I still have yet to vote (waiting for the lunchtime crowd to clear out) but two years ago we still used paper ballots.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
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I still have yet to vote (waiting for the lunchtime crowd to clear out) but two years ago we still used paper ballots.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
Since I've started voting in 2010, we've had an electrical one.
It didn't have levers, rather it's a felt like paper over a large area(4.5' x 4') with buttons underneath the felt. You pressed a button by the candidate or amendment and it would place a green X by the name or amendment.
I just googled "Voting Booth" and I see setups of 5 to dozens of booths. I went to a school and there were just two booths.
A few more from the last couple of weeks:
The Rocky River about a mile downstream from the last shot
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Tappan Square, Oberlin, Ohio
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Enzo contemplates the meaning of life - or where to poop next
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Tinker's Creek, Bedford, Ohio
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Enzo and I have a lot in common.
My daughter and her youngest son's first birthday.
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I hate to say it, but she looks nothing like you Gruff. The only fur she appears to have is on her head.
Plus, I can't see any whiskers either.
This one appears to be more like your daughter:
http://www.wormsandgermsblog.com/upl...%20w%20bow.jpg
Typical rainy day at work in Oregon.
(Looking out my new cube window.)
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That car next to the Durango appears to be a mid 90's Ford Escort station wagon! That was my first car.
*Heh*
If you add about a decade to the year built. And take away the station wagon.
But it was still the booger green color.
I had Mercury's version of the Escort wagon. Paid $150 for it which turned out to be about $100 too much. It was such a POS rustbucket I tried to get it towed away. I even parked it during a Browns' game ON THE SIDEWALK at the corner of West 6th & St. Clair right across the street from the Justice Center. You can imagine my disappointment when I returned the next day and it was still there.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
So I parked it in front of the third district police headquarters in a space marked "POLICE VEHICLES ONLY." It took more than two weeks, but they finally hauled it away.
Wow, sounds a lot like my car(unfortunately for me I paid about 10 times your price).
My first car was a nash rambler.
So old the floorboards on the driver side rusted through.
You had to keep your feet up on the pedals to keep them from dragging in the gravel.
Looked something like this though not as good looking.
faded pink top and dirty cream lower body.
Ran intermittently if you push started it.
The passenger door was held closed with coat hanger wire.
Older Nash models did not have cut out wheel wells.
I thought it made them look clunky. Not unlike a wind up toy car.
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My wife's grandfather's first car was an AMC Rambler. Yellow exterior and black interior.
I like the Hudson/Nash/AMC cars. That is pre-70s for the AMC. I did not like the Javelin or the others.
I call my old VB6 UI "AMC"...
New web version is AWC...
He grew up poor though and his first car wasn't until he got back from Vietnam in '70.
My current ride. The green sure footed mountain goat.
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Still paper ballots here. Sad to see so many Dem judges running unopposed including the entire 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. But that's the price of living in a liberal mecca like Cuyahoga County.
I did get to vote against the traffic cameras. That was nice. I believe they're as good as gone.
My mother's last car was a Rambler. She died in 1969.
You guys remember the SC/Rambler? That was a cool car...
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I'm actually %100 for traffic camera's if you're referring to the ones that take pictures of the license plates if you run a red light.
Those that live in that town know where they are, so the majority of the citations will be out of towners.
The AMX was cool. It was a two-seat Javelin.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
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The reason for the Javelin's fugly fenders was to allow oversized tires in the SCCA Trans-Am series. You couldn't flare the fenders just to race - the carbody had to be stock. So they put the flared fenders on at the factory.
Not here. The speed cameras are portable and constantly moved around so you never know where they are. I don't have a problem with the red light cameras, but the vote was an all-or-nothing thing so I voted to get rid of them all.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
Oh those! Yeah we had one in a smaller city west of us and they voted that out like a month after the city got it.Quote:
The speed cameras are portable and constantly moved around so you never know where they are.
I hate those red light buggers. If your traveling the posted speed and happen to hit the unholy sweet spot you are not going to be able safely stop in time. I did it once and left skid marks all the way up and over the crosswalk. Got a ticket for sure. I like to think I'm a safe driver, I leave lots of space ahead of me and drive the speed limit. Perhaps the camera and timing is set up wrong for the posted speed.
We moved up from clay tablets since the last election. Man did that suck! If you got there late in the day, the clay had dried enough that you got all dusty, and it was terribly hard work. It would have been easier if they'd just let us scratch one line through the box, but making us chisel out the whole box to a depth no less than a quarter inch was really hard on the elderly.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
This year, I got there early so that I could make my mark before the clay had really set up, but lo and behold, the ballots were made of paper!! Progress even arrives out here in the hinterlands.
I thought that they allocated a little bit of time after the light turns red to compensate for that.
What disappointed me about the polling station this year was that two years ago there was a serious MILF working there, but this year...I just voted. There were very nice people working there, but none that I wanted to poll.
What did disturb me, a bit, was the fact that the registration sheets were large with small print, so there were LOTS of names on each sheet, yet I may have been the first one to sign on the sheet that had my name. I realize that turnout isn't all that high in mid-term elections, and I did get over there in the first hour that the polling station was open, but it wasn't much of a showing.
Wow, I thought I was posting on something relatively recent, but two whole topics have been covered since my last post.
Gruff's daughter: She's a gal, so naturally she shaved off the extra fur. He's not European, you know.
Cars: My first car....has returned to the earth, I'm sure.
Cameras: I believe that we have red light cameras on most of the lights, but I also believe that the budget to operate them has never existed, so the cameras are just for show.
Back to polling...well, I added my comments.
That old age must be catching up with you Shaggy.
Your mind is going like that of Michael Faraday.
I learned about him last night, so I needed a reference.
Are you saying I lack the capacity (is that the right Faraday?)?
I know that he built the first motor and generator, but I don't think he built the first capacitor.
It's more like thisQuote:
Originally Posted by dday9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance
Quote:
The SI unit of capacitance is the farad (symbol: F), named after the English physicist Michael Faraday
That was what I was refering to. My capacity to remember met with some resistance. Ohm my gawd, I just couldn't remember what was watt.
*Groan*
Didn't michael Faraday also invent RF Shielded enclosures? (The Faraday cage)
Yeah. DDay caused me to waste an hour or two on Wikipedia. Kind of an interesting discussion of Faraday. I knew a bit about him, but he was quite the character. His lectures sound like they would have been pretty entertaining....and then there was the link about The Great Stink, which I just had to read.
Sounds like Faraday got the credit for the cage, but perhaps the original person to report the phenomenon was Ben Franklin. He wasn't just a lecherous old man.
Don't blame me... I voted for Kodos.
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Big night for the GOP last night. Whenever I fell asleep it was net +7.
I didn't even turn on the news until this morning. I knew that people would be talking and talking and talking, even when they had nothing new to say. There would be frequent recaps of what little was known and speculation on that which wasn't known, and only occasionally would anything new get added to the stream of redundancy.
Instead, I listened to music and other things. After all, I was pretty certain that I'd not only hear the results in the morning, but they'd also be more complete and more accurate. Nothing changed in that time, and I seriously doubt that anything really changed in Washington unless you are an insider. A few people gained more power, a few people lost some power, and life will go on about the same as before. The only question I have is whether less will be accomplished in the next two years than in the last two. After all, the senate now has the means to block EVERY appointment by Obama, so perhaps the dysfunction will be able to spread to judiciary (judges won't be appointed, and may not even be nominated). I would expect that the executive branch would largely remain untouched because the political appointments are largely figureheads running agencies that will continue about the same as they have for decades.
On the other hand, the Republicans have good reason to want to get something done, which would require a compromise. The optimistic view is that this congress will be able to get things done because the only way to do so is through compromise....but I'm not feeling optimistic.
I think that more will be done. Think about it, anything Republicans came up with for the past 2 years Harry Reid would shut it down; even if Democrats and their base would benefit more from it than the Republicans.Quote:
The only question I have is whether less will be accomplished in the next two years than in the last two.
I'm very optimistic about the next couple of years.
Oh, you can bet that plenty will get done - all by executive order. Obama has made it clear that laws don't apply to him and the Republicans have made it clear they will do nothing about it.
We're about to see the mother of all lame-duck sessions. That old Chinese saying applies here: "May you live in interesting times."
Thats a bit one sided, both sides have been doing that to each other to be fair. There has been very little working together from what i can see between the parties during the Obama presidencyQuote:
Originally Posted by dday9
I wouldn't be optimistic, basically you have a republican party that is almost allergic to Obama, they are likely to go out of there way to put through partisan bill's which Obama will just veto.
At least that is the impression we get across the pond :)
Homer - Anyone who Quotes George Carlin gets my vote, have you put your self forward for office yet ? :)
If he veto's certain issues, then I'm sure that you could get a congressional override. One that I can think of off the top of my head is the medical device tax.Quote:
they are likely to go out of there way to put through partisan bill's which Obama will just veto.
Now to get rid of something that has the president's name attached to it, you can almost guarantee that the president will veto it!
To override the veto, the Republicans would have to have Democratic support. They lack the votes in the senate to do that. That's why there was gridlock before. Harry Reid would ignore the partisan crap that he didn't want to deal with, and which was DOA anyhow, but he lacked a majority sufficient to bring up partisan crap of his own. The things that moved through the senate were things that got bipartisan support. They were then sent to the house to die, because there isn't any bipartisan support in the house for anything.
There are two senators per state. That makes it mighty hard to gerrymander states to make safe seats, which means that senators can't be quite as partisan. The house is a different story. Those seats are heavily gerrymandered in pretty nearly every state such that most seats are decided in the primary, not in the general election. Those reps don't have to please their constituents, only their partisans, which further polarizes the house.
This situation could be fixed in a variety of ways, but until it is, the house will become increasingly polarized.
Homer also makes a good point. W really got the ball rolling with his signing documents. He wasn't the first to use them, but he was the first to use them to re-write the laws that were handed to him. Obama, for all his talk about undoing some of the things W did, hasn't proved very intererested in undoing executive power in the slightest. It's understandable that it would be a bipartisan issue: Every president has a motivation to not weaken his own power, but it's a bad trend, as it leads to more confrontation and less cooperation.
The best thing that could happen to this nation in regards to congressmen is to add term limits. My proposal would be to allow a maximum of two terms. Once your term limit is up, you may run for re-election after the amount of time that you've been in congress is up. For example:
Code:Dim waitingPeriod As Integer = If(termServed = 1, 1, 2)