Kiddycar's random thoughts, comments, views, observations, desires, rants and other off the wall stuff.
This is something I could never do now, even with my new knees,
but there was a time when, given the chance, I surely would have tried!
Now, like most of you...it is too late!
And she's a girl...How Cool is that?
All I can say to all of you is...When You Get The Chance
'I Hope You Dance!'
And so it goes...
I am sure this applies to lots of my friends!
Everette
And so it goes...
Panthers running back DeAngelo Williams appears to have volunteered his first-class plane ticket to a Marine. The 31-year-old Williams posted a picture to his Twitter account Monday of the marine in full uniform next to his ticket. Accompanying the picture was a caption that reads, "I always give up my seat to military if my seat is better! I truly appreciate our troops #flyingtherightway"
DeAngelo Williams ✔ @DeAngeloRB
I always give up my seat to military if my seat is better! I truly appreciate our troops #flyingtherightway
12:19 PM - 7 Jul 2014
As of Monday afternoon, the tweet bearing the photo had been retweeted more than 100 times and favorited more than 200 times. Williams also posted the photo to Facebook, with a caption that reads "He just doesn't know it yet but he will be sitting in this seat when he boards the plane I always give up my 1st class seat! #isalutethetroops!" The post amassed more than 29,000 likes and 1,200 shares.
Williams has played eight seasons with the Carolina Panthers. The one-time Pro Bowler (2009) rushed for 843 yards and three touchdowns in 15 games last season.
SR Suntour forks on model year 2011 through 2013 Scott and Trek Bicycles: The front fork can break, posing a crash hazard. The recall includes SR Suntour front forks on 13 models of Scott and 11 models of Trek 2011, 2012, and 2013 bicycles. About 5200 forks on Scott bicycles and 120,000 forks on Trek bicycles were sold at bicycles stores nationwide from October 2010 to November 2013 for $450. To $1,100 for Scott bicycles and from May 2010 to June 2014 for $600 to $1,370 for Trek bicycles. For additional information, contact Scott USA at 888-607-8365 ext. 2012 or visit scott-sports.com or contact Trek at 800-373-4594 or visit trekbikes.com.
Source: Wikipedia.org
Ever since the founding of the United States, the Electoral College system has been used to decide the winner of Presidential elections.
But if a plan quickly making its way through state legislatures across the country gets enough support, the Electoral College – as we’ve known it throughout history – would be scrapped, and the winner would be based only on the national popular vote.
It may seem difficult to imagine, but here’s how the proposed plan would work.
This proposal – known as the Popular Vote Movement – involves an Interstate Compact where states would commit to select electors pledged to vote for the national popular vote winner, regardless of how their own state voted. Nine states and the District of Columbia (which cast a combined 136 electoral votes) have joined this compact: Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Vermont, California, and Rhode Island.
Both houses in New York have passed this bill and it’s on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desk. It’s already passed in the House in Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oregon. These states and New York represent 107 votes; combined with the others they add up to 242 votes.
If enough states pass this law to get at least 270 electoral votes (the majority of the Electoral College, and the number necessary to win a Presidential election), it will take effect.
Although this legislation is close to becoming reality, it’s not quite a done deal. It’s passed in the House in Arkansas and North Carolina (both red states), but not the Senate.
This bill is an end run around the regular constitutional amending process. Instead of requiring a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress and three-quarters of the states, this proposal would take effect when a simple majority approve it.
And the Electoral College system, which has been part of our representative republic, will be modified and converted to a pure democracy.
Who’s behind this bill and movement? It’s funded, in part, by the Center for Voting and Democracy – a George Soros-funded election group.
This proposal would encourage even more voter fraud in more populated (and left-leaning) states; and provide more incentive to allow illegal immigrants to vote.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud, mischief, coercion, intimidation, confusion, and voter suppression. A very few people can change the national outcome by adding, changing, or suppressing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
The closest popular-vote election count over the last 130+ years of American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election–and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself. Which system offers vote suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?
Toto
Over 90% of the contributions supporting the National Popular Vote effort have come—in about equal total amounts—from
● Tom Golisano, who has funded about 45% of National Popular Vote, is a pro-life, registered Republican businessman , living in Florida, and a founding member of the Independence Party of New York who ran on its ticket for governor of New York in 1994, 1998 and 2002 and
● John R. Koza who is a pro-choice, registered Democratic businessman residing in California. The National Advisory Board of National Popular Vote includes former Congressmen John Buchanan (R–Alabama), Tom Campbell (R–California), and Tom Downey (D–New York), and former Senators Birch Bayh (D–Indiana), David Durenberger (R–Minnesota), and Jake Garn (R–Utah).
Supporters include former Senator Fred Thompson (R–TN), Governor Jim Edgar (R–IL), Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–GA), and Saul Anuzis, former Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party for five years and a former candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The Nebraska GOP State Chairman, Mark Fahleson,Rich Bolen, a Constitutional scholar, attorney at law, and Republican Party Chairman for Lexington County, South Carolina, who wrote “A Conservative Case for National Popular Vote: Why I support a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College.”
toto
The presidential election system, using the 48 state winner-take-all method or district winner method of awarding electoral votes, that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founding Fathers. It is the product of decades of change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by 48 states of winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.
The Electoral College is now the set of 538 dedicated party activists, who vote as rubberstamps for presidential candidates. In the current presidential election system, 48 states award all of their electors to the winners of their state. This is not what the Founding Fathers intended.
The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.
A majority of the states appointed their presidential electors using two of the methods rejected by the Founders in the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 (i.e., appointment by the legislature and by the governor and his cabinet). Presidential electors were appointed by state legislatures for almost a century.
The presidential election system we have today is not in the Constitution. State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award Electoral College votes, were eventually enacted by states, using their exclusive power to do so, AFTER the
Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. Now our current system can be changed by state laws again.
National Popular Vote is based on Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives each state legislature the right to decide how to appoint its own electors. Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the
Founding Fathers left the choice of method exclusively to the states: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….”
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding the state’s electoral votes
The Republic is not in any danger from National Popular Vote.
National Popular Vote has nothing to do with pure democracy. Pure democracy is a form of government in which people vote on policy initiatives directly. With National Popular Vote, the United States would still be a republic, in which citizens continue to elect the President by a majority of Electoral College votes by states, to represent us and conduct the business of government.
toto
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).
Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in recent or past closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA –75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%;
in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and
in other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win. The National Popular Vote bill has passed 33 state legislative chambers in 22 rural, small, medium, and large states with 250 electoral votes. The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the 270 necessary to go into effect. .
For all my favorite “engineers” out there……an oldie but a goodie…
4 Feet 8.5 Inches--
History lesson 101---
You'll love the logic here.
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did 'they' use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, Because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
And so it goes...
