What about infers those other baseball interprets voters whose guy lost? They get no voice. The GOP's plan for "fixing" this is to change the rules, handing out electoral votes by congressional district. Whichever candidate wins the district gets its electoral vote No surprise that under these rules, in 2004, George W. Bush would have taken 22 California electoral votes away from John Kerry, who won the state by 1. 2 million votes. Yes, indeed, winner-take-all is just so darned unfair -- downtrodden GOP presidential candidates have won California a mere nine out of the last 14 elections. We didn't hear a peep from Republicans back then about disenfranchised Democrats. Only when California began going for the "D" presidential candidate did things suddenly look unfair. So when the initiative's spokesman, Kevin Eckery, tells my colleague George Skelton that "this has nothing to do with empowering parties.
It has everything to do with empowering voters," he must be auditioning for "The Daily Show. "Gov . Arnold Schwarzenegger told a radio show that the initiative "almost feels like a loser's mentality, saying, 'I cannot win with those rules baseball field . So let me change the rules. ' "If this "fairness" is so vital to our democracy, why not change the rules in Florida too? Or Texas, or Ohio? Oh yes -- they must be fair already Their winner-take-all electoral votes went Republican baseball tickets . Under the California GOP "fairness" rule, Kerry would have taken 19 electoral votes that went to Bush in those states. California Republicans tried this on themselves in 1979 best seats at coors field . A left-to-right Republican array, including former President Ford, tried to slow Ronald Reagan's rush to the White House by proposing to allot the state's GOP delegates proportionally.
Twenty years later, some of them tried to do the same thing to Bush's presidential steamroller . If they couldn't sell it to themselves then, why should the rest of us buy it now?Democrats' hands are not spotless in this carlos gonzalez . They tried the proportional divvy on the 2004 ballot in Colorado, where voters stomped it flat cellular field . North Carolina Democrats are pushing for it now, but surely big-foot Democrats realize they can hardly gripe about underhanded Republicans in California and let Democrats pull the same stunt in North Carolina. All this just demonstrates, again, how screwed up the election system is cellular field seating chart . A president of the entire nation should be elected under voting rules that apply to the entire nation. Larry Sabato runs the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, and his new book, "A More Perfect Constitution," offers ideas for tidying up the Constitution. He says this GOP initiative would make the system "even dumber than the one we have now. "How won't it work? Let him count the ways: Congressional districts are "terribly mal-apportioned" and already distort voting. Democratic votes are herded into higher concentrations in fewer districts, but Republican votes, he says, are spread out with narrower winning margins in as many districts as possible, leaving Democrats "underrepresented if you go district by district. " And if this system went nationwide, Sabato says, we'd see a lot more elections like 2000, in which one candidate wins the popular vote but the other wins in the electoral college. Democrats know it'll be cheaper to keep this off the ballot than to fight it if it gets there, so they're enlisting "fraud busters" like Nick Warshaw, a junior at Claremont McKenna College and head of California College Democrats. He's already done two "interventions" -- one at a recruitment fair for college organizations, when some freshmen in front of the Democratic group's table were about to sign initiative petitions handed to them by Republican students, and again outside an Albertsons Warshaw spotted a friend being lobbied for his signature.
"I explained to him how this isn't about fairness" -- a talking point from his "fraud buster" training . "The Republican guy was kind of shocked that anyone would come up and say anything. " Are the GOP's paid signature gatherers ready to square off with phalanxes of Nick Warshaws?Oh, the guy outside Albertsons didn't sign cellular field tickets . It's a lesson worth remembering: Friends don't let friends sign dangerous initiatives Colorado Rockies Coors Field - mlb . --patt. morrison cheap hotel . News Corp. 's Fox Entertainment Group Inc cheap hotels . said Wednesday that it had sold the syndication rights to its quirky-but-canceled sitcom, "Arrested Development" to Microsoft Corp. 's MSN Internet portal. The three-year deal marks the first time that a major Hollywood production studio has turned to the Internet for a bona-fide buyer of syndicated shows. Until now, studios have sold their reruns of shows such as "Seinfeld" or "Friends" to TV station groups and cable channels, reaping huge profits in the process. But Fox was in a pickle when it came to "Arrested Development," the Emmy-winning comedy about a dysfunctional family of Orange County real estate developers The series lasted just three seasons on the Fox network. Only 53 episodes were produced -- about half the number of a traditional syndication deal.
That forced Fox to get creative. Executives believed that the comedy, which garnered a small but loyal audience, would be a good test of the power of the Internet for delivering TV content . "We look at this as an opportunity to open up a new market," said Gary Newman, president of Twentieth Century Fox Television . He would not disclose terms of the deal Colorado Rockies Coors Field . The experiment comes at a time when the traditional TV syndication market has been weak, leaving studios struggling to win the multimillion-dollar license fees that were common five years ago coor field . In addition, the explosion of video websites has increased the value of content popular with the Internet crowd. Microsoft plans to offer free streams of the shows, which will include advertisements coor's field Colorado Rockies Coors Field - mlb . Fox also struck deals for "Arrested Development" with HDNet, for the high-definition rights, and with G4 Media Inc. , which bought basic cable rights. Rockies Coors Field "This is a very large deal for us," said Rob Bennett, MSN general manager for entertainment coors . "It fits right within the sweet spot of our strategy to invest in great content for the people who are spending time on MSN. "Many media companies have been migrating their shows to the Internet Time Warner Inc.
Next Articles
Top 10 NFL