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JibJab made another one!!

You already posted that link. Meh I don't live there so I would not get it.

No worries, we have no idea how your elections work either. :)

The President is usually directly elected by the people for seven years, and can be elected for a maximum of two terms. It's still kinda new we have only had eight presidents. THE MORE YOU KNOW. So whats the scoop on Obama and McCain, you can only learn so much from satire.

Seven years? Yikes!

About the same-ish system here... ish.

Presidents can only stay in power for a maximum of eight years, each term consisting of four years each. If, say, the candidates for the next election get biffed off for whatever reason and leaves nobody to take up the reigns, the old president can stick around another two years while a new election is organized.

Citizens vote first during the primaries, which decides who will be the frontrunner for our two major parties (Republican & Democrat). This season Obama is representing Democrats and McCain for Republicans. (Bush is a Republican, for a litmus test)

Thus far all we've heard here in the States is the same-old get-your-hopes-up happy talk. McCain talking about how he'll fix past mistakes with a new conservative policy, but will use his experience in Vietnam to direct the war from the Oval Office. And this is oversimplification, mind you. Lot of policy differences between the two.

Obama is running on the pontiff of changing the nation overall, including universal health care, finishing up the war, improving our image abroad, and apparently he's going to try to mend party schisms and all that jazz. So basically the same song and dance as McCain, but he's singing to a different audience.

I think right now, everybody is just happy to get Bush out of office. I'm voting for Obama because he's a liberal, which boons well for many rights organizations, but if McCain got plucked out instead... well, he's closer to the left than most conservatives are. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

Seems there is never a "good" candidate eh.

Heh, no. Not unless you can get someone up there who isn't a politician.

Hm...I think the Irish direct election approach is a tad better than our approach. I mean, we count all the citizen's votes, and the votes themselves don't really count because the number of votes from each state depends on population of the state, and each state gets X amount of votes, and whichever candidate wins the majority in each state wins all the votes in the whole friggin state, and a candidate can lose the popular vote but still win, and yet when ideas like gay rights lose the popular vote in the senate, they lose completely. What the hell? Yeah, a direct election system would be massively better, methinks.

I wouldn't mind seeing something along the line of Britain's parliamentary system be adopted here. In the States, the President really only has to meet with the Congress during the State of the Union Address and maybe during some obligatory national emergency. Beyond that, nothing.

In Britain, the PM has to make regular visits to Parliament where MPs can throw buckets of [censored] on him if he screws up. There's a lot more accountability in Britain than there is here.

It would be nice to see the popular vote become THE vote in the States.

Heh. Most people don't have any idea how true that is. Personally, I'm a bit too individualist to enjoy being 'under' someone for an extended amount of time, though I know it's unavoidable. I prefer to think everyone as equal in soul. (Mind and body are always different, except with twins. Then it's just body that's different. Or so I hear.)

I love the part (in the jibjab vid) that goes "Tell you anything you want to hear" and the paper in the background says "increase your manhood"
Then it goes into the "Spend billions of dollars to get our points clear" bit. Money that could be used for...better stuff, I guess. Video games?
Ah, politics. How tiresome...