To an extent I sympathize with that situation. But you have to keep in mind all parties run like that. The Dems and GOP don't pay any of their committee people. The actual paid state party organization is miniscule (generally 1-2 people per million residents). The big money in politics is spent by individual campaigns, and it mostly goes to TV or independent consultants not the guy at party HQ who calls potential gubernatorial candidates.
If you're Libertarian you have to figure out a way turn an operation that would be adequate for Iowa, if it also included multiple other equally well-funded committees (like the Senate, House, and Gubernatorial Committees the big two run), into an operation that can consistently get tens of millions of votes.
And you just let a really good chance at proving you can get to 100k go by. If it was an Alaska race or something I'd understand. But your entire HQ is in DC. The major race everyone in DC has been paying attention to since Obama beat Romney is VA Governor. Half your national staff probably technically qualifies to run, and as staff at a national political party they are probably both better qualified to run, and better speakers then the guy who did run.
It's just as likely nobody would vote for the third parties because they aren't exactly good at coalition-building.
What's most likely is that average voters would not realize anything changed, so that third parties would still be considered spoilers. Nader in particular taught a lot of people the hard lesson that voting Green is suicide, and they ain't gonna unlearn that lesson until somebody a) implements a new voting system, and b) spend a lot of money explaining to people that the new voting system exists.
I suspect that two things will have to happen before third parties become viable. First we'll have to go to some form of proportional representation at the State Level, and second a lot of ambitious people who are actually good at politics will have to join them. Everyone who thought for a second and paid attention politics, for example, knew that the Green/Libertarian parties would never have a better chance to win a Gubernatorial election then this year in Virginia. But the Greens don't have a candidate, and the Libertarians did their traditional "guy with no political skills who showed up," so instead of having an interesting race about Virginia's future we're stuck with arguing over Sleazy McSleazeball is worse then Crazy Cooch.
Right now third parties attract a lot of people who have proven incompetent in the big leagues, and a lot of other people who are really good at convincing the faithful they are the most pious, but pretty much nobody who can convince people of anything. If you're good at that you join a big party and try to change it.
GOP, and especially Tea Party, resistance to Obamacare has been consistent.
And the Democrats were equally opposed to numerous Bush priorities in 2006. Yet those priorities were passed, so they didn't shut down the entire government to force (for example) a hike in taxes or an end to GitMo. I would have supported both proposals, and am partisan hackey enough that if Pelosi had actually shut down the government in 2007 on the basis that GitMo had to be fixed I probably would have backed her. But in retrospect it's a very good thing she treated the budget a s a separate issue from all these other issues.
And, for the record, while the GOP strongly opposed ObamaCare numerous times it did not link ObamaCare to shutting down the entire government until very very recently.
Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
You act as if congress has the same makeup as it did then. Elections took the guys out of power who implemented Obamacare. I understand why the Dems want to protect it, but why pretend it won't be expensive to protect? They are no longer in charge of 100% of congress, and they are going to have to pay dearly if they want to protect their pet programs. Obamacare was enacted by a law, and can be changed by law - it's not magic or special in any way. I happen to think that it replaces a terrible system. It may not be great, but repealing it without another solution is a terrible idea. Going back to our unfunded socialism is the Tea Party's plan and I oppose it.
This line of reasoning terrifies me.
The American people tend to pick a President and a House that disagree, they also have a strong tendency to create parties that strongly disagree on trivial points (ie: 35% top income tax rate vs. 39.6%; an individual mandate that 85% of the country already complies with and most of the remaining 15% would gladly comply with if they had access to the subsidies in ObamaCare). Combine that with our tendency to admire the dude on a doomed, lonely fight, and you end you end up with a recipe for the FBI being sent home every time the Congressional majority changes it's mind on how much Salmon fishing the EPA should allow.
I didn't say America as a whole had no responsibility. I said that the OP's claim that the Federal government was the source of slavery and segregation is simply false. And it is false.
One thing that is (to my knowledge) completely unique about America is that most of the time when our Federal American government oppresses someone it doesn't actually do anything. To use the OP's words, it makes a point of neither regulating nor codifying anything,. It simply lets that person's neighbors oppress him, and claims that in a free country with a Limited Federal Government states are the only entity that can (for example) stop lynch mobs.
This isn't an excuse for America's role in oppressing it's own citizens, but it is something you have to keep in mind if you care about freedom in the United States. In a country like Germany or India the states are very much creatures of the Federal government. Bavaria cannot literally enslave the majority of it's residents (as South Carolina and Alabama did prior to the Civil War) and expect the Bundesrepublik to go along with that shit. Protecting freedom in Germany mostly consists of telling the Federal Bundesrepublik level what it can't do, protecting freedom in the US involves some restricting the Feds, but it also involves a) giving the Feds clear authority to beat up on states, and b) ensuring no deals in DC (like the one that allowed segregation) restrict this authority.
Conservatives like to think that the reason blacks consistently support increases in Federal power is that blacks are delusional morons, but the simple fact if you're black a jackbooted thug from the Federal government is almost always your friend, and the friendly local cop whose just stop-and-frisked your brother is not almost always your friend.
In a two-party system approval voting is identical to plurality voting. To get what you want we'd have to amend the Constitution. Under current case-law you can't do a lot of electoral reforms because parties have a right to exist, and they have a right to pick their candidate. Their one candidate if that's what they want. And since a political party's ideology is determined by the people who show up to it's meetings those parties tend to be incredibly extremist.
Political contributions require another amendment.
Gerrymandering would help, but not as much as people think. Modern Americans choose to live by their partisan brethren, which means most American counties swing at least 20 points one way or the other, and are surrounded by counties that agree with them. The GOP actually gets a slight edge in fair maps because Democratic voters are concentrated in cities. For example lets a state is one big City, about the size of a Congressional, district, and a countryside. The state as a whole gets three districts and is 55% Democratic so three districts democratic totals should 165%. The City is probably 80% Dem, which leaves 42.5% Democrats in each rural district. This state, whose population is largely Democrats, will be represented in the House by two Republicans.
And you still haven't actually fixed the problem. Most Republicans honestly believe that they have a duty to resist Obama. As long as checks and balances exist, they have the political strength to use them, and Obama remains President, we will get BS like this shutdown.
Generally in legislation you get give-and-take. What the GOP's done is link it's demand on a proposal that was finished in 2010 to proposals necessary to run the government in 2013. It did this at the last minute.
I really don't want to live in a country where the Democrats routinely stop the entire government because they lost a vote three and a half years ago. Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
Did you mean to imply there's some guy in DC picking drone targets at random? Or that drone warfare has substantially more civilian casualties then any other form of warfare? Because I can assure you neither of these is the case. Yeah people screw up and hit targets they shouldn't. Sometimes the only way to hit a target is to hit someone who isn't a target. But drones allow you to follow a target quite closely for weeks and months, which means you have a very good idea that a) the person you're following is you're actual target, b) the time to push the button is at exactly 7:52 AM on Sunday because the kids will be out playing soccer, his wife will be down at the laundromat, etc., and c) if the kid skips soccer you can scrap the mission.
Regardless, I didn't say everything the US Military has ever done is necessary for the world as a whole. I said there are things that need to be done, and only the US can do, largely because nobody else spends that much on their troops.
As for American leadership, I really don't care how it looks. Obama doesn't care how it looks. What he cares about is that a) apparently Putin thought he'd pull the trigger because Putin agreed to the deal, and b) he got chemical weapons away from Hezbollah without firing a shot. This means the Israelis don't have to fire a shot and John Kerry's recent attempt to revive Oslo retains it's miniscule chance of success. You and your Heartland buddies were gonna claim he looked weak even if he nuked Damascus unilaterally, so he really doesn't give a shit that you say he looked weak.
The thing about limited government like that is that everyone else also gets that kind of responsive government. For example if Counties are given 100% control of their air quality regulations this is great for people who live upwind of the neighbors because they can now pollute and the people responsible for enforcing anti-pollution rules have no reason to stop them. OTOH if you're downwind you're fucked because the same applies to the County next door. Spend a week in the Detroit area and you'll find lots of instances where one locality is intentionally manipulating the law to hurt other localities, and everyone wins re-election by a landslide.
Moreover as an American you have to be aware that historically almost all oppression in the US is the result of low levels of government. Even where the Feds act as the trigger-man (ie: the Indians, Japanese internment) the local government would have been a lot worse. In many areas (ie: segregation, slavery) the states not only thought of the Evil Policy, and implemented it; they also defended it on the basis that the federal government was Limited from protecting black people from states. In extreme cases white minorities managed to flip to the majority by the simple expediant of refusing to prosecute KKK terrorism, and if the Feds even thought of asking questions referred to the Posse Comitatus Act.
I believe the compromise candidate is John Boehner. The problem dealing with the GOP in DC today is that almost all of them see any compromise with Obama as flawed. If Obama's agreeing to it a) it must be a bad idea, or b) you probably could have gotten more out of deal. Since the thing they hate most about Obama is that he managed to pass universal healthcare they aren't gonna give up a chance to stop that shit without fighting so hard even the most hardened partisan tells them to back off. And this is pretty much everybody in the entire GOP.
If Boehner got the 20 liberalest Republicans to vote for him, and managed to get Pelosi to support him, that could work; and it has actualy happened at the state level several times. But Boehner would be a fool to agree to that because traditionally minority-party Speakers don't have much power and then when the next election happens (in about 13 months for US House) everyone votes against them.
The thing you've got to keep in mind is they aren't businesses maximizing profit. They're ideologues representing other ideologues. If you banned donations completely (which would be unconstitutional) they'd still fight battles like this because slightly more then half of them think their job is to represent the people who got creamed in the Presidential election. The donations are basically a way for them to tell that the people they think of as their bosses (ie: the Tea Party) are happy with them.
The solution that makes the most sense would be to move towards a more Parliamentary system, whereby if the President and Congress disagree on policy strongly there are new elections until the people select a Congress AND a President that don't hate each-other. There's a reason that every time we set up one of our lttle puppets (Japan, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) we try to make it Parliamentary.
The trick is convincing people brought up on the idea that Checks and Balances = freedom to give up their Checks and Balances, agree to a system where the President appoints some of Congress, etc.
The guys who tried to turn the entire Federal budget into a political pissing match over ObamaCare? I will remind you, not only has it been blessed as Constitutional by the Supreme Court, it's namesake was just re-elected, and the controversy is over a bit of it (the individual mandate) that has nothing to do with the budget.
Or the guy who said "OK. If you want to play the asshole-dick-measuring-contest-game we can play that game. Romney was twice the politician you losers are."
That causes a major practical problem and a major political problem. The practical problem is that lots of people would freak out. You'd have a lot of phone calls to lines that aren't allowed to pick up because they aren't essential, which would probably lead to even more panicked phone calls to lines that ARE essential (ie: the military, 911) explaining that no, the Census has just shut it's website down for the duration of the dispute, it isn't part of some evil plan to lock conservatives up. IMO a major reason FEMA's main page is still up is that they've been named in a lot of these "Conservative Concentration Camp" theories.
This leads directly to the political problem: it looks like it's intended to cause a ridiculous amount of drama, which means if you 404-error major bits of the government then Obama looks bad on TV, which means the EPA Administrator fires you. Much better to have a fairly secure static HTML page and leave it at that,
1) Who says the servers aren't down? You can have one server host a whole lot of static pages from as many domains as you like for very little cost.
2) Even if they didn't shut the main webpage servers down they shut down a lot of servers. Before shutdown the Census.gov FactFinder gave you a lot of data, which it had to present in very sophisticated formats. Now it serves a single HTML page. There are researchers who spent 8 hours a day on that site, taxing the servers, but now show up at 9 AM hit the bookmark, and goof off on YouTube for 8 hours because they can't do anything.
If Mount Vernon is privately owned and operated then the private owners and operators are the people you should complain to. They could have found alternate parking.
As for monument and foreign cemetery maintenance, I have a question for you: If you were on a jury, and the case was somebody who walked up to one of these monuments, cut himself on a broken bottle, was then attack by a rat, the injury gets infected, and subsequently paid $150k in medical bills, how much would you say the Federal government owes him?
Under Michigan law it would be $450k plus triple his lost wages. It's their site, they are responsible for it's maintenance. Not making it clear that the site was no longer maintained by putting up a fence would mean he gets actual damages. Because putting up a fence is trivial, and the Feds clearly knew maintenance was necessary (or they would not have been doing it in the first place) the damages are tripled.
Now if there's a fence, the poor injured person has no recourse because the Feds clearly told him not to come there.
The last Republican Speaker who was respected by the entire party was probably Gingrich, and they fired him. Hastert was even weaker then Boehner. Under Hastert the Majority Leader ran everything.
What seems to happen is that the base of the GOP is very ideological, but it knows it sometimes it can't win it's ideological fights. Therefore they put a reliable ideologue in as Majority Leader, but leave the official top job of Speaker to a deal-maker. When they decide their political best interests are served by a deal they let the Speaker deal. When they decide fighting is best they ignore the Speaker and Majority Leader looks like the most powerful person in the House.
Boehner knows that, so doesn't get ahead of his troops in his deal-making, very often, which is why he gets quoted in articles about the House more then his ideological Majority Leader (Cantor).
Food stamps run out in three weeks. Medicaid in DC has been shut down. Most military contractors aren't being paid, even if they're delivering goods. Social Security and Medicare are fine, but that's because they have their own budget not because they've been "deemed essential." So of the top three expense of the government one has been severely curtailed (Defense), Health has been affected (if only in DC), and Social Security alone remains unaffected. Lesser bills (like those pesky food stamps) have varying amounts of money in the budget, which will probably run out very soon.
For the monuments keep in mind that a) none of these guards is being paid, and b) basic maintenance cannot be done under a shutdown. Some idiot breaks a bottle and doesn't clean up after himself? The janitor's gone. If the Feds don't make it clear that they aren't maintaining these places they will be legally liable for the idiot who cuts himself on that bottle. Which means they have to have a fence up. That is actually an essential government service. They don't *have* to have cops out patrolling, but it's not like the cops have other jobs to go to when they ain't being paid by the Feds. They show up for work despite the shutdown and a) their boss loves them, and b) they might get paid eventually as part of the shutdown-ending deal.
I don't know if you noticed but their "right" to visit a government facility was not denied. They were inconvenienced, because they had to go through this woman and take down a fence, but they got there.
OTOH millions of people will not be able to eat next month because food stamps will run out of money. That's callous, and you don't seem to care.
As for closing the park, who do you think mows the grass? Who do you think cleans up when some drunk breaks a bottle? How quick would the government be sued if some little kid got into a non-maintained park and cut himself on the bottle? Hows the kid supposed to know there's no maintenance if you don''t have a big old fence up?
Keep in mind that your Congressman has more people in his district then live in any city in the country smaller then Boston (640k Bostonians vs. a congressional district of 750k). As an individual he simply does not have the time to deal with all the email he gets. Even most State Senators and State Reps (typical district: 100k) usually have staff answering emails.
Therefore the person who'd respond to you is probably some staffer, and the staffer isn't allowed to respond because he's not being paid.
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done. For the last 20 or 30 years we've been hammered with a 'Gov't is Evil' message. Never mind that it was the Federal Gov't that did away with Child Labor, Slavery and Segregation, created Superfund sites for cleanup of the messes made by private business and made them stop poisoning ground water.
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
I agree with this post. And that's why the shutdown will last a few more days, probably a couple weeks.
We t5hink we're right, they think they're right. We're all convinced that a few weeks of shutdown will convince the other side to see reason. Therefore we'll try a few weeks of shutdown and hopefully somebody sees reason.
Slavery was codified by the States before there was a Federal government. Virginia, in particular, took a leading role in creating the rules that allowed slavery. Under English law there were no slaves, just Serfs, and Serfdom was a) incredibly rare, and b) a lot nicer then slavery. Under slavery you could get home from a hard days work and discover your toddler was on a boat to New Orleans to cover Mas'r's gambling debts. Under serfdom both you and your toddler were tied to a specific Estate, which meant neither could be forcibly moved out of town.
Segregation was never codified under any Federal statute. The Military was segregated, which meant lots of military regulations were racist, but Segregation as a policy was created by the states and enforced by the states.
It's not extortion to you, it's extortion to the pizza parlour owner.
Moreover they aren't threatening anybody with actual physical harm. Those WW2 vets were able to get to their memorial.
It's definitely emotional manipulation, but so is referring to something that involves no violence (ie: putting up a barrier that is easily bypassed by disabled octogenarians) as "extortion."
Non-Americans say we should cut the military all the time, and then they refuse to use their militaries for things that are clearly necessary. Many of them make a point of under-funding their militaries specifically so that nobody will ever ask them to do anything. Some of them have have sensible explanations (ie: Argentina's troubling history of militarism), but they still take it way too far (ie: the Argentines haven't replaced their Air Force since the Brits destroyed it 32 years ago).
For example a few weeks back the thing everyone was freaking out about was Syria. The Syrians were apparently a) using chemical weapons on civilians, b) conducting joint military operations with Hezbollah, and c) share a border with Israel. The alternatives were 1) Netanyahu vaporizes Damascus, and 2) somebody who cares about restricting civilian casualties bullies the Syrians into giving up one of those three things. Despite the American left's most hopeful claims, option 3) we spend millions of dollars on Syrian refugees and no foreign power intervenes simply did not exist. Congress would not have funded it, and the Israelis would not have tolerated it.
So I'd agree that in theory we could probably cut a significant proportion of military spending and not hurt the world, we clearly cannot cut it to Danish levels. I do not like that F-35 is gonna cost $1.5 Trillion, but fifth-generation fighters aren't supposed to be cheap, and if we don;'t have thousands of the damn things Syria might be able to beat us with numbers. More then a dozen carrier battle groups is probably excessive, but it's a lot easier to bully the Syria of the world if you can just order an entire modern air force to show up on their coast in two weeks.
The problem with deciding which of these things aren't vindictive/petty is that to somebody they're all vindictive and petty to somebody. It may be tea party doctrine that all Federal workers will get backpay, but that isn't the law, and your mortgage ain't gonna accept "but it's likely I'll get backpay for this a in just a few weeks." If we could agree which Federal checks were useless and which weren't we wouldn't be in this mess.
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
You got an alternative?
My problem with third parties is not with the idea in principle. When I interned in Canada's Parliament I was with the NDP, which was at the time fourth. My problem is that they consist mostly of people who have no idea how the American system of government actually functions. Jason Amash and Dennis Kucinich do not exist in Canada because their party leaders would simply refuse to sign their nomination papers, and their Riding Associations would be forced to re-run the Caucus that nominated them. If the entire Green and Libertarian parties would just shut down their party organizations and vote in party primaries they would be as influential as Canada's NDP is. But they don't bother, because that would be boring, and being the Green Party Gubenatorial candidate is not boring.
In other words the reason corporatists dominate American government is not that some goddamn Corporatist Conspiracy is destroying everything, it's that the subset of American people who actually vote in the elections that matter (party primaries) like goddamn Corporatists, and everyone else prefers goddamn Corporatists to spending five minutes at the polls for primaries.
BTW, if you want a perfect example of third party cluelessness just look at the Virginia Gubenatorial election. It's the only competitive election of the year, and the Democrats have nominated the sleaziest sleazeball in American politics. The Republicans nominated a guy who would be about right in Alabama, but is simply insane in Blueish Virginia, and happens to have some minor sleaze problems of his own. Everyone has known these were the probable candidates for years, and it was quite predictable that nobody would actually want to vote for either guy. Moreover, this Governorship is a lot more important then Virginia's population would suggest because half of Virginians live in the suburbs of DC, VA's Governor is the only public official Americans regularly refer to as "His Excellency," the only other state-wide elections this year are incredibly boring (they're in deep-blue New Jersey, and there's no question who will win), etc.
If the Greens/Libertarians/etc. had any clue about anything they'd have recruited great candidates. They'd have fundraisers in Silicon Valley so their guy would benefit. But the Greens prefer to feud about some petty issue nobody else understand to nominating anyone. The Libertarian nominee is qualified for the job of Libertarian nominee, but not qualified for the job of Governor. Moreover he's only got like $4k in the bank. He's not gonna be able to get his message out, which means nobody will want to vote for him, which means that he's not gonna break 5%. And instead of figuring out how to turn Silicon Valley Libertarians into donors Libertarians seem to be insisting that people wioll prefer voting for a guy whose never had any contact with them to voting against Sleazeball or Crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Feds don't make it clear that they aren't maintaining these places they will be legally liable for the idiot who cuts himself on that bottle
Its been said before, but you cant sue the federal government without their permission.
And when's the last time the Feds (or a state) refused to give permission to a valid lawsuit?
To an extent I sympathize with that situation. But you have to keep in mind all parties run like that. The Dems and GOP don't pay any of their committee people. The actual paid state party organization is miniscule (generally 1-2 people per million residents). The big money in politics is spent by individual campaigns, and it mostly goes to TV or independent consultants not the guy at party HQ who calls potential gubernatorial candidates.
If you're Libertarian you have to figure out a way turn an operation that would be adequate for Iowa, if it also included multiple other equally well-funded committees (like the Senate, House, and Gubernatorial Committees the big two run), into an operation that can consistently get tens of millions of votes.
And you just let a really good chance at proving you can get to 100k go by. If it was an Alaska race or something I'd understand. But your entire HQ is in DC. The major race everyone in DC has been paying attention to since Obama beat Romney is VA Governor. Half your national staff probably technically qualifies to run, and as staff at a national political party they are probably both better qualified to run, and better speakers then the guy who did run.
That's possible.
It's just as likely nobody would vote for the third parties because they aren't exactly good at coalition-building.
What's most likely is that average voters would not realize anything changed, so that third parties would still be considered spoilers. Nader in particular taught a lot of people the hard lesson that voting Green is suicide, and they ain't gonna unlearn that lesson until somebody a) implements a new voting system, and b) spend a lot of money explaining to people that the new voting system exists.
I suspect that two things will have to happen before third parties become viable. First we'll have to go to some form of proportional representation at the State Level, and second a lot of ambitious people who are actually good at politics will have to join them. Everyone who thought for a second and paid attention politics, for example, knew that the Green/Libertarian parties would never have a better chance to win a Gubernatorial election then this year in Virginia. But the Greens don't have a candidate, and the Libertarians did their traditional "guy with no political skills who showed up," so instead of having an interesting race about Virginia's future we're stuck with arguing over Sleazy McSleazeball is worse then Crazy Cooch.
Right now third parties attract a lot of people who have proven incompetent in the big leagues, and a lot of other people who are really good at convincing the faithful they are the most pious, but pretty much nobody who can convince people of anything. If you're good at that you join a big party and try to change it.
It did this at the last minute.
GOP, and especially Tea Party, resistance to Obamacare has been consistent.
And the Democrats were equally opposed to numerous Bush priorities in 2006. Yet those priorities were passed, so they didn't shut down the entire government to force (for example) a hike in taxes or an end to GitMo. I would have supported both proposals, and am partisan hackey enough that if Pelosi had actually shut down the government in 2007 on the basis that GitMo had to be fixed I probably would have backed her. But in retrospect it's a very good thing she treated the budget a s a separate issue from all these other issues.
And, for the record, while the GOP strongly opposed ObamaCare numerous times it did not link ObamaCare to shutting down the entire government until very very recently.
Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
You act as if congress has the same makeup as it did then. Elections took the guys out of power who implemented Obamacare. I understand why the Dems want to protect it, but why pretend it won't be expensive to protect? They are no longer in charge of 100% of congress, and they are going to have to pay dearly if they want to protect their pet programs. Obamacare was enacted by a law, and can be changed by law - it's not magic or special in any way. I happen to think that it replaces a terrible system. It may not be great, but repealing it without another solution is a terrible idea. Going back to our unfunded socialism is the Tea Party's plan and I oppose it.
This line of reasoning terrifies me.
The American people tend to pick a President and a House that disagree, they also have a strong tendency to create parties that strongly disagree on trivial points (ie: 35% top income tax rate vs. 39.6%; an individual mandate that 85% of the country already complies with and most of the remaining 15% would gladly comply with if they had access to the subsidies in ObamaCare). Combine that with our tendency to admire the dude on a doomed, lonely fight, and you end you end up with a recipe for the FBI being sent home every time the Congressional majority changes it's mind on how much Salmon fishing the EPA should allow.
I didn't say America as a whole had no responsibility. I said that the OP's claim that the Federal government was the source of slavery and segregation is simply false. And it is false.
One thing that is (to my knowledge) completely unique about America is that most of the time when our Federal American government oppresses someone it doesn't actually do anything. To use the OP's words, it makes a point of neither regulating nor codifying anything,. It simply lets that person's neighbors oppress him, and claims that in a free country with a Limited Federal Government states are the only entity that can (for example) stop lynch mobs.
This isn't an excuse for America's role in oppressing it's own citizens, but it is something you have to keep in mind if you care about freedom in the United States. In a country like Germany or India the states are very much creatures of the Federal government. Bavaria cannot literally enslave the majority of it's residents (as South Carolina and Alabama did prior to the Civil War) and expect the Bundesrepublik to go along with that shit. Protecting freedom in Germany mostly consists of telling the Federal Bundesrepublik level what it can't do, protecting freedom in the US involves some restricting the Feds, but it also involves a) giving the Feds clear authority to beat up on states, and b) ensuring no deals in DC (like the one that allowed segregation) restrict this authority.
Conservatives like to think that the reason blacks consistently support increases in Federal power is that blacks are delusional morons, but the simple fact if you're black a jackbooted thug from the Federal government is almost always your friend, and the friendly local cop whose just stop-and-frisked your brother is not almost always your friend.
In a two-party system approval voting is identical to plurality voting. To get what you want we'd have to amend the Constitution. Under current case-law you can't do a lot of electoral reforms because parties have a right to exist, and they have a right to pick their candidate. Their one candidate if that's what they want. And since a political party's ideology is determined by the people who show up to it's meetings those parties tend to be incredibly extremist.
Political contributions require another amendment.
Gerrymandering would help, but not as much as people think. Modern Americans choose to live by their partisan brethren, which means most American counties swing at least 20 points one way or the other, and are surrounded by counties that agree with them. The GOP actually gets a slight edge in fair maps because Democratic voters are concentrated in cities. For example lets a state is one big City, about the size of a Congressional, district, and a countryside. The state as a whole gets three districts and is 55% Democratic so three districts democratic totals should 165%. The City is probably 80% Dem, which leaves 42.5% Democrats in each rural district. This state, whose population is largely Democrats, will be represented in the House by two Republicans.
And you still haven't actually fixed the problem. Most Republicans honestly believe that they have a duty to resist Obama. As long as checks and balances exist, they have the political strength to use them, and Obama remains President, we will get BS like this shutdown.
Generally in legislation you get give-and-take. What the GOP's done is link it's demand on a proposal that was finished in 2010 to proposals necessary to run the government in 2013. It did this at the last minute.
I really don't want to live in a country where the Democrats routinely stop the entire government because they lost a vote three and a half years ago. Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
Did you mean to imply there's some guy in DC picking drone targets at random? Or that drone warfare has substantially more civilian casualties then any other form of warfare? Because I can assure you neither of these is the case. Yeah people screw up and hit targets they shouldn't. Sometimes the only way to hit a target is to hit someone who isn't a target. But drones allow you to follow a target quite closely for weeks and months, which means you have a very good idea that a) the person you're following is you're actual target, b) the time to push the button is at exactly 7:52 AM on Sunday because the kids will be out playing soccer, his wife will be down at the laundromat, etc., and c) if the kid skips soccer you can scrap the mission.
Regardless, I didn't say everything the US Military has ever done is necessary for the world as a whole. I said there are things that need to be done, and only the US can do, largely because nobody else spends that much on their troops.
As for American leadership, I really don't care how it looks. Obama doesn't care how it looks. What he cares about is that a) apparently Putin thought he'd pull the trigger because Putin agreed to the deal, and b) he got chemical weapons away from Hezbollah without firing a shot. This means the Israelis don't have to fire a shot and John Kerry's recent attempt to revive Oslo retains it's miniscule chance of success. You and your Heartland buddies were gonna claim he looked weak even if he nuked Damascus unilaterally, so he really doesn't give a shit that you say he looked weak.
The thing about limited government like that is that everyone else also gets that kind of responsive government. For example if Counties are given 100% control of their air quality regulations this is great for people who live upwind of the neighbors because they can now pollute and the people responsible for enforcing anti-pollution rules have no reason to stop them. OTOH if you're downwind you're fucked because the same applies to the County next door. Spend a week in the Detroit area and you'll find lots of instances where one locality is intentionally manipulating the law to hurt other localities, and everyone wins re-election by a landslide.
Moreover as an American you have to be aware that historically almost all oppression in the US is the result of low levels of government. Even where the Feds act as the trigger-man (ie: the Indians, Japanese internment) the local government would have been a lot worse. In many areas (ie: segregation, slavery) the states not only thought of the Evil Policy, and implemented it; they also defended it on the basis that the federal government was Limited from protecting black people from states. In extreme cases white minorities managed to flip to the majority by the simple expediant of refusing to prosecute KKK terrorism, and if the Feds even thought of asking questions referred to the Posse Comitatus Act.
I believe the compromise candidate is John Boehner. The problem dealing with the GOP in DC today is that almost all of them see any compromise with Obama as flawed. If Obama's agreeing to it a) it must be a bad idea, or b) you probably could have gotten more out of deal. Since the thing they hate most about Obama is that he managed to pass universal healthcare they aren't gonna give up a chance to stop that shit without fighting so hard even the most hardened partisan tells them to back off. And this is pretty much everybody in the entire GOP.
If Boehner got the 20 liberalest Republicans to vote for him, and managed to get Pelosi to support him, that could work; and it has actualy happened at the state level several times. But Boehner would be a fool to agree to that because traditionally minority-party Speakers don't have much power and then when the next election happens (in about 13 months for US House) everyone votes against them.
The thing you've got to keep in mind is they aren't businesses maximizing profit. They're ideologues representing other ideologues. If you banned donations completely (which would be unconstitutional) they'd still fight battles like this because slightly more then half of them think their job is to represent the people who got creamed in the Presidential election. The donations are basically a way for them to tell that the people they think of as their bosses (ie: the Tea Party) are happy with them.
The solution that makes the most sense would be to move towards a more Parliamentary system, whereby if the President and Congress disagree on policy strongly there are new elections until the people select a Congress AND a President that don't hate each-other. There's a reason that every time we set up one of our lttle puppets (Japan, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) we try to make it Parliamentary.
The trick is convincing people brought up on the idea that Checks and Balances = freedom to give up their Checks and Balances, agree to a system where the President appoints some of Congress, etc.
Enough of who?
The guys who tried to turn the entire Federal budget into a political pissing match over ObamaCare? I will remind you, not only has it been blessed as Constitutional by the Supreme Court, it's namesake was just re-elected, and the controversy is over a bit of it (the individual mandate) that has nothing to do with the budget.
Or the guy who said "OK. If you want to play the asshole-dick-measuring-contest-game we can play that game. Romney was twice the politician you losers are."
And leave a 404 error?
That causes a major practical problem and a major political problem. The practical problem is that lots of people would freak out. You'd have a lot of phone calls to lines that aren't allowed to pick up because they aren't essential, which would probably lead to even more panicked phone calls to lines that ARE essential (ie: the military, 911) explaining that no, the Census has just shut it's website down for the duration of the dispute, it isn't part of some evil plan to lock conservatives up. IMO a major reason FEMA's main page is still up is that they've been named in a lot of these "Conservative Concentration Camp" theories.
This leads directly to the political problem: it looks like it's intended to cause a ridiculous amount of drama, which means if you 404-error major bits of the government then Obama looks bad on TV, which means the EPA Administrator fires you. Much better to have a fairly secure static HTML page and leave it at that,
1) Who says the servers aren't down? You can have one server host a whole lot of static pages from as many domains as you like for very little cost.
2) Even if they didn't shut the main webpage servers down they shut down a lot of servers. Before shutdown the Census.gov FactFinder gave you a lot of data, which it had to present in very sophisticated formats. Now it serves a single HTML page. There are researchers who spent 8 hours a day on that site, taxing the servers, but now show up at 9 AM hit the bookmark, and goof off on YouTube for 8 hours because they can't do anything.
If Mount Vernon is privately owned and operated then the private owners and operators are the people you should complain to. They could have found alternate parking.
As for monument and foreign cemetery maintenance, I have a question for you:
If you were on a jury, and the case was somebody who walked up to one of these monuments, cut himself on a broken bottle, was then attack by a rat, the injury gets infected, and subsequently paid $150k in medical bills, how much would you say the Federal government owes him?
Under Michigan law it would be $450k plus triple his lost wages. It's their site, they are responsible for it's maintenance. Not making it clear that the site was no longer maintained by putting up a fence would mean he gets actual damages. Because putting up a fence is trivial, and the Feds clearly knew maintenance was necessary (or they would not have been doing it in the first place) the damages are tripled.
Now if there's a fence, the poor injured person has no recourse because the Feds clearly told him not to come there.
The last Republican Speaker who was respected by the entire party was probably Gingrich, and they fired him. Hastert was even weaker then Boehner. Under Hastert the Majority Leader ran everything.
What seems to happen is that the base of the GOP is very ideological, but it knows it sometimes it can't win it's ideological fights. Therefore they put a reliable ideologue in as Majority Leader, but leave the official top job of Speaker to a deal-maker. When they decide their political best interests are served by a deal they let the Speaker deal. When they decide fighting is best they ignore the Speaker and Majority Leader looks like the most powerful person in the House.
Boehner knows that, so doesn't get ahead of his troops in his deal-making, very often, which is why he gets quoted in articles about the House more then his ideological Majority Leader (Cantor).
Food stamps run out in three weeks. Medicaid in DC has been shut down. Most military contractors aren't being paid, even if they're delivering goods. Social Security and Medicare are fine, but that's because they have their own budget not because they've been "deemed essential." So of the top three expense of the government one has been severely curtailed (Defense), Health has been affected (if only in DC), and Social Security alone remains unaffected. Lesser bills (like those pesky food stamps) have varying amounts of money in the budget, which will probably run out very soon.
For the monuments keep in mind that a) none of these guards is being paid, and b) basic maintenance cannot be done under a shutdown. Some idiot breaks a bottle and doesn't clean up after himself? The janitor's gone. If the Feds don't make it clear that they aren't maintaining these places they will be legally liable for the idiot who cuts himself on that bottle. Which means they have to have a fence up. That is actually an essential government service. They don't *have* to have cops out patrolling, but it's not like the cops have other jobs to go to when they ain't being paid by the Feds. They show up for work despite the shutdown and a) their boss loves them, and b) they might get paid eventually as part of the shutdown-ending deal.
Dude,
I don't know if you noticed but their "right" to visit a government facility was not denied. They were inconvenienced, because they had to go through this woman and take down a fence, but they got there.
OTOH millions of people will not be able to eat next month because food stamps will run out of money. That's callous, and you don't seem to care.
As for closing the park, who do you think mows the grass? Who do you think cleans up when some drunk breaks a bottle? How quick would the government be sued if some little kid got into a non-maintained park and cut himself on the bottle? Hows the kid supposed to know there's no maintenance if you don''t have a big old fence up?
Keep in mind that your Congressman has more people in his district then live in any city in the country smaller then Boston (640k Bostonians vs. a congressional district of 750k). As an individual he simply does not have the time to deal with all the email he gets. Even most State Senators and State Reps (typical district: 100k) usually have staff answering emails.
Therefore the person who'd respond to you is probably some staffer, and the staffer isn't allowed to respond because he's not being paid.
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done. For the last 20 or 30 years we've been hammered with a 'Gov't is Evil' message. Never mind that it was the Federal Gov't that did away with Child Labor, Slavery and Segregation, created Superfund sites for cleanup of the messes made by private business and made them stop poisoning ground water.
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
I agree with this post. And that's why the shutdown will last a few more days, probably a couple weeks.
We t5hink we're right, they think they're right. We're all convinced that a few weeks of shutdown will convince the other side to see reason. Therefore we'll try a few weeks of shutdown and hopefully somebody sees reason.
BS. Complete and utter twaddle.
Slavery was codified by the States before there was a Federal government. Virginia, in particular, took a leading role in creating the rules that allowed slavery. Under English law there were no slaves, just Serfs, and Serfdom was a) incredibly rare, and b) a lot nicer then slavery. Under slavery you could get home from a hard days work and discover your toddler was on a boat to New Orleans to cover Mas'r's gambling debts. Under serfdom both you and your toddler were tied to a specific Estate, which meant neither could be forcibly moved out of town.
Segregation was never codified under any Federal statute. The Military was segregated, which meant lots of military regulations were racist, but Segregation as a policy was created by the states and enforced by the states.
It's not extortion to you, it's extortion to the pizza parlour owner.
Moreover they aren't threatening anybody with actual physical harm. Those WW2 vets were able to get to their memorial.
It's definitely emotional manipulation, but so is referring to something that involves no violence (ie: putting up a barrier that is easily bypassed by disabled octogenarians) as "extortion."
Non-Americans say we should cut the military all the time, and then they refuse to use their militaries for things that are clearly necessary. Many of them make a point of under-funding their militaries specifically so that nobody will ever ask them to do anything. Some of them have have sensible explanations (ie: Argentina's troubling history of militarism), but they still take it way too far (ie: the Argentines haven't replaced their Air Force since the Brits destroyed it 32 years ago).
For example a few weeks back the thing everyone was freaking out about was Syria. The Syrians were apparently a) using chemical weapons on civilians, b) conducting joint military operations with Hezbollah, and c) share a border with Israel. The alternatives were 1) Netanyahu vaporizes Damascus, and 2) somebody who cares about restricting civilian casualties bullies the Syrians into giving up one of those three things. Despite the American left's most hopeful claims, option 3) we spend millions of dollars on Syrian refugees and no foreign power intervenes simply did not exist. Congress would not have funded it, and the Israelis would not have tolerated it.
So I'd agree that in theory we could probably cut a significant proportion of military spending and not hurt the world, we clearly cannot cut it to Danish levels. I do not like that F-35 is gonna cost $1.5 Trillion, but fifth-generation fighters aren't supposed to be cheap, and if we don;'t have thousands of the damn things Syria might be able to beat us with numbers. More then a dozen carrier battle groups is probably excessive, but it's a lot easier to bully the Syria of the world if you can just order an entire modern air force to show up on their coast in two weeks.
The problem with deciding which of these things aren't vindictive/petty is that to somebody they're all vindictive and petty to somebody. It may be tea party doctrine that all Federal workers will get backpay, but that isn't the law, and your mortgage ain't gonna accept "but it's likely I'll get backpay for this a in just a few weeks." If we could agree which Federal checks were useless and which weren't we wouldn't be in this mess.
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
You got an alternative?
My problem with third parties is not with the idea in principle. When I interned in Canada's Parliament I was with the NDP, which was at the time fourth. My problem is that they consist mostly of people who have no idea how the American system of government actually functions. Jason Amash and Dennis Kucinich do not exist in Canada because their party leaders would simply refuse to sign their nomination papers, and their Riding Associations would be forced to re-run the Caucus that nominated them. If the entire Green and Libertarian parties would just shut down their party organizations and vote in party primaries they would be as influential as Canada's NDP is. But they don't bother, because that would be boring, and being the Green Party Gubenatorial candidate is not boring.
In other words the reason corporatists dominate American government is not that some goddamn Corporatist Conspiracy is destroying everything, it's that the subset of American people who actually vote in the elections that matter (party primaries) like goddamn Corporatists, and everyone else prefers goddamn Corporatists to spending five minutes at the polls for primaries.
BTW, if you want a perfect example of third party cluelessness just look at the Virginia Gubenatorial election. It's the only competitive election of the year, and the Democrats have nominated the sleaziest sleazeball in American politics. The Republicans nominated a guy who would be about right in Alabama, but is simply insane in Blueish Virginia, and happens to have some minor sleaze problems of his own. Everyone has known these were the probable candidates for years, and it was quite predictable that nobody would actually want to vote for either guy. Moreover, this Governorship is a lot more important then Virginia's population would suggest because half of Virginians live in the suburbs of DC, VA's Governor is the only public official Americans regularly refer to as "His Excellency," the only other state-wide elections this year are incredibly boring (they're in deep-blue New Jersey, and there's no question who will win), etc.
If the Greens/Libertarians/etc. had any clue about anything they'd have recruited great candidates. They'd have fundraisers in Silicon Valley so their guy would benefit. But the Greens prefer to feud about some petty issue nobody else understand to nominating anyone. The Libertarian nominee is qualified for the job of Libertarian nominee, but not qualified for the job of Governor. Moreover he's only got like $4k in the bank. He's not gonna be able to get his message out, which means nobody will want to vote for him, which means that he's not gonna break 5%. And instead of figuring out how to turn Silicon Valley Libertarians into donors Libertarians seem to be insisting that people wioll prefer voting for a guy whose never had any contact with them to voting against Sleazeball or Crazy.