Mike's Election Guide Read Online Free PDF Page B

populated. A plane from the sky raining missiles down on a heavily populated area of a nation’s capital.
    McCain’s plane plunged into a lake not far from the presidential palace. With three broken limbs, McCain was drowning. Vietnamese civilians on the shore dove in to save him. Just like we would do, if someone had just bombed our neighborhood, right?
    He was brought ashore and an angry mob formed. They beat him and someone stabbed him in the groin. That’s when Mai Van On, the local villager who helped pull McCain out of the lake, stepped in to save him a second time. He stood in front of McCain and told the mob to back off. Eventually, the police and the army showed up, McCain was apprehended, and it was off to prison for him.
    So let me ask the question again. If someone had just been dropping bombs on your home, how would you react? After seeing your child blown to pieces, what would you do to the man who fell out of the sky, the man who committed this act? Please answer honestly.
    And if you did decide to let him live, what kind of justice should be handed to him? Should it be the death penalty, the same death penalty we are asking for those charged with 9/11 crimes in Guantánamo Bay? Or should it be life in prison? Would five years be enough? Torture is ALWAYS wrong, even when we do it. Torturing John McCain was outrageous and appalling. I hope the people who perpetrated these heinous acts have apologized to him.
    John McCain is already using the Vietnam War in his political ads. In doing so, it makes not just what happened
to him
in Vietnam fair game for discussion, but also what
he did
to the Vietnamese. Considering what the Republicans were willing to do to smear war hero John Kerry in the last election, I don’t want to hear them now say that John McCain’s war record cannot be called into question. I would like to see one brave reporter during the election season ask this simple question of John McCain: “Is it morally right to drop bombs and missiles in a ‘heavily populated’ area where hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians will perish?”
    Please explain the electoral college. Can I get in with a 2.0 grade point average?
    Rob Thomlinson
    Elkhart, IN
    ANSWER: The electoral college is not an institution of higher learning but rather a brilliant attempt by the Founding Fathers to build in one last layer of “protection”—just in case “the people” choose the wrong president.
    Each state is assigned a certain number of electors. That number is the total sum of each state’s members of Congress. Which means that the smaller states have an unequal advantage as they each have two senators, regardless of their population. This was one of many steps that the authors of the Constitution took to make sure the itsy-bitsy states got to have
more
say as to who the president should be. And really, isn’t that the right thing to do, to give more power to lovely little places like Delaware?
    In all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) it’s a winner-take-all affair, meaning that the delegates to the electoral college are not proportional to the actual number of popular votes each candidate receives. So if Candidate “A” in Indiana got 5 million votes but Candidate “B” got 5 million and one votes, Candidate “B” gets 100 percent of that state’s delegates—and Candidate “A” receives nothing.
    And why should he? He
lost
, and this is America. It’s written in the Constitution that we don’t like losers. I think.
    Denying representation to 49.9 percent of the public, though, was still not enough protection for the Founders. They built in one more genius safeguard. Let’s say in Indiana they have 11 delegates assigned to the electoral college. Candidate “B” wins by one popular vote, so he gets all 11 delegates. Well, who picks the 11 delegates? The state political parties do! But that’s not the best part. Any one of the 11 delegates has the legal right to vote for whomever he or she