PowerMedia

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The Candidates on the Issues

Ok, Something rare in this election, the Issues.

Details of Local Media ownership

Who owns local media?

These were added to the Research section to the right.



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Media Relations for active communities

This is a site from Scotland, but the basics are solid.

Please use this as a roadmap for getting the event going.

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Ok, We are embarking on the class project/projects, depending on how things seem to be going.
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Both sessions are acting on this, so somewhere along the line I'll have to define parameters for you.

I am currently leaning towards having the 12:00 session work on the most important part, setting a date and getting a hall. This will mean contacting the school for written permission and coordinating with Public Safety office. A police officer may be needed, or may not. We may want to consider heckling as a potential issue.

My current thoughts have the 1:00 pm session working on the format the event will take. We will need to be able to clearly express the event description to potential guests. Questions to consider include:
- how structured it should be;
- what is the value of an open format;
- will we need a time keeper with a warning signal;
- will there be questions from the floor or a panel, or both?

It would be fair to let the attendees know that we may be asking for detailed questions about specific policies or issues. Embarrassing them might not be good for future Merrimack events.


I have set up a new blog for the coordinators. All may view this, but at this point I have only given posting rights to the two sets of coordinators. http://commandcontrol.blogspot.com/

More details will follow shortly.

JP

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What Are You Voting For?
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This is heavily biased against George Bush! This is NOT here for the content, but the presentation, aka medium, it represents.

This is a novel approach. Please filter the information appropriately, some of the facts there are in disputed by knowledgeble people.

527s: The Major Players

This is an excellent starting point. Please at least scroll through the document instead of taking the first one from each party! As a matter of fact, DO NOT USE Alliance for Economic Justice or American Civic Coalition.

JP

The Electoral College

This link has a good primer on how the Electoral College works.

To sum it up in very general terms, the Electoral College, aka Article II of the Constitution:

- The Electoral College is, in many ways, a legacy of our 18th century beginnings;

- Electoral College began when the majority of Americans were rural, and relatively uninformed due to distances and lack of communications infrastructure;

- The basic premise was that the voters would select the wisest among us to make the choices, similar, but not exactly the same as the theory behind the Supreme Court's role. So each state sets the specifics on their electors, some may be appointed; some states have elections for the electors themselves. Somewhere on your recent ballots, you probably had a chance to vote for an elector.

- Changing it would de difficult, requiring a Constitutional Amendment. This would require a 2/3 majority of all states approval as a minimum requirement.

- States with small populations would lose tremendous influence if the above amendment were to pass, and are not expected to allow that to happen.

- Individual states may different ways of selecting the electors by their individual laws.

- "Winner Take All" practice allows all the states electoral votes to be awarded to the candidate that has the most votes from that state. Only Maine and Nebraska allow the distribution of the electoral votes to reflect the states actual percentage of votes to the candidates.
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