Chief Robin, At 13:32 12/01/2000 -0500, you wrote: On a personal note, the Gore camp's >contempt for American military personnel removes him from any serious >contention of being the real Commander-In-Chief. This is the thing about he-who-would-do-or-say-anything-to-be-ki.. er..a.. president which sticks in my craw the deepest. Way back when, during the Vietnam War, I was stationed on a ship which spent a _lot_ of time in the Tonkin Gulf, particularly in 1972. (Remember the Haiphong blockade?? 75 days at sea between port calls...) At that time, mailcall was not a daily affair. It might be 2, 3 days or up to a week between having that mail helo landing on the fantail. 1972 was, as you may remember, a presidential election year. I voted absentee and I sent mine off in plenty of time, I think. Here's the rub. My ship was big enough to have it's own mailroom and did cancel stamped mail, usually. HOWEVER, members of the service in a warzone do not need postage! All one had to do was to write "free" where the stamp would go. (That's called "franking" and congress has the same priviledge.) Smaller craft would not have mailrooms and their stamped (and franked) mail would be routed through the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco. The stamped mail would _then_ get a postmark, or maybe not, which could easily be more than a week after mailing it. My folks got lots of letters from me without postmarks. Anybody out there still think that excluding military ballots with missing or late postmarks is fair? Does anybody care anymore what the military has to put up with to preserve the republic? Stepping down now from rant mode. Conrad Hoffsommer PO2 USN - Quit when still alive. Conrad Hoffsommer - mailto:hoffsoco@luther.edu *They call television a medium. That's because it is neither rare nor well done. *98% of the population is asleep. The other 2% are staring around in complete amazement, abject terror, or both.
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