response 1 of 136:

Sep 23 14:35 UTC 2000

And on another note:
If you live in Michigan, and want to be able to vote check your voter
registration address and your driver's license address.  If they don't match,
you don't vote.

response 3 of 136:

Sep 23 19:31 UTC 2000

Given that both the drivers license records and voter registration records
are computerized, I'm sure the State can crosscheck them if they're
sufficiently determined to stop college students from voting.

response 5 of 136:

Sep 23 21:15 UTC 2000

If #4 is a response to #3, then yes, there are laws about that:  Michigan
passed one this past Spring requiring the two addresses to match.  Many
believe that the law was specifically aimed at *preventing* students' voting
in their college town, instead requiring them to vote "back home".

Part of the problem is purging of old data:  How does the City Clerk of 
Ann Arbor know that I am now registered to vote in Scio Township and so
prevent me from voting in the City?

response 7 of 136:

Sep 24 01:24 UTC 2000

In theory, the clerk in Scio Township is supposed to tell the State that you
registered to vote there, and then the State can tell the City to unregister
you there.

Does this work at the Federal level too, or once I register to vote in
California will I still be registered in Michigan?

response 9 of 136:

Sep 24 04:04 UTC 2000

This is a specifically Michigan problem, although some other states
(like Massachusetts) have had something similar in place for years.

Until recently, Michigan was one of the few states that handled voter
registration strictly on a local level (city and township), rather
than at the county or state level like most other states.  There were
various problems with this, but everybody thought local control of
voter registration in Michigan was politically sacred.

Since every individual city and township stored voter records
differently, some on physical paper records, others in any one of a
wide variety of mainframe, mini, and microcomputer systems, there
was no practical way to compile a statewide voter list for campaign
mailings, EXCEPT once a year, in May, when every city and township in
the state of Michigan was required to submit a list of voter names
and addresses to the circuit court (county level), to be made into
a countywide computer file, so that jurors could be draw from it at
random.

Laws and court rules (established by the state supreme court) required
that every county do this in exactly the same way.  Therefore, anyone who
wanted to send political mail to, say, voters in all the counties in
Northern Michigan, could get those lists in identical formats from the
jury boards in those counties, every May. 

Then a disaster happened.  A decision was made to stop using voter lists
to draw jurors.  Civil rights folks convinced the legislature that it
would be much more representative to use driver lists, since there are
more nonvoters than nondrivers in Michigan.  The court clerks and jury
boards wrung their hands and sobbed, saying, it would be PHYSICALLY
IMPOSSIBLE to combine voter and driver lists, it had to be ONE or THE
OTHER, NOT BOTH.  So the Legislature voted to draw jurors from licensed
drivers instead of registered voters.

Oops.  Seems that the driver list has ZIP codes but not counties or
cities.  Zip codes like 48917 and 48906 (not to mention hundreds of others
in all parts of the state) sprawl wildly across county and court
boundaries, and lots of people were ordered to show up for jury duty in
courts were they were not legally eligible to serve.  The Secretary of
State computer people wrung their hands and said it was the fault of the
counties and the courts, and besides, it would take years to fix.

MEANWHILE, May arrived, and all of a sudden, all the cities and townships
all over the state were no longer required to submit their voter lists to
be made into a jury pool that politicians could mail campaign literature
to.  Republicans were the most directly affected because they tended to
have the rural districts with dozens of townships that kept voter
registrations on little typed cards rather than in a computer database.

All of a sudden, the Republicans, who had always fought like tigers to
protect local control of voter registration, were up in arms about how
inefficient it was.

As a short-term kludge, the Republican Party demanded, and received, a
free copy of the entire state driver's list, so they could still do
mailings (not quite as good as the voter list, but oh well).  Normally,
the driver's list is sold by the state to direct marketers for about
$200,000.  Naturally, the Democratic Party wanted one for free, too.  And
then the Libertarian Party sued and said it ought to have one, too -- and
won, of course.  And the Libertarians, not really interested in statewide
mailings, sold copies of their list to anyone who was interested and had
the money.

But as a long-term strategy, though local cities and townships were
allowed to continue keeping up "pretend" voter lists, all that activity
was superseded by what the new law called the Q.V.F. -- the "Qualified
Voter File".  And the Q.V.F. was -- the driver's list!  (With just a
couple of fields added to say, "this person is/is not a qualified voter,
in such-and-such a precinct."

Up to this point, your voter address and driver address were irrelevant to
one another.  You could be a driver from your parents' house in Hillsdale
(where insurance is cheap), a voter at your lakeside cottage, receive your
magazines at a P.O. Box in Flint, and be a resident of Toledo for tax
purposes, with none of those interfering with each other one bit.  Indeed,
court decisions had facilitated this.

But now, since the Q.V.F. and the driver's list are the same computer
file, it really inconveniences certain state bureaucrats to have to
maintain two different addresses for you.  So they got a law passed making
it a requirement that you have one address for both purposes, and plan to
quietly delete your voter registration if you refuse to comply.

Perhaps it's a coincidence, but the state senator, Mike Rogers, who
introduced this last bit of legislation is now running for Congress in the
8th District, which includes a major university campus inhabited by
thousands of students of voting age, a great many of them not in sympathy
with Mr.  Rogers' party or platform.  Some cynical observers think Sen.
Rogers was looking for a way to reduce the number of votes for his
opponent in the November, 2000 congressional election.

response 11 of 136:

Sep 24 05:02 UTC 2000

Re 10.  There happens to be another university campus about fifty
miles northwest of Ann Arbor.  There are even more students there
than at the University of Michigan main campus, and they have a much
stronger tradition of getting out and voting than University of
Michigan students do.

Admittedly, that other university started as an agricultural college, just
a few miles down the dirt road from what was then a raw new state capital
in the middle of the wilderness, but that was almost a century and a half
ago.

In the 1940s through the 1960s, an empire-building university president
built it into a major state university, with strong programs in many
different fields, a huge and often beautiful campus, and nationally known
football and basketball teams.

Alongside that university, a community grew up, ultimately becoming
a city that adjoins the state capital city.  Today, that city has
about half the population of Ann Arbor, but quite unlike Ann Arbor,
something like three-quarters of the adults are university students.
Many of the rest are university faculty and staff.

That city, which as recently as 1966 was one of the most Republican cities
in Michigan, now usually generates large majorities for Democratic
candidates at all levels.

response 13 of 136:

Sep 24 05:27 UTC 2000

Larry, in addition to the nationally known football and basketball 
teams, that university has a nationally known hockey team, as well as 
the winningest hockey coach in NCAA history (who only owns one jacket, 
but I digress)

response 15 of 136:

Sep 24 14:20 UTC 2000

re#0:Kennedy 'won' Illinois by a slim margin mostly due to the DNC
'Daley Machine' votes from a lot of dead people.  Its one of the more
quaint things about Chicagoland, 'we got your dead people right here
next to yer phantom employees and yer out-to-lunch streets an
sanitationary types'.  In my precinct something about near 60 percent of
the registered Republicans vote, neither early nor often.  The last time
I was the fifth of 10 - Jack O'Malley and some other pern had moved away
(he lived a couple buildings east and less than half a dozen north -
somehow I figured him to live in the 'rich' neighborhood somehow, where
Jesse and Louis live...(Jackson and Farakhan)).  I be a registered
(filed and monitored) Republican (even though I tend to vote more for
Democrats) just to piss off whats-her-name and so I don't have to wait
in line so much.

response 17 of 136:

Sep 24 17:10 UTC 2000

gotta love them there electoral college fellers.

response 19 of 136:

Sep 25 15:11 UTC 2000

Still another political mass emailing:


----- Original Message -----
From: "American Renewal" <americanrenewal@townhall.com>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 12:47 PM
Subject: Press Release - Actions Speak Louder Than Words


For Immediate Release: September 22, 2000
Contact: Heather Cirmo, 202-637-4617

GORE-LIEBERMAN ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN THEIR
WORDS ON HOLLYWOOD SLUDGE

"Their cozy relations with the Hollywood elite raise grave
doubts about how serious or sincere they are about
protecting America's children," says AR's Lessner.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The actions of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman
continue to speak louder than their words on Hollywood's
marketing of offensive music, movies and video games to
children, American Renewal Vice President Richard Lessner
said in a statement released today.

"Al Gore and Joe Lieberman continue to issue threats and
talk tough about the filth some in the entertainment
industry are purveying to children," Lessner said, "but
their cozy relations with the Hollywood elite raise grave
doubts about how serious or sincere they are about
protecting kids."

The latest revelation of hypocrisy on this issue involves a
particularly offensive compact disc that was handed out last
month in a gift pack at the Democratic National Convention.
The Washington Times and Washington Post both reported this
week that a CD by a rock group calling itself "Eels" was
included in a package of gifts handed out at an official
convention luncheon honoring Rep. Nita Lowey of New York.
The CD, titled "Daises of the Galaxy," features innocent-
looking, cartoon children on its cover, but it contains such
songs as "It's a Mother- - - - - " and such lyrics as "When
I grow up, I'll be an angry little whore."

The offensive CD, which looks like something suitable for
children, was produced by Dreamworks, the studio run by
prominent Gore-Lieberman supporters Steven Speilberg,
Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.  In this election
cycle, these three Hollywood moguls have contributed
$525,000 in soft money to the Democratic Party.

"How can Al Gore and Joe Lieberman hold such cultural
garbage up to shame and opprobrium one day," Lessner asked,
"and the next day stand beside and praise the very people
responsible for producing this sewage?  Despite the Gore-
Lieberman rhetoric about the flood of filth emanating from
Hollywood, the entertainment money continues to flow into
the Gore-Lieberman campaign coffers.  Clearly, the Hollywood
big shots are not overly troubled by what they doubtlessly
have been given to understand is just so much empty campaign
rhetoric."

Lessner noted that despite the efforts of Al Gore and Joe
Lieberman to come across as cultural conservatives and
defenders of traditional America's values, the non-stop
Hollywood fund-raising machine has not slowed one bit in its
efforts on behalf of Gore-Lieberman.

"Of course, it probably helps that both Mr. Gore and Sen.
Lieberman have gone out of their way to tell Hollywood not
to worry," Lessner said, "that any criticisms the candidates
might voice about the industry's despicable products and
marketing practices are not to be taken seriously."

Al Gore and Joe Lieberman this week attended a soft money
fund-raiser in Hollywood, at which it was reported vulgar
and off-color jokes were told and Governor George Bush's
Christian faith was openly ridiculed.  The failure of Sen.
Lieberman to object to such bigotry caused well-known values
advocate Bill Bennett to break with his former ally in the
fight to clean up Hollywood.  Mr. Bennett accused his former
ally of "selling out."

"Parents in America are deeply concerned about their
children being exposed to the most debased sex and violence
in rock music, video games, movies and on television,"
Lessner said.  "Al Gore and Joe Lieberman know this and it's
why they have tried to pose as critics of the entertainment
industry.  But their willingness to accept millions in
campaign cash from the purveyors of cultural sewage, and
their muted criticisms in the presence of the Hollywood
elite, raise doubts about their commitment to the well-being
of America's families."


------------------------------------------------------------
American Renewal is located at 801 G Street, N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20001

response 21 of 136:

Sep 25 16:20 UTC 2000

what will she take to stop running those ads?

response 23 of 136:

Sep 25 17:02 UTC 2000

Lansing is ghetto