The Election

The next day brother Maherban held the conference call… After the conference call, brother Maherban writes another e-mail to his family…

Dear Family,

Today we had our Shura conference call at 12:30PM. Here are the resolutions from the call...

Attendance:
- Maherban representing my self, my wife, my three children
- Talking Bird: representing her self, her daughter and her husband (if he is coming)
- Brother Superior and his wife provided their proxies to Maherban
- Nephew from North Carolina provided his proxy to Maherban

Missing:
- Brother Moderate, his wife and his two children
- Niece who organized the vacation and her husband
- Abbu and Amma
- Nephew from Chicago (if he is coming)

Resolved:
The attendees addressed the issue of the Ameer. Sister Talking Bird was nominated to the position by Maherban, Brother Moderate was nominated in absentia by Anonymous.

Sister Talking Bird position was represented by Maherban who described her qualifications as follows:

Maherban speaking on Behalf of nominee Sister Talking Bird:
As a person who has known her since she first changed my diaper, I consider her to be of excellent character. She is generally a conservative personality. She is trustworthy and has vast international experience in managing family vacations. She also has foreign policy experience in managing households in an international setting. You might say she is a Maverick and has gone against many opinions within her own family. She is definitely her own person. Her other pertinent experience includes managing the vacation budget for multi-family (over 4 different families spanning 4 separate vacations over 10 years) and NEVER exceeding the original budgeted amount (i.e. NO DEFICIT Spending or lamb [Halal] barrel projects). Sister Talking Bird has supported the line-item veto to pair down the menu. Given the tough vacation environment, as well the fact that our vacation house is so close to an international border, we need a person with fiscal responsibility and foreign policy experience. I strongly urge the Shura to elect Sister Talking Bird as the new Ameer.

Brother Moderate’s position was represented by Anonymous who described his qualifications as follows:

Anonymous speaking on Behalf of nominee Brother Moderate:
If you ever wanted change, Brother Moderate is the right person. He has a great many untested ideas that might be excellent. He is young, energetic, and works well with all who agree with him. He started his career in managing parties after finishing college. His first party was a community block party where he brought numerous community groups to feast on all kinds of food they had never tasted. For this effort, he was recognized as a community organizer and awarded $50,000 to fund alternative food tasting parties. He used this money to establish Alternative Cuisine of Ravishing Nuggets (ACORN). The money was provided by a person of questionable character. The ACORN group has recently been in the news for faking food parties. Setting aside the early failures with ACORN, Brother Moderate served a distinguished career in the household serving many delicious meals to his family. However, a review by the budget office has revealed DEFICIT spending by Brother Moderate on numerous occasions when large parties were organized. Brother Moderate has international experience seeing over 60 countries in High Definition (HD) on the Discovery Channel in just the last 4 years. Just this year, Brother Moderate visited the 4th battalion vacationing in the BAHAMAS where he got to see the challenges faced by vacationers first hand. Brother Moderate has proposed over a dozen new snack and meal items. The citizen for low calories foundation has denounced his plan and pointed out that his snacks and meals are not paid for in the budget. The new deficit will blow a hole in the family budget. However, If you are looking to CHANGE the way you vacation, then you definitely want to elect Brother Moderate as your Ameer. He will bring a CHANGE you can believe!

After both speakers had finished speaking, a confidential vote was held. By a very slim margin, Sister Talking Bird won the vote. Brother Moderate’s partisans immediately filed suit against the Shura for not counting the votes of people who were not present. They argued, that the clear intent of those not present was CHANGE!. However, the court dismissed the suit and denied all further appeals thus validating Shura's original vote.

After selecting the Ameer, the Shura quickly moved to the next Agenda item as time was running short.
The Ameer agreed with the following suggestions:
that the variety of cookies will be cut down to just 2 (chocolate chip, oatmeal),
the number of deserts to just 3 (Birthday cake, Apple Pie, and Tiramisu)
The number of snacks was paired down to 2 (Nachos no meat, spinach dip)
After pairing down the menu, the Ameer quickly issued new commands to the cooks to revise their ingredient(s) list.

The meeting was then adjourned with 3 takbirs.