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Ask Slashdot: Which Candidates For Geek Issues?
Okian Warrior writes "An oft-repeated sentiment on Slashdot is that we should change the situation by voting in better officials. An opinion that appears in nearly every political thread is: 'we're to blame because we elected these people.' On the eve of the first primary (in New Hampshire), I have to wonder: how can we tell the candidates apart? Ron Paul is an obvious exception, and I am not discounting him, but otherwise it seems that no candidate has made a stand on any issue. Consider the candidates (all of them, of any party) as a set. What issue can I use to divide them into two groups, such that one group is 'for' something and the other is 'against'?"
Probably not Ron Paul any time.
His preferred position on economics is to ignore that silly mathematics stuff and go with a mix of psychology and gut instinct.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
He's the only acceptable one in the GOP bunch. Romney is second but he's clearly a 1-percenter and beholden to big money so you can't expect any solutions from him.
Perry and Santorum are GWB squared and Libertarianism is a stupid outdated ideology so Paul doesn't make the cut either although he has a few good ideas. Gingrich has proven that he's an unethical asshole (just like Perry and Santorum.)
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Erm... I'm pretty sure RP has a much, much better mathematical background in economics than any of the other candidates. He has actually written books on it, is a member of the Mises institute, and has photos of Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard on his wall.
I'm not sure if I agree %100 on his monetary policies, but he's certainly learned about it. You might prefer Keynesian economics but its certainly not more based in mathematics.
Pete Ashdown isn't running for president, but he is running for a senate seat against that epic ass clown Orrin Hatch. He started the best ISP I've ever used here in Utah and has run for congress before with a very tech-savvy platform and utilized cool technologies in his campaign.
Check him out: http://peteashdown.org/
In my mind getting rid of Orrin Hatch and getting Pete Ashdown to replace him is killing two birds with one stone.
or else!
The Democratic Senators from Oregon are both opposed to SOPA- and Ron Wyden has offered his services to Fillibuster it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Parent is referring to the fact that one of the underpinnings of Austrian School economics is often ignoring empirical data, mathematics, and the scientific method. Economics as a whole has been called The Dismal Science, but the Austrian School takes it to new lows by ditching the "science" part altogether.
CAPTCHA: nonsense
It's too bad he's such an anti-equality, anti-women's rights racist homophobe.
He's the only acceptable one in the GOP bunch. Romney is second but he's clearly a 1-percenter and beholden to big money so you can't expect any solutions from him. Perry and Santorum are GWB squared and Libertarianism is a stupid outdated ideology so Paul doesn't make the cut either although he has a few good ideas. Gingrich has proven that he's an unethical asshole (just like Perry and Santorum.)
A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for the banks. Let's take a look and see who's paying for his campaign. Shall we?
Goldman Sachs $367,200
Credit Suisse Group $203,750
Morgan Stanley $199,800
HIG Capital $186,500
Barclays $157,750
Kirkland & Ellis $132,100
Bank of America $126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers $118,250
EMC Corp $117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co $112,250
The Villages $97,500
Vivint Inc $80,750
Marriott International $79,837
Sullivan & Cromwell $79,250
Bain Capital $74,500
UBS AG $73,750
Wells Fargo $61,500
Blackstone Group $59,800
Citigroup Inc $57,050
Bain & Co $52,500
Courtesy of Open Secrets:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?cycle=2012&id=N00000286
There is nothing legally or constitutionally prohibiting another political party from forming in America. Indeed there are several other would-be political parties that routinely get votes and even hold conventions and at least pretend to be competing against the major two.
The problem is really one of money and people willing to support those parties.
This said, I would have to agree with you that some of the legal mechanisms that keep the major parties entrenched into their position and keep other minor parties from getting accepted is a tragedy and something that ought to be fixed in some fashion. Something even as mundane as proportional allocation of electoral votes (tried in Colorado, and the voters failed to pass the referendum question) would go a long way to helping support 3rd parties being recognized as a legitimate political force. Or more importantly simply winning some seats somewhere, even if it isn't everywhere (like the Libertarians are trying to do with the Free State Project).
There are valiant attempts to go beyond the two major parties, but it takes people doing something about it rather than constantly bitching that they need to go. You also have to be very creative in terms of working within the system as you need to be aware that the deck is stacked against you.
H. Ross Perot had a real chance to make a real difference, had he not flaked out so awfully. If some billionaire or even a not so terribly huge group of multi-millionaires got together and wanted to make a real challenge to the status quo, I'm pretty certain they could make it work. Or perhaps if a group of more ordinary folks got together and put together a genuine populist movement (Occupy Wall Street actually getting organized in some fashion?) they a true competitive 3rd party could form. The sad thing is that most of the 3rd party groups want to remain 3rd party groups and aren't focused on actually winning elections instead of spreading their political message. That takes a whole lot of work, organization, and effort.
Yes and no. Democrats definitely are not defined as "look at individuals for success"; the Republicans often like to bash them for being the opposite of that in their support of big government programs. The parties are too hard to define so succinctly though. Democrats are for the workers but they're actually more supportive of unions than actual individual workers per se. Both parties are mostly beholden to big campaign donors, whether those donors are sitting on top of a giant pool of workers versus a giant pool of stockholders. The "big business" side of Republicans is just a small and declining wing of the party, and it's much less of a division between the two than it was in the past.
I definitely disagree with the naive European view that the two parties are identical. Just because both lean to the right of the European center does not make them identical. There are distinct and obvious differences. Maybe in certain areas they look very much alike (pro-business).
A big problem is that because we have a winner-takes-all process in most districts in the US we end up with a defacto two party system. A third party that's viable is very rare and doesn't last long. The two dominant parties will dance around a bit and end up covering roughly half the populace each, with things always kept in flux due to internal party divisions and occasional offshoots. A European parliament may form a coalition of a few parties in order to gain a majority control whereas the US Republican and Democratic parties are essentially coalitions themselves. This is what makes the US parties so hard to understand since they're internally inconsistent.
Very broadly speaking and due to history, Republicans tend to be mostly rural and southern whereas Democrats are urban and on the coasts. And this strongly influences their outlook. Republicans in the last 50 years have also been the most staunchly anti-communist as well (and thus anti-socialist). So a more rural Republican base is very distrustful of anything to do with welfare whereas a more urban Democratic base is in favor of government programs and assistance. However that strong southern and rural leaning in the Republicans make them much more conservative with regards to moral issues than the urban Democrats.
So you end up with the inconsistency of the Republicans being for individual freedoms in economic issues while being in favor of restrictions on individual freedoms in social areas, with the reverse broadly holding true for Democrats. Most of the other big differences can be traced back to either historical issues or the demographics of the voting bases. And the history goes all the way back to before the states were independent.
Dude, he said that women who get sexually harassed at work are at fault if they don't immediately stop working there, as if dropping your job without a replacement already lined up is a real possibility for most of America right now. Ron Paul is farther out of touch with real Americans than John Kerry was.
source: http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2012/01/ron-paul-says-victim-sex-harassment-bears-some-responsibility-for-resolution/fyCUfBYPwVLj4eLcE4YnPI/index.html
Ron Paul has introduced legislation that would ban federal courts from hearing issues on the Constitutionality of gay marriage bans. You know, the very court system the Constitution itself sets up to hear these kinds of questions. So don't give me that bullshit that he's not against gay marriage.
And I'll believe the stance that he wants to "get the federal government out of marriage altogether" when he introduces a bill to remove recognition of straight marriage from the federal government.
Most of the debt accrued during Obama's term is attributed the unfunded liabilities introduced in Bush's terms. Most the debt comes from the Bush tax cuts and Bush pharma bill which has never been funded. The majority of the debt added directly by Obama is attributed to one time costs associated with stimulus packages.
If you think Obama is doing a worse job than Bush you aren't paying attention, or you're only paying attention to Fox News.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
There are some great infographics that show the debt over time and the effect Bush's unfunded programs had on the debt. I think it was even shown on the Daily Show one night. Looking at the first graphic, the white area at the bottom is what the deficit might look like if neither Bush nor the economic downturn hadn't happened. You might have a hard time seeing the white area, it's very small. Looking at the second chart, you'll noticed the single largest contributing factor to the debt is the Bush tax cuts, and it's contribution gets larger each year. In theory, if Bush had been replaced with an inanimate carbon rod, the U.S. debt would be almost half of what it stands at today.
Of course, there are other informative graphics, like this Debt as a Percentage of GDP graphic. The most important fact to note from this graphic is that the rate of growth of the debt is actually slowing. If Obama were making the problem worse, the debt should be growing faster.
There's also a pair of infographics on this article from the New York times. The first one shows the difference between Clinton's policies and Bush's policies. At the end of Clinton's (Jan 2001), the Congressional Budget office was predicting 10 years of surpluses, if Clinton's policies were continued and the economy continued to grow at the same rate. At the end of Bush's term (Jan 2009) the congressional budget office was predicting 10 years of massive deficits if Bush's policies were continued even if the economy returned to normal growth.
The second New York Times graphic shows the contributions of Bush and Obama to the debt by policy change ($5.07 trillion for Bush and $1.44 trillion for Obama). $1.136 trllion of the Obama's debt contribution is stimulus spending and stimulus tax cuts. $0.278 trillion is non-defense discretionary spending and $0.152 trillion is health reform and entitlement changes. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Bush tax cuts each were responsible for more debt by themselves than all of Obama's policies combined (projected costs across 2 terms to make the numbers comparable).
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