bring it to fruition, and those whose desire for power leads them to mould their ideology to the prevailing public mood, and therby to achieve power (dunno what this translates to in USA but in the UK it’s the difference between old labour and new labour). Arguably the latter sort are becoming prevalent, an this is perhaps a good thing only in the sense that the bastards are at least vaguely interested in what the majority of the electorate want. But no matter how you mess with voting systems, democracy is the only possible form of government in a civilized world. If you care a lot about a particular issue, rather than swimming with the tide as most of us do, then there is no alternative but to get involved in politics yourself.
This may not be the best example for you Brits, but California is a perfect example of why you should NOT govern by referendum. As Robert Heinlein said, when given the chance, most people will vote for bread and circuses. E.g., in CA they voted to do away with all their taxes and at the same time voted in more things for the government to pay for.
Logic is not a strong suit in the electorate (or most other groups of people).
I’m with xy and Mabsba, Direct democracy would be an utter failure of Titanic proportions. We have become more so than ever a society of specialists. That is people who have focused their knowledge and ability in to a narrow skill set and have absolutely no understanding of anything outside their narrow world view. Only in the aggregate do social opinions even appear to make sense and then only if you bias your questions demographically.
I work in IT. On a daily basis I deal with doctors who can’t wrap their head around the fact that email requires a working internet connection, Ph.D.’s that don’t understand that not updating their antivirus in 5 years is equivalent to not having antivirus, and MBA’s that think we should wave a wand and make all the spam just stop. Likely less the 10% of the people who read this site could rebuild their own transmission, and less than 30% could tell you why antibiotics can stop a bacterial infection and not a viral infection. And you want these people to have a say on things like net neutrality, vehicle saftey regulations and healthcare?
The problem lies in the fact that it’s too easy for our elected representatives to ignore their responsibility to allocate resources for the betterment of their community and just go with either whatever is popular, or even worse go with the will of whichever company pays them the most in ‘campaign contributions’ (read: bribes) with no long term accountability.
The ‘just vote them out next term’ doesn’t help since under the same pressures the likelihood is the next guy is going to succumb just as quickly as the last one did (see Guantanamo, warrentless wire tapping, and government transparency under the current US administration).
Western democracy in its current incarnation is far to susceptible to corruption, this is the fundamental problem all western democracies face; and those with the power to stop it, have no motivation to do so.
Not to mention, actually voting someone out of office is not so easy, since most people really like their ‘own’ representative. *Thinks of all the pork brought home*
That and one vote doesn’t go so far.
There are other ways for choosing representatives. Take Belgium as an example.
Green Beard, so what are the solutions? One-party dictatorship? It made the trains run on time in Italy. (Not being facetious, genuinely interested in what you think.)
I recommend Vetinari from Terry Pratchetts Discworld series. He may be an evil dictator, but he’s a Good evil dictator. I’ve also been campaigning Gandalf for president. It’s hoevever becoming quite apparent that fictitious characters are although better rulers, exceedingly difficult to find real life equivalents for.
Vetinari of the one man, one vote? (He’s the one man, and he has the one vote.) I read somewhere (can’t remember attribution) that the best form of government for the people is a benevolent dictatorship.
Of course, I don’t think Vetinari is benevolent; he just makes the system work.
I don’t think we necessarily have to go as extreme as throwing out representative democracy entirely but the existing system of checks and balances appears to be insufficient. What we need is some kind of revision that places real accountability on the heads of decision makers.
My personal political stance is that the system lacks sufficient personal responsibility for everyone involved. Making an effort has been glorified to the point that failure, no matter how weak the effort, is always the fault of someone else. I think forcing the established bureaucracy to accept limitations on how much they can benefit from corporate lobbying as well as real personal consequences for failing to deliver reasonable legislation and regulation would be enough for the foreseeable future to ‘fix’ the mess we currently have in place, the problem is building up enough momentum to make it happen.
Of course enlightened despotism is the most effective form of government, the problem is finding someone sufficiently enlightened.
clearly only optimis prime has the wisdom to lead us
Me! Me! *jumps up and down, waving hand in air* I’m enlightened. Honestly, I am.
Actually, for all its drawbacks, I do believe representational democracy IS the best form of government. And I agree that personal responsibility needs to be enforced on the elected officials as well as the electorate.
Do you know that Congress is required to submit a balanced budget every year by a specific date and never does? (Not that I remember, anyway.) If I didn’t fulfill my job requirements, I wouldn’t get paid.
In a lot of cases it seems any consequences would be better than what we have now, plenty of politicians have abused their positions doing things that would send most anyone else to prison and receive nothing more than a slap on the wrist if that. No bitter, we can’t have optimus prime, because then the machines will take over! Didn’t you see the matrix or terminator?
@ mabsa – that sounds reminiscent of Hobb’s “Leviathan” or perhaps even in some readings, Plato’s Republic.
In my so humble opinion, most of the ‘fixes’ to representative democracy that people propose would have the opposite than the intended effect (term limits, getting rid of political parties, etc). Sadly, I don’t think most American’s are willing to accept the drastic overhaul to our electoral system or system of checks and balances (that makes change nearly impossible).
Precisely the problem in my opinion Mabsba, we need to regulate the regulators, in a way they cannot ignore. Threat of revolution is gone, too much of society could not function without our current social framework. We need to do something to put fear of failure back in to our politicians, because we are the ones suffering for their incompetence.
That is exactly my point!! Most Politicians have their nose so firmly in the trough and know that the people are paying enormous taxes (which helps go towards their wage increases since they are so desperately poorly paid
) and know that whoever the people vote for won’t bother changing the status quo (pigs and a certain brown smelly substance anyone 
) and there is no way that the people can punish the politicians apart from at the next election which only serves to bring up the same old new faces who seem to forget about five minutes on entering Politics that the people elected them in and that they are there to serve the people’s needs not their own. They’re there for five years at a time and in that time they can make a fortune. If they get unelected they can always rest on the thousands they made during their five or so years in Parliament. In the UK there is always the option of getting the local Constituency Party who nominated the candidate to throw him out but despite whatever they do this happens very very rarely and is never much of a threat to the MPs. There needs to be some form of people power to automatically punish any politician who steps over the line. (If this was the case then the UK Parliament’s expenses row wouldn’t have happened and Mr Duck Pond would have got his marching orders and told to duck off 
)
Karzai’s photo would look better under this caption.
No, this one was perfect.
My ex-boyfriend once told me the same thing.
Oh..no wait…that was an erection.
The question is, was it rigged?
now eddie thank you very much, i now have a fantastic image in my head of all manner of formwork… plus a crane… and the project in question…
I know sharing is caring, but did you need to share that image? *remembers picture from inside cover of “The great big book of penis” and realizes that might be what’s required to get that thing up*
i do share because i care
sorry dude … see sharing that kind of wrongness is in a way its own kind of therapy 
also… “The great big book of penis”… WIN
It’s the sequel to “The great big book of breasts” The covers are great, they’re pictures of the appropriate pieces of anatomy, the dust jackets are clear plastic except for a picture of a piece of underwear, you take off the dust jacket and you get to see the boobies/penis.
Oooh!! Are they pop up books
No, but there is a book called “The pop up book of sex” and a “Pop-up Kama Sutra”.
Oh, I have got to find those ones!!
We have them at Borders, but we don’t have borders in Canadia.
No borders eh?
Oh come on – are we still taking the piss out of George Bush? That was nine years ago people! Let it go already!
Yeah, they should have done like in Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia, three American citizens were sent there and elected as three local presidents, that is all. That’s what I call getting real democracy.
This is not funny…..
Go Khazai! GO =]
Wanna keep saying that when the U.S starts droppin’ nukes on him and his supporters? \=)