Cults produce in their devotees quiet docility and the leaders can channel it. People could react suicidally once committed to retaliating, and feeling part of another reactionist group. The personality type measures that place people as followers, leaders, rule bound, and creatives indicate the need for leaders as followers tend to be 80% or similar amongst surveyed.

The other group of National supporters are the type of people that make no link between who they voted for and policy. The fail to see that the nice smiley Mr Key actually is killing their businesses. Its that whole but he is smiling he seems nice to me how could he possibly be bad disconnect.

Its going to take a whole group of people about 3 years to realise they are living a 90s rerun.
Its like watching a movie and taking 30 minutes to realise oh shit I have seen this before and it was crap you keep looking at the cover of the DVD packett going” oh shit surely not, how did I get this out again?”
Finally you realise you picked it because of the same reason you picked it the last time, it looked good in its cover and the spiel sounded interesting.

By this time the family is shitty at you and you are saying ” I wont get that out again” and they are reminding you that you said that the last time you got the same shitty DVD out.

No.

It results in a certain fatalism ’cause everything is already lost. Humanity didn’t and doesn’t care otherwise the present situation wouldn’t have come to be. There is no anger. There is an ‘already dead’ mentality that takes precedence.

They are led into the woods. No objection. You’d cringe or even weep at their level of observable apparent compliance. They even appeared to converse affably with their (soon to be) executioners.

These videos were the last images these kid’s mothers saw of them.

Only I think TV 3 have it wrong and the “Nationhood” speech played little role in the support for Labour and the Greens going up and National’s polling falling. 2-3% falls in support for or against a party is well normal with polling. Its almost expected. Thus in my view Labour polling higher with the Greens is just that. A symptom of what occurs naturally in polling. But additionally better media coverage of Goff and Labour. They’ve been performing better as the opposition and have gotten some good hits against National and lifted their profile.

National’s polling and John Key’s have fallen more substantially than 2-3%. Hence my feeling that artificial high polling and some questionable policies and bad governing as of late is directly responsible for National’s poor polling. They’ve taken hits, ministers have been all over the news. Key and National continue to be vague on a vision for their government. They just haven’t delivered that well as of late.

Overall, therefore a good poll for Labour and bad for National. But this poll is more about how horrible National has been lately than any speech Goff gave two weeks ago. No doubt the media everywhere will like TV 3 point to the “Nationhood” speech as what made the polls turn. Its easy to do. But I think they’re wrong.

So to answer your original question: “Under the US Constitutional system what option had they? Vote for Obama, vote for McCain, not vote.” they could have voted for any of the numerous independents that stood for the presidency. Of course none of these have made realistic showings since Ralph Nador cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000, but they were still an option, just like RAM and the other maginal parties in NZ are an option.

‘Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard’, said Ford, ‘the wrong lizard might get in.

Zorr there are means other than political to bring about positive change in society. The very fact that you see it as an issue of the lesser of two evils shows how bankrupt the system is and that is the way that many Americans see it themselves. Is that any kind of democracy where your vote is only to play one evil off of another? I don’t think so, but you insist on framing it in democratic terms i.e., if Obama didn’t get in than McCain would’ve. The American people need to work outside the system to change it for the better.

Not much to choose from there QtR and Obama is by far the lesser of two evils. The issue lies in the giant pedestal that they built to place the 50ft towering golden statue of him on.

What might at last be seeping into the American psyche is that their much-vaunted Constitution, the theoretical product of very different world, no longer suffices. It’s an uncomfortable merging of a quadannular Kingship trying to co-exist with the Roman Republic. It might have been a vast improvement over the systems that existed two centuries ago but many of those, such as the Westminster system, have moved on considerably and while far from perfect have proved far more responsive to the needs and demands of the modern world that the US and can adapt far faster.

Barack Obama’s faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people’ e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.

In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people’s champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.

With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.

I feel if these people had engaged their minds a little more before the election instead of the usual leader worship and fealty to authority of the mainstream left they wouldn’t have wasted their time supporting that fool.

Yet we all keep our heads down. We all keep our mouths shut and do as we are told because if we are good people…. compliant, polite and accommodating, then we might be okay.

Of course we know we won’t be.

Nevertheless…