Slashdot Mirror
Larry Lessig Ends Presidential Campaign, Citing Unfair Debate Rules (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Harvard law professor Larry Lessig is ending his run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Lessig blames the demise of his campaign on party rules that have left him "shut out" of the Democratic debates. "The party won't let me be a candidate," Lessig said in his final campaign video. "I can't ask people to support a campaign that I know can't get before the members of the Democratic Party."
This is the Democrat Party we are talking about. The coronation of Hillary for 2016 was decided years ago.
Lessig has great ideas, and we need someone really serious to fix the corruption in our system. However, I can't imagine anybody taking his platform seriously. He wants to resign after a partial term! I think people won't want to elect someone that's only serious about doing part of the job. A specialist. Unfortunately, the US has been sick for a long time and needs a specialist.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Perhaps a single issue "I'm going to pass one law and then resign" candidate just isn't well aligned with the Democratic party platform? Just a thought.
Actually they kept him out because of how sharp he is. Afraid he would reveal how corrupt they are and the whole system is. Or are you saying he should never have tried something because it might not work?
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
If he can't convince his own party to put him in a debate, how would he do at convincing congress and senate to support his policies as president? Convincing politically biased groups to do things is just about the primary job skill for a president. It sounds like he thought he had that skill, but it turned out that he wasn't up to the practical test.
You're talking right out of your ass here, or at best, projecting. Seek help, in case its the latter. Even such a bigot as you has the right to know his own mind.
He's not really wrong, though he should have said extreme left. That of course is the left part of the spectrum, where anything that isn't a part of your ideology is far-right. You can look at the amount of garbage coming out of universities attacking common people from wrong think, going directly after freedom of speech and expression, attacking people for wearing costumes they find offensive, whining about how people are invading their safe spaces while engaging in so much self-hate and white guilt that they're drowning in their own stupidity.
It's not limited to just the US, it's also in Canada and in Europe. Many of the things the extreme left are engaging in, aren't any different then what the ye olde aristocracy engaged in. That's not disproving the occasional horse shoe theory in action.
Om, nomnomnom...
Ive met him a few times and Im from a third world country with no PHD at all. Yet he listened to my ideas with interest and gave constructive and useful suggestions. He listened to my talks the way I listened to his lectures.
You are slandering a man in ignorance. Elitist ? Exactly the opposite. He is a man who spends his life in search of new ideas and cares not where he finds them
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
when they refuse to put your name in the polls? That's what they did.
Shutting Lessig out was to stop the idea that money should be taken out of politics, because most of that money goes to the media organisations. Letting Lessig in would cut their revenue significantly.
Remember, this is an industry that wants to get skipping adverts made illegal because it might hurt their profits, and CEOs claim it is "stealing from the company" not to watch the adverts.
You don't think they'd make up rules to save the billions they get from political ad campaigns??
If we don't get leaders that actually solves problems into positions of power it really doesn't matter what we elect.
Lessig has no realistic plan to solve, or even address, any problem. His plan is to amend the constitution (something the president has no power whatsoever to do) and then resign. That isn't a plan, it is a fantasy.
Step one: learn your own history. Jefferson forsaw the rise of an American aristocracy and created a perfect tool to prevent and undo it: the estate tax. Since the early 20th century rightwingers have been progressively dismantling that tool and now, surprize surprize, America is ruled by a de facto aristocracy.
Restore the estate tax to 95% and the problem (in all its many forms) is fixed in one generation.
You might want to listen to "right-wingers" now and then to learn something. The estate tax in its current form has been around for 90 years - not since Jefferson. During that time the exemptions haven't been indexed to inflation so the size of an estate that is taxed is now dramatically smaller than it was back then. That means that it hits small businesses and farms the hardest. Meanwhile actual rich people have carved out big enough exemptions that they don't have to worry about it.
While I don't care to "dismantle it" (of course, I'm not a "right-winger", anyway) it needs to be fixed back to its original purpose of taxing rich people. The debate is similar to the left trying to raise taxes on "the rich" while succeeding in raising taxes on the middle class instead. Doctors and lawyers are not "rich". (In case you're that far left, let me make this simple: "but he has more money than me :(" doesn't mean "he" is "rich")
I know someone right now who owns a farm that's been the family for a few generations. During the time the city has grown up around it and the property values have soared. She's 84, husband is gone. It's unlikely that her four kids can come up with the money when she's gone, so the land will be sold. That wasn't the intent.
Do you have ESP?
I know someone right now who owns a farm that's been the family for a few generations. During the time the city has grown up around it and the property values have soared. She's 84, husband is gone. It's unlikely that her four kids can come up with the money when she's gone, so the land will be sold. That wasn't the intent.
Today, the estate tax applies to inherited assets in excess of $5.43 million. She has 4 heirs, and they can each inherit $5.43 million free from the estate tax. If it's "unlikely that her four kids can come up with the money when she's gone", the implication is that they'll face an estate tax burden greater than $0. That means that the total value of this farm exceeds $21.72 million, assuming the heirs cannot afford any tax burden.
I'd argue that someone with a single asset worth $21.72 million is indeed wealthy, and that the intent of the estate tax was (and is) indeed to tax her. If she chooses to allocate her assets such that she doesn't have any liquid capital, only the farm, then that's her choice. To spin her as some sort of charity case, however, is disingenuous at best. There's enough wealth to generate an annual revenue of $434,400 at a modest 2% interest rate (and even a CD will yield closer to 2.45%). Split evenly between the five family members, that's $86,880 per year per person, indefinitely, living off the interest alone. That's 3.25 times the size of the median individual income. While she has my sympathies for the loss of her husband, I won't be losing any sleep over this independently wealthy family's financial situation.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Biden tried and failed to get his party's nomination TWICE already. In this business, the third time isn't the charm, and two strikes is out. His 2008 campaign was effectively over just moments after it started, as he unloaded a half-dozen controversial statements about his opponents that went viral, and never recovered.
His continued poorly-considered statements after becoming Vice President prove he hasn't learned anything, and any Biden campaign is going to be peppered with video of him telling the viewer to "Get a shotgun" followed by usage tips which would get anyone else arrested for negligent discharge of a firearm. Combine that with his advanced age and recently-deceased son, and it's obvious why he wouldn't and even shouldn't run, without resorting to crazy theories.
There's no major animosity between Obama and Clinton that would cause either to set-up the other for failure. Clinton was a close second in the 2008 primaries, far ahead of Biden, and the obvious presumptive nominee next time around.
And just because Biden was Obama's choice for VP doesn't indicate any particular preference or connection. VPs are generally chosen to fill-in and balance out voting blocks, not because the administration has any particular preference for them. In fact quite the opposite (disdain and animosity towards their chosen VPs) seems to be more common.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's not like the Democratic party called him up and gave him permission to run. He declared his candidacy and then quickly and effectively put out a message that the majority of the country agrees with in a way that caused a lot of people to start talking about him. He forced his way into the Democratic contest, he was not "allowed" in. If they would have tried to push him away then there either would have been a lot of people asking questions about why some candidates aren't allowed to debate (which neither party wants to answer), or he would just run as an independent.
He wasn't "allowed" to run, he made it happen because people agree with his message. The reason why there is so much doubt around his candidacy is because the media and the parties keep telling the public that he is a fringe candidate. He's not fringe, he's mainstream. The media is trying to push fringe candidates like Clinton and Trump/Rubio/Cruz on people and call them mainstream, but the polls show that the majority of the country supports Sanders when people aren't being shoved loaded terms like "socialism", where they think it means something that it doesn't. You can see that in polls where people say that they agree with Sanders' positions, and also that they wouldn't vote for a socialist. The media is controlling the dialog, which is why you think Sanders is a fringe candidate or does not have a realistic chance at getting elected.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black