Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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I used to watch it all the time at mid-day on TV3. And then chuckle when they lifted an item whole for their 6pm bulletin -- they simply revoiced the report with a TV3 reporter, but still using the ABC script.
It was on at midday! :-(
Worse was when you'd see a story on one night, and then a week later it appeared on 3's evening news.
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So those of us in areas where UHF reception is shite are shite out of luck?
No. You'll just need a satellite.
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If George does gravitas, I guess I've missed it
It's no Meet the Press, but when I was talking gravitas, it was more the news, than the Sunday-morning interview show. I'm not sure any of them pull gravitas on their interviews ... it would be decidedly misplaced.
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How come no mention of PBS
Cos PBS only puts audio on iTunes...
And I feel your pain with the BBC. My memories of the BBC coverage of the taking of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe still surface whenever someone herald's the BBC as less biased than alternatives. Some of the throw-away lines its reporters have throw in have also been cringingly bad...
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Moral of the story: “Only get into a conversation with me about the history of television if you really mean it.”
[random comment to get this into system]
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Just a quick comment to get this onto PA System, given that the RSS feed funning into the System home page is broken today.
If believe the obligatory opening comment is supposed to be something like:
First!
And people think you know something about teh Internet :-)
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It seems to me that there would be a good case to just run the Florida and Michigan primaries again
Then there would be an uproarI'm not sure there would be an uproar, but there just isn't enough time to do this.
Primaries are organised (and paid for) by the States. They're run under legislation passed by the state legislature and run by the Florida government. A new primary cannot happen. It has been suggested that the Florida and Michigan democratic parties could hold caucuses to select delegates, but this doesn't seem likely either (the party would have to pay for these, and they'd likely favour Obama because his greater financial resources play well in caucuses).
No-one really seems to think replacing the votes of a couple of million primary voters with mere thousands of caucus votes is that great an idea, and the possibility of an all mail-in vote has been mooted. The democratic party has apparently promised some cash, and a website raising funds for the possibility has been set up.
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Has there been a case, similar to the one that you described, where the super-delegates effectively changed the nomination, and that nominated person went on to win?
No.
The nomination didn't used to be decided so openly through primaries - up until 1968 it was largely decided by party insiders. Following 1968 they kicked the power over to democratically elected delegates, but by 1980, party leadership was worried that outsiders with little to do with the democratic party (apart from voting in the primaries) had too much power and were weakening the party. So they added superdelegates.
1984 was the first time the the current system - with its mix of elected and unelected delegates was used. And Bill Clinton has been the only Democratic president since then (and he won enough pledged delegates)...
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Candidate A beats Candidate B by a narrow margin. But Candidate A is not inaugurated because Congress and The House of Representatives have 'Superdelegate' status and it is their job to question "is this the best person for the job?" and they give their votes to Candidate B.
Imagine the uproar!
It can kind of happen. Just as in the primaries, the winner of the presidential election has to get an absolute majority of the votes in the electoral college.
If they don't (because there's a tie, or some third party candidate splits the electoral vote three ways), then the House of Representatives decides the presidential election, with each state's congressional delegation getting one vote.
And the Senate then decides the Vice-Presidential election.
This has happened before. The US used to have the person who came second in the election become the Vice-President (although the electors got two votes so would vote for the two people they want). In 1800/1801 the majority of electors on the electoral college all voted for their Presidential pick Thomas Jefferson, and their Vice-Presidential pick Aaron Burr - so there was a tie. After 36 rounds of voting Jefferson got support from the required majority of state delegations. They then added the 12th amendment to the Constitution so that electors voted once for president and once for vice-president.
The 1824/1825 election saw electoral votes split between 4 candidates, with John Quincy Adams victorious on the first ballot in the House.
And in 1836 Virginia's electors refused to vote for Martin van-Buren's Vice-Presidential running mate, leaving him 1 short of the needed majority, and threw the VeeP election to the senate (the only time it got there).
Every election the numbers-guys at CNN and the other networks will try to come up with a scenario in which the two candidates each get 269 votes so throwing the election to the Congress, but it hasn't happened yet.
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Could it be that we're seeing series six of The West Wing play out in real life? I mean, insurgent candidate with an inspirational message and an ethnic minority background, up against experienced insider candidate.
West Wing writers have recently confirmed that the character of Santos was based on Barrack Obama.
There are also potential parallels with season 7 too. An older McCain against a young insurgent Santos, where the older Senator is considered pretty liberal for a republican, and often off-side with religious conservatives...