Democrats & Liberals Archives

Not a new idea, has been discussed for at least 50 years. The issue with the current system is that a city like Chicago or Indianapolis can outvote the rest of the state, so the electoral votes of an entire state are determined by the people in a single geographical area who we can agree have different needs, wants and desires.

In fact, two states do this already. It is now being discussed in Virginia. To be honest, it should be up to the state to determine this, shouldn’t it?

Whether this is ‘fair’ or not is a topic for debate, but your only issue with it appears to be that had the system been in place in 2012, Obama would have lost.

The benefit of the electoral college has been to prevent states with larger populations to drown out the votes of states with lesser populations, or at least buffer it a bit. By going this route, it will further buffer against that. It tells people that even though they live in a less populated area, their votes will still matter. Unlike the current system or, more importantly, a popular vote system where those people just become irrelevant.

I’m still not sure why people are so upset that a president who wins the popular vote may not win the presidency, this has happen several times in our history and is a POSITIVE because of the reasons I have explained, not a negative.

But, we can’t let Republicans win now, can we?

BTW, when Republicans wanted to end the system in Nebraska because it helped Obama win the election in 2008, Democrats defeated it and left the system in place…

But, that was ok then, right? I don’t remember seeing a post by you about it then, decrying how horrible it was…

Nebraska split its electoral votes for the first time in 2008, giving John McCain its statewide electors and those of two congressional districts, while Barack Obama won the electoral vote of Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district. Following the 2008 split, some Nebraska Republicans made efforts to discard the Congressional District Method and return to the winner-takes-all system. In January 2010, a bill was introduced in the Nebraska legislature to revert to a winner-take-all system; the bill died in committee in March 2011. Republicans had also passed bills in 1995 and 1997 to eliminate the Congressional District Method in Nebraska, but those bills were vetoed by Democratic Governor Ben Nelson.

You had a good thing going Stephen until you started with the us good, them bad crap.
The best way to insure that no party has an advantage over another is to do away with the representative districts for the house and elect all representatives at large. No party can gerrymander that way to keep control of the House.

Rhinehold
I’m still not sure why people are so upset that a president who wins the popular vote may not win the presidency, this has happen several times in our history and is a POSITIVE because of the reasons I have explained, not a negative.

Actually it’s only happened 3 times. Adams in 1824, Hayes in 1876, And Bush in 2000.

Rhinehold-
First, they’re not going to do it broadly. they’re going to do it specifically in swing states. They’re going to do it in order to rig the next election in their favor in a way they never felt they had to do before now.

Second, if you go by popular vote, in many of these states, the proportions of popular vote to congress critters of a given party is way out of balance.

You want to know how out of balance? Under the Virginia plan, Obama would have received 30% of the votes in a state he won by 50%. Yep, that’s right, Obama voters, in one of history’s sickening ironies, would have counted for three-fifths of a person.

This gerrymandered imbalance is seen in other places as well. Republicans won only 52% of the vote for Ohio Congressional races, yet somehow got three quarters of the seats. Republicans lost the popular vote in Michigan by 240,000, but their delegation is 9 to our five.

You say my only issue is that Obama would have lost.

What rational person in their right mind would accept a deal where they got the majority of the votes but the minority of the seats or electors? I could understand the logic if we were dividing electors strictly on population lines, in all 50 states, which would mean that for all the electors lost from states we won majorities in, we would win some from states we didn’t.

But this is basically taking the gerrymandering, the willing distortion of representation of party, compared to population, and extending it to electing a President. It makes the electoral system even less representative.

Are you too busy trying to accuse me of being a hypocrite, and therefore unworthy of having a political opinion, to notice the complete lack of democratic and republican principle that this would represent?

As for this?

The benefit of the electoral college has been to prevent states with larger populations to drown out the votes of states with lesser populations, or at least buffer it a bit. By going this route, it will further buffer against that. It tells people that even though they live in a less populated area, their votes will still matter. Unlike the current system or, more importantly, a popular vote system where those people just become irrelevant.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether it really does benefit the less populated states. What irks me about what you say there is that you’re saying that its the government’s job to tip the scale in their favor, far beyond equality, to having votes that matter more than everybody else’s.

I would be fine with a completely proportional electoral vote system. It would match electoral votes with the popular will. But if you’re not only talking about splitting electoral votes according to the popular vote, but doing it selectively in 2012 Swing States with the aim of extending monstrously unrepresentative house maps to the election, if you’re telling me that a guy should be able to lose by 5 MILLION votes and still become president, you’re basically asking the rest of us to pay a heavy price for your feelings of well-being.

No. If you want that advantage, I think you should compete for that. I am fully willing to open things up to competition, either by turning the electoral college to a more popular-vote oriented system, or abolishing it altogether by constitutional amendment. I am willing to do away with Democratic Party gerrymandering, with Republicans doing the same, and have Democrats and Republicans going toe to toe, competitively.

I am willing to reform elections here, and around the country, so that third parties have an easier time getting into the elections.

I want my party to be as in touch and responsive to the people as it can be. I don’t want it to surround itself with all kinds of protective barriers in order to maintain its advantage, because I know, in the end, that the political influence of my party will wane if it governs poorly, or in disregard of what the voters want.

Those are my principles. What principles justify diluting the value of voter’s franchise, in order to keep competitive a party that’s losing its appeal to the electorate? What have they done to deserve the new, added advantage?

“The best way to insure that no party has an advantage over another is to do away with the representative districts for the house and elect all representatives at large.”

I will nominate that idea as the worst I’ve read in 2013. You may as well argue that Senators should be elected at large by the entire nation.

Ron Brown-
The point of those districts was to keep some element of local interests and concerns in the national government.

As for why people would be upset?

Guy comes in first in the race. Doesn’t disqualify himself anyways. He’s declared the loser.

Can we expect people to boo?

A guy catches a football, takes it to the other teams endzone for a touchdown. Some blind ref makes a call that invalidates it

Can we expect people to boo?

A skating pair delievers a marvellous performance, while their opponents repeatedly trip and botch moves. The judges award their opponents the prize.

Can we expect people to boo?

We want to believe that we are a meritocracy, that in our games and contests, the best man or woman will win. We want to believe, as a democratic republic, than when a person is elected, that they are representative of the population, that he won by the greatest consensus of voters. We’ve accepted results that are less than fifty percent, but the man has to get at least the plurality of the votes, popular or electoral, in order to win their post.

If they didn’t?

Well, look up there at those events. If people regularly saw such botched officiating, such unfair judgment of the results, it would gut their trust in the meaning of what they saw, the legitimacy of the results in their eyes.

Maybe some would like it if they won despite the results, but you know what? I wouldn’t want that to happen, because although you would have won in a nominal sense, in a very real sense, you would begin your tenure with a real deficit of trust in the notion you should be there at all.

The amount of the difference in the disputed election in 2000 was less than a thousand votes. But because that particular state wasn’t definitively recounted, George Bush spent the whole rest of his tenure with many people believing that this election was illegitimate, and that came with a political cost. He was seen as somebody who hadn’t won things on his own strength, but because his party and organization used political, financial, and material advantages to force the results.

Republicans have tried to force matters by accusing Obama of being elected by false or fraudelent means. But since the audience for that largely was internal to the party, Obama never had Bush’s problems with legitimacy. He won his election handily, virtually lapping his opponent on the Electoral votes, with a nine million vote margin. This time? 332- 206, with a margin of five million.

Both times better than anything Bush ever achieved. Both times, wining by better than fifty percent. Only the cranks dispute the fact that Obama was elected President, and it was nowhere near enough to get him to lose.

But what if Romney had won the electoral vote, as under this plan, but lost the popular vote by over five million?

I mean, really, are any of the President who lost Popular vote, but won the election seen as the best Presidents? John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and George W. Bush?

No, they were seen as weak or incompetent. They never shook that appearance, not even Bush, after he won a Second term.

So I would ask you, are all means of winning an election created equal? I think you want the process to deliver you the strongest, not the weakest candidates, and plans like this would ultimately do two things: 1) encourage the GOP to field weaker candidates, knowing they could win, and 2) endanger Republicans prospects later if the legislatures are redistricted against their favor.

It’s not a positive idea, it’s a trap for those too concentrated on winning elections to realize that popular support is a crucial part of the advantages elections are suppose to afford.

What irks me about what you say there is that you’re saying that its the government’s job to tip the scale in their favor, far beyond equality, to having votes that matter more than everybody else’s.

Apparently you are completely in the dark with the founding of this country and the compromise that was set in place for a senate and a house and why they are apportioned as they are.

The idea is that a larger number of people should be heard on issues, but ALSO that areas that are less populated should not have their voices drowned out.

Your view of what is ‘fair’ and ‘equality’ are myopic at best when they only include what YOU think is fair, not what is fair for all concerned.

So, in your mind, without an electoral college (since you don’t seem to think we need one), all a presidential candidate has to do is visit LA, Chicago, NY and other large population centers, tell them that he is going to lower their taxes by 100% and raise everyone else’s to make up the difference, then get elected.

You call that fair?

You talk about how we live in an ‘urban’ society now. No, not everyone does. Yet you want to govern like everyone is living in a big city. They aren’t.

In fact, why on earth do we even have states at all? We should remove the state lines and just make it one big country, right?

This has nothing with trying to make you look like a hypocrite, you are doing that all by yourself. It is trying to educate those that want to be educated on why we have an electoral college to begin with and why your suggestions are biased in the favor of large population centers. And why politics should be mostly done locally, not nationally.

I don’t have any illusions that I would ever sway a partisan like yourself from backing what the Democrats are backing, even when they backed the exact opposite view just a couple of years ago in Nebraska.

I have no problem with a state leaving how they apportion their electoral votes, either the winner take all (which has always seemed unfair to me) or by congressional district, which seems to make the most sense to me. It should be left to the states.

I would ask my liberal friends if they would like to have their county or city ruled by Washington. If not, why not?

It has been so cold in Chicago that someone observed that democrats even have their hands in their own pockets for a change.

Rhinehold-
I’m not in the dark about the founding of this country. As I remember it, they didn’t merely do something that gave an advantage to one group, and then left the other side out to dry. Instead, they balanced those interests against each other.

Balanced. Which meant they had to work together. You seem willing to countenance any distortion of the system that disadvantages those you see as supporting big government. You say the framers wanted to protect rural interests, fine. They also, though, did not let those rural voters completely drown out the voices from the city.

I’ve quoted the imbalances in representation. Does that not strike you as defeating the purpose of the House of Representative, in representing the Cities and more populous regions? Rural states have the Senate as the Framer’s balance for them. Why do they need Republicans to distort the results in the electoral college this selectively, and undermine the balance selectively in their favor?

As for your claim about population centers? First, I think the Constitution specifically stipulates that all taxes must be equal throughout the entire nation.

I have calmly laid down my willingness to live with any number of situations, including the current one. I can see the point of an argument that America should not simply be governed by the biggest cities, that it should not simply be necessary to just win the urban and suburban parts of the country. I can also see the point of those who believe that the system as it is dilutes the right of those cities, now much, much more populous than the rural sections of the nation, to have their say in the political process.

I can understand that the fair solution for everybody (that’s the operative term), might not be what seems most fair to just one group, one faction. Can you?

As for what I back?

In the case of Nebraska, I think it’s been amply demonstrated that the outcome was more than fair for Republicans. But if you look at the Republican’s plan in key swing states (which Nebraska isn’t), it most definitely would have turned the election against Obama, and in a way very disproportionate to what the voters of those states actually wanted.

I don’t know about you, but government in America should relate somewhat to what people actually want!

If you want Nebraska to go back to being winner-take-all, like it once was… Go ahead! I don’t care. Why you think it makes me a hypocrite that they decided one way or another puzzles me. You never asked my opinion, to determine whether I every personally backed any such idea.

More to the point, you claim equivalence in principle where you cannot prove equivalence in result. The difference seems to be a grand total of one electoral vote four years ago, and absolutely nothing last year.

The plan you so enthusiastically support here would kick dozens of electoral votes a different way, would have decided the election in the completely opposite direction, and all this despite a strong popular vote lead for Obama.

I doubt any serious Democrat would have gone into the debate on that thinking they could somehow turn Nebraska blue. You cannot say the same for Republicans seeking to turn those states red. They know that they have distinct and disproportionate advantages to their support in the population, thanks to their redistricting.

But of course, if there is ever a similarity, you claim equivalence and identical character for the event, regardless of whether the effect or the intent is measurably the same.

My belief is that if we’re going to move from winner take all, it should be a mutual disarmament, so the winners of future elections don’t have to carry the burden of being opposed by most of their population, a fate as I have indicated above, didn’t turn out well for the Presidents in question. So far, you’ve shown little substance to demonstrate that I don’t believe that, or that I see much good in selective, major reorganization of the electoral college. You seem to think that confronting me with what Democratic Politicians are doing, without asking me my opinion first, is enough to declare me a hypocrite.

Really, you lean on that argument way too much. There is a lot you can still get wrong, if you declare all the people you think are hypocrites wrong by reason of their inconsistent beliefs. The Real world doesn’t depend on the integrity of our thoughts to be what it is.

If a nations majority population of voters is receiving its sustenance from government which is paid for by the minority of voters, is there a political means for the minority to resist even further erosion, by taxation, of their work product?

Is there any logical reason why those on the receiving end of government largess would ever, for any reason, vote for the politician who advocates stemming those free (for them) benefits?

1. You cannot legislate the poor into
prosperity, by legislating the
wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without
working for, another person must
work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to
anybody anything that the
government does not first take
from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by
dividing it.
5. When half of the people get the
idea that they do not have to
work, because the other half is
going to take care of them, and
when the other half gets the idea
that it does no good to work
because somebody else is going to
get what they work for, that is the
beginning of the end of any nation!

You seem willing to countenance any distortion of the system that disadvantages those you see as supporting big government. You say the framers wanted to protect rural interests, fine. They also, though, did not let those rural voters completely drown out the voices from the city.

I am willing to let the states decide if they want to have their allotted electoral votes to be awarded in a winner takes all system OR by another method such as congressional districts. States have been doing this before, some at the benefit of Democrats, for decades. The only reason you are upset about it now is that it a) may hurt Democrats in the future and b) you favor urban votes over rural ones. It also appears that you are not happy with the electoral system at all, IMO, since you don’t like the idea that a president can win the presidency without winning the popular vote.

As for your claim about population centers? First, I think the Constitution specifically stipulates that all taxes must be equal throughout the entire nation.

No, it used to say that, but that isn’t the case anymore with the 16th amendment. Income taxes do not have to be apportioned equally throughout the nation. Direct taxes still do.

in a way very disproportionate to what the voters of those states actually wanted.

The state is more than just the large population centers. This method of appropriating the electoral votes that each state gets is one way to ensure that the population centers don’t override the wishes of everyone else in the state. IMO, either way is ok, it should be left up to the states to decide.

I don’t know about you, but government in America should relate somewhat to what people actually want!

Yes, provided that a) that government doesn’t violate the individual rights of the minority by the majority and b) we can determine what it is that the people actually want. You seem to think that a direct vote is the way to go, but there are issues with that view, which I have already demonstrated.

The plan you so enthusiastically support

Enthusiastically support? That’s interesting considering I had just stated “I have no problem with a state leaving how they apportion their electoral votes, either the winner take all (which has always seemed unfair to me) or by congressional district, which seems to make the most sense to me. It should be left to the states.”

How does that equate to ‘enthusiastically support’? I simply provided a defense of the option, which you eventually agreed has some merit, and stated that I preferred one to the other, but was ok with both as long as it was left to the individual states to decide. I also pointed out that this seems only to be an issue to most Democrats, you included, because it may hurt you down the road. Before now Democrats were defending it, though they were against it in the 60s when I first find mention of a possible change. It may have been discussed earlier, but I have not found record of it.

There are lots of things I find ‘unfair’ about national politics concerning the election of the President, this is not nearly on the top of that list. Having the primaries on different days throughout the year is patently idiotic IMO, and unfair to many states. The current system devalues many people in many states who don’t vote until the candidates are already decided. It should also not be as hard as it is in some states to get a candidate on the ballot, since you don’t follow third party politics very much I imagine, you may not be aware of just how tipped in the favor of the two current parties that process is. And of course, anyone who is on the ballot in enough states to mathematically win the presidency should be in the debates. Not having those people there as a means to balance and counter the “I’m horrible, but that other guy is worse” type of elections we have been having is deplorable and an insult to the voters in this country.

One final point, if the change is made in a state, than it will have to be done with majority support in the state, right? So, if the majority are ok with splitting their electoral votes in the future, it will be done with the backing of the majority votes of those in that state, not what people outside the states (national parties, other states, etc) want.

Stephen

“In some swing states, groups of Republicans are urging the states to break with the old winner-take-all system, and go with something that assigns electoral votes according to Congressional districts. Win them, and you win a Presidency.”

There are a couple states which already do this, but since they have little impact in swinging an election no one seems to care. If the tables were turned democrats would be quick to suggest the very same strategy, but since it seems this might benefit the republicans it is nothing but a power grab, right ?

Who was it that claimed after losing the 2000 election that the electoral college should be scrapped ? I’ve noticed since Obama has won the EC vote twice now that this no longer seems to be a concern. Changing the rules to benefit your team. What a novel idea. LOL !

“With such a system, as proposed, Romney would have won the election. Won, despite the fact he lost many of those states as a whole. Won, despite the fact he lost the popular vote by more than five million votes.”

States congressional seats are determined by population. Some gain seats while others lose them as people leave. The party in power will always try to swing things in their favor when re districting. This is noting new. The dems will do the same thing in order to turn the tables in the house of reps, and if that should happen your crying about this suggested rule change in swing states will cease. Republicans winning another presidential election….OH HORROR ! LOL !

Here, I fixed this one for you.

“The______________ don’t even care whether they have majority support, they want to get their way, to win their elections.”

Fill in the name of the opposition party above.

“What Republicans could do, if they were smart, is adapt to the times.”

Translation- Be more like democrats.

“We should not delude ourselves that the heedless pursuit of power is compatible with or very attractive within a democratic republic like ours. Sooner or later, power has to be accountable to the people,”

Yes….wake me when that happens. BTW, this country was founded as a constitutional republic. The founders did not like democracy as it tends to lead to abuse of the minority by allowing thew majority to run roughshot over the rights of individuals.

The famous “why democracies fail” quotation is.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”

All hail king Obama. LOL !

Royal Flush-
You aren’t saving anybody or anything. What would be the consequences of getting what you want? Of making poverty more severe? Of forcing the Elderly back into the arms of a market that screws their retirement on a regular basis anyways, and keeps their medical premiums high?

For ideology’s sake, you undo useful programs, and then bull**** people with aphorism about the economy.

Well, your aphorisms about taxes have proven wrong. No, the deficit didn’t go down because we cut taxes. Big surprise. It went up, and it went up more than just the spending that Bush put in place.

The simple fact of the matter is, much of what the Republicans are trying to reform is what people have earned through the federal taxes, which, for most people, constitute the largest share of the taxes they pay. So, for all your piety, what you’re asking people to do with your policy, is pay for the tax cuts for the rich, and two wars drawn on way too long, with the benefits and the medical care they earned throug their hard work.

Why should that be considered fair?

The problem is, the Republican brand of fairness is a sociopathic brand, one built on a zero-sum, remorsesly self-serving philosophy that idealizes greed as a kind of universal good. There’s no room for the even the traditional kind of community support system, or even the traditional assumptions about the line between encouraging self-reliance, and forcing the sacrifice of the individual interests, so those with power can get everything they want.

My doctrine is, if the government is going to force you to pay for it, then you should get some benefit from what you pay into, and you, not some academic in a conservative think-tank should have the right to set what the boundaries for the size and scope of government. I feel that’s something people have to take responsibility for themselves.

You folks won’t even vote in majority to support disaster relief. That’s how beyond the pale Republicans have gotten.

Rhinehold-
1) You acknowledge two things: One, the proposals will hurt the Democrats, two, they will hurt urban representation. You haven’t disputed that it could lead to a situation in which five million vote lead in the popular vote translates to a lost election.

So, really, what you want me to do is let your transparently unfair proposal run right over me. You’re going to tell me that because I’m a Democrat, I should accept a selective manueuver in a battleground state, meant to translate what is already a poorly justified lead in the legislative delegation, into a poorly justified lead in the Presidential race.

Why should we allow ourselves to be treated as second class citizens. Why should the country be given an extra advantage over the city, above and beyond what the framers already gave them.

And yes, I do dislike the idea of having the man or woman who represents this nation to the world as a whole not being the person who has the most support. I’ll accept that outcome every now and then as the result of a close election, but I will not let somebody just deliberately skew the whole thing so people like you can impose their politics without getting the public support necessary to form a foundation for it.

I am for people winning on the merits, and short of that, on the basis of consensus that can be, and is reversed when things go wrong. I am for a nation whose policies don’t simply get stuck where some ideologues like yourself put them, when the majority of people want something different, and there isn’t a real constitutional reason why.

I am for a responsible, responsive government, and this sort of behavior is meant by the Republicans to remove the necessity of their adaptation to our wishes, in order to retain power.

You look at the Declaration of Independence, the document so many of you fawn over so piously, and you will see a laundry list of greivances that the crown did not heed, and instead just tried to stone wall. The whole central thesis of the document is that when government quits doing what the people need it to do, quits admitting its mistakes, quits being accountable and responsible, that government needs to be changed.

But you? You have a vested interest in suppressing this new political direction you don’t like, and you have no shame whatsoever of saying that people in cities should heard less, and have less power than those out in the country. You want to stack the deck, and then have me and others like me, kiss your ass for having put us at a disadvantage. Well, screw that. The majority should rule, with the minority protected by rights. That’s how my conservative civics teacher put it, and that’s what I agree should be the case, even when it works against me!

But no, you’re too busy relying on your hackish go-to argument, which is that the people who disagree with you are hypocrites, and therefore should be ignored.

dbs-
What really frustrates me is that you folks are trying to justify a rather selective, rather purpose-built, rather specific change in a strategic state’s electoral college vote distribution by saying that any and all states should be able to decide this matter for themselves.

Except, with two exceptions, most states give their electoral votes a certain way. They’re not proposing that all the safe states do the same. They’re selectively reducing the likely result of the next election, even if the next Democrat matches President Obama’s clear victory precisely.

We didn’t do this after Bush or Reagan won, we lived with the system as it was, even though it meant that we lost a few elections. This government cannot survive if we play games with the very legitimacy, the very popular support that undergirds the nation’s institutions as a whole. If this becomes a nation where a minority of voters can consistently get the government they want, while the rest of us are screwed, things are going to fall apart pretty fast.

And what nobody is willing to admit is that the congressional districts in question, while nominally of the same population, were created with computer programs to disproportionately stuff one party’s supporters in a few districts, while many of their own supporters get majority districts of their own.

And, at long last, what’s not acknowledged is that if the gerrymandering ends up flipped, or Demographics defeat it, you could very well end up having this system do a phase change, and go from being a huge backstop for Conservative power, to being the barrier to their interests that they intend it to be for liberals.

Do you folks realize that so many of the tactics you used against Democrats could be used against you? Do you even consider things past whether you win or not?

As for what Republicans can do to adapt to the times?

Well, horror of horrors, it might, in part involved being more like Democrats. But it could also mean just finding a more productive way to disagree, a more realistic and practical way of being conservative. Your problem is that Conservatism for you has become about being opposed to Democrats and liberals, and their policies.

It no longer seems to exist on its own as a mass of philosophy, of which some parts might reasonably be in agreement with Democrats. This is how you get a party foolish enough to oppose disaster relief.

Republicans play the bad guys because Democrats play the good guys, and they don’t have the brains to figure out that direct opposition is not the only way to contrast with Democrats. Republicans have let their imaginations dry up, and have become both the shadow of themselves, and of the Democrats.

Only when you admit you can agree with us on some things and remain conservative, can you really be free to act.

Of course, you might not be able to carry out all the fantasy agenda items that the party pushes, but then, fantasies don’t buy respect, results do, and Republicans have become short on results.

1) You acknowledge two things: One, the proposals will hurt the Democrats

No, I acknowledge the fact in some cases they will. In other cases, they help. Just as I pointed out in Nebraska.

two, they will hurt urban representation.

Possibly yes.

You haven’t disputed that it could lead to a situation in which five million vote lead in the popular vote translates to a lost election.

Haven’t disputed nor thought that it was a matter of consequence. Apparently you have a problem with the system where a candidate can win the popular vote but not win the presidency, I don’t. Because I understand why the system is made that way.

So, really, what you want me to do is let your transparently unfair proposal run right over me.

Unfair to WHOM? I think you are misunderstanding the use of the word fair, you keep throwing it around like you know what it means, but, what it seems to me is that it means unfair to democrats…

You’re going to tell me that because I’m a Democrat, I should accept a selective manueuver in a battleground state, meant to translate what is already a poorly justified lead in the legislative delegation, into a poorly justified lead in the Presidential race.

Which will have to be voted on by the majority of people in the state. Isn’t that what you are always telling others, that if the majority want something, whether you want it or not, you should just ‘accept’ it? Or is that only for things you agree with?

Why should we allow ourselves to be treated as second class citizens.

No one is treating you as a second class citizen. No one in Nebraska and Maine are ‘second class citizens’ and when it was suggested that Nebraska return to the winner take all system, the Democrats who benefited from it stood against it and it was defeated. Were they ‘second class citizens’, voting on how their state should allocate their electoral votes?

Why should the country be given an extra advantage over the city, above and beyond what the framers already gave them.

No one is suggesting that they get an ‘advantage’, you just seem to think that the situation where larger population centers should be able to hold sway against those in rural population centers. You also make the assumption that there is no advantage to the urban environment in the current situation (in 48 states). That is what we should be discussing, or rather what the states should be discussing.

Here’s the problem. The people in the city have their interests at heart when voting. The people in the rural areas have their interests at heart. The decisions of those two areas may not be the same. But by using a winner take all system, the people in the urban areas are weighted more than those in the rural areas because of their number, because they have more people in a smaller area.

You would have us believe that we don’t need to make those distinctions, therefore we should not allow, ever, (when it hurts democrats at least) the states to decide to allocate their electoral votes by congressional district. So, why not just get rid of the electoral college all together? If you truly believe that is fair, then you have no use for the electoral college at all. You can’t say that the electoral college is ‘fair’ and then say that this method is not. Not if you have a shred of intellectual honest.

And yes, I do dislike the idea of having the man or woman who represents this nation to the world as a whole not being the person who has the most support.

Again, more assumptions. Do 100% of the people vote?

I’ll accept that outcome every now and then as the result of a close election

HA

but I will not let somebody just deliberately skew the whole thing so people like you can impose their politics without getting the public support necessary to form a foundation for it.

People like me? Explain this ‘people like me’ phrase, Stephen. What are ‘people like me’?

I am for people winning on the merits

I am too. But I’m also concerned about how we determine that. You apparently have already decided and see no point in discussion about the topic. I, on the other hand, say it depends on the state, how the state is drawn, how the congressional districts are made up and how the people IN THOSE STATES choose to resolve it. It may change over the years, back and forth. So be it, it should be THEIR decision, not your’s, almighty Stephen.

I am for a nation whose policies don’t simply get stuck where some ideologues like yourself put them, when the majority of people want something different, and there isn’t a real constitutional reason why.

‘isn’t a real constitutional reason why’. Please explain this one, Stephen…

I am for a responsible, responsive government, and this sort of behavior is meant by the Republicans to remove the necessity of their adaptation to our wishes, in order to retain power.

Stephen, had this option to split electoral votes had never been discussed, had never been implemented, you *MIGHT* have an argument. But it is a viable, legal and constitutional option that every state has the right to determine for themselves.

You look at the Declaration of Independence, the document so many of you fawn over so piously, and you will see a laundry list of greivances that the crown did not heed, and instead just tried to stone wall.

Yep, most of which the progressives and conservatives are putting back into place.

The whole central thesis of the document is that when government quits doing what the people need it to do, quits admitting its mistakes, quits being accountable and responsible, that government needs to be changed.

No, not exactly, no… That you view it that way is just an example of your ideology that you want to enforce on others while calling THEM ideologues… It wasn’t about not doing what it needed to, it was about overstepping the bounds of what a government COULD or SHOULD do. Because they understood better than most that a ‘government’ is force and should only be wielded when absolutely necessary.

But you? You have a vested interest in suppressing this new political direction you don’t like

Wait a second, aren’t you the one who has written article after article telling us how the Republicans are being destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth, no longer relevant…? Who is suppressing what, Stephen?

and you have no shame whatsoever of saying that people in cities should heard less, and have less power than those out in the country.

Again, you can phrase it however you want, but that isn’t at all what I have said or stated, repeatedly. You have this problem of just ignoring the things you don’t like to hear in order to try to make your point.

I am not saying they should or shouldn’t, I am saying that it can be a problem, as we have seen as the purpose of the electoral college in the first place, and that it should be up to the states to make that decision on how to resolve it. *I* am not pushing anything on anyone, YOU are the one who wants to deny them that right that they have to make that determination themselves.

You want to stack the deck, and then have me and others like me, kiss your ass for having put us at a disadvantage.

Wow, unhinge much, Stephen?

Well, screw that. The majority should rule, with the minority protected by rights. That’s how my conservative civics teacher put it, and that’s what I agree should be the case, even when it works against me!

BS. Total and complete BS. Name one SINGLE time…

If you really believed that you would be a libertarian, Stephen. The fact is that you have repeatedly said you wanted to ignore the constitution whenever it suited you if the majority said so, screw the rights of the minorities.

Repeatedly.

But no, you’re too busy relying on your hackish go-to argument, which is that the people who disagree with you are hypocrites, and therefore should be ignored.

No, not ignored, Stephen. Identified and perhaps, maybe, cause the offender to rethink their opinions so that they can be somehow consistent in their beliefs in the future. To understand how their personal feelings and emotions are causing them to restrict the rights of others when they don’t want the same to happen to them.

And there are hypocrites who agree with me as well, who I point out all the time. You just don’t like it when I point that flashlight on you.

Hypocrisy is not a virtue, Stephen, no matter how much you want to try to make it out to be.

It always gets me that Republicans get in a foul mood when anybody asks them to be more like liberals. When we were in the minority, those same people would holler to high heaven if Democrats didn’t cave in and do what they want, yet somehow Democrats like me are awful for expecting them to do a rather mild adaptation to the change in the political climate.

This is America, a Democracy. If you don’t have enough people agreeing with you, your purity won’t be worth anything. The system isn’t meant to reward political purity, it’s meant to reward compromise and cooperation, and to punish those who don’t operate by consensus.

Republicans need to realize that some of their ideas may simply not have the popularity they need to get through, and the more they try to force things their way, the more hell they make for themselves.

BTW, this constitutional ‘scholar’ sounds much like Stephen, I wonder if this is his alter ego?

I’ve got a simple idea: Let’s give up on the Constitution.

…

To be clear, I don’t think we should give up on everything in the Constitution. The Constitution has many important and inspiring provisions, but we should obey these because they are important and inspiring, not because a bunch of people who are now long-dead favored them two centuries ago.

Unfortunately, the Constitution also contains some provisions that are not so inspiring. For example, one allows a presidential candidate who is rejected by a majority of the American people to assume office. Suppose that Barack Obama really wasn’t a natural-born citizen. So what?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57566014/professor-take-our-country-back-from-the-constitution/

Yeah, I know that I am an ideologue because I think the government should follow the laws that are there for them to follow… In the minority too, so I don’t apparently count.

Doughboy writes; “Royal Flush-
You aren’t saving anybody or anything. What would be the consequences of getting what you want? Of making poverty more severe? Of forcing the Elderly back into the arms of a market that screws their retirement on a regular basis anyways, and keeps their medical premiums high?”

Look…I know you have some medical problems that you struggle with but I didn’t know reading comprehension was one of them. I wrote nothing about entitlement programs…but you just go off on some wild tangent that appears to suit your “answer of the day”. Reading your crap is very tiresome as it’s just rehashed junk we have all read, and puked over, before. Get a new line of bullshit…your current one is stale and stinks.

What’s worse, Royal, is that he actually things that not following ‘the progressive way’ would make poverty more severe, the elderly screwed, premiums high…

He doesn’t get that freeing business from their constraints would allow for more jobs and decreased poverty. For example, as John Mackey wrote:

Mackey, who early on in the book mentions reading free-enterprise thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Jude Wanniski, Henry Hazlitt, and Thomas Sowell. “I learned that free enterprise, when combined with property rights, innovation, the rule of law, and constitutionally limited democratic government, results in societies that maximize societal prosperity and establish conditions that promote human happiness and well-being—not just for the rich, but for the larger society, including the poor,” he writes.

Much of the book proceeds along these sensible lines. Mackay writes, for example, that in 2011, the taxes his company paid were “more than twice as high as the profits we were allowed to keep.” ($343 million in after-tax profits, $825 million in total taxes.). “If business taxes were lower, all the other stakeholders would have more — lower prices for consumers, higher wages and benefits for team members, and higher net profits for investors, and the amount of money we could give to support the nonprofit sector would also be proportionately greater,” he writes.

Rhinehold-
In some cases they will? In the only cases the Republicans are proposing. Are you just that naive, or do you just want to dance around that uncomfortable truth?

As for urban representation, was I hallucinating it when you suggested that the proposal would further benefit rural representation? You get the converse point for free.

Haven’t disputed nor thought that it was a matter of consequence. Apparently you have a problem with the system where a candidate can win the popular vote but not win the presidency, I don’t. Because I understand why the system is made that way.

Funny how most people with common sense have tried to keep one close to the other. Something to do with legitimacy in what most people perceive as a Democracy. When you start disillusioning people that the opinion of the majority matters, you get trouble in a society like ours. I understand that just because a system allows an outcome, doesn’t mean its smart, wise, or even moral to test people’s patience by moving to produce that outcome.

As far as fairness goes, everybody’s got their idea of what’s fair. The whole point of our system is to negotiate the differences between what one person thinks is fair, and what another person thinks is so.

And yes, as a Democrat I will complain when I think things are unfair to my side. The problem here is, what kind of decent argument is there for making things unfair in this way? The last time the Republicans fielded a candidate who won by less than the majority or plurality of the popular vote, the party was in tatters by the end of his administration.

That kind of selective change will mean that every candidate for the next few years will face the same kind of disdain. Without majority or plurality victories, Republicans will only reinforce their image as elitists who impose themselves on an unwilling public.

Which will have to be voted on by the majority of people in the state. Isn’t that what you are always telling others, that if the majority want something, whether you want it or not, you should just ‘accept’ it? Or is that only for things you agree with?

Here’s what you fail to grasp about my argument: The Republicans aren’t even asking for the popular vote to be directly translated into a share of electoral votes. They’re asking for gerrymandered districts, unrepresentative of the actual will of the state itself, to determine the votes.

If you had bothered to read what I actually wrote, instead of spending time pre-composing attacks on my hypocrisy, you might have noticed that one of the premises of my argument is that results based on who won the given congressional districts would have yielded Obama 30% of the electoral votes based on the 50% percent of the population voting for him.

Think about that for a second. Less than fifty percent of the population given almost seventy percent of the electoral votes? What crap is that? My argument is consistent. You’re just not paying attention!

As for the Maine and Nebraska thing, exactly what benefit did Democrats draw from those states that they didn’t get already? The first time, you got a grand total of one electoral vote. The next? Zip. Again, you’re not paying attention! There’s a difference between a result that would obviously produce a much better result for those involved, which could in fact throw an election, and one that did in fact, do absolutely squat to change anything.

As for who should hold sway?

The Senate already gives Senators representing Alaska, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Idaho as much pull as those representing California, New York, New Jersey, and Texas. That was the Framer’s compromise on that, between the more populous states and the ones that had more land than people.

This is also reflected in the electoral college, since the electors are equal to the number of members of Congress, both Senators and Representatives, that the state is entitled to.

What you beat me up for opposing, even if, somehow, you have no other opinion on it (what principle, what consistency!), is an effort to basically overweight the strength of Republican voters in the Presidential election.

At the same time, though, the framers also put in the requirements for Representation, meaning that the populous states would get credit for being populated, and the people in those big cities would get their due political power in our system.

More to the point here, there’s a difference between the America of today, and the America of yesteryear. In essence, if you look at the statistics, Less than ten percent of Americans lived in the cities in 1790. Now it’s more than eighty percent.

You want us to pretend America is not a strongly urbanized nation? How much should you actually stack the deck, if you don’t want to effectively disenfranchise most Americans? If eighty percent of us live in cities, why should rural concerns predominate? They shouldn’t go away, they should be given their due, but how much more do we really need to pump up their influence, beyond what the Constitution already affords them (and which I wouldn’t unafford them!)

If there isn’t a real constitutional reason why, I don’t see the point in running America like a nation where over 90% of the people lived in the country. We are an urbanized nation.

More to the point, I don’t see the point in having an imbalance between the political power of those in the population, and the congress. If the point of what the Framers produced in the House was to represent the populous parts of the nation, then this gerrymandering seems to be a violation of that intent.

And as I’ve said before, and you refuse to pay attention to, I am fully willing to support mutual disarmament on the gerrymandering question.

Oh, another thing here: I don’t think I’ve ever been so foolish as to imply that these things weren’t the state’s decisions. I’ve just been stating my opinion on what those decisions should be. Nothing in what I say binds or otherwise rescinds the God-given grant of free will that the fine ladies and gentlement of those legislature have been blessed with!

Still, I am allowed to say that it would be a foolish move, driven by short term politics. I am allowed to explain how it could backfire in the long term. I am allowed by that same God-given grant of free will to explain how it is a travesty of the will of the people to do things this way, especially if we’re being selective, and undermining the proportionality of the results of the Electoral college to the actual results of the popular vote.

I get the feeling you don’t know what I actualy say. I get the feeling that you only listen for the bits and pieces that drive you into your ideological frenzy, and forget everything else.

The reality is, when it comes to structure, I’m a bit of a conservative. I don’t like major changes to the system without major reasons to back them (I also don’t like people to ignore major reasons for major changes when they come along, but that’s another matter)

So, what’s the reason to change this system, which has operated the way it has for my entire life, and more besides?

I’ll sum it up for you: Obama won. That’s the reason they will put aside years of electoral tradition: so they don’t have to confront the fact that Obama won, and maybe they need to do something else, if they want to win Virginia on a regular basis in the future. They want to stick with being a party that promotes ideas supported by the minority of Americans, yet somehow get the results that a most people think should be earned by a majority vote from the people.

My values are consistent. I did not argue for any changes to the electoral college when Bush won in 2000, or in 2004, and if I had, I would have argued for the WHOLESALE change of the system. That is, I would argue for a change that, on the whole, neither benefits my party nor the Republicans.

If the states in general want to go to a proportional system, I have no objections. One part would balance the other, for the most part.

But if what we’re talking here is a sore-losing motivated attempt to distort the electoral college in order to rig the system against Democrats? Of course I won’t support it, because it goes against a fundamental sense of fairness on my part. What you fail to ask, or realize from what I’ve already said, is that I would have rejected that proposal coming from Democrats, if they tried it in Virginia, or somewhere else.

I’m not a hypocrite, you’re just an ideologue who fails to listen to what people like me say, and take it at face value. And really, I’m a face value kind of person. My heart is on my sleeve, what’s on my mind is what I say, and I don’t dance around my opinion. The more you try to reinterpret what I say to fit what you think I mean on some sort of prejudicial basis, the more you fail to actually grasp my real points.

Rhinehold, we could simply not respond to Doughboy’s posts. He certainly doesn’t read and comprehend ours.

We have all known society leeches who believe it is their right that those who work pay for them to live.

I have read, and continue to read the free-thinker authors you mention above. They wrote about what is required for a nation and its people to prosper.

Our Constitution and Bill of Rights are the blueprint for success. Liberals wish to thrash it at every opportunity as they do not, and will not, abide by its sensible provisions that have enabled the US to become the most prosperous and free society in history. For them it is not suitable for today…believing that people and their desires have changed since our founders days.

We have spawned generations of free loaders and malcontents. We continue to enable them to dictate to the very people who pay for their support and well being. The poor will always be with us for many reasons, but it is incumbent upon us to help them become not poor by using their own hand and mind. The liberal finds this cruel and demand that they partake of an ever bigger slice of the product of those who work and earn. And today, they are so brazen as to curse and deride the very folks who put food in their mouth, clothes on their back, and a roof over their head. Doughboy is in that category. Have you ever once read him thanking taxpayers for what we have done for his family. NO…NEVER.

The reason he is so un-thankful and unhappy is simple. He believes he is owed whatever he wants by his right of birth. He birth certificate appears to be different than yours and mine. His gives him rights to our stuff and ours, he believes, demands that we give him stuff. Frankly…I would like to give him some foot where the sun never shines.

Rhinehold-
I find it curious that you post the words of somebody else, accountable for their own opinion, and its consistency with thier other opinions and actions, as a way to paint me as a hypocrite.

The funny thing is, as an autistic, I have very little concept of saying anything else but what I actually mean, so my basic response to your continued tilting at the windmills is sad astonishment.

I find it interesting that you insist that everybody take the constitution at the strictest of literal terms, yet when I post my opinions, you’re always reading in **** left and right!

Save yourself some trouble. Believe that I believe that when you’re losing a political battle, the last thing you need to be doing is attempting some ridiculous plan to try and reverse the verdict.

For my part, yes, I like to win. But I like to win the way an autistic would want to win, and that is, FOR REAL. The other way just seems like cheating to me, like somebody who’s operating from a position of weakness.

I have a great deal of respect for the Constitution. I don’t like the idea of bending its rules lightly. What I believe, though, is that like all other legal or logical creatures, you can’t approach it as if you could build a foolproof logical system out of it, without referring to anything else in the real world.

Laws are meant to serve the citizens of this country, and they were written by the framers to practical ends. They wanted a society that works. The Supreme court has wisely said that interpretations that defeat that point should not be considered.

My opinion, basically, is that we should go about the business of fulfilling the functional intent of the constitution before we start requiring that it be changed. Literalism doesn’t help, because the Framers thought about this in context-based ways, not in terms of abstracted insistence on just the letter of the law.

In other words, they left room for interpretation in the Constitution, and a branch of government to help us in that interpretation.

As for freeing business?

I get your theory just fine. I just haven’t seen it work out like you predicted it should. You can blather on all you want to about what’s supposed to happen, but as man proposes, god disposes, and I pay attention to what actually works.

You folks just seem to insist on pushing this crusade endlessly, without really letting the fact that your changes aren’t having the effect you anticipated get you down.

Your example includes taxes, but doesn’t include the fact that many companies completely escape having to pay them, and that the capital gains rate is pretty damn low. During the past few years, while you were raising holy hell about the burden of government, your corporations were making the biggest profits of all time.

The real trouble is, you and I have different criteria for success. Mine is based in a world where the ideology can fail practice. Yours is based in a world where it’s practice that fails ideology. You blame taxes still being too high when a cut fails to bring the wanted economic boom, instead of admitting that perhaps high taxes wasn’t the constraining factor.

So on and so forth.

In some cases they will? In the only cases the Republicans are proposing. Are you just that naive, or do you just want to dance around that uncomfortable truth?

It doesn’t matter what the Republicans want, the decision will be that of the people of the states. Sorry, but you are getting your panties in a bunch over a proposal by your sworn enemy… It’s hard to take you seriously…

As for urban representation, was I hallucinating it when you suggested that the proposal would further benefit rural representation? You get the converse point for free.

Apparently. Because I clarified what I said and you STILL got it wrong. ‘further benefit’ implies they are already getting benefit and will get more *AND* implies that they aren’t at this point being misrepresented by the current rules.

And it depends on many things as to whether or not that would be the impact. It could be that two different population centers, one wanting republicans representation and one wanting democratic representation, would each get to have their say.

You have simplified it in your mind that ‘this will help republicans therefore I am against it’ without even once debating the merits in any real sense.

The Republicans aren’t even asking for the popular vote to be directly translated into a share of electoral votes. They’re asking for gerrymandered districts, unrepresentative of the actual will of the state itself, to determine the votes.

And what you failed to read is that the republicans cannot wave a magic wand and make this happen. For it to happen it will have to be done by the will of the people in that state. Get it? If a state decides to go to this alternative system, which 2 states have already, one in the 70s for pete’s sake, then it will be THEIR decision, not the Republicans, not the Democrats. The tradition argument is bunk when states have been doing this already for 50 years. If it gets put into place and the people in those states don’t like it, they will vote it back out by majority vote. It’s the perfect way to deal with it, not sit on the sidelines and cry ‘unfair’.

Think about that for a second. Less than fifty percent of the population given almost seventy percent of the electoral votes? What crap is that?

It not crap… it’s the way the system is set up to work. I’m sorry you don’t LIKE it, but all you have to do is convince people not to go with that system. No one is forcing this on anyone.

No, wait, you could go into demagoguery mode and scare everyone from enacting it, that’s been the model of the Democratic Party for decades. It seems to work to.

As for the Maine and Nebraska thing, exactly what benefit did Democrats draw from those states that they didn’t get already? The first time, you got a grand total of one electoral vote. The next? Zip. Again, you’re not paying attention! There’s a difference between a result that would obviously produce a much better result for those involved, which could in fact throw an election, and one that did in fact, do absolutely squat to change anything.

So, because one state made a change and it benefited Democrats once with a single vote, that’s ok. Those people aren’t being considered ‘second class’, because it didn’t affect the outcome. No outrage necessary.

But when it might affect ME negatively?

*sigh*

then this gerrymandering seems to be a violation of that intent.

First, this isn’t gerrymandering. I don’t know how that phrase got started to describe what is being talked about, but it does nothing but muddle the waters. Gerrymandering for political gain is a terrible practice, because it takes away the idea that areas of people coming together to decide something.

This is something else. That you can’t seem to get that is because you don’t choose to listen.

Second, it is NOT a violation of that intent, if you understand the intent. It isn’t about urban v rural, it isn’t about republican v democrat. It is about people of a geographical region being able to choose their electors, not having others in another geographical region choosing for them.

So, what’s the reason to change this system, which has operated the way it has for my entire life, and more besides?

Except it hasn’t, there have been two states who have operated differently, and another who toyed with it but decided against it. Other states have decided against it.

THIS IS NOTHING NEW.

Of course, you want to bring it up because you have an agenda to paint the Republican party in a certain light and you think this helps with that overall cause. I get that. But don’t pretend it is anything but.

NO ONE has said that you aren’t ALLOWED to have your say. But you can’t expect people to accept what you say as true without challenging you on it. That’s an example of hubris that no one is afforded.

The Republicans are bringing this up to the attention of people because they want to change the system so that the people in states that are 95% blue and 5% red on a map (take a look at some of the states by congressional district) end up voting all of their electoral votes red. They don’t see it as fair. They want what they see as a more fair system to be put into place.

Of course they are going to bring it up in states that they have a better chance of making the change in. And especially those states that would make a difference for them in the future. But that doesn’t take away from the potential merits.

They can’t make the change across the whole country at once, they don’t have that power, thank god. Nor do the Democrats to prevent it. The fact is that some states may change, most probably wont, and if it ends up favoring the republicans, so bet it. It will work itself out, as these things do.

I find it curious that you post the words of somebody else, accountable for their own opinion, and its consistency with thier other opinions and actions, as a way to paint me as a hypocrite.

I didn’t. I am not trying to ‘paint you as a hypocrite’, I am painting you as you are. Someone how has repeatedly said much the same things, that the constitution is outdated and we should just ignore the parts of it that doesn’t fit our sensibilities. (and by ‘our’ you mean people who think like you).

In other words, they left room for interpretation in the Constitution, and a branch of government to help us in that interpretation.

Actually, they didn’t. The Supreme Court was not put into the constitution to be the sole arbiter of what was constitutional… The Supreme Court took on that responsibility themselves. Many of the founding fathers were aghast at them doing so…

I just haven’t seen it work out like you predicted it should.

It hasn’t been in place for decades, not sure how you would have seen it not work… *shrug*

Bush put in more regulations than Clinton did, just a few less than Obama did. The free market hasn’t been free of onerous regulation designed to benefit existing power structures and corporation at the expense of keeping the market free for quite some time. You clearly don’t understand what is being discussed and instead rely on ideology to further your partisan powerbase…

So on and so forth.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 28, 2013 7:02 PM

I suppose his autistic mind knows what that is…I sure don’t.

From Wikipedia…

“Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize.”

Can we see Mr. Daugherty in these symptoms?

One of my sons is autistic and I know the symptoms very well. He prefers to dwell in a magical land unless he is forced to live in reality. He is intelligent but can’t recognize his repetitive nature as boring. Concepts which he believes to be true, even if false, are difficult to correct and inform. Despite his affliction he is a very happy person who would never expect something he didn’t work for to be given to him on demand. He is a good worker when he understands and has demonstrated for him, what work he is to perform. He must be supervised in anything that requires considerable original thought. He can relate movie plots adnauseum. He loves role playing games that give him magical power over others. There is much more, and this is just a little insight into the autistic mind and makeup.

Think green program doesn’t only emphasize the use of alternative energy sources, but also on the utilization of energy efficient loads that will replace the high-energy consuming loads. One cited example of this is on the lighting system. An incandescent lamp of 60W can be substituted by a 5W LED light giving also the same quality of brightness and luminance. By just merely subtracting the power consumed by the two, an unbelievable 55W difference will definitely amaze the consumer and therefore attract more and more consumers to make a big shift and be one of those who supports green living. Solar LED street lights technology has already made a bond with the solar power technology in providing quality and energy efficient lighting.

Royal Flush-
You know what my theory is? Your side is being run by people just like me, mildly autistic souls. Only, they don’t have either the diagnosis or insight to realize that it could be a problem.

Not everybody with autistic characteristics has them at the same severity or the same levels of challenge. I’m diagnosed Aspergers, which by definition is higher functioning, and I’m told I have a milder form of the disorder.

Having been diagnosed, I have enough self-consciousness to see the disabilities among the abilities. I’ve learned to pull back on lecturing people about my interests, learned to moderate my belief systems with disciplines that involve seeking out facts and figures, rather than simply depending on logic or belief.

I’ve come to realize through a combination of education and sometimes bitter experience that there are certain aspects of myself that I indulge at my own risk. It’s still a struggle, but I can manage my life.

Others, though, were never diagnosed. They may indulge, rather than fight the weakness of empathy that comes natural to those on my spectrum. They may indulge, rather than fight the egotistical regard for their own beliefs, not realizing that they have to justify them, not believing they should have to.

They look at the world, wishing it could be like they think it is, not realizing or admitting to themselves that while their beliefs may be blindingly strong, there being little strong competition from other’s ideas in their brain, that others might have more insight and understanding.

It reads to me like the GOP has acquired itself a case of autism, growing progressively more eccentric, progressively less sociable. There’s more of that raw sort of dogmatism that people like me can get into if folks don’t reach us and open us up to more of the world and the ideas in it.

I think it’s the price your party is paying for seeking and rewarding supporters who emphasize rigid adherence to a set of beliefs, literalism in communication and interpretation, An extreme emphasis on the interests of the individual, even at the cost of the greater community, etc.

When I talk about the need to do outreach in politics, I speak in part from my own experience, and my own desire to be effective in what I do. I understand this critical truth that too many Republicans have forgotten: that earnest lectures about what one believes is true, and what one believes should be done, aren’t necessarily rewarded with agreement. Empathy, whether I like it or not, is necessary for good politics.

Read Rhinehold’s stuff. Does he understand that no rational being would willingly let themselves be taken advantage in that way? Would I really be a self-respecting Democrat if I didn’t complain?

Bush won Virginia two times in a row under current rules- Obama’s done the same. Virginia remains a swing state. If the Republicans tried hard, if they did their homework, if they got out the vote, they could win. But the Republicans promoting this legislation don’t want to put their faith in that. They don’t want to compete. They want to dominate regardless of whether raw numbers say they deserve it.

If you give me an example of a state where Democrats Gerrymander, I am more than willing to support the end of that. I am also willing to oppose any attempts by Democrats to do what those Republicans are trying to do, simply because I consider it inherently shameful behavior.

I am not disputing that the choice lies in their hands, and not in mine. I have no idea what would convince people that I thought otherwise. I simply have an opinion about what that choice should be. Namely, that if Republicans want to be more competitive (and Democrats as well), then they ought to get in touch with the constituents, and when elected do their best job in the real world.

In other words, what we tell every child our government works by doing. If there’s any way my Autism manifests, its in the fact that what I learned as a kid about the way our nation works, the fairness and equality, the sense of the little guy being protected from the big guys, the majority rules aspects of our government, and the notion that we’re all in this together, still remains with me.

Does he understand that no rational being would willingly let themselves be taken advantage in that way?

Except for the people in two different states…

Would I really be a self-respecting Democrat if I didn’t complain?

The Democrats who defended and kept the system in in Nebraska weren’t self-respecting?

Stephen, there is more to the issue than you want to simplify it to. There are inherit flaws in our current system. You aren’t concerned about that, only how THIS specific proposal would favor Republicans.

BTW, the specific proposal (which isn’t going to happen, obviously) indicate that the two ‘free’ electoral votes go to the winner of the most districts. *THIS* is the specific issue you should be having a problem with. The way it is implemented in Maine and Nebraska is sound and balances the issue out much better than the current system or the proposed system.

But you don’t even want to focus on those inequalities, like 95% of the area of a state being red but the state being blue, millions of rural voters told that there is no reason to go to the polls because the people in the ‘big city’ will get their representation by sheer number, etc.

The truly fair way to do it would be to divide the congressional votes up by district (house) and award the two free votes to the winner of the state (senate). Then you get the real balance between the two, just as the house and senate balanced the wills of the state and the people. The populous areas would still get their extra two electoral votes, but the more rural areas of the country (making up 90% of the country’s area) would also get to be heard to.

It’s unfortunate, IMO, that the Democrats demogauged the issue in the 1960s when this was discussed before and since few in this country can speak for themselves, I doubt it will be enacted now. But your assertion that the current system is ‘fair’ and that you are interested in protecting the ‘little guy’ is laughable, based on everything else you have written. You probably think that is what you are doing, but the majority != little guy, the majority destroys the little guy, over and over again in our nation’s history.

Rhinehold,

Did it ever occur to you that the Virginia Plan might’ve been a better idea than he Connecticut compromise?

I find the idea that rural voters deserve extra votes in order to make up for their small number to be incredibly laughable. Should we afford the same privileges to other minorities (racial minorities, etc) as well?

Rhinehold-
Let me put it simply. You and I can both agree that in general it is the right of those states to decided how they divvy up their electors. That’s not the dispute.

My problem is the motivation and the result, both of which are measurable, thanks to the fact that we know the political makeup of the districts in question. We know why Republicans would seek to do it. It wouldn’t be to bring the electoral vote equal to the popular vote, since Obama would get three fifths of the votes he would have if we had just done things by population, creating a big disparity.

Nor is this an overall movement. Only a few, critical battleground states are involved. Cynically selective.

Last but not least, the GOP has only done this after losing the state two times in a row, hoping that the unfair advantage in Congress, due to gerrymandering, can save them from losing more elections.

I would think that somebody caring about fairness would object to this attempt to put a thumb on the scale of the electoral college. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the right of the legislature to make that decision, it doesn’t make it a moral or wise decision, and that is what matters.

You talk about the people, but its legislatures making the decisions. You didn’t happen to hear the other day about Republicans redistricting while one of the Senators was away, and could not vote against them, did you? That is the kind of people we’re dealing with, folks whose main response to being handed what should be thought provoking defeats, is to double down on what got them in trouble in the first place, and try to restore their power by less than savory means.

You turn a blind eye to it, saying that this is their freedom, will of the people… but when majorities vote the other way, and the Republicans do everything they can to undermine that mandate’s power, then it isn’t the people responding any longer, but a powerful few who have succeeded in manipulating the system.

So, because one state made a change and it benefited Democrats once with a single vote, that’s ok. Those people aren’t being considered ‘second class’, because it didn’t affect the outcome. No outrage necessary.

I never said it was okay. But if you’re trying to use it for one of your tiresome hypocrisy arguments, there are a few premises you need to get straight.

First, I had no part in that change, so I don’t know why my principles are said not to be upheld in what I do and do not support.

Second, McCain got 80% of the electoral votes in 2008, despite only getting 57% of the popular vote. The result you’re trying to say was biased for the Democrats, is instead biased against them! Needless to say, 2012 went even more disproportionately against the Democrats, compared to the split.

Which is what happens when you have a Republican legislature controlling just three House seats.

Virginia, though, has eleven districts, which despite the fact two Democrats control the Senate Seats, are controlled in the majority by 8 to 3. So, the party that has swept the Senate races, taken the state in the last election, is somehow this poorly represented in Congress.

Again, let me remind you that this isn’t a question of legality. They are free to redistrict. The question is, is this fair to voters? Is the Republican representative delegation representing more the party’s influence, or the actual will of the people? I think its obvious its the former, with what Virginians do statewide.

It’s strange here, if you really think about it. I’m actually accounting better for the gritty facts of real world politics, while you’re pretending that the representation here is actually democratic (small “d” deliberate).

First, this isn’t gerrymandering. I don’t know how that phrase got started to describe what is being talked about, but it does nothing but muddle the waters. Gerrymandering for political gain is a terrible practice, because it takes away the idea that areas of people coming together to decide something.

God. You really haven’t been paying attention.

The gerrymandering matters because those districts are supposed to be the basis for how the vote is divided up in the state!

The basis for the doom and gloom as for the consequences, is the popular vote as won or lost per each congressional district. The concentration of liberal votes into a few districts means Obama won those handily, but the rest he ended up losing. You’re measuring the deliberate displacement of political power created by clever redistricting, concentration of their political opponents in a few districts, rather than the real proportion of popular support.

Overall, the effect they seek is that, on a higher level. So the question remains, why should Democrats anywhere agree to have their votes diluted so they can be presided over by a President who doesn’t even necessarily have even a plurality backing him or her?

The point of majority rules isn’t that it’s perfect, or respects everybody’s rights or wishes. Rather, it’s the fact that the alternative is even more coercive- if we’re being ruled by a minority, then whatever complaint you have about the Majority get amplified and returned by those having to tolerate the minority’s imposition of its way.

As for painting me as I am?

You aren’t even close. The problem is, you’re exceedingly arrogant about your own interpretation of the constitution, so you assume that if somebody disagrees with you, they’re not simply wrong, but against what you treasure so much. I don’t assume that. I think you’re wrong. I’m just not going to bother to attribute it to an anti-constitutional belief system, like you do in my case.

As for the Supreme court, it was mean to be the final arbiter on the interpretation of the law. Marbury vs. Madison simply took the Supreme Court’s constitutional authority to interpret the law, and said that since the constitution is the law of the land, the court must be able to decide what its proper interpretation is.

I just have to wonder, how would you deal with measures of questionable constitutionality from the Executive or Legislative branches? Who would say no to them, put them back on the straight and narrow?

As far as regulation goes? Regulations don’t operate by count, they operate by what they allow and disallow. You don’t necessarily have to have fewer regulations to have looser ones.

As for that last part? God what a boring argument. Anybody can tell anybody else they don’t know ****, and should stay out of the argument. And just about anybody with self respect, by common sense, will say no, and just keep on arguing what they were earlier.

That’s why, despite all the slings and arrows, I don’t spend most of my time insulting people. It’s pointless. Who are you going to take an insult personally from? Me? I’m your rival here, your adversary. If I say nasty things, exactly how much influence do I have with you to make you take that personal?

My sensibility is to waste less time on BS that won’t have any effect, and more time on the interesting stuff, the stuff that really determines right and wrong.

Rhinehold-
The first state, Maine, instituted its change before I was born. The second? 1992, over twenty years ago. Otherwise, most states have done things the same way.

Also, as I pointed out in my last comment, the balance of electoral votes is actually running against the Democrats, rather than for them, if we’re measuring by voting percentages. If you get almost sixty percent of the vote, yet your competitor gets eighty percent of the districts at best, then you’re not adding signficantly to any advantage, and this time around, not at all.

In fact, the fact that Republicans had control of that redistricting process means that the 1992 plan actually works against Nebraska disproportionately helping the Democrats!

As for majorities and the little guy, do you think minority-centered governments are any kinder? Do you really think the concentration of power in fewer people’s hands will mean more power in the hands of individuals?

Stephen,

Just curious, since you didn’t realize that income taxes didn’t have to be apportioned equally throughout the United States, are you also not aware that congressional districts have to follow population equality?

IE, if a state has 6 districts and 12 million people, each congressional district would have to serve roughly 2 million people?

Rotten Boroughs are not allowed in the United States…

As far as regulation goes? Regulations don’t operate by count, they operate by what they allow and disallow. You don’t necessarily have to have fewer regulations to have looser ones.

If you think that the regulations were more lax in 2008 than they were in 2000, please give examples.

The fact is that there are more regulations than there were, if those regulations were very lax, they are still more restrictive than ones that didn’t exist at all before, right? You can’t be more lax than no regulation…

Some regulations are onerous and create more problems than the ones they were designed to fix. Some regulations are in place to protect corporate interests. Some regulations are passed to make things worse for political gain.

We need to examine each one and determine if they have hurt or helped, fix or eliminate the ones that hurt, allow competition again and quit foisting millions of dollars of unnecessary paperwork onto the businesses. As well as end the corporate tax which just ends up being a hidden regressive tax on the poor.

You once said that the government should just regulate the transactions of the business economy and otherwise stay out of the way. Exactly how Libertarians believe. But, when put into practice, you continually support regulations that obtain a desired result… In other words, ‘picking sides’.

BTW, this is the redistricting plan that fellow libertarians and myself in Indiana tried to put forth for our recent redistricting.

http://lpin.org/2011/04/12/rethinking-redistricting-where-did-it-go/

Rethinking Redistricting was a plan put together by Secretary of State Todd Rokita (now the Congressman in the 4th District.) The plan put together districts based solely on census data. No other political data, aspirations, or considerations were used.

The Republicans and Democrats both rejected it, they would rather do what California did in creating stable zones for both parties.

And the reason many in Indiana wanted to do away with the winner take all system?

Overall, a winner-take-all system subjects the state of Indiana to a representation deficit because it only rewards a single candidate that wins while pushing aside the influence of minority groups. Even worse, it leaves most voters in noncompetitive races, discouraging turnout. In this way, our suggested method would help ensure that election outcomes accurately reflect grassroots opinions and generate opportunities in which voters have meaningful choices in each and every election.

Rotten Boroughs are not allowed in the United States…

Montana’s At-Large District has nearly twice as many people as Rhode Island’s 2nd district.

In the great words of GK Chesterton, arguably one of the most brilliant writers of his century, wrote while describing Christianity and the dutiful study of the great literary works as a lifetime discipline that is bound to create better men:

“It is not that the great tradition [mentioned above] has been tried and found wanting, it has been tried, found difficult, and duly abandoned.”

The left is RACING further and further to left, and I am reminded daily of the growing similarities between, and I am intentionally drawing these parallels now, Hitler’s rise to power on the cheers of the uneducated poor, and the foolish children of Germany’s academe, and the adulation and blindness with which Obama’s supporters across our decaying nation laud his seemingly inexorable march to tyranny.

He was elected on the promise of transparency and to restore responsibility and trust to the oval office, and to cleanse and restore our international reputation and has laughably and demonstrably squandered the former, and is now involved in 8 illegal conflicts which are in direct opposition to the latter.

Only a fool speculates the reasoning when Homeland Security requisitions 7000 MORE semi-(and easily convertible to full) automatic rifles for “Close Quarters Domestic Combat” while at the same time attempting to ram an assault weapons ban (FROM WHICH CURRENT AND PAST CONGRESSPERSONS ARE PERSONALLY EXEMPT) down the throats of law abiding Americans.

This administration knows that when America finally understands the depth of the establishment (past and present) monetary treachery is revealed, and wealth on an apocalyptic scale is evaporated overnight, there will be chaos, and they are preparing for that violent eventuality.

The public frog is starting to feel the bubbles, I know you all sense it on some level, but the kettle has begun to simmer. I didn’t get a damn thing done all morning for the national and international news.

I will never understand the leftist mindset and the desire to be ruled by a like-minded king. Stephen (who thanks to the Aspergers Declaration I can finally understand) and his ilk on this blog yearn for a tyrant who they foolishly believe will RULE our society with their values system. Who will IMPOSE diversity, and equality, and differing opinions will be snuffed. You will hear no outcry from Stephen, or Woman Marine, or Jane Doe, or David Remer, or Adam Ducker when this administration begins to use violence to contain dissidence, and it’s going to happen.

In the great words of Cicero: “Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.” Not to learn what happened before you were born, that is to be always a boy, to be forever a child.

And it is from you leftist children, that our liberties will be taken all. And you will have no one to stand for you, and no one else to blame.

Why should the Republicans change their message or policies to attract more voters when they have an institution like the Electoral College that is so susceptible to mischief and manipulation?

Rhinehold-
In your naivete about your system, you fail to realize something: the constitution says equal numbers of people have to be in each district. It doesn’t say which, and that’s crucial.

Let’s say you have 9 Xs in groups of three

XXX XXX XXX.

Turn Three of them into O’s.
XXO XXO XXO

If the X’s represented the number of votes for a parties candidate, the O party would get zero representatives, and the X’s all three representatives.

But if we put all the X’s together, and all the O’s?
XXX XXX OOO.

Then we get 2 groups of X’s that get 2 representatives, and one group of O’s that gets one.

Now if you look at the numbers of X-voters and O-Voters, they’re no different than before. The total numbers of voters haven’t changed. Just the containers they are put in. The question is not whether the same number of people are contained in each district, but which ones.

That is how you get a 3-8 split against the Democrats, despite the fact that enough of them voted for Democrats to put in two Democratic Senators, and help elect one particular Democratic President, despite everything, to two terms.

Now you have no problem with this, citing the rural-city divide, but the problem with that is, the original intent of the framers with those districts was to serve as the city/populous area side of the compromise, combined with the Senate giving the big and/or poorly populated states equal representation with the ones that had the cities or big communities in them. You’re kind of asking for a bigger piece of cake than all the rest of them.

By the way, I’m fine with a redistricting plan along the lines of what you showed on the Indiana question. California seemed to work out well, shaking up the old Democratic ranks, and undermining the old gerrymandering.

As for your characterization of me, and my position on regulation?

Let me put it this way: if you consistently write regulatory policy to frustrate accountability, to allow banks and polluters and telecommunications companies to do worse than they otherwise could, bad regulation can be worse than none at all.

Regulations concerning commodities would be an example. Specifically, oil. It was attached to the Commodities Futurization act, passed by the Republican Congress. Further changes in regulation also helped create the Deepwater Horizon crisis, by minimizing the time that inspectors had to certify rigs and their drilling as safe.

As far as “regulate, but otherwise stay out of the way” goes? You say you are, but I see little evidence for it. The Libertarians I’ve seen at work tend to take a side, and it’s rarely the side of the people who have to pay the price for the policy. There’s a naturalistic fallacy at work, where the assumption is that if the system is left to itself, and things go out of control or perform badly, its simply assumed this was the best things could be, or should be.

Some regulations, to have teeth, must have cost those who run up against them. Without clear consequences, you can’t make it difficult for companies to misbehave.

I might pick a side if we’re talking about renewable vs. Fossil Fuel energy, but then I’m not looking at it from a purely market based perspective. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that I’m fully willing to let the market do its work within those market, products competing against one another, and yes, some of those companies failing, because that’s what sometimes happens in competition.

If you’re criticizing me for not carving my point of view in stone, just keep in mind that my view of human nature is that we can predict some things, and other things are too complex or reactive to events we can’t foresee. We need, to paraphrase the Serenity prayer, to deal with the problems we can predict, let the market help us deal with what we can’t, and to seek out the wisdom to know the difference.

Yukon Jake-
The irony of references to Aspergers Syndrome, is I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people on this sight are undiagnosed, but have this condition. You don’t necessarily feel like you’re abnormal in any sense. Your perceptions are the ones you’ve dealt with your whole life, the quirks of how your mind work simply how you assume other people must think. Like the lenses of your eyes, you cannot see them directly for yourself, because, in fact, you see through them.

The further irony is, I’ve got an above average memory for history, American and World.

Your fears are bull****, to be blunt. They’ve been stoked by a set of radicals who need people to be in that kind of volatile state of mind not to dismiss them summarily.

Seven thousand guns. For what? Folks assume that direct force is the means of taking over a country, but when you get over a certain crowd size, it becomes difficult to impossible for a hostile military or police force to impose its will.

But if you divide seven thousand among a hundred cities, that’s just seventy guns apiece. For what? Well, if you deal with the hundred most populous cities in the nation, you’re talking 210,000 people at minimum. Or, put another way, one gun for every three thousand people, minimum.

That’s hardly much of an added advantage.

Or, what if you just deploy them all to the biggest city?

1178 people for every new gun. Again, not much of an added advantage.

I think if that is the big plan to take over the country, you aren’t really planning that well. The problem with conspiracy theories like this one, is that the people who push the panic button often don’t know the first thing about military force. They just see some item in the news, and they react and jump to conclusions.

Far more often, people are seduced into supporting tyranny, as many Republicans were seduced into supporting the low-grade violations of the Bush Administration. All too often, conspiracy theories help blind people to the poorly thought out policies, help innoculate them against sympathy with the victims of the power grab.

You folks paint yourself as heroes. What you really are, are the real world version of the dupes that you think we are.

A year from now, if we are in some sort of financial apocalypse, it will be because of what folks on the right, frenzied by this kind of crap, have done. Not because of us. People like me, we’d be the last to support some sort of armed crackdown. Who are the people threatening to crash the economy? Who are the people threatening to resort to “second amendment remedies?” Who are the people talking about secession?

Who are the people discussing disrupting our system of government, our monetary system, the peace and tranquility of our nation?

It’s not us. We’re trying like hell to keep this place together, prosperous, despite the handwaving and obstruction of the right.

The Right Wing has become the childish one.

Stephen,
My comment about your Aspergers was merely an understanding of how you could get in a focused thread and write 8 pages in response to one sentence, and then do it again in response to one sentence in the very next post twenty minutes later. I have an Aspergers nephew. It wasn’t a comment about anything other than the most tiring thing about your commentary; their absurd length.

You say you have studied history, and even go so far as to brag about your talent for recollection. In every major socialist/facist holocaust, from Chairman Mao, to Stalin, to Hitler - one vital FIRST step is to take away the guns and disarm the society. This is irrefutable fact.

The right to bear arms wasn’t enshrined so that we’d have the authority to hunt for food, it was so we would be able to resist a tyrannical government. That tyranny has yet to formally reign in the great experiment we call America is a byproduct of this broad armament and the expected difficulty of controlling and subduing an armed society.

You attempting to distill the hypocrisy of the left’s cry for gun control down to simple mathematics misses the point of my fears entirely. As if I expected 7000 assault weapons to represent the numerical advantage, or sum strategy, of a government preparing for anarchy. Such foolishness is akin to disregarding a point of view because a comma was in the wrong place. It’s a complete non-sequitur when my point was about the policy, not the numbers.

I would argue that Obama himself, who continually breaks the rule of law, neither submits or passes a budget, and installs such further cancers of liberty as the NDAA, are the reasons I say the left themselves are disrupting our form of government. Under Bush the left filibustered to the point of deserved ridicule, and now the establishment right is doing the same. You yourself extolled the horrors of the Patriot Act, and now we have both the Patriot Act, AND the NDAA, a far worse erosion of liberty, thanks to your Dear Leader. As to disrupting the monetary system, you neither understand nor study our monetary system as evidenced by your utterly infantile understanding of the role debt plays in economics, the total disconnect between market fundamentals and the charade we see over the last 3 years, as well as your loyalism to the Keynesian Economics (and last two spend-a-holic presidents) which have put us here.

I neither paint myself a hero, nor the conservatives who share my values, as you accuse. I am simply reminded of the history you plainly ignore. That leftist policies fail utterly virtually everywhere they are embraced, now and throughout history. That they lead to violence and death on a grand scale. And the worst of all the historical examples, mentioned earlier, consistently begin by disarming the general public. These are facts. You ignore them at MY peril, which is why I write.

Your blind allegiance to Obama, and those of your counterparts, is what is alarming to me. I consistently criticized Bush for his spending, though you personally would accord me no quarter and accused me of trying to have my cake and eat it too, as though someone elected as a conservative must represent everything ALL conservatives stand for and any criticism of the leader of the Republican party by a conservative was two-faced. You did this dozens of times and it was maddeningly stupid.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Obama is executing executive authority and usurping law after law as well as having a total disregard for traditional judiciousness, passing laws like the NDAA that literally destroy our liberties, spending our country into debt we will never repay (a fact widely accepted in international financial markets) who ran on transparency and now does everything in secret and behind closed doors, who is prosecuting illegal conflicts without approval of congress all over the globe, now attempting to take a truly MASSIVE step to disarm the public while at the same time leaving congresspersons past and present personally exempt AND adding 7000 assault weapons and a billion bullets to the arsenal of “HOMELAND SECURITY” and the commentary from the left on ALL of these abuses of power: crickets. Deafening silence.

And you have the gall to call ALL of my fears bullshit.

It is actually YOUR blind allegiance to party, and your obvious desire to be ruled by a like-minded king, that scares me the most.

You are not even man enough to admit that any one of the things on that list (and the war in Iraq WAS one) would have had you an womanmarine and especially adrienne literally frothing at the mouth and calling for impeachment, war criminal hearings, etc. AD NAUSEUM.

And lastly, thank you for making me right from a post on another thread here on WB that the left is setting this up to blame the right when our currency implodes from the debt and spending they flame-threw us into. “Obama’s spending was just trying to keep this place prosperous, it was the RIGHT who imploded our currency.”

My God man.

Yukon Jake-
That’s funny. As I recall it, the first step in Mao taking over China was winning a Civil War against the Nationalists. That involved a lot of people WITH guns. Hitler? I think he had to do all the political scapegoating of Jews, Communists, and other undesirables first, and get into power, before he started taking away the guns.

It’s not a first step. The first step is getting people to the point where they are willing to overwhelm the political and civil rights of their fellow citizens. Taking away the guns comes afterwards, after the force has been brought to bear to lock the new political situation in place. It’s most often a case of climbing into the upper windows of power with the ladder of violence, then pulling the ladder up so nobody else can take over the same way.

As for the right to bear arms, nowhere is it mentioned that insurrection, defiance of the government is the point of it. Now, that was a sub rosa consideration, but it wasn’t purely about defeating domestic tyranny. The colonists of that time did not want, or have the resources for, a big standing army. That’s why the amendment starts out something like “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of the state.”

The thing to keep in mind is travel time, and communication time. In those days, if you were invaded, you had days, weeks, even months to wait. The right to bear arms was in part meant to help safeguard the country, give us a homegrown line of defense, not dependent on armed forces that might not get there in time to help us.

As for your assault weapons, and your charge of hypocrisy?

Give me a break, you were trying to panic people over that number. This isn’t a matter of not putting the comma in the right place, this is matter of taking an alarmist and misleading interpretation of the facts.

Now, you sit here and you lecture me about how little I know, yet when delivering facts to justify your paranoia, you fail to do basic analysis for yourself on what’s going on. You don’t think these things through, you just absorb them in their constant onslaught from the right wing media, which purposefully keeps people in this state of volatile anger and anxiety, so they don’t question their radical policies with any kind of critical eye.

I would not mourn the end of the Patriot Act and all its BS. Question is, can we get a repeal through as things are now in Congress? Obama can’t pass laws by himself He is not a legislature, a Senate and a House all wrapped up into one.

As far as the monetary system goes, we just went through a major deflationary crisis. If you want proof of how much, just look how much money the Fed’s put into the economy, and then look at how little inflation has actually moved, by comparison. Look at the yield rates. If there was any question of the value of the dollar, they’d be moving higher. I don’t doubt it will get ugly later, but from what I’ve seen, there seems to be more of a threat of our currency collapsing because morons are confusing the debt ceiling with some means of limiting our nation’s borrowing, and trying to make political points by preventing it’s rise, than from what the FED is doing.

As for spendaholic? Look at the actual outlays! Look at Bush’s, then look at Obama’s. Your problem is, you’ve bought into a myth, and that myth isn’t backed up by good information. The Republicans have been the spendaholics, in no small part because they think defense spending increases in the hundreds of billions of dollars are not actual deficit creators.

The problem is, you’re imagining things, more than you’re actually looking at things, learning how things actually work.

Oh, by the way, I never called for impeachment. I was content to win elections, and didn’t really see how impeachment would work for the most part, given who had Congress. Hell, by the time we did have Congress, Bush only had two years left, so what was the point? You’d spend most of that time pushing the BS, and only get him out a few months early.

See, that’s the way I think. I don’t froth at the mouth. In fact, I kind of plod along. I had my share of conspiracy theory when I was a kid, but my brain kept on plodding along, pointing out things about the conclusions. By the time I was in my mid-teens, it had occured to me that the common feature of most conspiracy theories was an argument from ignorance that counted on the conspiracy always having all the evidence of its own existence, always hiding away, until the truth came out.

It was always, “the truth is out there, over the next hill, behind the next door, just left, went out to lunch, will be back by one, did I say one? I mean one o’clock tomorrow, etc.”

I began to realize that folks just didn’t want or need present evidence, real world stuff. Everything was at a second remove, everything was to be discovered when somebody finally forced the authorities to give up and reveal everything. If that could be done. An inherently hopeless, illogical, and ultimately pointless way of thinking.

And you know what? It’s a great distraction from the real world, where the people who actually conspire with each other are not omnipotent, do not hide things flawlessly, and often end up exposed in the course of covering up whatever they were trying to get away with! Only in Hollywood and pulp fiction do conspiracies really play out with such nigh invulnerability, and that’s simply because the author can write anything they want without having to stick absolutely to causality, like the real world does, and have the conspiracy carried out by flawed humans.

As for the right to bear arms, nowhere is it mentioned that insurrection, defiance of the government is the point of it.

”A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”
~George Washington

”The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
~Thomas Jefferson

”The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest possible limits. … and [when] the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
~St. George Tucker

”[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
~James Madison

”Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.”
~George Washington

”No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.”
~James Burgh

”No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
~Thomas Jefferson

”Laws that forbid the carrying of arms… disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
~Thomas Jefferson (quoting Cesare Beccaria)

”Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined”
~Patrick Henry

”To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm … is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege.”
~Wilson v. State

”The philosophy of gun control: Teenagers are roaring through town at 90MPH, where the speed limit is 25. Your solution is to lower the speed limit to 20.”
~Sam Cohen (inventor of the neutron bomb)

”The right of self-defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals.”
~James Monroe

”Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion in private self defense.”
~John Adams

”The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.”
~Thomas Jefferson

”Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”
~Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

”Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the outcome of the vote.”
~Benjamin Franklin

”This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.”
~Abraham Lincoln

”If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”
~The Dalai Lama

”This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!” ~Adolph Hitler, 1935, on The Weapons Act of Nazi Germany

Stephen,
From a philosophical point of view, I can agree (horror of horrors) that most conspiracy theories are usually bogus. And the frequency of their creation ought to mitigate the impact that their constant creation creates, and for me, it does.

I notice you did not address the NDAA, or the fact that Obama is involved in unapproved conflicts all over the globe, or the fact that congresspersons are personally exempt from Frankenteins Ban, you for all intents and purposes obfuscate the reasoning behind my concerns and lump them all into the easily dismissable rantings of a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Yet I have described no conspiracy, only the dangerous pattern I observe being woven into and over an uneducated (or more accurately) a colossally uninformed and misinformed, electorate.

The problem with that one-size-fits-all answer to the growing list of my concerns with this administration, the banking cartel that is the fed, and the economy in general is that the people who continuously laud Obama (that would be you) are incapable of any objective criticism, and the actions that I list WARRANT criticism. They are broad and overreaching and radical and in many cases identical or worse than the things that Bush did which had the vociferous left on WB and across America frothing at the mouth.

You also do not admit this.

I (though I’ve never gotten the same charity from you) will concede the point that you weren’t frothing at the mouth to destroy, impeach, and hang Bush in the same manner that other leftists on this blog were. Touche’ sorry to lump you in with your more violent and volatile acolytes. Your efforts in written length were directly proportional to the rage expressed in their brevity.

I will not write too long a dissertation here on the disconnect between 80 years of market fundamentals and the last 3 years of stock market activity. But there IS a complete and utter disconnect. From commodity delinkage, to inflation, to blatant manipulation of the Comex and LiBor, and on and on, the stock market has become a lottery. There is zero sound market principle and fundamentals anymore, and you can do your own research, though I recommend avoiding the alphabet soup networks that are all cheering the ignorant public to buy, buy, buy.

Anecdotally, I trade forex and do quite well with some of my personal algorithms, and have many friends that trade actively, 2 of which stand on floor of the NYSE on a nauseating basis. ALL of them (and none know each other save the two on the floor) are saying the same thing on the phone, and over a beer, behind closed doors: this is a mad cash grab. Everyone who knows, knows the market has been broken utterly by the Keynesian erosion of assets and the derivative profligration. Conservative estimates are over 400 trillion in liabilities with only a tiny fraction of that in assets. It got too complicated, too quickly, and now we are past the point of no return. It is now merely an insane cash grab. The market “strength” for which you laud Obama’s handling of the economy is a complete and utter farce, and those immersed in market operations know it. What’s happening though is no one has even the foggiest idea what to do about it. None. So, like lemmings, they do what they’ve always done, they print money, but it doesn’t have the same effect anymore because market fundamentals are BROKEN. So, everyone is trying to make as much as they can, as fast as they can, before some global event decisively tips that first domino. While most American’s are either politically asleep or hypnotized by all the sex, sex, sex on TV.

Don’t mistake this for a conspiracy, notice I don’t lay the conspiracy at only Obama’s feet, only at his contribution of the overwhelming accumulation of debt and the role that said debt plays. It’s the human condition. If you understand that at some point there will have to be a great monetary reset, what would you do? Would you nobly resign and say I cannot participate, or would you try and make as much as you can before TSHTF *A commonly bandied trading term these days representing the coming market apogee and subsequent implosion. Especially considering the mindset of traders which is based on the axiom: trading is a battle of winners and losers, for every winning trade, someone loses, and the market requires an endless supply of losers. Hardly the noble and charitable type from which you could expect a graceful bowing out. Same for Obama. I guarantee that he is informed of far more than I can dig up looking at historical charts and correlating events, and its his job to lead the country. So what would YOU do if you were a naked marxist? Sit idly by while it happens, or prepare to crack down when the public realizes the extent to which their livelihoods and retirements have evaporated. As a marxist leader, you can hardly blame him for the preparations he is making.

But you call me a conspiracy theorist for highlighting the writing on the wall, in all its many forms. And I respond with the charge of blindness, because the market data alone cannot just be dismissed while whistling the famous tune from Huey Lewis. The same blindness cannot rationally be applied to Obama’s illegal conflicts, his debt accumulation, nor his abuse of executive order, illegal appointments, and on and on.

In fact, my friends think they are going to only have perhaps a day or two if they are lucky, possibly only hours, of advance notice over John Q. Public when the great reset does begin, and they are counting on that time to be able to get the hell out of dodge. All hoard food, water, guns, fuel and ammunition in various places around the world. All own as much gold and silver as they can get their hands on and still keep easily transportable.

You can whistle the care-free tune Stephen, but I hope you have the guts to see the error of your blind loyalty when you realize you are part of that same public you thought would just be happily “ruled” with your own values. It will not be so pretty as that when the great reset comes.

Do I think Obama personally is the great Satan who WANTS to see American’s die? No. Do I think Obama knows full well what I know, and much more, and will lose any sleep over doing “whatever is necessary” to keep the farce going now and later to try prevent chaos? Also No. His power is secure, and that I believe is where his loyalties lie. Securing his own power, and his abuses evident that belief.

I just hope more people than you or I read both our sides of this story, do their own research, and trust their gut.

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