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How is your own side full of crap?
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JRsec Offline
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Post: #21
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-20-2017 09:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:12 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 05:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 02:41 PM)JRsec Wrote:  There is only one solution for this and it hasn't been practiced in this country for well over 150 years, free elections. In the early days of the nation the press gave the space to carry the individual views of the candidates. Candidates spent as much on their elections as they needed to for travel, but the press carried their promises and views because it sold papers so they didn't have to purchase "air time".
My problem with your "solution" is that I think it will be turned into the same problem we have today. The R's and D's will get free air time and nobody else will. It's pretty easy to set a threshold level of perceived support to qualify for the free time, and to set that level high enough to create a barrier to entry. How do you implement it to keep that from happening?
Then you obviously didn't read the post. All candidates got space to present their visions. What I didn't mention was that they couldn't use the free time to criticize one another so much as to lay out their agenda. Stump speeches were the time for muckraking. As for the entry point it's been on the books until H.W. Bush. Get the requisite number of signatures to get your name placed on the ballot. The total was once a national one for national elections. H.W. made sure it was per state and grandfathered in the Republicans and Democrats. Strike his legislation and return to the original. Then limit the space and appearances to a certain amount or limit of time and restrict the presentations to what you will do, and how you will accomplish it. That frees the election process up to new ideas and new approaches. Then the people choose. Those who've taken over the country don't like ideas that they don't approve of so we get two parties of candidates who they already own. Everyone else is dismissed, or even if they qualify aren't invited to the debates (corporate TV policy), and usually can't afford commercial time on television.
Make the elections free as far as message goes and we will finally get reforms and a new vision.

But who decides who is a candidate and who isn't? Do the Greens get this? Do the Libertarians? Do the Communists? Does the Constitution Party? Where do you draw the line?

And what constitutes the forbidden criticizing each other? If republicans had self imposed that rule and followed it, Donald Trump would not have been their nominee.

Are you willfully being obtuse? Any candidate who can acquire the requisite number of signatures of registered voters can run. That's how it was initially set up.

As for what constitutes forbidden criticism the media governs it for the time they give (and remember they do this as a public service). They set the parameters for advancing your point of view or agenda and restrict air time or space if it is violated.

As in every election since the dawn of democracies and republics the mudslinging is reserved for private speaking engagements and stump speeches. You can't stop it, but you can limit it to those realms. Debates should include all candidates and they are moderated. The electorate determines the candidates, not the danged parties. The process should be same for all of them regardless of party affiliation, and it once was.
(This post was last modified: 12-21-2017 12:51 AM by JRsec.)
12-21-2017 12:31 AM
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Owl 69/70/75 Online
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Post: #22
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-21-2017 12:31 AM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:12 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 05:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 02:41 PM)JRsec Wrote:  There is only one solution for this and it hasn't been practiced in this country for well over 150 years, free elections. In the early days of the nation the press gave the space to carry the individual views of the candidates. Candidates spent as much on their elections as they needed to for travel, but the press carried their promises and views because it sold papers so they didn't have to purchase "air time".
My problem with your "solution" is that I think it will be turned into the same problem we have today. The R's and D's will get free air time and nobody else will. It's pretty easy to set a threshold level of perceived support to qualify for the free time, and to set that level high enough to create a barrier to entry. How do you implement it to keep that from happening?
Then you obviously didn't read the post. All candidates got space to present their visions. What I didn't mention was that they couldn't use the free time to criticize one another so much as to lay out their agenda. Stump speeches were the time for muckraking. As for the entry point it's been on the books until H.W. Bush. Get the requisite number of signatures to get your name placed on the ballot. The total was once a national one for national elections. H.W. made sure it was per state and grandfathered in the Republicans and Democrats. Strike his legislation and return to the original. Then limit the space and appearances to a certain amount or limit of time and restrict the presentations to what you will do, and how you will accomplish it. That frees the election process up to new ideas and new approaches. Then the people choose. Those who've taken over the country don't like ideas that they don't approve of so we get two parties of candidates who they already own. Everyone else is dismissed, or even if they qualify aren't invited to the debates (corporate TV policy), and usually can't afford commercial time on television.
Make the elections free as far as message goes and we will finally get reforms and a new vision.
But who decides who is a candidate and who isn't? Do the Greens get this? Do the Libertarians? Do the Communists? Does the Constitution Party? Where do you draw the line?
And what constitutes the forbidden criticizing each other? If republicans had self imposed that rule and followed it, Donald Trump would not have been their nominee.
Are you willfully being obtuse? Any candidate who can acquire the requisite number of signatures of registered voters can run. That's how it was initially set up.
As for what constitutes forbidden criticism the media governs it for the time they give (and remember they do this as a public service). They set the parameters for advancing your point of view or agenda and restrict air time or space if it is violated.
As in every election since the dawn of democracies and republics the mudslinging is reserved for private speaking engagements and stump speeches. You can't stop it, but you can limit it to those realms. Debates should include all candidates and they are moderated. The electorate determines the candidates, not the danged parties. The process should be same for all of them regardless of party affiliation, and it once was.

No, I'm not being obtuse, willfully or otherwise, but I think you are. Unless we can round up a few angels, you are proposing a system that will be run by human beings, and thus subject to the biases that humans introduce.

Suppose they just set the number of required signatures so high that nobody but two candidates can meet them. Then what?

And the media governs what is or is not forbidden criticism? So if the media favor candidate A, he gets to call candidate B a witch because, of course, that's not forbidden criticism because candidate B hasn't proved that she isn't one, but candidate B cannot say that she has a better health care plan because that is a dog whistle that candidate A is a racist.

And no, don't tell me that sort of stuff won't happen. It happens now in how ballot access is granted and how the nightly news gets edited. If, say, a libertarian had had full ballot access in the Alabama senate race, he might well have been elected given what went down. But he didn't. We can run a story about how despicable Donald Trump is because he is truly despicable, but we can't run a story bout how Hillary broke the law because Comey said that he would not recommend prosecuting her.

Where are you going to find the angels to run your system fairly and impartially? Hint: You're not.
12-21-2017 07:02 AM
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miko33 Offline
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Post: #23
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
A lot of back and forth that seems to be primarily based on ballot access for all - possibly requiring the media to provide fair coverage for all candidates regardless of party (great or small). I'm starting a new thread that's related to this discussion; however, it goes deeper into the sausage making regarding how we get our candidates today.
12-21-2017 09:14 AM
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Post: #24
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-20-2017 06:14 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  arkstfan,

My concept has always been individual rights > states' rights > federal rights. I think that's what the 10th Amendment says. Lots of issues actually go away if we quit trying to make everything a federal case.

Secularism, gay marriage, and abortion are three issues where the religious right has hijacked the republican party, and their unwillingness to adopt any approach other than "my way or the highway" makes it impossible to work with them. So everything defaults to the extreme. As for religion and government, what the 1st Amendment says is that congress may nor favor the establishment of a particular religion, nor prohibit the free exercise of religion. I think we lose sight of that second part all to frequently in our zeal to prevent anything that looks even remotely like "establishment." Gay marriage should be allowed, but forcing churches or others to support such marriages in violation of their legitimately held religious beliefs strikes me a major violation of that "separation of church and state" which the left seems to embrace so fondly. As for abortion, life starts at conception, and the unborn have rights from that point, but so does the mother, that doesn't mean that the rights of the unborn automatically trump those of the mother from the moment of conception. At some point they should, absent a showing such as rape or incest or health of mother or child, and that point has historically been somewhere around the end of the first trimester or 20 weeks. That makes sense to me.

As for capitalism, no system in history has done more to lift the well-being of the poorest members of society. But it takes both a healthy demand and a healthy supply side to work properly. We have focused almost entirely on stimulating demand since the days of the New Deal, without ever catching up the supply side. Keynes understood this, you stimulate demand in hard times, and you catch up supply in good times. We keep neglecting to do the latter. Keynes said that would eventually produce a situation where supply and demand are so far out of balance that demand stimulus no longer works. Look at where we are. Americans consume more and save less than citizens of any other advanced economy. We are the world's largest debtor, both individuals and government. We are the world's largest importer. And the Obama "stimulus" has produced multipliers, not in the 7-9 range predicted by Keynes, but rather in the 1-1.5 range. That all sounds pretty much like the problem Keynes predicted.

As far as health care, no, Obamacare is not the republican plan. The republican plan was based loosely on German Bismarck (I think Bismarck is the way to go, but I prefer the French, Dutch, or Swiss versions to the German). Obamacare keeps some of the same words, but not the same ideas. For example, the exchanges in the German and republican plans were created to provide a mechanism for out-of-state health insurance purposes. Under Obamacare, there are no out-of-state health insurance purchases, so the exchanges cannot possibly be the same. Same for the mandate. The republican plan had a mandate, but anyone purchasing insurance got a refundable tax credit that basically paid the cost. You need to have something to prevent the "free rider" effect if you require coverage of pre-exisitng conditions. But structuring it as a tax credit instead of a penalty has significantly different implications. The other main, and probably bigger difference, is that those other plans didn't have nearly the size of centralized federal health bureaucracy, and nothing like the IPAB, that are part and parcel of Obamacare. Get rid of the IPAB and the other bureaucratic overhead, and turn the mandate into a tax credit, and Obamacare would start to look something like the original Heritage plan. But without those changes, it doesn't.

Out-of-state health insurance purchases are for the most part a false trail.

If Mutual of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado offers cheaper insurance than what I can get in Arkansas and I buy it, what do I get for my money?
I get a small out-of-network benefit. So if an office visit is billed at $100 and Mutual pays $60 in network and only 70% of that out-of-network ($42), I owe $58. Doctor wins big if I'm not a deadbeat. He gets $100 when he was willing to accept $70 if I had signed with United of the Ozarks and I'm paying out-of-pocket 82% of what he would have accepted.

If Mutual of the Rocky Mountains tries to get my doctor to sign up, his answer is likely "Why should I bother?" They don't have the critical mass that makes doing business with them essential.

Counter-intuitive but increasing competition for insurance simply increases inflation in the sector because it erodes the ability of the insurer to have the market force to negotiate better prices and moves us toward a pay the sticker price system.

Having been on a high deductible plan with an HSA for several years, paying the first X out-of-pocket even via a dedicated account makes you more price sensitive. My elderly mother has a number of health problems and before I went high deductible I'd agree with my dad, go to the ER for the weekend and night issues, but now I've got him lined up with a local urgent care clinic to help him save money and cut waiting times. Quite literally, the week my migraine medication went off patent, I called my local non-big box chain pharmacy and asked when they would have the generic.

That's why I'm a fan of the Singapore system. Give me a mandatory HSA, give me a debit card to pay for the routine stuff which allows my doctor to hire fewer people to get paid and changes his cash flow from 90 days out to same day to 3 days depending on card processing. Then we will let a catastrophic plan clean up the messes.
12-21-2017 10:16 AM
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arkstfan Away
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Post: #25
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-21-2017 12:31 AM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:12 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 05:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 02:41 PM)JRsec Wrote:  There is only one solution for this and it hasn't been practiced in this country for well over 150 years, free elections. In the early days of the nation the press gave the space to carry the individual views of the candidates. Candidates spent as much on their elections as they needed to for travel, but the press carried their promises and views because it sold papers so they didn't have to purchase "air time".
My problem with your "solution" is that I think it will be turned into the same problem we have today. The R's and D's will get free air time and nobody else will. It's pretty easy to set a threshold level of perceived support to qualify for the free time, and to set that level high enough to create a barrier to entry. How do you implement it to keep that from happening?
Then you obviously didn't read the post. All candidates got space to present their visions. What I didn't mention was that they couldn't use the free time to criticize one another so much as to lay out their agenda. Stump speeches were the time for muckraking. As for the entry point it's been on the books until H.W. Bush. Get the requisite number of signatures to get your name placed on the ballot. The total was once a national one for national elections. H.W. made sure it was per state and grandfathered in the Republicans and Democrats. Strike his legislation and return to the original. Then limit the space and appearances to a certain amount or limit of time and restrict the presentations to what you will do, and how you will accomplish it. That frees the election process up to new ideas and new approaches. Then the people choose. Those who've taken over the country don't like ideas that they don't approve of so we get two parties of candidates who they already own. Everyone else is dismissed, or even if they qualify aren't invited to the debates (corporate TV policy), and usually can't afford commercial time on television.
Make the elections free as far as message goes and we will finally get reforms and a new vision.

But who decides who is a candidate and who isn't? Do the Greens get this? Do the Libertarians? Do the Communists? Does the Constitution Party? Where do you draw the line?

And what constitutes the forbidden criticizing each other? If republicans had self imposed that rule and followed it, Donald Trump would not have been their nominee.

Are you willfully being obtuse? Any candidate who can acquire the requisite number of signatures of registered voters can run. That's how it was initially set up.

As for what constitutes forbidden criticism the media governs it for the time they give (and remember they do this as a public service). They set the parameters for advancing your point of view or agenda and restrict air time or space if it is violated.

As in every election since the dawn of democracies and republics the mudslinging is reserved for private speaking engagements and stump speeches. You can't stop it, but you can limit it to those realms. Debates should include all candidates and they are moderated. The electorate determines the candidates, not the danged parties. The process should be same for all of them regardless of party affiliation, and it once was.

We don't have political parties as they once were perceived.

The party leadership does not get to just pick their candidates, instead anyone who is a registered voter who identifies with the party may vote for the candidates in a primary. That means if you think being for issue X is the cornerstone of the party but a group of voters believes opposing issue Y is the most important thing, they can nominate people via primary who oppose the cornerstone issue of the party's leadership.

I can't answer for the other 49 states but I think the law in Arkansas is instructive.

In Arkansas a party receiving a set percentage of votes (sorry not looking it up right now and I don't remember it) in an election for specific offices is automatically on the ballot, all they have to do is provide a nominee list and may nominate by primary or convention.

Until you hit that threshold you must submit a petition with signatures from the lesser of 3% of the votes cast for president or governor in the last election or 10,000 voters, district elections require 3% of the votes for that district from the last election or 2,000 signatures (that I remember). OR you can submit 10,000 signatures asking that the party be recognized.

You are really better off just running for the nomination of the existing parties even if you don't buy their politics because it's more likely you can win a primary with non-party orthodoxy than it is that you can win running third party.

That's why we won't have a significant third party. Right now a libertarian probably would have an easier time winning a nomination as a Democrat because the personal rights and individual liberty movement has been shouted down in Republican primaries.
12-21-2017 10:34 AM
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tanqtonic Online
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Post: #26
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-20-2017 03:19 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  As a formerly reliable Republican voter.

States rights. Sorry fellas but that little dust-up that resulted in some bloodshed in the 1860's was capped by constitutional amendments that now require the states to not screw with individual rights.

Scorn of secularism. I'm a church goer. But I believer heartily in a secular government. Drive around town making note of church signs and proximity to each other. We Christians can't agree on how to live the Bible. You impose a government scheme of regulation that is Bible based on you will trample on the beliefs of some Christians.

Gay marriage? I changed my mind on the issue when I realized I couldn't defend the status quo without citing scripture or "that's how we've always done it". Those aren't valid arguments. The government gives married people special rights (inheritance and property ownership most notably) has to have a compelling reason to deny those rights and privileges to others. Can't be about reproduction. My 74 year old father-in-law and his 72 year old girlfriend got married and they ain't producing any children.

Abortion. I'm against it but I can never support a system where a doctor is afraid to save a mother because he might be second guessed or worse, a system where someone needs to find a judge at 3am on Saturday to get an emergency order signed. Focus on reducing the pressures that prompt people to choose abortion.

Capitalism in the US. Screwed all to hell. Capitalism only survives if there are consumers. Rich people are not job creators. Job creation is a byproduct of certain investments. If the public at-large isn't buying house and building new ones, an investment in refrigerators won't pay well and you aren't going to hire people to make refrigerators unless you think you can sell them. Cutting the Walton Family's taxes isn't going to prompt them to hire anyone, open new stores, or give anyone raises. Leave their taxes alone, cut the lower income people because they will spend that money and a big piece of it will go to Walmart. Our regulatory scheme is a complete mess. Large corporations often lobby to make regulations dense and complicated to serve as a barrier to entry for their competitors. Only thing propping up our small business numbers is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Claim you have a business, claim you made some money, file a tax return get the EIC money. Toss the numbers out for those scam businesses and the US is a small business wasteland vs our peers.

Health coverage. We had a plan. Several conservative think tanks endorsed the plan. Nixon proposed a similar plan (Dems killed it under Ted Kennedy's urging, expecting to be able to go single payer in 1976). Newt dusted it off when Hillary was working on health coverage. Romney supports a variant. Then Obama signs on and oh hell no it's socialist. The socialist plan was Bush's Medicare Part D which got amended to bar Medicare from negotiating drug prices and has required diversion of tax dollars above the payroll tax to prop up. Let's adopt the Singapore plan. Everyone is required to save to a personal account a set percentage of earnings and that account covers routine medical, then we can have a national catastrophic plan that kicks in after say $20,000 of out-of-pocket. We've got to do something. Hospitals and clinics spend too much getting paid. Workers Comp, Home, Auto, and other liability coverage insurance could be cheaper if they only had to cover the first $20,000 in medical bills.

With all due respect, the health coverage plans supported by the right in the past were not 'dusted off' and called Obamacare. The plans *may* have had similar portions (such as the idea that for 'overall coverage' without pre-existing, some form of mandate was needed on the back side). But overall they were *quite* different in structure than the structure we ended up with in 2008. Vastly.
12-21-2017 03:18 PM
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tanqtonic Online
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Post: #27
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
I am a Chicago-school economics / constitutionalist / libertarian (little L).

I used to to label myself as conservative. Terry Schiavo / Bush told me that path was wrong, and that path was anathema to what supposed conservatives should have done with that state's rights issues.

Since then the Republican Party has consistently told me I am not a 'true conservative'; so I believe them now.
12-21-2017 03:24 PM
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JRsec Offline
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Post: #28
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-21-2017 07:02 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-21-2017 12:31 AM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 09:12 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-20-2017 05:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My problem with your "solution" is that I think it will be turned into the same problem we have today. The R's and D's will get free air time and nobody else will. It's pretty easy to set a threshold level of perceived support to qualify for the free time, and to set that level high enough to create a barrier to entry. How do you implement it to keep that from happening?
Then you obviously didn't read the post. All candidates got space to present their visions. What I didn't mention was that they couldn't use the free time to criticize one another so much as to lay out their agenda. Stump speeches were the time for muckraking. As for the entry point it's been on the books until H.W. Bush. Get the requisite number of signatures to get your name placed on the ballot. The total was once a national one for national elections. H.W. made sure it was per state and grandfathered in the Republicans and Democrats. Strike his legislation and return to the original. Then limit the space and appearances to a certain amount or limit of time and restrict the presentations to what you will do, and how you will accomplish it. That frees the election process up to new ideas and new approaches. Then the people choose. Those who've taken over the country don't like ideas that they don't approve of so we get two parties of candidates who they already own. Everyone else is dismissed, or even if they qualify aren't invited to the debates (corporate TV policy), and usually can't afford commercial time on television.
Make the elections free as far as message goes and we will finally get reforms and a new vision.
But who decides who is a candidate and who isn't? Do the Greens get this? Do the Libertarians? Do the Communists? Does the Constitution Party? Where do you draw the line?
And what constitutes the forbidden criticizing each other? If republicans had self imposed that rule and followed it, Donald Trump would not have been their nominee.
Are you willfully being obtuse? Any candidate who can acquire the requisite number of signatures of registered voters can run. That's how it was initially set up.
As for what constitutes forbidden criticism the media governs it for the time they give (and remember they do this as a public service). They set the parameters for advancing your point of view or agenda and restrict air time or space if it is violated.
As in every election since the dawn of democracies and republics the mudslinging is reserved for private speaking engagements and stump speeches. You can't stop it, but you can limit it to those realms. Debates should include all candidates and they are moderated. The electorate determines the candidates, not the danged parties. The process should be same for all of them regardless of party affiliation, and it once was.

No, I'm not being obtuse, willfully or otherwise, but I think you are. Unless we can round up a few angels, you are proposing a system that will be run by human beings, and thus subject to the biases that humans introduce.

Suppose they just set the number of required signatures so high that nobody but two candidates can meet them. Then what?

And the media governs what is or is not forbidden criticism? So if the media favor candidate A, he gets to call candidate B a witch because, of course, that's not forbidden criticism because candidate B hasn't proved that she isn't one, but candidate B cannot say that she has a better health care plan because that is a dog whistle that candidate A is a racist.

And no, don't tell me that sort of stuff won't happen. It happens now in how ballot access is granted and how the nightly news gets edited. If, say, a libertarian had had full ballot access in the Alabama senate race, he might well have been elected given what went down. But he didn't. We can run a story about how despicable Donald Trump is because he is truly despicable, but we can't run a story bout how Hillary broke the law because Comey said that he would not recommend prosecuting her.

Where are you going to find the angels to run your system fairly and impartially? Hint: You're not.

Look, I'm the last guy who believes in angels among politicians. I've worked with and against them. I'm just stating that the system has been hijacked and it was hijacked with outside funding more than a century ago. But the most egregious influence over the process has occurred in the last nearly 40 years. When the number of requisite signatures was established as the criteria for getting your name on the ballot the country was small, a proportional number would be easy to ascertain.

I'm just saying if you want to clean up the cesspool you start by retracting the legislation that made it that. You give voters the ability to back candidates not put up by the machines. There will never be a perfect process but what we once had was vastly superior to what it has become.

Have dead people voted in the past? They sure as hell did under L.B.J. and I doubt he was that innovative. Have absentee ballots miraculously appeared at the last moment, of course. But never before has the electorate been so eliminated from deciding by petition and then ballot the names that were before them.

I wrote in Nick Saban in the Alabama senate election. I figured that way I wasn't voting for a long term Clinton supporter nor was I voting for Moore. Heck if Saban had won it would have made all Auburn folks happy!

The issue is that outside of the upper echelons of party power brokers in the state we don't even control the nominees here! At the national level for the last 30 years it's hard to find a candidate for president that didn't have ties to two families.

Our original system never worried about the dominance of one family because of their anti-monarch sentiments and because the job was seen as truly public service and mostly at the expense of the family business. But they did leave an open system whereby those not supported by the early parties could gain access. And all parties had go through the same ballot access procedures. Not any more.

The means of redress are as legally simplistic as the legislation that changed them. Never has this been an argument about the deplorable state of human ethics. We will never have perfect people. But we can have a fairer system.

Ballot access, and the elimination of corporate funding in elections, and equal campaign event access (debates, air time, etc.) is essential to correcting the intentional inequities that have been legislated in by the current two parties who are not serving the public as much as they are turf protecting and perk protecting.

If you start with the premise that people are anything other than flawed you will end up with the justification for totalitarianism every time.

Your methods here are a form of quibbling and pettifogging. A standard is a standard and it is either equally applied or not. Calling someone a witch is not even relevant if the parameters are that you are limited to discussing your ideas and how you will accomplish them. Elections are about ideas for governing when they correctly conducted. They were never intended to be reprise of Jerry Springer.

We have been without standards for election conduct for so long now that it will be a shock to reestablish them. And guess what, we won't, until the public has access to run candidates in opposition to those of the two parties. That's why the process has to be addressed first.

Orderly transference of power is becoming less and less of a reality. When that breaks down civil conflict will follow. Our nation was never designed to be of one mind. We were designed to be governed in a competition of ideas, not ideologies. Compromise was intended. Those who can't accept that whether from the left or right are obstacles to how free people are governed.

And for the record where is your support for stating Trump is despicable? And who says that Director Comey is impartial? I didn't vote for either Clinton or Trump but so far there is not any proof that either is criminal, but sadly there is a dearth of evidence that they are good. But having been close enough to it before the best mantra is trust no one. Most of them operate like the rules don't apply to them and until somebody holds the smoking gun they don't listen either.

The whole gist of my initial post is that we no longer have a government that is interested in the people, let alone one that is there to serve the public and we won't have one as long as the majority of the money they receive comes from corporate sources and as long as candidates outside of their party sphere are obstructed so intentionally.
(This post was last modified: 12-21-2017 04:24 PM by JRsec.)
12-21-2017 04:07 PM
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Post: #29
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
See, I hate to admit it, but I think a big problem with the current process is the primary system. When the political bosses picked the candidates in the smoke-filled back rooms, their primary concern was electability, so they tended to pick toward the center. In the primaries the bases turn out, and on both sides they tend toward the extreme. So we get Roy Moore as a candidate for senate in Alabama, when the bosses would have picked either of two other candidates over him, either one of which would have won in a landslide. And that's just a very recent and obvious example.

I don't have a ready solution. I'm somewhat intrigued by what some of the western states are doing, where all the candidates from both parties run in one primary, and the top two vote getters run in the general. If both of them are from the same party, then that party was pretty obviously going to win in the first place, and in the general the voters for the other party would presumably support the more moderate of the two. But I'm not that familiar with the details, and I would expect to find unanticipated problems if I dug deeper.

I also like the concept of proportional representation. It is obviously a way to make it easier for third party candidates to win, which I like. It also provides a way for supporters of a minority party (e.g., republicans in California) to have representatives who support their values. And both of those in ways that first-past-the-post systems cannot provide.

My problem with your approach is that you are relying on fallible and probably biased human beings to decide who gets on and who doesn't, and what content is permissible and what isn't. And I simply don't trust that.
12-21-2017 04:58 PM
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CrimsonPhantom Offline
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Post: #30
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
I was once told in an online discussion in an article, that political beliefs should be based on ones income. The lower the income, Democrat. Higher the income Republican. I believe that is a load of crap. Income shouldn't dictate ones political beliefs. For me it depends upon the issue. I lean more to the right. Overall I'm very disappointed by how Republicans have been handling things when they control the government. They have been more talk and no action. I will not vote democrat, I've seen them in action. I was registered as an independent, but in NM you must be a Democrat or Republican to vote in primaries. In 2016 I re registered as a Republican to vote in the primaries.

No party cares about the American people IMO. Its like the American People are customers in a walmart. The Democrat employees are outside trying to get people into the store, not using the front proper entrance. The Republican employees are on a brake. Neither is helping the customers. Occasionally one from either side actually appears in the store, but quickly leave when they get overwhelmed by too many customers.

Both sides are full of crap.
12-21-2017 07:08 PM
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Post: #31
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-21-2017 07:08 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  I was once told in an online discussion in an article, that political beliefs should be based on ones income. The lower the income, Democrat. Higher the income Republican. I believe that is a load of crap. Income shouldn't dictate ones political beliefs. For me it depends upon the issue. I lean more to the right. Overall I'm very disappointed by how Republicans have been handling things when they control the government. They have been more talk and no action. I will not vote democrat, I've seen them in action. I was registered as an independent, but in NM you must be a Democrat or Republican to vote in primaries. In 2016 I re registered as a Republican to vote in the primaries.

No party cares about the American people IMO. Its like the American People are customers in a walmart. The Democrat employees are outside trying to get people into the store, not using the front proper entrance. The Republican employees are on a brake. Neither is helping the customers. Occasionally one from either side actually appears in the store, but quickly leave when they get overwhelmed by too many customers.

Both sides are full of crap.

That trope is political propaganda

Go look up average income by state. Match that to the electoral college last election. My recollection is the 8-11 states with the highest per capita income voted for Hillary.

If you subscribe to the idea that all people vote self-interest rather than some ideological reasons (I think we vote tribally but that's for another time), people living in densely populated areas who have wealth tend to vote Democrat. So the question becomes what is the self-interest they are voting? Maybe they are voting to not have people living on sidewalks pissing on their building or vote out of fear that the poor will rise up and toss them out of their home.
12-22-2017 01:56 PM
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AdoptedMonarch Offline
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Post: #32
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
I am among the most despised of political labels: the neocon. We are liberal at our core, but simply cannot get comfortable with the economic incoherence, cultural disdain and absence of basic patriotism that has so infected the Democrat Party and the modern progressive ideology.

The result is a constant internal debate over irreconcilable principles (or perhaps it's just a lack of principles), which causes us to feel a need to engage on virtually every issue but never commit squarely on a sensible solution. Think Jonah Goldberg, John Podoretz and perhaps even Peggy Noonan.

If the Democrats ever regained their sanity, we'd probably come back into the fold. But, until then, our donations and votes usually go to the Republican or Libertarian candidate, whichever is least offensive.

Great thread, b.t.w.
12-22-2017 04:59 PM
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JRsec Offline
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Post: #33
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-21-2017 04:58 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  See, I hate to admit it, but I think a big problem with the current process is the primary system. When the political bosses picked the candidates in the smoke-filled back rooms, their primary concern was electability, so they tended to pick toward the center. In the primaries the bases turn out, and on both sides they tend toward the extreme. So we get Roy Moore as a candidate for senate in Alabama, when the bosses would have picked either of two other candidates over him, either one of which would have won in a landslide. And that's just a very recent and obvious example.

I don't have a ready solution. I'm somewhat intrigued by what some of the western states are doing, where all the candidates from both parties run in one primary, and the top two vote getters run in the general. If both of them are from the same party, then that party was pretty obviously going to win in the first place, and in the general the voters for the other party would presumably support the more moderate of the two. But I'm not that familiar with the details, and I would expect to find unanticipated problems if I dug deeper.

I also like the concept of proportional representation. It is obviously a way to make it easier for third party candidates to win, which I like. It also provides a way for supporters of a minority party (e.g., republicans in California) to have representatives who support their values. And both of those in ways that first-past-the-post systems cannot provide.

My problem with your approach is that you are relying on fallible and probably biased human beings to decide who gets on and who doesn't, and what content is permissible and what isn't. And I simply don't trust that.

This is what flabbergasts me. What I'm proposing is what we first had. A viable candidate gets his or her name on the ballot by registered voter petition. How in the hell can anyone say that is biased? The electorate decides who is on the ballot, not some party boss. Once they are on the ballot they utilize free access to media to present their ideas and agenda. Time or space which is free should not be wasted on negative campaigning which is almost exclusively ad hominem in nature, released late in the campaign, and designed to provide little to no time for rebuttal or forced retractions. This should be the only restriction and it should come from the government and pertain only to the free access. They can use their local speeches and public outings to throw rocks if they want to, but the media presentations are limited to ideas and how they might be accomplished. Where is the fallibility in that? The point is with free access and the prohibition of corporate money the candidates gain their support from the people who choose to support them. It is the most basic step in cleaning up the present partisan party politics and the kingmakers that reside within those parties who vet the candidates and put forth only those they can control. And more importantly it helps to stop the corporate interests from backing and funding candidates under both parties so they can be assured of the same perks moving forward regardless of which side wins.

Requiring the media to be of service to the public they rely upon for the numbers they need to make money is also essential. If the time is free their parent organizations can't utilize them to regain the money they donate by charging back for time and space. When they can't recoup the money they donated by charging the candidates for time and space then the public becomes more relevant to the process again.

I find the primary process you cite to be intriguing and at first glance I don't find anything wrong with that approach and see a benefit in not having crossover voters trying to tip a party primary to a more easily defeatable candidate.

There are many things in the process that can be tweaked but getting one's name on the ballot should fundamentally be by registered voter support. I've signed many such petitions for candidates I probably was not going to support, but I see it as essential to a free society that if someone has something to say, and is willing to front the time and money to seek office, to give them a chance to speak about whatever it is was that compelled them to that action.

IMO the biggest issue we have today is an uninformed electorate because candidates seldom state clearly what they are for and how they are going to achieve it and spend most of their time and energy in denigrating the opposition. If we continue down this road we'll have no discussion of ideas, no shaping of policy to form the best possible coalitions, and even worse not many good candidates. Who wants to put their families and themselves through such a negative process? As a result we'll have more of Dupe A vs Dupe B where both are backed by the same corporate money and only multinationals win and by definition that is a conflict of interest as to what is best for the United States.

It doesn't mean that corporations won't back their guys in each party, but it does mean that by controlling the two parties through financing that they can't control all of the voters on the ballot, and deny access to public events, like debates, to those of which they don't approve. It's been decades since all eligible candidates have had access to broadcast debates.
(This post was last modified: 12-22-2017 05:21 PM by JRsec.)
12-22-2017 05:11 PM
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Post: #34
RE: How is your own side full of crap?
(12-22-2017 05:11 PM)JRsec Wrote:  This is what flabbergasts me. What I'm proposing is what we first had. A viable candidate gets his or her name on the ballot by registered voter petition. How in the hell can anyone say that is biased?

Because you have human beings deciding how many signatures a petition requires, and what constitutes a valid signature. If they want to keep a candidate out, they can set an unreasonably high threshold number of signatures, or go through petitions knocking out signatures willy nilly until the threshold number is no longer met. And don't say those things can't happen, because they can--and do--now.

Quote:
The electorate decides who is on the ballot, not some party boss. Once they are on the ballot they utilize free access to media to present their ideas and agenda. Time or space which is free should not be wasted on negative campaigning which is almost exclusively ad hominem in nature, released late in the campaign, and designed to provide little to no time for rebuttal or forced retractions. This should be the only restriction and it should come from the government and pertain only to the free access. They can use their local speeches and public outings to throw rocks if they want to, but the media presentations are limited to ideas and how they might be accomplished. Where is the fallibility in that? The point is with free access and the prohibition of corporate money the candidates gain their support from the people who choose to support them. It is the most basic step in cleaning up the present partisan party politics and the kingmakers that reside within those parties who vet the candidates and put forth only those they can control. And more importantly it helps to stop the corporate interests from backing and funding candidates under both parties so they can be assured of the same perks moving forward regardless of which side wins.

Unfortunately, I think we got better candidates when the party bosses picked them. Their job security depended on winning elections, so they picked electable candidates (generally more centrist to pick up crossover votes). In primaries, the more radical elements of the party bases dominate, and electability is not as important. So you end top with wacko extremist candidates.

Quote:Requiring the media to be of service to the public they rely upon for the numbers they need to make money is also essential. If the time is free their parent organizations can't utilize them to regain the money they donate by charging back for time and space. When they can't recoup the money they donated by charging the candidates for time and space then the public becomes more relevant to the process again.

Again, I don't trust the media either. You want them to patrol what is issue discussion that gets on, versus ad hominem attacks which don't. I can just see our biased media deciding that candidate A's platform issues are a personal attack on candidate B, but candidate B's ad hominems against candidate A are legitimate issues.

Quote:I find the primary process you cite to be intriguing and at first glance I don't find anything wrong with that approach and see a benefit in not having crossover voters trying to tip a party primary to a more easily defeatable candidate.
There are many things in the process that can be tweaked but getting one's name on the ballot should fundamentally be by registered voter support. I've signed many such petitions for candidates I probably was not going to support, but I see it as essential to a free society that if someone has something to say, and is willing to front the time and money to seek office, to give them a chance to speak about whatever it is was that compelled them to that action.
IMO the biggest issue we have today is an uninformed electorate because candidates seldom state clearly what they are for and how they are going to achieve it and spend most of their time and energy in denigrating the opposition. If we continue down this road we'll have no discussion of ideas, no shaping of policy to form the best possible coalitions, and even worse not many good candidates. Who wants to put their families and themselves through such a negative process? As a result we'll have more of Dupe A vs Dupe B where both are backed by the same corporate money and only multinationals win and by definition that is a conflict of interest as to what is best for the United States.
It doesn't mean that corporations won't back their guys in each party, but it does mean that by controlling the two parties through financing that they can't control all of the voters on the ballot, and deny access to public events, like debates, to those of which they don't approve. It's been decades since all eligible candidates have had access to broadcast debates.

I was a huge proponent of primaries when they started coming in big time, but I have to admit I was wrong. It's bad enough that we have an uninformed electorate voting, but when that uninformed electorate is also choosing who gets to run, that is not a sure-fire recipe for success.

I definitely support the concept that all candidates have access to debates and public air time. But I worry that the process you propose could get very bent out of shape very easily. If you can come up with reasonable solutions to address my concerns, I'd be interested.
12-22-2017 11:59 PM
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Post: #35
How is your own side full of crap?
How can you say we have an uninformed electorate? In Arkansas we elected a state auditor who campaigned on overturning Roe and defending the second amendment. He’s already had to repay the state for improper use of office funds. But he’s kept one promise 2A is alive and well. He’s failed to audit Roe into being overturned so far.


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12-23-2017 07:29 PM
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