Not One Man One Vote Anymore

[eulesseagle]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061803766.html

"it is going to expand"

[UNT90]

http://www.washingto...0061803766.html

"it is going to expand"

Strange indeed.

[Mean Green 93-98]

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned "get out the vote" efforts?

[UNTflyer]

How is this not getting national coverage?

[GreenMachine]

The ROT is sounding better and better every day. I don't understand why we have to appease every single group and ensure everyones happiness.

[KRAM1]

Nothing much coming out of Washington surprises me any longer. We have "lost" so much of what made this nation the greatest nation on earth. We are fast becoming a nation of entitlement and will soon find that America looks very much like France, Greece, etc. We are Black-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Gay/Lesbian-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc., etc.

Get real...we are all Americans, not some hyphenated American sub group. Until we start to think and act like Americans one and all and stop finding some pet cause or some excuse to blame someone or call someone some "name", we will continue to fall further and further from the ideals that our founding fathers fought and died for so many years ago.

[TheTastyGreek]

Nothing much coming out of Washington surprises me any longer. We have "lost" so much of what made this nation the greatest nation on earth. We are fast becoming a nation of entitlement and will soon find that America looks very much like France, Greece, etc. We are Black-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Gay/Lesbian-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc., etc.

Get real...we are all Americans, not some hyphenated American sub group. Until we start to think and act like Americans one and all and stop finding some pet cause or some excuse to blame someone or call someone some "name", we will continue to fall further and further from the ideals that our founding fathers fought and died for so many years ago.

You should all be so lucky.

And please don't talk about Greece and entitlement. You may have read some article during this recent economic situation, but that doesn't mean you have any idea what or why Greece wound up in that situation, or the political reasons that it developed.

[eulessismore]

Nothing much coming out of Washington surprises me any longer. We have "lost" so much of what made this nation the greatest nation on earth. We are fast becoming a nation of entitlement and will soon find that America looks very much like France, Greece, etc. We are Black-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Gay/Lesbian-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc., etc.

Get real...we are all Americans, not some hyphenated American sub group. Until we start to think and act like Americans one and all and stop finding some pet cause or some excuse to blame someone or call someone some "name", we will continue to fall further and further from the ideals that our founding fathers fought and died for so many years ago.

I disagree. Check out the following link for maps of the 111th Congress, stroll down to the district of someone you like or dislike, who you think has been in Congress just too long, and consider the likelihood that someone in that Representative's state designed a district for him/her in order to increase the chances of them being reelected over and over. In case you don't get the point, very little has been said about gerrymandering, because, as someone said after the last congressional redistricting for Texas "The Democrats did the same thing when they were in office". So, I guess this "proportional representation" might cause us to have "lost" so much of...something in American culture: gerrymandering.

Look at Congressional District maps here:

Edited June 20, 2010 by eulessismore

[GreenMachine]

I disagree. Check out the following link for maps of the 111th Congress, stroll down to the district of someone you like or dislike, who you think has been in Congress just too long, and consider the likelihood that someone in that Representative's state designed a district for him/her in order to increase the chances of them being reelected over and over. In case you don't get the point, very little has been said about gerrymandering, because, as someone said after the last congressional redistricting for Texas "The Democrats did the same thing when they were in office". So, I guess this "proportional representation" might cause us to have "lost" so much of...something in American culture: gerrymandering.

Look at Congressional District maps here:

Drawing up district lines to proportionally give a political party, race, religion etc an advantage or put a political party, race, religion etc at a disadvantage is not the same as allowing one voter multiple votes for multiple candidates or multiple votes for one candidate. Even by allowing multiple votes per person, a minority (or any candidate) could get more single votes from more voters but fewer votes overall.

[KRAM1]

You should all be so lucky.

And please don't talk about Greece and entitlement. You may have read some article during this recent economic situation, but that doesn't mean you have any idea what or why Greece wound up in that situation, or the political reasons that it developed.

Why is Greece off limits? Don't take it personal but Greece is a society full of the "entitlement mentality". If you don't understand that, I would be very surprised. Part of Greece's economic challenges is how to deal with the bloated entitlement programs. No, not the entire reason for the challenges Greece has been facing, and all the lovely street rioting and protesting of weeks past, but a major challenge none the less. A challenge the US is facing to a much greater extent every year.

You may be the resident Mean Green "expert" on Greece but that hardly means you are the only one here who has a bit of knowledge concerning the current situation and why Greece finds itself there today.

We should all watch the situation closely and hope Greece finds a way to stave off increasing economic challenges. If they can't, it is likely that Europe and the Euro will feel the pain for a long time to come. Glad to see that most of the other Euro countries came to Greece's aid with a bailout of sorts to stabilize the situation. We'll see if it "sticks". I certainly hope so, but since I'll be in Greece in September, I wouldn't mind the Euro staying a bit "weak" against the dollar.

Don't get too excited Tasty...no body is picking on Greece.

[Travis]

yay for discrimination!!!!

[eulessismore]

Drawing up district lines to proportionally give a political party, race, religion etc an advantage or put a political party, race, religion etc at a disadvantage is not the same as allowing one voter multiple votes for multiple candidates or multiple votes for one candidate. Even by allowing multiple votes per person, a minority (or any candidate) could get more single votes from more voters but fewer votes overall.

I still have my doubts about that, but gerrymandering does seem to get more people involved in using GIS software. I favor technological advancement, but prefer it to be used appropriately. But, those putting together athletic conferences don't seem to care about (paraphrasing Mack Brown's words) "geographical fit", and end up with quite a scattered distribution. Hmmmm, still don't really like that.

[TheTastyGreek]

Why is Greece off limits? Don't take it personal but Greece is a society full of the "entitlement mentality". If you don't understand that, I would be very surprised. Part of Greece's economic challenges is how to deal with the bloated entitlement programs. No, not the entire reason for the challenges Greece has been facing, and all the lovely street rioting and protesting of weeks past, but a major challenge none the less. A challenge the US is facing to a much greater extent every year.

You may be the resident Mean Green "expert" on Greece but that hardly means you are the only one here who has a bit of knowledge concerning the current situation and why Greece finds itself there today.

We should all watch the situation closely and hope Greece finds a way to stave off increasing economic challenges. If they can't, it is likely that Europe and the Euro will feel the pain for a long time to come. Glad to see that most of the other Euro countries came to Greece's aid with a bailout of sorts to stabilize the situation. We'll see if it "sticks". I certainly hope so, but since I'll be in Greece in September, I wouldn't mind the Euro staying a bit "weak" against the dollar.

Don't get too excited Tasty...no body is picking on Greece.

When I read Greek entitlement mentality in something you wrote, I wonder what the hell you are talking about. That's not a nation of people who feel entitled to much of anything.

Greece didn't have an economic crisis because of an "entitlement mentality". They have an economic crisis because the past century has been one disaster after another, some internal and some external.

I'm not worried about you "picking on Greece", I'm just annoyed over how everything you're saying betrays a total lack of awareness of the history that led to the current situation and system of government. I'm not claiming to be an expert, I just heard it all secondhand while growing up.

My grandfather was one of two males in his family to survive a genocide that was barely nipped in the bud. His family just happened to live in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. Because of it, he grew up mostly illiterate. Didn't know for sure when his birthday was because he wasn't even 10 years old when he was smuggled across the sea disguised as an elderly woman so that he wouldn't be killed like every other man in his family was. Wasn't reunited with two of his sisters for over a decade. When they finally found each other, they couldn't remember and agree on what their last name was.

The other male who survived was imprisoned for years until he was released under the terms of a treaty that repopulated over two million people between Turkey and Greece. By the time he got out, he had been beaten and tortured so badly that he couldn't even walk. He pushed himself around with the palms of his hands, dragging his ass and his mangled legs along the ground until a compassionate doctor took pity on him and performed a series of surgeries that allowed him to limp around for the rest of his short, pain-filled life.

My grandfather was luckier, and unlike his only other surviving male relative, managed to live long enough to endure a military occupation by Hitler. His wife was almost killed before his eyes when she caught an Italian soldier trying to steal food from them, and chased him off by beating him with a broom. The Italian was trying to steal their food because part of the German occupation strategy was instigating a famine that killed more than a quarter of a million people in Athens.

Then Hitler was defeated and Greece settled into another four years of distress with the start of the Greek Civil War. That conflict caused more social and economic damage than the Nazi occupation did.

Then, in 1967, the three colonels staged a military coup. For seven years, my grandfather had to live in constant fear of the government. Having guests over to the house was dangerous because it might look like secret political meetings. If his daughter rejected the wrong person for a date, he might denounce her as a communist and she would be tortured and killed. Just dumb random bad luck, like shopping at a grocery too close to an underground meeting place or riding on a bus with a suspected subversive was enough to get himself thrown in prison, tortured and/or killed.

During the military government, my mother tracked down a third sister that everyone thought had been murdered 50 years earlier. She had been living in the northern part of the country, and she had a different, third variation on their family name.

Then, in 1974, the Colonels were overthrown and my grandfather (and all of Greece) could finally relax. All they had to worry about was the Cyprus crisis that popped up in the wake of the military government's collapse. It merely spawned a cold war with Turkey that persists to this day.

Oh, and the military government also led to the formation of a domestic Al Qaeda that operated for nearly 30 years and carried out over 100 terrorist attacks.

But all in all, a cold war with a territorial neighbor that they've already fought four major wars against in the past 125 years, that occupied the country and outlawed the language for 400 years, and that slaughtered nearly everyone in his (and his wife's) family probably wasn't a very big deal for my grandfather. At least, not compared to the other stuff he had to live through.

So there's your recap of the past 100 years of Greek history from the perspective of Ioannis Malakias. Or Ioannis Malaki. Or Ioannis Malkas. Depending on whose memory you trust most. Not a whole lot of grounds for a sense of entitlement to anything. Not even basic survival.

Don't casually throw out Greece as a nation of "entitlement mentality" because of some conclusion you might have jumped to based on the recent economic situation. Because the recent "crisis" is only in relation to what is really an economic miracle. The fact that Greece isn't a semi-anarchic smoldering ruin like Albania is evidence enough that the people there aren't of an "entitlement mentality". It's a country that has spent the past century (and perhaps even more accurately, the past 500 years) entitled to nothing but a chance to struggle to pick up the pieces every time the universe pounds it down into the ground.

If Greece were a state in a federated European Union, the "crisis" wouldn't even be a spit in the ocean compared to how California relates to the United States. And what you call "bloated entitlement programs" is what kept millions more people from starving to death at various times of complete devastation and ruin. I'm no socialist, but I'm also not blind to the hard, savage realities that led to the genesis of the situation.

I still like you, KRAM, but you are way, way off base in what you're saying. You aren't the only one, but seeing anyone here talk about how we might "turn into Greece" as though that were a bad thing is laughable. The only prevailing mentality among native Greeks (a group I am not a member of) is to tolerate whatever wretched calamity pops up next, struggle through it, and then put their heads down and work their way back.

[eulesseagle]

All of Europe has the welfare state mentality. Greece has it the worse. Pick up a paper or look on various web sites & notice the "riots" in Greece. Why are they rioting? They want more entitlement money for retirement, they want to work less for more pay & now the country can not sustain the financial burden. Greek credit is basically .... junk. Portugal, Spain & Italy are in the same boat but not as bad. Their current birth rates are not sustaining growth to achieve more or the same entitlements. The only groups that are having positive rates of growth that are double to triple the countries growths are the Muslims. Not too far behind these European countries is the United States.

As far as the original topic I am surprised this has not headed to court. But since all measures are political and for the most part the American people are left out of the loop does this surprise anyone? IMHO, political equality via the ballot box is of little use when you compare it to social/economic inequality. Case in point the '64 Civil Rights Act.

[TheTastyGreek]

All of Europe has the welfare state mentality. Greece has it the worse. Pick up a paper or look on various web sites & notice the "riots" in Greece.

I don't need to read any white supremacist forum to get my Greek news. My mother and my American father have been over there for months now, and I'm pretty well up to speed on the situation, thanks.

If anyone wants to see my dad rocking a Mean Green shirt in a riot-free and economically vibrant downtown Athens, photos are available.

How's that Nazi superfuel development coming along?

Edited June 20, 2010 by TheTastyGreek

[eulessismore]

When I read Greek entitlement mentality in something you wrote, I wonder what the hell you are talking about. That's not a nation of people who feel entitled to much of anything.

Greece didn't have an economic crisis because of an "entitlement mentality". They have an economic crisis because the past century has been one disaster after another, some internal and some external.

I'm not worried about you "picking on Greece", I'm just annoyed over how everything you're saying betrays a total lack of awareness of the history that led to the current situation and system of government. I'm not claiming to be an expert, I just heard it all secondhand while growing up.

My grandfather was one of two males in his family to survive a genocide that was barely nipped in the bud. His family just happened to live in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. Because of it, he grew up mostly illiterate. Didn't know for sure when his birthday was because he wasn't even 10 years old when he was smuggled across the sea disguised as an elderly woman so that he wouldn't be killed like every other man in his family was. Wasn't reunited with two of his sisters for over a decade. When they finally found each other, they couldn't remember and agree on what their last name was.

The other male who survived was imprisoned for years until he was released under the terms of a treaty that repopulated over two million people between Turkey and Greece. By the time he got out, he had been beaten and tortured so badly that he couldn't even walk. He pushed himself around with the palms of his hands, dragging his ass and his mangled legs along the ground until a compassionate doctor took pity on him and performed a series of surgeries that allowed him to limp around for the rest of his short, pain-filled life.

My grandfather was luckier, and unlike his only other surviving male relative, managed to live long enough to endure a military occupation by Hitler. His wife was almost killed before his eyes when she caught an Italian soldier trying to steal food from them, and chased him off by beating him with a broom. The Italian was trying to steal their food because part of the German occupation strategy was instigating a famine that killed more than a quarter of a million people in Athens.

Then Hitler was defeated and Greece settled into another four years of distress with the start of the Greek Civil War. That conflict caused more social and economic damage than the Nazi occupation did.

Then, in 1967, the three colonels staged a military coup. For seven years, my grandfather had to live in constant fear of the government. Having guests over to the house was dangerous because it might look like secret political meetings. If his daughter rejected the wrong person for a date, he might denounce her as a communist and she would be tortured and killed. Just dumb random bad luck, like shopping at a grocery too close to an underground meeting place or riding on a bus with a suspected subversive was enough to get himself thrown in prison, tortured and/or killed.

During the military government, my mother tracked down a third sister that everyone thought had been murdered 50 years earlier. She had been living in the northern part of the country, and she had a different, third variation on their family name.

Then, in 1974, the Colonels were overthrown and my grandfather (and all of Greece) could finally relax. All they had to worry about was the Cyprus crisis that popped up in the wake of the military government's collapse. It merely spawned a cold war with Turkey that persists to this day.

Oh, and the military government also led to the formation of a domestic Al Qaeda that operated for nearly 30 years and carried out over 100 terrorist attacks.

But all in all, a cold war with a territorial neighbor that they've already fought four major wars against in the past 125 years, that occupied the country and outlawed the language for 400 years, and that slaughtered nearly everyone in his (and his wife's) family probably wasn't a very big deal for my grandfather. At least, not compared to the other stuff he had to live through.

So there's your recap of the past 100 years of Greek history from the perspective of Ioannis Malakias. Or Ioannis Malaki. Or Ioannis Malkas. Depending on whose memory you trust most. Not a whole lot of grounds for a sense of entitlement to anything. Not even basic survival.

Don't casually throw out Greece as a nation of "entitlement mentality" because of some conclusion you might have jumped to based on the recent economic situation. Because the recent "crisis" is only in relation to what is really an economic miracle. The fact that Greece isn't a semi-anarchic smoldering ruin like Albania is evidence enough that the people there aren't of an "entitlement mentality". It's a country that has spent the past century (and perhaps even more accurately, the past 500 years) entitled to nothing but a chance to struggle to pick up the pieces every time the universe pounds it down into the ground.

If Greece were a state in a federated European Union, the "crisis" wouldn't even be a spit in the ocean compared to how California relates to the United States. And what you call "bloated entitlement programs" is what kept millions more people from starving to death at various times of complete devastation and ruin. I'm no socialist, but I'm also not blind to the hard, savage realities that led to the genesis of the situation.

I still like you, KRAM, but you are way, way off base in what you're saying. You aren't the only one, but seeing anyone here talk about how we might "turn into Greece" as though that were a bad thing is laughable. The only prevailing mentality among native Greeks (a group I am not a member of) is to tolerate whatever wretched calamity pops up next, struggle through it, and then put their heads down and work their way back.

+1, although it just gets you up to even at this point. Anyone wanting to get scared could have listened to the NPR segment yesterday on the financial circumstances of the states; California and New York are just the best known financial disasters at this point. One problem: States can't declare bankruptcy, so without something like that hanging over their heads, the various parties have nothing to hold their feet to the fire and make any compromises. One thing I can remember a fellow from UK who was visiting us during our financial meltdown saying was that "In Europe, we have strong regulations that will prevent that from happening". No government entity that I can think of should feel comfortable in saying "it can't happen here". Speaking of entitlement programs, nobody seems to want to talk about all the executive bonuses that were being paid to American financial institutions who had received TARP money and hadn't yet paid it back. Do corporate executives of large corporations fall behind anyone in their attitude of entitlement?

[Shuke-D]

Wow. What started out as an article about a fairly lame, and local, NY voting position, has morphed into a full-blown discussion of Greek/European/US comparisons. This might be the most significant Hellenic-related hijack since the Corinthians hijacked Epidamnus from Corcyra, thus precipitating the Peloponnesian war.

[TheTastyGreek]

Wow. What started out as an article about a fairly lame, and local, NY voting position, has morphed into a full-blown discussion of Greek/European/US comparisons. This might be the most significant Hellenic-related hijack since the Corinthians hijacked Epidamnus from Corcyra, thus precipitating the Peloponnesian war.

Did I laugh?

Yes, I did.

[eulesseagle]

I don't need to read any white supremacist forum to get my Greek news. My mother and my American father have been over there for months now, and I'm pretty well up to speed on the situation, thanks.

If anyone wants to see my dad rocking a Mean Green shirt in a riot-free and economically vibrant downtown Athens, photos are available.

How's that Nazi superfuel development coming along?

________________________

http://www.world-newspapers.com/

this is some great "superfuel" for the uniformed.....even for you tastygreek.

_____________________________

i would suggest you read a few of the european papers daily for about six months to get a good idea what is going on.

Edited June 20, 2010 by eulesseagle

[TheTastyGreek]

My parents are living on Mesogeion, one of the largest streets in Athens, within a 5-10 minute walk to the Pentagon. My uncle is a former fighter pilot, still works for the military training other pilots right outside Athens. Another uncle used to work in shipping, and lives at Pireas, the country's main seaport. My aunt works for an airline at Eleftherios Venizelos, the main commercial airport in Athens. One of my closest friends over there is a lawyer, and her office is right off Syntagma Square. She walked through the "riots" to get to work. My godmother is a translator for one of the government ministries, and she works near Syntagma Square, too.

If anything actually does get bad over there, I won't need a 6 month old newspaper to find out about it. I won't need you or the folks at Stormfront to clue me in, either.

I'm pretty comfortable with my grasp of the current political climate and economic situation, thanks. As far as any non-resident can feel confident they have a finger on the pulse of what's happening in Greece, I think I'm pretty on top of it.

Edited June 21, 2010 by TheTastyGreek

[UNTflyer]

I disagree. Check out the following link for maps of the 111th Congress, stroll down to the district of someone you like or dislike, who you think has been in Congress just too long, and consider the likelihood that someone in that Representative's state designed a district for him/her in order to increase the chances of them being reelected over and over. In case you don't get the point, very little has been said about gerrymandering, because, as someone said after the last congressional redistricting for Texas "The Democrats did the same thing when they were in office". So, I guess this "proportional representation" might cause us to have "lost" so much of...something in American culture: gerrymandering.

Look at Congressional District maps here:

Political gerrymandering, although highly unethical, is actually legal.

Getting to vote six times because you are Latino is NOT.

[UNTflyer]

How's that Nazi superfuel development coming along?

I hear it's going to be a smash hit! It will change the world, and then they're going to get right back on that Jew problem.

[eulesseagle]

My parents are living on Mesogeion, one of the largest streets in Athens, within a 5-10 minute walk to the Pentagon. My uncle is a former fighter pilot, still works for the military training other pilots right outside Athens. Another uncle used to work in shipping, and lives at Pireas, the country's main seaport. My aunt works for an airline at Eleftherios Venizelos, the main commercial airport in Athens. One of my closest friends over there is a lawyer, and her office is right off Syntagma Square. She walked through the "riots" to get to work. My godmother is a translator for one of the government ministries, and she works near Syntagma Square, too.

If anything actually does get bad over there, I won't need a 6 month old newspaper to find out about it. I won't need you or the folks at Stormfront to clue me in, either.

I'm pretty comfortable with my grasp of the current political climate and economic situation, thanks. As far as any non-resident can feel confident they have a finger on the pulse of what's happening in Greece, I think I'm pretty on top of it.

____________

Evidently not......I really think you do not have a clue what is happening by your own statements. Your bios on your family are a little feeble to say the least on defending your point. Who cares what your family did or does? The point is that the Greeks are in serious financial trouble and all they want to do is riot and have cheese with their incessent whine. I once visited Greece once and not to sound critical they were a bit lazy and so said the same with tourists from other European countries.

[Censored by Laurie]

____________

Evidently not......I really think you do not have a clue what is happening by your own statements. Your bios on your family are a little feeble to say the least on defending your point. Who cares what your family did or does? The point is that the Greeks are in serious financial trouble and all they want to do is riot and have cheese with their incessent whine. I once visited Greece once and not to sound critical they were a bit lazy and so said the same with tourists from other European countries.

While boring as fuck amidst nothing but conference realignment talk...this place has been surprisingly devoid of stupid for quite a while.

Go away. Or to tie it back into recent conversation...jog off.

[TheTastyGreek]

I hear it's going to be a smash hit! It will change the world, and then they're going to get right back on that Jew problem.

Ninjaface?