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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'?"
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Perry and Santorum are GWB squared and Libertarianism is a stupid outdated ideology so Paul doesn't make the cut either although he has a few good ideas.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
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!
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 Perry and Santorum are GWB squared and Libertarianism is a stupid outdated ideology so Paul doesn't make the cut either although he has a few good ideas.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
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.