Sunday, October 19, 2008
Yeah Ok. I've Calmed Down.
I still side Orange & Blue, but I fuckin hate caving before the Machine. It only serves to move backwards for the MOVEMENT. 12 seats and 10,500+ in a Fall election is HUGE. I hope these kids do some major work. If Sam, Mark, and Frank aren't the real leaders, then I'm not really interested in who is. I was never really interested in behind-the-scenes-types, those kinds of people have the power, but they're usually chicken-shit-weasels to quote Chuck Norris in Delta Force II.
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17 comments:
Good, there are too few of us to allow infighting, i too am curious what the party will accomplish.
I'm hopeful and optimistic that good ole fashioned burn it down legislation comes out here soon, personally reworking the codes to demolish the roadblocks set up to fuck independent parties would be excellent;
My number 1 priority for the orange and blue would be:
Proportional representation for off-campus students in the Fall
That was idea floated around by Pedro Morales. I really had high hopes for him, at one point in time.
It's a solid idea imo.
Anon. 8:04 is Mike Belle :lol:.
How would you suggest bringing about proportional representation? I find our current Fall system rather silly but I cannot really see a better way of managing it other than making Frat Row on campus. There are some valid points behind making Frat Row an on-campus but I am not sure as many of those points can be applyied to Sorority Row. I am interested to see an actual, detailed plan for proportional rep...so bring it on :-).
Miorelli secured a deal where he gets to be JJ's VP in the spring, if he withdraws the online voting lawsuit.
Hi Christian,
I'm pleased that you had high hopes regarding my ideas of PR. Too bad I was about to graduate and couldn't push it along. I'd be a hypocritical SG politico if I would have added an extra year to my UF life just to fiddle around with SG. (Side note: huge kudos to Lauren Mierley, for example).
I can't say that I'm pleased with other recent uses of my name, but heck I take regular baths in oil, and a daily Amiplin 500 mg. I measured my blood pressure today at Publix, and my regime works. I also hope you love the sinner and hate the sin.
The Alligator proposed the idea of PR in an editorial a while back, I think it was around the Arturo VP campaign. And it would be a great Independent thing to tackle.
For the sake of this discussion, let's call the independent party IP and the system party SP. I'm almost a mathematician and I love variables and equations.
Why PR? There was a letter to the editor in the Alligator about the inherent unfairness of senate seat allocation. Let's face it. In the four years I was at UF, no IP ever won a freshman (10), sophomore (6), journalism (2), districts A(7), B(6), C(6) or similar. My apportionment numbers may be off but hopefully you and your readers get the point. So without PR, the IP are at least at a 50% Senate institutional disadvantage, no matter how hard they work. 200 freshman senate IP votes will never top 1200 SP votes. Likewise 100 Indy district A votes to 1100 for GP. So imagine that after a fall election, the IP wins 1 seat from districts A, B, and C each. The huge civil war within the SP would be: ok, who does NOT get their seat? I think by forcing the SP to have those discussions would be unprecedented by itself. They would make highly interesting House Leader meetings! So with PR, a fall IP campaign can regularly win let's say, 3-5 district A-C seats, 4 district D, a couple of dorm seats, so the 10-12 seat "sweep" this year would not be unprecedented, but expected. With PR in the spring, an IP can win 3-5 freshman and sophomore seats, 1 journalism, one business administration, etc. So an IP presence in the Senate can be composed of 20-30 senators, YEARLY. Those kinds of numbers can help you win battles in the Senate floor, like R&A confirmations, vote-down resolutions, especially with lax SP attendance at Senate. You know the honorarium cap battle on Nov 9, 2005 was won with one vote (because Gator '05 senators didn't bother to show up). Being in the minority party is psychologically taxing and I was not really interested in accumulating battle scars, specially when I was about to sit down with a pen and paper to write the next chapter of my life.
How could PR be implemented? By constitutional amendment, which can only happen in the Spring elections. Massive turnout (60%+1). Make it be the only way. Gather the 1/5 signatures required (10,000: no small feat). Gather phone numbers of people, grass-roots. Of course, I don't believe gathering signatures for an initiative is "campaigning".
If you read the SB Constitution, you would see that it is paramount for Indies to win the 2009 SBP election as they would control more seats in the Constitutional convention. Please excuse my laziness but I don't want to go into the SBC and quote it, but I know it's there, close to the end. Again, red meat for your readers. If IP has a controlling voice at this convention, it can draft a constitution that can better serve the student body. Not to mention, that the grassroots network built for the PR initiave can and should be used to get this second constitution approved in Spring 2010.
Now if the O&B want to be really radikal, they could advocate for the elimination of the fall senate. No one really needs 95 senators anyways, right? Save an election period and save like $30k in elections! Wow, that's change you can believe in.
Duque flips side more than Obama does
Mike Belle... no comment.
The Pedro Morales ban is hereby lifted. Nice post.
If Sam really made such a deal, then Sam is a douche-bag and I would personally and profoundly mourn his passing if some crazed lunatic pushed him in front of a speeding RTS bus with shoddy brake-pads and all that was left of him were his shoes.
But I don't think Sam Miorelli would have gone like that. After all, he's got Tommy Jardon in his corner...
some quick revisions:
1) Every year ending in '9 there is a constitutional review committee not convention.
2) in my scenario, GP=Gator Party, which is the same as SP=System Party.
3) Yes, the zip-codes unfairness letter to the editor, I believe was Mike Belle's. I only interacted with him briefly after getting elected to Senate in fall 05 with the Impact party.
4) For implementing PR on the constitution: No way the Senate is going to put such an amendment on the ballot. Over its dead body. So start gathering the signatures now! 5 minutes ago. You're wasting time already.
5) A 1/3 presence in the Senate can block some Supreme Court justices if I recall correctly, so please stress that Senate IMO is the key to SG. Remember Alan Passman and what could have happened this year.
I don't know any of the new SG players find any of this interesting, but feel free to look me up on facebook if you want to chat. Note that my middle initial is B. There are a couple of Pedro Morales on facebook.
My sources tell me that Orange & Blue came out swinging at R&A tonight and didn't pull a single punch.
I also have heard there exists an audio recording of the entire 6 hour ordeal.
It has been highly recommended you obtain said recording,
Listen to the deliberations portion at the very least,
Then begin drafting your apology letter to O&B for doubting they were giving into The System's demands.
duque,
you should learn to stop taking the troll's bait
I would rather have a PR system for all of off campus where the parties picked out a slate of candidates for ALL of off campus, then the seats are divvied up based on the proportion of votes won. (you would only get to vote for the party, not the candidate)
For those that really insist a mechanism to vote candidates up on the slate could be applied....i guess
Apology letter? I'm not sorry for getting upset and I'm not sorry for putting O&B on the spot -- in fact, in my book, they remain on the spot.
Let's not kid ourselves here. I support this party, but with many reservations. The fact they have some fight in them after stuffing their faces full bureaucratic pie for the whole of last week hardly warrants any discussion of apologies.
Get a grip pal.
Duque,
If you still believe that O&B is in bed with GP on any level, you should obtain a copy of the audio recording of last night's meeting. GP shuffled the deck in their favor, and after several impassioned deliberations, they dropped the smoke screen altogether and didn't even try to hide it. The last 30 mins is classic System.
A PR system, in my opinion, would be far too complex of an idea to gather sigs on. As far as I know, there is only one question that has gathered enough sigs to qualify as an amendment is that is the online voting question. Online voting is straight vote, easy to explain, and everyone understands but gathering sigs for that was like pulling teeth; just imagine how difficult attempting to gather sigs for a PR system would be.
I am still unclear about the voting process that would occur under a PR system as well and making an amendment single subject would be near impossible.
I know various countries implement the voting process for PR differently as well. What do you envision? When casting your ballot in District A would you simply be casting your ballot for O&B or for Gator (actually connecting the line for the particular party)? What would happen to independent candidates?
In honor of EEE,
A storm is approaching... And Gator, on Tuesday night, make sure you have something to hold on to.
Pedro's idea for PR would work especially well in the fall. The problem in the Spring (and in the dorms) is PR functions less effectively in small districts, and I see merit in representing the dorms and colleges.
When I was on Judiciary during '01 reapportionment, I proposed a plan (and was ignored) that would have created a few more off-campus districts. Some of my ideas were later adopted (a District F was there for awhile, better representation for the dorms and colleges like Journalism), but SG didn't like the small change I did suggest at the time.
PR would be a bit too complex for signatures, but I think we should be proposing it. There are a number of ways to do it. In Australia, their Senate is elected on a form of PR that also gives each individual candidate a form of mandate from their state, which I think is better than a straight list system (as it gives voters, not the backrooms of FBK and the GDIs, the say in who represents them).
The Aussie's do it this way. Say 1600 people voted Gator in District A and 600 people voted O&B. 2200 votes are divided 8 ways = 275. The translates into 5 Gators to 2 O&B. And then we look at the results (much as we have the votes done already), and give the top 5 Gators the 5 slots, and the same for the 2 O&B.
It's not a bad system, as it rewards both party popularity and individual popularity.
But, again, the trouble is with the smaller districts. We may need to combine dorms into 1 or 2 districts, and shift Spring into college representation (no fresh/soph/grad - since grade levels aren't as meaningful).
Electoral mechanisms are something I love to contemplate, but getting them reformed at UF would require winning SBP and/or convinced FBK that this isn't the worst thing in the world. Neither of which would be an easy task.
Did Ken Kerns graduate in 1989? I read that somewhere. He doesn't look that old.
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