Goldwater,

The British definition of "conservative" differs from the American one. You are applying your own cultural interpretation of political terminology onto another country.

But maybe you are simply trying to cause a fuss over something as pedantic as semantics to divert attention from the main subject of this thread....?

What should be the point of that - who cares what El Portillo says?

If I remember correctly both Buchanan and Perot were largely campaigning against NAFTA. If Buchanan had won the nomination, Perot might not even have run. Clinton would have won.

My View Part Two: Nobody can force you to go to a restaraunt that allows smoking.

Unless every restaurant does...Which is true in most parts of Europe.

Nobody can force you to go to a restaraunt, as an adult anyways.

Yeah, but that may mean I can't go to a restaurant/bar/cafe/whatever at all. Now, I don't have a problem with that, but I do know people who do.

I favor electoral voting.

1) If there were ever to come a perennially strong third party and the vote were to be as evenly split three ways as it has been in the past with a two-way race it could cause gridlock.

2) If we were to go to a popular vote system, there would very likely be an increase in election fraud on the part of all parties in power in various states to make the majorities larger than they actually were.

There's actually more incentive for fraud now, under the Electoral College, because there is a greater chance that a small amount of vote fraud in a few key swing states can decide the election. The popular vote nationwide is less likely to be close enough that fraud could matter. But the electoral vote is more likely to be affected by fraud in key swing states.

Exactly true.

It's closely related to just what the two parties have put up in the field of running mates recently...not necessarily how "good" these people were as running mates but what kind of people they were. The two parties clearly do have different strategies there. The Republican Veeps looked, er, less like potential presidents.
I mean: Who really believes that Cheney might be a president one day - and who believed it before he picked himself as his ward's running mate? (Sorry, couldn't resist...)
Who saw Kemp as a man with a future?
I know some people must have believed Quayle might make a president, but not many.
Now compare Gore or Edwards, or even Lieberman or Bentsen though they aren't in the same league.

Debs ran from prison in 1920.

I will be home for all of July and probably all of August as well, though I will be living during this period...

Or so you hope!

Interesting trend... with the exception of Acadie-Bathurst, the Bilingual ridings not in Quebec the Liberals win the Franco vote and lose the Anglo vote, while in Quebec it's the other way round.

Another example of that "minorities vote leftwing" thing we had elsewhere.
Or maybe the Liberals are just seen in Canada as the all-Canadian party.

If you go into a bar, expect smoke!!!  I'm a "drinking only" smoker.  I'm going to have to go with the Republicans on this one!  However in restaurants there should be separate rooms for smokers and non-smokers with air tight compartments.

I don't smoke, but I'd still choose to hang out in the "smoking" room. The smokers are much more fun than the anti-smoking crowd.

That does tend to be true, yes.

My View Part Two: Nobody can force you to go to a restaraunt that allows smoking.

Unless every restaurant does...Which is true in most parts of Europe.

What would you all say to a system where businesses were given some sort of financial incentive to ban smoking but not required too. Maybe some sort of tax break. Also a requirement for all establishments where smoking is allowed to clearly display this at the entrance?

I could live with that.

I do not use any tobacco products, but I strongly advocate your right to use them in establishments where the owner of the property allows you to. Unlike the general public, I realize that second hand smoke is not nearly as dangerous as the general public has assumed it to be at the prodding of mass media.

So my relative is alive and well then?

Yes.

I both smoke (not cigarettes)

What have you been smoking, man?

Smoking bans annoy me, even though I don't smoke anymore, but it's not property rights whose violation bothers me.

Of course it was stolen.
Having said that, all 19th century elections the world over would count as extremely fraudulent by European end-of-20th-century standards.
The really bad thing about 1876 is the dirty settlement that ended the crisis.

So when will Debs stonghold Oklahoma be up?

Sniff...still waiting for my Other-Oregon avatar...

Jeanne - Le Ber did go to a recount, but that's already finished. Remains Liberal by seventy votes or so.
St Lambert went Bloc by about 10 points, I guess a gain.

I don't know the Tyneside suburbs. But I wasn't thinking of ghetto extremes either.
I was just thinking of slabs of concrete like the Frankfurt suburbs of Steinbach or Schwalbach, or Frankfurt's own Nordweststadt. Not affluent (unlike most of Frankfurt's Northwestern suburbs), incredibly dull (like most but not all of them), just "get me out of here" style places.
Now, Mörfelden-Walldorf or Raunheim, to the Southwest, also kind of suburban, also poor, have a very different feel. I could live there if I had too. (Except that Raunheim is terribly loud because of all the planes coming in just over your head.)

Order of preference:

1. Inner city
2. Country, not in town
3. Middle Suburbs
4. Country Town
5. Outer Suburbs
6. Under the sea

Maybe swap 5 and 6

I can't stand the suburbs.  Waste of space. Give it to me COMPACT.

4-2-1-6-3-5

I would rather die than live in suburbia (of course there's a difference between a suburb and suburbia... working class suburbs are not suburban)

Yes they are...They can be even worse than the other kind.

It's Demography, not Politics, but still...
Out of Canada's 308 "ridings" (constituencies), 40 are over 10% French speaking and over 10% English speaking. They form something of a belt from Nova Scotia to Manitoba via Montréal and Ottawa cities.
(Note that the census asks for "mother tongue", prompting many immigrants and children of immigrants to mention the language from back home, even if they speak English these days. This seriously affects the number of over-10%-English speaking seats in Montréal.)

West Nova (In NSc)
Egmont (on Prince Edward Island)
Acadie-Bathurst
Madawaska-Restigouche
Beauséjour
Miramichi
Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe
Tobique-Mactaquac (all of them in NB. The first three are majority French speaking)
Gaspésie - Iles-de-la-Madeleine
Compton - Stanstead
Brôme - Missiqoui (rural Québec to the South of St Lawrence - English seems once to have been more widely spoken here, as viz. place names like Sherbrooke, Drummond, Richmond etc etc)
Outremont, Mount Royal, Notre-Dame-de-la-Grace - Lachine, Westmount - Ville-Marie, La Salle - Emard, Jeanne - Le Ber, St-Laurent - Cartierville, Pierrefonds - Dollard, Lac-St-Louis (all on Montréal Island, which includes a total of 18 ridings - Lac-St-Louis is almost 50% English speaking, but 7 out of these 9 are less than 50% French, and so are two more that are less than 10% English)
Brossard - La Praire
Châtauguay - Saint-Constant
Saint Lambert
Laval - Les Isles (all suburban Montréal)
Vaudreuil - Solanges where the Ottawa and St Lawrence rivers meet
Hull - Aylmer and Pontiac opposite Ottawa in Québec
Ottawa Centre, Ottawa South, Ottawa Vanier, Ottawa Orléans - ie all Ottawa City ridings safe one
Glengarry - Prescott - Russell and
Stormont - Dundas - South Glengarry to the South of Ottawa, to the east of Vaudreuil - Solanges. Glengarry etc is majority French speaking
pretty much all the Northeast Ontario ridings, with French percentages ranging into the forties:
Timmins - James Bay
Nipissing - Timiskaning
Nickel Belt
Algoma - Manitoulin - Kapuskasing
Sudbury
plus Provencher in rural SE Manitoba and St Boniface in Winnipeg.

I've never met a brit who was black. I must admit the British accent would throw me off for sure.

A first or second generation Black Brit is more likely to have a Jamaican or West African accent than a British one.

Jamaican accents are cool

I shan't disagree.

Yours, except for the last two words.

"If it existed, what would it be like?" That's pretty silly, right? "If you had a girlfriend, what would she be like?"
But I'll weigh the options and tell you in a minute what kind of heaven I'd be pleasantly surprised to find six feet under. Not NH, btw (see "Red and Blue")

Order of preference:

1. Inner city
2. Country, not in town
3. Middle Suburbs
4. Country Town
5. Outer Suburbs
6. Under the sea

Maybe swap 5 and 6

I can't stand the suburbs.  Waste of space. Give it to me COMPACT.

1 - 4 - 2 - 6 - 3 - 5 for me.