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McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
It's high time we the people just say no to the corrupt two party system. It's time we got off our lazy asses and learn about the alternatives available outside the corporate-approved "choice" spoon-fed to us by Big Media. Oh sure, probably we'll get either McCain or Obama this time, but if enough people vote outside the box it will encourage others to do the same.
Just three weeks ago I would have argued with you about this. Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity. In so doing he lost my vote and my support. The only thing I would dispute is that the third parties really offer a better alternative. Consider:
Bob Barr: Witch-burning religious lunatic that led the impeachment of Bill Clinton and somehow gets to masquerade as a libertarian. Could they really do no better than this guy?
Ralph Nader: Left-wing crazy that thinks we should nationalize the energy industries (even I don't lean this far to the left) and expand the nanny state.
McKinney: Don't know a lot about her yet but the initial reading is not very promising. Seems to have a huge chip on her shoulder and is probably at least as far to the left as Nader is.
I won't be voting for Obama or McCain but I don't see how I can support any of these crazies either. I'll sign their petitions for ballot access if asked but I fear that my vote for POTUS may wind up being blank this year :( I'd love the chance to meet Bob Barr and ask him directly if he's changed his tune on wiccans/neo-pagans -- a satisfactory answer might get him my vote. The others don't stand a chance though.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Vast increase in federal spending!
That's bad enough but you forgot "while reducing Federal income by slashing taxes" at the end.
They morphed into a me-too-but-more party.
Indeed. To quote a friend of mine: I'd rather be a tax and spend Liberal than a borrow and spend Republican. At least the Dems are pretending to have a way to pay for their proposals -- the Republicans just want to put it on the national credit card.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
As a fellow Brit, it's almost ontopic to reply here :p
I wrote a JE a while back, asking people to vote third or fourth party, even if they could "make do" with one of the "main" parties. The interesting thing is that reasons to do so do not rely upon faith!
A number a years back, I did some campaigning for the Liberal Democrats; I no longer consider myself to be party political, but their campaign techniques were interesting. The most interesting was the "reverse squeeze". The way that that works is that the Lib Dems would go after either Labour or the Tories, whichever had the fewest votes in the seat. Once their support went down, the numbers voting for the other team would come down in roughly equal numbers.
In other words, one vote fewer for one of the main parties implies approximately one fewer votes for the other one. Because voters can sense the political equilibrium, your own decision to deny the main parties your vote for a better personal choice is essentially costless! Better still, your vote is amplified (although they might instead choose to vote for another small party).
Not only is your change of vote essentially costless, but also you get to send a signal both to voters and to your future representative. The voters get to see a change in the support of your chosen party which is bigger than the signal would have been if cast for one of the main ones. Your representive receives a signal as to how best to win your vote the next time around.
The only reasons not to vote for a smaller party are if you are better represented by one of the main parties, or else if you think that competition is a harmful force in politics, and would rather give a clearer "mandate" to the winner. American voters seem to act like this, with later voters preferring to strengthen the early vote, and it can even make a kind of sense if a "strong nation" is more important to you than democracy.
The flip side to the last observation is that if you're in the US, vote early. Others will then copy your vote, so in a sense, you get to "vote early, vote often".
Wikileaks, no DNS
That doesn't give us more choice, because the choices are filtered for us by the media and the parties before most of us get a say.
We need a final election system that is made to work with multiple candidates so that there should be no reason for somebody to vote against their preferred candidate out of fear that there second (or third) preferred candidate will fail to eliminate defeat their least preferred candidate. If we have this electoral system, we could have 5 or six candidates from each party and another dozen from other parties or as independents.
After that, if we still decide we want a primary system, it needs to be a party-less primary, so that nobody is eliminated from contention without the say-so of the entire electorate. The only purpose of the primary should weed out individuals that the majority of the electorate consider clearly out of the running.
This would eliminate the current one side against the other conflict that we have. All candidates would struggle to appeal to the broad middle, by trying to piece together policies that appeal to all people instead of one half of the country or the other, who may only be interested in a couple of issues of one party or the other.
If done for the members of Congress, you could also end up with 3-5 parties who each have different focuses on different issues. The members of each party would then examine the issues out of their focus, and side with or against a party that had a focus on that issue, and make for a much more fluid Congress. For instance, there might be a party that focuses just on adhering the Constitution and strict adherence to it, which might side with the Republicans on certain issues and with the Democrats on others. You might have a party that only focuses on issues concerning parents (education, crime) and another that focuses on elderly issues (medical expenses, Social Security, etc.).
This would reduce the venom in our public discourse, because some popular policies that are currently blocked by our current 50-50 split would probably find more support if there were more than just two parties, who sometimes take a bad policy stance just to keep a minority happy.
Unfortunately, we'll probably never get it approved, because the electorate doesn't understand the need, and the parties in power won't want it.
As evidenced in, say, Somalia. I know Somalia's not a great model (it's missing the "enough basic laws" part), but it's not irrelevant.
I'm a big-government libertarian, which I know is inherently contradictory. I like the ideals of freedom, but in practice you always end up with so much market failure due to externalities, information asymmetries, etc., that a nice layer of medium cost bureaucratic inefficiency is actually a desirable thing.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
If there is anything un-american in the political landscape of the USA, it's the fake two party democracy that is essentially a single party dictatorship in disguise.
I don't live in the US. I live in Europe. From our point of view, you have two parties that are so similar we can't even really tell the difference. Our position is usually closer to the democrats, since we tend to be quite a bit more "left" on the political spectrum than the average US person, and the dems aren't "so far right" in most of their positions. Oh, don't get me wrong, from our point of view, one is a moderate right wing party, the other is a harcore right wing party. But then, we're not really into the "strong leader" idea. We had some bad encounters with that.
Many people here seriously don't see the point in voting. Maybe because we're also not really used to the idea of parties having corporate sponsors. To us, it seems you're voting on what cartel is to rule the US. Political viewpoints come secondary. So if you want the media industry and computer industry to rule, go Dem, if you want military and oil to call the shots, vote Rep.
That's basically how it looks from beyond the pond.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To temper this a little bit, let me try to inform on the assumption that dems see gun ownership as "immoral". We do not find gun ownership immoral (while unaffiliated, I almost always vote democrat). I'm also an NRA member, and I have enough guns to arm my entire neighborhood, twice over.
For most of us left-leaners, guns are seen as tools of war or tools of crime or tools of getting something to eat. Most left-leaners have no problem with gun ownership, but also believe that there's a certain level of responsiblity (and regulation) that makes them safer to have around if one -=must=- have one around. Interestingly, in conversations with my right-leaning friends who keep and shoot guns, they also point out that a concealed carrry license doesn't require any safety training or demonstration of competence, whereas we require that for cars and motorcycles. The colorful part is that people die from poor operation of cars and motorbikes all the time, so there's a seperate argument as to whether training and testing have much effect, ... but I digress.
Left-leaners basically don't want to see guns used in crimes, and the thought is that if you make guns hard to get, or restrict which guns can be acquired based on meaningful background checks or licensing/registration schemes, the likelihood of having these guns being used in crimes is diminished. Our friends on the right love to point out that criminals don't follow the rules, and therefore the restrictions only fall on the law-abiding. True enough. Yet, if a bank robber gets one sentence if he robs a bank with a fist and an angry look, most lefties believe that he should be charged with two crimes if he robs a bank with a gun, and three crimes if it's a gun that has not been legally acquired.
I concede that most of these controversies tend to flow to envisioning "what if" scenarios, but I believe it is unfair to state that democrats think owning guns are immoral. Democrats want to see criminals who use guns punished to the fullest extent, and to reduce the numbers of guns used in crimes. That last sentence is not forcing morality on anyone. Everyone can agree on those two things, even the gun-nuts. Where people differ is on how you accomplish those two things, and that's a very good dialogue to have.
Lots of democrats own guns, but most of them choose to not associate themselves with the NRA, and choose to not justify their ownership by way of the 2nd amendment. They're pretty much silent on the topic, unless you get them talking about hunting. For my part, I am an NRA member because we stand for the training, gun education (operations, safety) and gun rights education. In general, I do not support the candidates that the NRA suggests I support,... unless they're democrats, that is.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R