For the purposes of allocating the resources of the new republic, do you count this group as one person, six, or some other number. When the dust settled, the founders decided this group would be counted as four persons–one citizen and 3/5 * 5 = three “other persons.”

Try however you might to pretend this doesn’t treat the “others” as three-fifths of a person each, you’re still pretending.

Amused, Rush’s “underlying point” is most definitely racist. He’s exploiting racial resentment and fear to attack Obama, the press and Gallup specifically. Rush’s underlying point is this: “If it wasn’t for blacks this black man wouldn’t have the authority to push his socialist agenda on us whites and might not even be president in the first place. Damn that liberal media for selling out their race!”

Naturally, as a racist fuck yourself, you agree with him.

The three fifths compromise was not some glorious example of the morality and righteousness of the founding fathers.

It was a moral failure, an act of political cowardice that enshrined the institution of slavery in our founding document.

Here’s how it works: Don’t you uneducated Stalin-loving Marxists know that the 3-4 compromise related to the apportionment of congressmen amongst the states and was not a philosophical statement on the value of slaves? Therefore, any remark you Trotskyite death panel anarchists make about it is void of meaning.

In point of fact, the compromise inherent in the 3/5 language does no such thing. I’d suggest it does the opposite. Slaves were chattel. They were property. They had no rights at all let alone the right to vote. The compromise as to how to incorporpate them into the algorithm that apportioned the HOR treated them as no more than numbers to be counted into determining how many white male congressmen white male voters in each state could elect. In terms of rights, treatment etc. counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for the calculus is not substantively different than a compromise that would have counted livestock on a 3/5 basis in making the apportionment decision.

In other words the fact that they were just chattel going into a calculus totally irrelevant to their lives enhances rather than vitiates the underlying point you made.

For the Lefties, the only thing this country has ever done that was good was to win World War II, and that we couldn’t even have done without the Russians.

What a creepy bunch.

What that stupid-ass bit of the Constitution says is not that un-white people are only worth 3/5 of white people; it’s that slave-holding states will get to throw more weight in Congress than their potential voting population allows, because they also get to count 3/5 of the people held in servitude to the slave-masters.

So, you all would have liked it better if they’d got extra power in Congress for 5/5 of the slaves? Clever, real clever.

The right propotion of people held in servitude to count for the representation of their masters in governing a free republic is bloody fucking ZERO.

OTOH, without this outrageous provision, Jefferson would almost certainly not have been elected. His enemies,in fact, referred to him as the Negro President, because of the non-persons whose numbers increased the voting power of their owners. Win a few, lose a few.

OW also erred. What was your reaction again?

By that logic, we can also deduce that oversampling white people would understate Mr. Obama’s approval rating, yes?

Yet you, like Bloatbaugh, provide absolutely no proof whatsoever that this is occurring the Gallup’s sampling.

Why not suggest that Gallup is really Obama’s robot twin spewing out statistics based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

No one would dare argue the validity of that statement either, right?

Just not for their slaves.

Brilliant logic there; sort of like how White Americans have overwhelmingly voted for every White presidential candidate that ever ran, even during all those races where a Black candidate had entered.

Ohhhh…..that’s righhttttttt…..it was just the ONE time…..

How this validate what Rush said in any way, shape or form?

Not so. What you said was that this was Rush’s underlying point when it was no such thing. You take his simple declarative statement that this was what Gallup was, IN FACT, doing and by some ideological use of transubstantiation turn it into a self-evident hypothetical that if Gallup did A that B would result.

You conclude by noting that “Ollie said nothing that would refute that basic premise” which is another statement of the obvious in that OW was talking about what Limbaugh actually said and not your wistful vision of his underlying point.

I don’t think we are so far apart here on the Rush/Gallup thing. You say, if I understand you correctly, that Limbaugh is incorrect about Gallups black sampling ratio. I said that whether or not it is true about Gallup’s black sampling ratio that oversampling blacks would be one way to fudge Barry’s numbers upwards and that Ollie said nothing that would refute that basic premise.