all the members have to act the same and they all get money from the same places and................oh wait.

on the American people through the media empire he began building in THIS country in 1979. The GOP voter base has no clue that they have been relying on news sources developed by a Korean cult leader.


Barnes and Noble:

Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom

by John Gorenfeld, Barry W Lynn (Foreword by), Barry Lynn (Foreword by)


Overview: What does it say about American politics when a famous 1970s cult leader publishes a Washington newspaper, dresses up in the U.S. Senate offices like King George III, and no one in D.C. seems to care? One night in 2004, at one of Washington’s most outrageous dinner parties, members of Congress bought a shining crown and robes to a billionaire mystery man who calls himself the True Father: the Reverend Moon, sushi mogul, conservative philanthropist, and publisher of the right-wing Washington Times.

but it appears that from their very beginning, they were involved in unscrupulous voting processes.

In the Republican Presidential Nomination Convention of 1860, the Republicans packed the voting hall with Lincoln supporters using counterfeit admission tickets disallowing thousands of Seward support the right to enter the convention hall. They also rigged the votes by reducing the number of votes that could be caste by the Southern delegations.

http://blueandgraytrail.com/event/1860_republican_convention

You might call it a "change" in the way delegates were allocated, from a population-based standard to a party-strength formula, but I wouldn't necessarily call that "rigged".

(Anyway, how many delegates do you suppose Seward would have gotten from Southern states vs. Bates or Lincoln or Cameron? Doesn't seem that any "rigging" would have been necessary to me. The bigger problem would seem to have been coming up with enough Republicans south of Mason-Dixon to have any kind of Republican Party organizations capable of sending delegations that were legitimately representative-- seeing as people with Republican sympathies were being literally tarred and feathered or run out of town. Based on those factors, it would seem to make more sense to allocate delegates based on party strength ONLY--- otherwise the strength of the southern delegations would be totally out of proportion to their states' likely vote for the party ticket, which in 1860 was less than five percent in all cases-- mostly less than ONE percent, actually.)

The fact is, the Democratic Party now also uses a forumula to determine party strength in a state to allocate convention delegates, based on party votes in previous elections, as well as electoral votes. I'm sure the GOP does likewise. The delegate allocations are only based partly on total state population.

The idea is that states which are more likely to be won by the party's candidate, and provide a greater proportion of the total Democratic vote, should have a greater say in the nomination of a candidate than one that is unlikely to be carried. ie New York will have a greater proportion of delegates to population than Alabama, for instance.


See http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/D

"The rules for the 2012 Democratic National Convention call for the following formula to be used in determining the allocation of delegate votes to each state and jurisdiction sending a delegation to the Convention:

Each state plus the District of Columbia is to be assigned a number of Base delegate votes based on an "Allocation Factor" multiplied by 3,700 (the optimum minimum size of a Democratic National Convention as determined by the Democratic National Committee): a state's (or D.C.'s) "Allocation Factor" being a decimal fraction arrived at through a calculation involving the following factors-
1.the state's (or D.C.'s) popular vote for the Democratic candidate for President in the three Presidential Elections just previous to the Convention (in this case: 2000, 2004, and 2008). This is the "State's Democratic Vote" [SDV].
2.the total popular vote for the Democratic candidate for President in the three Presidential Elections just previous to the Convention. This is the "Total Democratic Vote" [TDV].
3.the state's Electoral Vote [SEV] and
4.the total Electoral Vote [TEV] (538)

The formula for determining a given state's (or D.C.'s) "Allocation Factor" [AF] is:

AF = ½ × ( ( SDV ÷ TDV ) + ( SEV ÷ 538 ) )

counterfeit tickets that were given to Lincoln people in order to disallow the Sewell backers from participating. I should have made that point clear.

So far as their efforts to limit the votes of the Southern delegation by rule was just "hardball" politics. The very fact that Mississippi and Alabama are almost the same size and just part of the former Mississippi Territory is an example of weakening the Southern votes by dividing them.

most of the southern states did not even send a delegation to the 1860 Republican convention. Only the border states of Missouri and Kentucky were represented. I rather thought that may have been the case so I looked it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Republican_National_Convention


In both Alabama and Mississippi, the Republican votes totaled 0% in both 1856 and 1860 (in fact, 0 total votes according to this):
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1856
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1860

So, you can't really "weaken" the 'southern delegations' by the forumula used to apportion delegates, when nobody shows up anyway, because there is no popular support for the party candidates in those states. NONE.

Anyone in Alabama or Mississippi who was known to be attempting to participate in the Republican convention in 1860 would likely have been lynched. Things were that bad. But there was literally no party organizations in those states to select any delegates in the first place, for the same reason.

the Lincoln people to keep Sewell's people from taking there rightful seats. More than 1,000 such tickets were fraudulently given out therefore costing Sewell quite a few votes. This has nothing to do with the Southern votes as almost none were there either for Sewell or Lincoln.
(Sewell was from New York)

Spectators didn't have a vote at the convention; they could only make noise. Yes, the Lincoln people packed the galleries, which was easy for them to do since the convention took place in their home state of Chicago. To say it "cost Seward votes" is only a matter of opinion, as all the spectators could do was try to influence delegates with their cheers and jeers. Spectators with counterfeit tickets did not crowd out delegates, who had actual votes, if that is what your post is implying.

That page you linked is rather troubling. They seem to have fictionalized major portions of the story-- the most glaring falsehood being that the soon-to-be-Confederate states sent delegations to the convention, who were somehow cheated out of their rightful proportion of votes-- when they actually sent no delegations at all--- is such a blatant lie.... It would seem that "Georgia's Blue & Gray Trail" is not a reliable source on the history of the civil war period, more likely some sort of "southern revisionist" site. You might want to go elsewhere.

Sorry, don't mean to seem like some sort of nit-picker, but I am a fanatical scholar of that whole period of American history-- so the thing about "southern delegates" to the 1860 Republican convention being somehow 'cheated' out of their rightful representation caught my attention-- just couldn't leave that hanging out there.

The Republican Party started out with noble aims: limiting and eventually abolishing slavery, federal funding for internal improvements/infrastructure and a transcontinental railroad, land-grant colleges, the homestead act to provide cheap land for people to start new farms, all of which were opposed by the Democratic Party of those days. Today, the Democratic Party are the rightful heirs of those types of ideals, while the Republicans have arguably lost their way in the interim.

a black man in the WHITE House.

I want to ask them, "How can you vote for this insanity? The meanness? The stupidity?" People say you shouldn't let politics come between relationships, but how do you reconcile people voting for & supporting the republican party?

A cult of privilege, scurrying around for crumbs the ubber wealthy spread about and leaving their shit all over the place.

Whatever the blonde ladies in Fox tell them is repeated like scripture