for 17 November 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Welcome to the millennium of superficiality, apathy, and laziness. I was more disappointed than anyone to find out that half the united states is a bunch of morons. Then I was even more disappointed to find out that slightly more than half didn't even care enough to vote. At this point I find that I hate approximately seventy five percent of the united states and a portion of that number is pregnant with future frustrations. This is really far too much hate for me to carry around with me and it is exhausting.

Before you poop on our electoral college, take a look at some serious research please. Even after reading this I bet you are undecided on whether we should actually have direct elections.

"No one really goes to Aqua Bar for the drinks, but we make sure our drinks don't kill you. This is something you must remember."

William Mauritzen
<varion@turbinegames.com>

William,

Thanks for sending along that Discovery magazine article, which remains as thoroughly unpersuasive now as it was when I first read it in 1996. Professor Natapoff's tendency to make baseball analogies at least proves that he understands one important principle of the electoral college — how to get half your audience to tune out immediately — but the metaphor is as crabbed as a Jim Morrison lyric. Votes belong to the voters, not the candidates; runs belong to the teams that make them, and don't decide for themselves whether they want to be made for one side or the other. A run for one team doesn't take away a run from the other team. You can score an infinite number of runs, but there are a finite number of votes. And so on.

However, the real problem with Natapoff's argument isn't that it's stylistically herniated, but that it's completely insane. The purpose of one-person, one-vote isn't to "empower" the individual voter; it's to ensure that every vote in the country gets counted equally, with the hope that whoever gets the most votes becomes President. If people in South Dakota are worried that they're not getting adequate attention from Washington (unlikely given the number of Federal subsidies that go to the Midwest as opposed to, say, New Jersey or Connecticut or any of the other states that actually pay for the federal government's evil work), then they should convince more people to move to their state. Either that or pay more attention to the Senators and Representatives they elect to represent their interests in Washington. The presidential candidates are running to be President of the whole country, and there's no non-rhetorical reason why they even should be giving "attention" to individual states — which the electoral college supposedly forces them to do. This empowerment business — as Natapoff himself says — applies more to voters in a smaller electorate than it does to people in a large electorate. By that logic, and in fact in reality, Californians are getting screwed because they live in a populous state; North Dakotans are unnaturally "empowered" because they live in an empty one. In practical terms, it's better to have a few people get screwed than many people. And in fact, with a popular vote nobody would be getting screwed. We'd all be getting the same deal, and the attendant realization that our votes don't really count would encourage us all to pursue more important interests, like discussing how exciting it is to have Robert Downey Jr. as a regular on Ally McBeal.

Yr Pal,

BarTel

Dear Suck :)!

I see that you are covering the sorry state of politics but like 99% of all Americans you are blind to the true reality behind the scenes. You seem to have the mistaken belief that you live in a free country, a democracy. How would you like a professional monetary and tax law expert, writer, screenwriter, and artist to whip up a free article for you, artwork included, that explains a terrible corruption that has been taking place? You stand for freedom don't you? All I need is a place to rant and expose the naked truth and a link back to my site.

What is the truth? The truth is that the elections have been rigged for the past 87 years and I can tell you HOW this has been done in detail! It's a secret which in the past was known as the "banker's secret" and only those rare few people who get into money and the markets at the highest levels ever discover the secret to how you're being ripped off and lied to. But the secret is so easy to understand that when you finally learn what's really going on in politics then ...well, heck... I don't know what you'll do. You might get dangerous! It's very disillusioning to learn that your entire life has been lived under a lie conceived by greedy and power-mad men.

I can tailor make the article for your site and during this key Florida Vote thing I'm sure it will cause controversy from coast to coast as you bust the story. If you're interested just email me.

Ken D. Webber
<kensmindmovie@hotmail.com>

Well, thanks for the big news, Ken, but we've always known the voting was rigged. There's no way American Beauty would have beaten out The Sixth Sense in a free and fair vote.

Why not write us another opus on the Scripted Mind instead? Or better yet, explain who's behind this Fred Rogers retirement. Was it Henrietta Pussycat? It must have been. Meow Meow, indeed!

Sucksters

Hi Sucksters,

Nice mess you've gotten yourselves into this time. What first looked like a newscaster endurance contest then turned into a Twilight Zone episode and now into a playground tug of war. Even the blame is undecided between candidates such as the founding fathers, Ralph Nader, Florida election officials, outdated hardware, and 80 year-old voters. The ballot misdesign is an instant classic for obfuscation, just right. If Nader had been in the Buchanan spot, the whole thing would've gone unnoticed, and with a mini-party in the Pat spot, it would've been even harder to claim Palm Beach was a Workers' Party stronghold.

Most probably, future voters will mock the 2000 election every time they vote (most of the time for a living candidate) on their adaptive personalized MyBallot, and interface designers will fondly commemorate this as the date of their vindication. The rest of us will remember the time before e-tailers were able to justify 5 inch high BUY buttons. But that's almost a best-case scenario, prolong this a few more weeks and you'll have the Democrats changing the locks and barricading the doors while Bush circles the White House in a U-Haul truck, holding a "Bush Wins!" headline and honking to be let in. And it wouldn't even make the front pages, since by then the lead story would be the people jumping off buildings or slamming their heads against the wall trying to wake up from a very bad dream.

Greetings,

Humberto Moreira
<hmoreira@subidea.com>

Don't look at us, Humberto. We're trying to figure out why the lead story this week isn't Mr. Rogers's retirement.

Maybe it was Queen Sarah Saturday who maneuvered the big guy out. That husband of hers is such a stuffed shirt, you know they must have resented the boss deep down.

Sucksters

Where the hell do you get this crap from? No one is saying that what happened in Palm Beach County was due to fraud. Of course you know this but the truth probably gets in the way of your playing the morally superior cynic.

I have a cousin who sees a disconnect in the Palm Beach County controversy. On "any given friday night down at the bingo hall, 500 little 'ol ladies and gents can manipulate 20 bingo cards in front of them at once! — Ink blotters moving in an exact and calculating fashion..."

This is a useful observation. We keep hearing about all the poor seniors who were too enfeebled in mind to be able to competently vote. And of course just because some seniors have quick and nimble minds it doesn't mean that some of their peers aren't all that bright. But it is good to get a little countervailing perspective. People are beginning to construct a stereotype of the helpless and simple-minded who need an advocate to make sure that they get to place a ballot that will be counted.

I don't even have a problem with that. But the time for advocacy is BEFORE the ballots are cast not after when the outcome hasn't proven to your liking. The best time to have addressed this problem was after the '96 election when some 15,000 ballots were thrown out for the SAME reason. Those votes wouldn't have affected the outcome. It wouldn't have harmed anyone to review the whole process then. But of course the citizenry and leading officials of this heavily Democratic county were not very concerned about the allegedly "disenfranchised" then. Their guy won.

There is something delicious about this controversy that I haven't heard anyone comment on yet. I'm sure it won't be much longer until we do. The very same people who have been telling us how incredibly stupid my candidate is (a friend INSISTS that Governor Bush is a moron) are now confessing that many in their number don't have the intellectual candle power needed to punch a single hole in a punch card next to the name of the candidate they support.

A story in the Shreveport Times helps us to determine just how hard to master was the "butterfly ballot" used in Palm Beach County. (BTW, my brother says that he was mailed a sample of the ballot a week before the election. All Palm Beach County registered voters were.) The story in the Times is about Lisa Burns' 4th grade class. Ms. Burns is a teacher at Stockwell Elementary School in Bossier City. She "pulled a sample of the controversial Palm Beach County, Fla., ballot off the Internet on Thursday. She then put her class of 9- and 10-year-olds to the test. 'I gave them a ballot and had them take a blue marker to vote for Al Gore and a red marker to vote for George Bush. Then I had them put their name on the bottom of the ballot and turn it in.'" Not one of the 22 children in her class was befuddled by the ballot. Each one marked his or her ballot without error. The same test was given to a class down the hall — Stacey Robinson's first grade class. Nineteen out of twenty-four marked their ballots correctly. Hmmmm.

GW
<GWRJR33@aol.com>

Wait a second: Are you saying your brother and your cousin are both in agreement on this?

Well that's enough for us! We're supporting your guy. Which guy are you supporting? We hope you're supporting Robert Downey Jr. He rocks!

Sucksters

Portland, Oregon is not in western Washington. Good effort though.

Jeremy Alexander
<Jeremy.Alexander@web-x.com>

You must be reading this issue on Windows, which causes all dotted lines to point to Redmond. Nothing we can do about it.

Sucksters

In today's column, you said:

"Whatever the outcome of the recount, it's heartening to see that the electoral college system — initially created to give more voting power to slave-owning states — is still doing its good work"

Where did you find that the electoral college system was created to give more power to slave states? Do you have any documentation to back up these claims, or are they speculation?

Thanks,

Crooked (aka Mike Lovell)
<crookedx@hotmail.com>

As explained on page 130 of A History of the United States, by R. Wade, H. Wilder and L. Wade:

The Southern States thought that slaves should be counted in deciding the number of representatives per state but should not be counted when direct taxes were to be levied. Northerners protested, however, that this would give Southerners an unfair advantage. The compromise committee suggested that five slaves be counted as three persons for purposes of representation as well as taxation. The solution was accepted by the delegates.

And later on the same page:

The electoral system proved to be one of the clumsiest parts of the Constitution. It was designed to make the President independent of the legislative branch without putting his election directly into the hands of the people. The delegates believed that if the people were to elect the President directly, they might vote only for local candidates because of lack of knowledge about leaders of other states.

That book is a high school textbook, so we know it's telling the truth. We're not so sure Akhil Reed Amar is telling the truth, but we know that he's employed at Yale University and is writing for The New York Times, and that therefore we have no choice but to believe the OpEd column he wrote recently. An excerpt:

In 1787, as the Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed direct election of the president. But James Madison of Virginia worried that such a system would hurt the South, which would have been outnumbered by the North in a direct election system. The creation of the Electoral College got around that: it was part of the deal that Southern states, in computing their share of electoral votes, could count slaves (albeit with a two-fifths discount), who of course were given none of the privileges of citizenship. Virginia emerged as the big winner, with more than a quarter of the electors needed to elect a president. A free state like Pennsylvania got fewer electoral votes even though it had approximately the same free population.

The Constitution's pro-Southern bias quickly became obvious. For 32 of the Constitution's first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency. Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800 against John Adams from Massachusetts in a race where the slavery skew of the Electoral College was the decisive margin of victory.

The system's gender bias was also obvious. In a direct presidential election, any state that chose to enfranchise its women would have automatically doubled its clout. Under the Electoral College, however, a state had no special incentive to expand suffrage — each got a fixed number of electoral votes, regardless of how many citizens were allowed to vote.

Prof. Amar has been making the grand tour of brainy media these days. The Sucksters remain unconvinced by his claim that there is some equivalence between the early southern lock on the presidency and the (disputable) fact that Bush won the South by appealing largely to white Southern males. While we give no quarter to the states' rights crowd in general, we also think his scoffing dismissal of the notion of state interests ("what are those, anyway?"), is intemperate. Nor do we agree with him that increased Federal oversight of the electoral process would necessarily be a good thing. But as long as we all must continue to pretend that the United States is a meaningful entity, we believe American voters should be counted as a national bloc, and we welcome as an ally anybody who demystifies the supposedly hallowed tradition of the electoral college.

Powdering our wigs, we remain,

Sucksters

Fraud?

I've used that same ballot machine with the same ballot layout. Anyone "confused" by it is confused by life itself and has no business in a voting booth.

Democrats said the Osceola County return was obviously bad because the Libertarian candidate, listed under Gore, got 309 votes in a county with about 12 registered Libertarian voters. The rest of the story: a libertarian radio talk show host (Neal Boortz from Georgia) did a 2-hour special broadcast there Saturday. He said a vote for Bush was wasted and encouraged the audience to vote for Harry Browne and for freedom. Apparently about 300 did. Yet the Gore campaign wants to claim those votes as well.

The likely real reason for the squalling about the ballot layout is simple. Democrat activists took voters to the polls and told them to vote for the second candidate (even Democrats are often able to count to two). The activists didn't expect their passengers to look down the ballot on *both sides* of the page.

And does ANYONE believe Rep. Wexler's claim to have seen *hundreds* of crying and wailing post-traumatic-stress-syndrome voters in the parking lots around the polls??

------

"There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? DISTRUST." -- Demosthenes

"The Founders did not want efficient government; they wanted safe government. And to that end they built a government full of blocking mechanisms, secure in the faith -- vindicated by the subsequent 200 and more years of history -- that anything the American people wanted protractedly, intensely and reflectively, they would get in the fullness of time." -- George Will

If you don't vote to support the policies you want, you deserve the politicians you get. Go to www.self-gov.org, take the World's Shortest Political Quiz, and see who deserves your vote.

---

Best,

Mark (Wyoming Libertarian voter)
<mark.wilson33@us.army.mil>

We're with you on the Gore camp's effort to claim those 309 votes based on census anomalies. We are in fact, opposed to any effort to investigate or otherwise influence the Florida elections that originates from the Gore camp.

However, we wouldn't want to live in a country where Palm Beach yentas did not have the inalienable right to sue everybody in sight. We recall no language in the constitution that makes intelligence a requirement for voting. And we think that the dismissal of 19,000 ballots is, under any circumstances, grounds for a legal action by the voters in that area. Particularly when the voters are actually alive, which as you know is not always the case with Democratic voters. The fact that this sort of thing has apparently happened several times before does not appear to be sufficient legal reason to block such a legal challenge now.

Thus, the court of Suck opinion sees no reason why Palm Beach voters (or for that matter any voters in any place where voting irregularities can be credibly alleged) should not be allowed to seek redress in civil court, even if such an attempt inconveniences either or both presidential candidates.

But what we really want to talk about is your sig file collection, and in particular your pitch for the World's Shortest Political Quiz. First of all, it's false advertising (The world's actual shortest political quiz is "Which side are you on?"). Second, it's phony as a three-dollar ballot: If you vote for anything less stringent than martial law, you get designated as a Libertarian. No American worthy of the name could take the quiz and not recognize it as pure hokum. Somehow, the principles of libertarianism, which should have such resonance among rank and file Americans, keep getting lost among crackerbarrel appeals like this one and not-ready-for-prime-time candidacies like the presidential bids of Harry "Invest in gold and save yourself from the coming fiscal apocalypse" Browne. The one true path for the Libertarian party is clear, should anybody be bold enough to take it: More Russell Means, less anti-FDR conspiracy theorizing. More Starchild, less vituperation about how Democrats are dumb and the person you're debating with has obviously not read the Constitution. And get some better candidates on the slate. Can't T.J. Rodgers be persuaded to take a crack at the White House?

Sucksters

Having covered both John Ashcroft (as the hymn singing Governor and Senator of Missouri) for UPI and Carnahan for the St. Joseph News-Press, he should have stuck with his plans to run for President. It sure beats dying to win. And I'd bet he probably expects to be resurrected.

Of course his sense of entitlement pervades him family. He lost popularity when his wife forced the Missouri State Librarian to come in on Sunday, her day off, to open up the State Library in Jefferson City so the little Ashcrofts could do their homework, because they had a Monday deadline.

Funny the things we remember about people...

Eric Welch
<ewelch@gia.edu>

You must be mistaken, Mr. Welch. We've heard dozens of glowing testimonials to Mr. Ashcroft's selfless and devoted service on behalf of Missouri and Missourians, and his tender kindness to widows of all political stripes. And they wouldn't be allowed to say things like that if they weren't true! You must be making these stories up.

Sucksters

Did Bush really say that to Queen Elizabeth? That's the best reason for voting for him I've heard yet. Good thing you covered that up until after the election.

Now if he'd just insult Adrienne Clarkson and toss off a few rude remarks at Lionel Jospin, I could really get behind his presidency!

Michael Straight
<straight@email.unc.edu>

Agreed. Maybe the way out of this whole electoral mess is for the Federal Election Commission to proclaim that if Bush ever said anything even remotely insulting to Queen Elizabeth he should be appointed President without further ado. Unfortunately, the real story of the Bush/Royalty insult appears to be that Laura Bush failed to realize that Al Gore goes by the title Dauphin down in the Voluteer State, and didn't curtsy properly during Gore's abortive concession call.

Sucksters

The Shit

Physical Strength and How to Obtain It, by Eugen Sandow

Bamboozled, A Spectacular New Film by Mr. Spike Lee

G. Beato's all-new Soundbitten

William Demarest, Sultan of Snarl, in The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)

George Wallace: Settin' The Woods On Fire, directed by Daniel McCabe and Paul Stekler

1995

Bobby Darin, Darin at the Copa (Atlantic)

Shinji-San in the floating world of indeterminate duration, by Peter Richardson

American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor

Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1996, Merge)

45, by Bill Drummond

Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, Singing in the Rain (ASV)

Do you know of stuff that doesn't actively suck? Things so good they deserve to make the Shitlist?Send your suggestions to us.