A Petition to Support the Saving American Democracy Amendment_____________________________________
READ THE ACTUAL 3-PAGE DRAFT HERE.
For the record, I never said that. (The Twitter handles of those who sent it will go unmentioned in order to protect the guilty.) That’s a Tweet I saw, and to which I responded this way: “Obama wasn’t referring to greed. He was referencing FDR’s 4 Freedoms Speech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms”
What upset me more than the sarcasm was the ignorance it showed. I couldn’t decide what surprised me most; that “freedom from want” could be so easily misinterpreted as ‘freedom from desire’, or that the phrase “freedom from want” didn’t immediately spark recognition of an allusion to one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most famous speeches?
The banner on my website, which I seem to quote with annoying frequency, is, “An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.” This is a prime example of why that’s so.
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[Update, April 2, 2012: Another embarrassing and inexcusable election scandal in Florida. Palm Beach Elections Overturned After Hand-Count Reveals Op-Scans Mistallied Results. As Brad Friedman’s article further suggests, we MUST have a verifiable paper trail for all election tallies have a physical count of ballots by humans before an election is certified. ]
[Update, June 13, 2011: This piece is made even more relevant by the recount discoveries and legal challenges surrounding the Wisconsin Supreme Court elections – Mike]
In 2000, the United States experienced a very close and heavily contested presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Bush won a minority of popular votes, but after legal challenges were exhausted, he had a majority of the Electoral College, giving him the election. Enough serious questions were left forever unanswered to shake Americans’ confidence in the honesty of the election outcome. The result was Continue reading
