Tort reform has actually been passed in every state. Frequently more then once. It's an idea that sounds great, but as long as it's possible to spend millions on medical treatment from a single injury (for example: if you're 15, and you need a full-time nurse for life), it doesn't actually do much. Either you have to let that 15-year-old kid die when his maximum $50k settlement runs out, or you have to allow him to win his $3 Million. And if he can win $3 Million the benefits of tort reform do not exist.
Student loans pay for college. Teacher's unions don't represent college profs. So there's monetary profit in a teacher's union doing that. There's ideological profit (unions are left-wing, and the left-wing likes education spending), but no monetary profit.
You're really getting causality backwards. If I'm an amoral jackass selling my vote to the highest bidder I'll lose because I'll get a 50% rating from everyone. Some liberal will outflank me to my left, some conservative will outflank me to the right, and unless I can tell a compelling story tying all my votes to deeply held personal beliefs the center will figure me out. Centrists hate amoral jackasses. If I'm an amoral jackass who blindly totes the local party line I'll get lots of money from the supporters of the local party (if I'm in a Democratic are that would be teacher's unions and lawyers, a GOP area would have the NRA and Chamber), it'll look like those groups are buying my vote, but they're not. They're supporting their team. They probably know I'm an amoral jackass, but I'm their amoral jackass, so they have to support me or they'll the seat to The Other Party.
One solution would be to place a cap on the donations that one company of individual could make, but then you'd soon see dodgy accounting being used to work around it - things like companies giving a few thousand employees 'bonuses' on the implicit understanding they must donate to a certain candidate, or creating lots of semi-independent front companies who can each make the maximum donation.
You do realize that this is what John Edwards was charged with? A law firm apparently gave it's employees money on condition that much of it end up with Edwards' campaign.
So contrary to Slashdot theory this system is entirely possible to implement in the real world. the trouble is the Courts have ruled that donation limit infringes speech rights, so you also have the right to donate to a SuperPAC, which has no donation limits (or, in some cases, reporting requirements), but cannot take advantage of cheap candidate advertising or co-ordinate with campaigns.
These guys got financial support because they were pro-NSA from 2010-2012. Nobody should be surprised that they were still pro-NSA in 2013. It's not like you can send a Congressman $50k and buy his vote. He'll take your $50k, vote his heart, and if he voted against you he'll use your money to buy an ad trumpeting how uncorrupt he is.
In the US you can't actually get large sums from a tobacco firm. You can get $5k. If they have a PAC you can get another $5k. Per PAC. The reason these NSA guys are up to the $40k range isn't that NSASpySoft cut a $40k check, it's that people working for NSASpySoft cut checks adding up to $40k. The pro-NSA guys got basically a month's fundraising from these folks, so it's not like anybody is worried about losing his next election bid if he pisses the NSA. They're worried that voting against the NSA would look weak on terror, which would piss of a certain segment of voters.
SuperPACs complicate things because their donations are unlimited, but a) they can't co-ordinate with a candidate, b) they tend to be run by ideologues who don't understand how they sound to normal people, and c) they get charged commercial rates for ads (candidates get the lowest rate charged). So SuperPAC money didn't have much practical effect on last cycle's elections. They might fix that in 2014, but who knows.
These guys are bit closer to zealous nut then professionals. Last time I checked they'd only managed to get both houses to agree to 13 bills. Since they all claim to be convinced the Nation Is In Peril, it strikes me that pros should probably be passing more then one proposal every three weeks. They aren't likely to pass a budget, or a debt ceiling hike without extreme drama. I will be surprised if Federal employees get all their scheduled paychecks on time this year, and won't be stunned if the military gets caught in the gears for once. And nobody in the House seems to mind because they want ot be known as they guy who opposed Obama so strongly that veterans got screwed.
Keep in mind that in most cases underhanded activity is necessary to get something through Congress. Obamacare involved both the "Louisiana Purchase," and a "Cornhusker Kickback." Simply put there're so many veto points that if less then 90% of the country thinks something is a good idea it ain't happening, and when's the last time you heard of a major issue where 90% of the country agreed?
Term limits don't help. The reason the current Congress is dysfunctional is that most of it's guys got elected in the past six years, and they don't have any experience in the herculean task of getting Texas and California to agree. They honestly think that getting nothing done is better for their political futures then reforming the immigration system and passing a budget because all their political experience is from the last three elections, and in those elections a lot more people lost because they didn't suck up to the base enough then lost because they sucked up too much.
They also increase corruption exponentially. For example in the early 90s Michigan passed term limits. In 2001 two Senate terms had passed, so the entire Senate was term-limited. Their political careers were over. So they got their buddies on the compensation commission to recommend a 36% pay increase, and refused to bring it to the Senate floor. At the time pay raises had to be voted down by both houses to not take effect, and all pre-term limits Senators were on a pension scheme where your benefit is based on your last earnings, so essentially these wily old goats got themselves a huge raise for life and they didn't have to vote for it. Term Limits mean your legislators are exactly smart enough to really screw you over, but have no reason to not screw you.
Another example: let's say you're a mediocre Representative. Due to term limits you can't stay a Representative. But you're mediocre, so you ain't gonna be a Senator. Some lobbyist comes through and tells you about all this pork-barrel spending he is supporting, and (incidentally) his firm is seriously considering hiring a guy with your exact resume to a six-figure job the month you get termed-out.
Hell, let's say you're a first-term guy because the previous guy got term-limited. The President has an idea that annoys a powerful group in your district. Most of your voters have barely heard of you, but they have heard of (and respect) the UAW/NRA/whoever. You think the President's idea is great. Do you have the balls to fight the UAW/NRA/whoever, and how do you win? If you're John Dingell it's easy. People voted for you, because they like you. If you're the new guy who got elected because he was the one spewing the exact UAW/NRA/whatever line it's not easy.
According to the Founders the federal government's job was to be exactly centralized enough to keep other countries out, therefore it's designed to include an intricate set of Checks and Balances that make it virtually impossible to actually do anything. Constant fundraising is an excellent additional check because it requires they talk to "the people" (aka: that set of people interested in politics, and with sufficient disposal income to donate) instead of law-making.
According to the voters Congressman are magically endowed with a super-human understanding of the intricacies of both Federal law and public policy, therefore they not only have the time to read every bill they vote on (including all bills and amendments for everything that comes before their committee), they also magically understand all it's implications without help from their staffs. They are also able to instantly process any request that comes into their office, and respond with exactly the right combination of information, humor, and grace instantaneously. Which leaves them plenty of time to hammer out budget deals on reasonable terms that don't entirely please anyone, but give everyone a little of what they want. If half of Congress wants to fire all federal employees, and the other half wants to hire thousand more; not to worry Congressman have been granted the wisdom to square the circle by some clause of the Constitution or other. The $2 Billion we spend on staffers to do all this for the MBAs and Lawyers who dominate the Congress is just wasted money and if only we got rid of it there would never be a deficit ever again, everyone could get a tax cut, and we could triple Social Security.
Back in the real world, there's no way in hell an MBA understands a law even until a staffer explains it to him with powerpoint. There's no way a lawyer understands how a law will work in the real world (as opposed to the glorified debating societies we call "courts") until a staffer explains it to him using a bizarre combination of very small words and Latin. Since the country is polarized, almost all of them are in districts where representing the district means mindlessly parroting an ideological line. In practical terms the only thing the constant fundraising actually does is force them to end their conversations with the phrase "And I need money. My staff thinks you can give $500, so make the check out to..."
I don't think Obama broke any records last year, but he still had an awful lot of money from small individual donations.
Small individual donations are actually the way all the biggest-money pols make their targets. Personal donations max out at $2,600, and both corporations and PACs are limited to $5,000. SuperPACs can spend unlimited amounts, but they are banned from actually talking to a campaign about strategy, and tend to be run by political novices; so dollar-for-dollar they have so far been extremely ineffective. The way to rake in the donations is be an extre partisan jackass. There are a lot of people out there who just want to stick it to the liberals/conservatives, and will donate $50 to the last person they saw on MSNBC/Fox comparing Boehnor/Obama to Hitler.
Technically this story precedes the SuperPAC era, but it should show you the problems with depending on a SuperPAC to bail out a campaign. Prior to one of Bush's tax cut votes Maine's Olympia Snowe was on-the-fence. So the Club for Growth ran a http://archive.bangordailynews.com/2003/04/24/snowe-ad-puzzles-viewers-experts-tax-cut-advocates-attack-moderates/>snarky ad comparing her opposition to France's cowardice in opposing the Iraq War. Problem is Maine's 23% ethnic French. It's also in independent New England, so demanding fealty to the White house isn;t exactly great political tactics.
Keep in mind that the difference between $41k from the defense industry and $18k isn't actually that big a deal to a Congressman. A Congressman whose doing it right raises the $23k difference every month. Since only 205 of them voted against the bill, as long as Civil Libertarians pony up $5 million they'll actually turn a profit.
So you've basically got it backwards. They got $41k because they were going after the tough-on-terror voters who actually like the NSA program (support goes up from 30%ish to 40%ish if you mention it's supposed to be looking for terrorists). The others got $18k because they were going after the kind of voter who hates the NSA program.
Also, keep in mind that unless you live in India all these fundraising numbers are supposed to be an order of magnitude greater then you're used to. US Congressional districts average 750,000 people, and there are only two serious candidates in each district. Which means that if Congressional candidates spend $0.50 or $1.50 trying to communicate with every individual in the district they're gonna have a $500k budget. Since they have to do this every two years they have to raise $250k a year. Most countries have much smaller districts (both Canada and the UK are about 100k), more parties (and thus more candidates), so spending per voter per election is about the same for a lower house candidate in any industrialized country.
What's different about the US is that a) elections happen every two years (most countries it's four, altho the Aussies have House elected every other year), and b) we also have Senate races and a Presidential race all going on at the same time.
The Defense Industry lobbyists were smart enough to know which candidates actually liked them, therefore they gave twice the money to those candidates. It's almost like the articles is saying they actually ask candidates what they think BEFORE they cut a bunch of checks.
If you look at the actual numbers the ridiculousness of the "campaign contributions as bribes" theory gets even clearer. A House race costs at least $500k. In extreme cases (ie: Bachman) they cost millions. That's $700 a day for a cheap race. You'd rather have $40k from defense contractors then $18k, but the difference is only 32 days of fundraising for the guy with the cheap $500k race. Somebody like Bachman brings in $22k in under a week. Note that by international standards $500k is a really cheap election for the 750,000-person districts we have. Canadian pols spend in the $50k-$100k range, but a) there are generally three serious candidates in every riding so that works out to $150k-$300k per riding, and each riding only has 100,000 people in it.
In other words if you're a Congressman you pick a side. If you pick the anti-NSA side you get geek donations, grassroots buzz from Civil Libertarians, and a little defense industry cash (Honeywell et al. want to maintain a relationship with you, so you do get that $18k). If you pick the pro-NSA-side you get to be tough on bad guys on TV, and you get a little more defense industry cash. You do not change a side just because somebody offers you a lot of money, because that would look terrible on TV ("He's an EVIL FLIP-FLOPPER"), the new voters you were appealing to wouldn't actually vote for you because they wouldn't trust you, and the ones you stabbed in the back are gonna hate your guts.
Since the GOP won the last go-round tough-on-bad-guys got more votes then Civil Libertarians.
Keep in mind that a) "not pursuing" is a vast improvement over pursuing, because people tend to get killed when Bulgaria pursues the idea that that Dobruja does not belong in Romania, and b) the territorial disputes you mention cover a tiny fraction of Europe's landmass.
Prior to WW2 the Hungarians, for example, really wanted the entirety of the Hungarian bit of Austria-Hungary to be put back in Hungary. They wanted almost all of Croatia, 1/4 or so of Romania, something like half of Serbia's land area, and a good third of Slovakia. The Romanians had territorial disputes with two of their other neighbors, which means they were seriously considering war with three of the six countries on their borders every damn day. If you add up the Tyrol, various sections of Turkey that the Greeks wanted, the most of Poland that various non-Polish ethnic groups/nations wanted, the German bits of Schleswig-Holstein, all of Belgium and Switzerland (both survived the 19th mostly because nobody wanted to fight another war over where the borders of France ended, so letting two non-ethnic nation states take up a good chunk of the French border was a brilliant idea), Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland etc. you've got a huge chunk of Europe.
I believe you may need a grammar lesson. "Annex" means formal border-change. The US is not trying to make Honduras or Venezuela the 51st state.
China is trying to make several islands controlled by non-Chinese nations Chinese territory.
More to the point: who gives a shit? Just because the US is wrong in one area of the world, that does not imply that everyone who disagrees with us is always right. Most importantly, the fact that we bully (or attempt to bully, I don't know if you noticed but it hasn;t worked since the 90s) Latin America does not mean the Filipinoes deserve to be bullied just because they hate us less then Peru does.
One of the major achievements of the post-WW2 New World Order was that it got rid of almost all territorial disputes. Before WW2 everybody in Europe had claims on most of their neighbors, which made for an extremely unstable military situation. Nowadays almost nobody has claims on anybody's continental territory, which makes for a lot less international warfare. The major exceptions are Israel/Palestine, and Kashmir.
There are still plenty of maritime disputes, including islands, but it's a lot better then 1932.
Granted, a guy listed as "phone expert" on Chinese media isn't exactly conclusive, but given that China actually had fake Apple stores for awhile I would not be surprised if some idiot who didn't know what he was doing made deadly chargers and slapped an Apple logo on them.
OTOH iPhone 4 has been out for three years. And it didn't kill anyone until Ma Ailun.
I would trust a charger from almost any company that puts it name on said charger. It might not be the exact specs that are perfect for my electronics, but it won't kill me. If it did that there's be litigation, and publicity, and the company would go kaput.
The problem with a fake Samsung, or Apple, or whatever charger is that it's probably from somebody who doesn't know how to make a safe charger (or they'd make their money under-cutting Apple/Samsung/etc. in their own name), and it's definitely from somebody who doesn't care whether the charger is safe because the cops aren't supposed to be able to figure out who actually made the damn thing.
Fake AC Adapter is the least unlikely explanation. It only takes one idiot (and he doesn't have to be particularly idiotic), the others are incredibly unlikely, or take multiple idiots.
First the incredibly unlikely. The iPhone 4 has been out for almost exactly three years (first units shipped July 24, 2010). By now there have to be a 100 million of the damn things floating around. If they were dangerous we'd have dozens and dozens of dead Apple fans. It's possible Apple re-designed their AC Adapters really recently, but if that were the case somebody involved in the story would have mentioned it.
Second, a multiple idiots scenario. First an idiot at FoxConn screws up and manufactures a batch of AC Adapters with defective safety equipment. Second a bigger idiot at FoxConn decides to make little on the side by selling deadly AC Adapters cheap. Since Apple can;t continue to do business with people who endanger it's customers this guy is risking company to make a minuscule amount of money, which makes him quite possibly the biggest idiot in the history of human-kind.
Third, the one-idiot scenario. One idiot makes shitty, unsafe AC Adapters. People aren't suicidal, so they don't buy them. He is stupid, so he doesn't think the problem is he sucks at his job, he thinks the problem is people don't trust him enough. So he slaps the Apple logo on the next batch. Given that China gave us counterfeit Apple Stors I;d be stunned if some fast-talking hustler hadn't decided to make cheap AC Adapters he could sell for genuine Apple prices to yokels.
As for the difficulty of finding the damn things, it really depends on a) how hard the Chinese look, and b) how good the counterfeiter is. If the Communist party decrees that every iPhone AC Adapter in the country will be taken to the County courthouse where an electrical engineer will test with his voltmeter, then they'll all be found within a matter of weeks. This is China, it is run by actual Totalitarians, if they decide to crush the dumbass who made this particular AC Adapter he will be crushed. Period. If the counterfeiters screwed up the font or something it's possible they won't need to do that to catch all the bad AC Adapters. Counterfeiting well enough that customers at a bazaar think it;s genuine until they get it home isn't hard, counterfeiting well enough so those customers can;t figure it out even after the local news anchor has told them where you screwed OTOH...
I've been to Scandinavia. I visited cousins in Gothenburg in the late 90s.
I will agree the Scandinavian states are far lily-white, are a lot less white then they used to be, and are much more welcoming of diversity and new immigrants then damn near anybody else. However, that does not mean they are not currently incredibly white compared to most of the world. They're much more diverse (and better at dealing with diversity) then much of Europe, but they ain't blacker then Nigeria or Browner then the Saudis.
If you have a strong secular tradition, you don't freak out when some chick shows up wearing a headscarf. Hell, you don't ban yamakas either. You don't respond to the legalization of gay marriage with massive demonstrations and record low approval ratings for the president.
What you guys actually have is a "we're at school, we'll pretend we're not all Catholic," tradition.
I didn't say that. I did say that when faced with the choice of an Anglophile government in Rwanda or a genocidal government, the French chose the murderers.
To this day most French press coverage of the incidents focuses on alleged false accusations against specific Rwandans, not that Chirac sent in French troops to protect a Rwandan government that clearly murdered hundreds of thousands. They then spent a decade insisting the woman who probably planned it was innocent, and when finally they arrested her French Courts cleared her. According to the French justice system hundreds of thousands of people hacked themselves to death because Lady Genocide never wrote anything down.
I believe the US has used it's power over the internet to seize a bunch of online gambling sites, some bittorrent sites, screwing with Antigua, etc. It's a lot less US Government action then I'd expect knowing the US Government, which implies somebody is trying to be very honorable, but it has happened.
The problem with turning this kind of thing over to a committee (aka: the UN) is that depending on the culture of the committee it could mean everybody gets everything they want, or nobody gets anything they want. If it's the latter it's good for internet freedom because Antigua can go back to gambling. If it's the former the Dalai Lahma can't have a website.
I suspect the problem is that everyone uses the US DNS standard, and the US doesn't abuse the standard much, so to switch over to something else you'd have to teach grandma a whole new internet, and you'd only avoid a small amount of abuse.
That's kind of the problem with figuring out who should run the internet. Clearly France/Russia/China should be kept away, because all three are even better at hypocrisy then us.
The newish democracies of Latin America/Africa/Asia don't have long track records, so we can't really judge whether they're France or Iceland in ethical terms. Eastern and Southern Europe are in same boat.
Which basically leaves us with Northern Europe.
And I'm not sure turning the internet over to the whitest, most Protestant, countries in the world, with a total population of roughly 100 million, is more democratic then just leaving it with the brownish, multi-religious, 300+ million US.
The difference is that with one corrupt country we ALWAYS have to do what that one country says, but with a group of countries (corrupt or not) stuff only gets through if enough countries vote for it.
Have you ever heard the term "horse-trading?"
The Islamic countries hate Jihadwatch. So does India, because people who rile up Muslims threaten the stability of India. China has this list of websites that it wants banned. They add Jihadwatch.
India + Islamic countries + China = majority = no freedom of speech for Chinese dissidents or assholes racist against Muslims.
Once you give people the power, it's damn nearly impossible to take it back from all of them.
Fact is, even if the UN did take over the Internet, or worse, we still have the knowledge, technology, and capability, to construct our own, new Internet, elsewhere. And simply move computers onto it. Apparently, having private networks in the home is BEYOND impossible for the average consumer.
RIP oppressive jackasses; worldwide communication is beyond your stranglehold.
Yeah, that works great for white hipsters.
For everyone else, including most of India, all of China, etc. that ain't happening.
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Tort reform has actually been passed in every state. Frequently more then once. It's an idea that sounds great, but as long as it's possible to spend millions on medical treatment from a single injury (for example: if you're 15, and you need a full-time nurse for life), it doesn't actually do much. Either you have to let that 15-year-old kid die when his maximum $50k settlement runs out, or you have to allow him to win his $3 Million. And if he can win $3 Million the benefits of tort reform do not exist.
Student loans pay for college. Teacher's unions don't represent college profs. So there's monetary profit in a teacher's union doing that. There's ideological profit (unions are left-wing, and the left-wing likes education spending), but no monetary profit.
You're really getting causality backwards. If I'm an amoral jackass selling my vote to the highest bidder I'll lose because I'll get a 50% rating from everyone. Some liberal will outflank me to my left, some conservative will outflank me to the right, and unless I can tell a compelling story tying all my votes to deeply held personal beliefs the center will figure me out. Centrists hate amoral jackasses. If I'm an amoral jackass who blindly totes the local party line I'll get lots of money from the supporters of the local party (if I'm in a Democratic are that would be teacher's unions and lawyers, a GOP area would have the NRA and Chamber), it'll look like those groups are buying my vote, but they're not. They're supporting their team. They probably know I'm an amoral jackass, but I'm their amoral jackass, so they have to support me or they'll the seat to The Other Party.
One solution would be to place a cap on the donations that one company of individual could make, but then you'd soon see dodgy accounting being used to work around it - things like companies giving a few thousand employees 'bonuses' on the implicit understanding they must donate to a certain candidate, or creating lots of semi-independent front companies who can each make the maximum donation.
You do realize that this is what John Edwards was charged with? A law firm apparently gave it's employees money on condition that much of it end up with Edwards' campaign.
So contrary to Slashdot theory this system is entirely possible to implement in the real world. the trouble is the Courts have ruled that donation limit infringes speech rights, so you also have the right to donate to a SuperPAC, which has no donation limits (or, in some cases, reporting requirements), but cannot take advantage of cheap candidate advertising or co-ordinate with campaigns.
You have things really backwards.
These guys got financial support because they were pro-NSA from 2010-2012. Nobody should be surprised that they were still pro-NSA in 2013. It's not like you can send a Congressman $50k and buy his vote. He'll take your $50k, vote his heart, and if he voted against you he'll use your money to buy an ad trumpeting how uncorrupt he is.
In the US you can't actually get large sums from a tobacco firm. You can get $5k. If they have a PAC you can get another $5k. Per PAC. The reason these NSA guys are up to the $40k range isn't that NSASpySoft cut a $40k check, it's that people working for NSASpySoft cut checks adding up to $40k. The pro-NSA guys got basically a month's fundraising from these folks, so it's not like anybody is worried about losing his next election bid if he pisses the NSA. They're worried that voting against the NSA would look weak on terror, which would piss of a certain segment of voters.
SuperPACs complicate things because their donations are unlimited, but a) they can't co-ordinate with a candidate, b) they tend to be run by ideologues who don't understand how they sound to normal people, and c) they get charged commercial rates for ads (candidates get the lowest rate charged). So SuperPAC money didn't have much practical effect on last cycle's elections. They might fix that in 2014, but who knows.
So a large, for-profit, private sector is less corrupt then the government?
I believe you need to check a dictionary for the definition of the word "corrupt."
These guys are bit closer to zealous nut then professionals. Last time I checked they'd only managed to get both houses to agree to 13 bills. Since they all claim to be convinced the Nation Is In Peril, it strikes me that pros should probably be passing more then one proposal every three weeks. They aren't likely to pass a budget, or a debt ceiling hike without extreme drama. I will be surprised if Federal employees get all their scheduled paychecks on time this year, and won't be stunned if the military gets caught in the gears for once. And nobody in the House seems to mind because they want ot be known as they guy who opposed Obama so strongly that veterans got screwed.
Keep in mind that in most cases underhanded activity is necessary to get something through Congress. Obamacare involved both the "Louisiana Purchase," and a "Cornhusker Kickback." Simply put there're so many veto points that if less then 90% of the country thinks something is a good idea it ain't happening, and when's the last time you heard of a major issue where 90% of the country agreed?
You're incredibly] naive.
Term limits don't help. The reason the current Congress is dysfunctional is that most of it's guys got elected in the past six years, and they don't have any experience in the herculean task of getting Texas and California to agree. They honestly think that getting nothing done is better for their political futures then reforming the immigration system and passing a budget because all their political experience is from the last three elections, and in those elections a lot more people lost because they didn't suck up to the base enough then lost because they sucked up too much.
They also increase corruption exponentially. For example in the early 90s Michigan passed term limits. In 2001 two Senate terms had passed, so the entire Senate was term-limited. Their political careers were over. So they got their buddies on the compensation commission to recommend a 36% pay increase, and refused to bring it to the Senate floor. At the time pay raises had to be voted down by both houses to not take effect, and all pre-term limits Senators were on a pension scheme where your benefit is based on your last earnings, so essentially these wily old goats got themselves a huge raise for life and they didn't have to vote for it. Term Limits mean your legislators are exactly smart enough to really screw you over, but have no reason to not screw you.
Another example: let's say you're a mediocre Representative. Due to term limits you can't stay a Representative. But you're mediocre, so you ain't gonna be a Senator. Some lobbyist comes through and tells you about all this pork-barrel spending he is supporting, and (incidentally) his firm is seriously considering hiring a guy with your exact resume to a six-figure job the month you get termed-out.
Hell, let's say you're a first-term guy because the previous guy got term-limited. The President has an idea that annoys a powerful group in your district. Most of your voters have barely heard of you, but they have heard of (and respect) the UAW/NRA/whoever. You think the President's idea is great. Do you have the balls to fight the UAW/NRA/whoever, and how do you win? If you're John Dingell it's easy. People voted for you, because they like you. If you're the new guy who got elected because he was the one spewing the exact UAW/NRA/whatever line it's not easy.
Depends.
According to the Founders the federal government's job was to be exactly centralized enough to keep other countries out, therefore it's designed to include an intricate set of Checks and Balances that make it virtually impossible to actually do anything. Constant fundraising is an excellent additional check because it requires they talk to "the people" (aka: that set of people interested in politics, and with sufficient disposal income to donate) instead of law-making.
According to the voters Congressman are magically endowed with a super-human understanding of the intricacies of both Federal law and public policy, therefore they not only have the time to read every bill they vote on (including all bills and amendments for everything that comes before their committee), they also magically understand all it's implications without help from their staffs. They are also able to instantly process any request that comes into their office, and respond with exactly the right combination of information, humor, and grace instantaneously. Which leaves them plenty of time to hammer out budget deals on reasonable terms that don't entirely please anyone, but give everyone a little of what they want. If half of Congress wants to fire all federal employees, and the other half wants to hire thousand more; not to worry Congressman have been granted the wisdom to square the circle by some clause of the Constitution or other. The $2 Billion we spend on staffers to do all this for the MBAs and Lawyers who dominate the Congress is just wasted money and if only we got rid of it there would never be a deficit ever again, everyone could get a tax cut, and we could triple Social Security.
Back in the real world, there's no way in hell an MBA understands a law even until a staffer explains it to him with powerpoint. There's no way a lawyer understands how a law will work in the real world (as opposed to the glorified debating societies we call "courts") until a staffer explains it to him using a bizarre combination of very small words and Latin. Since the country is polarized, almost all of them are in districts where representing the district means mindlessly parroting an ideological line. In practical terms the only thing the constant fundraising actually does is force them to end their conversations with the phrase "And I need money. My staff thinks you can give $500, so make the check out to..."
I don't think Obama broke any records last year, but he still had an awful lot of money from small individual donations.
Small individual donations are actually the way all the biggest-money pols make their targets. Personal donations max out at $2,600, and both corporations and PACs are limited to $5,000. SuperPACs can spend unlimited amounts, but they are banned from actually talking to a campaign about strategy, and tend to be run by political novices; so dollar-for-dollar they have so far been extremely ineffective. The way to rake in the donations is be an extre partisan jackass. There are a lot of people out there who just want to stick it to the liberals/conservatives, and will donate $50 to the last person they saw on MSNBC/Fox comparing Boehnor/Obama to Hitler.
Technically this story precedes the SuperPAC era, but it should show you the problems with depending on a SuperPAC to bail out a campaign. Prior to one of Bush's tax cut votes Maine's Olympia Snowe was on-the-fence. So the Club for Growth ran a http://archive.bangordailynews.com/2003/04/24/snowe-ad-puzzles-viewers-experts-tax-cut-advocates-attack-moderates/>snarky ad comparing her opposition to France's cowardice in opposing the Iraq War. Problem is Maine's 23% ethnic French. It's also in independent New England, so demanding fealty to the White house isn;t exactly great political tactics.
Keep in mind that the difference between $41k from the defense industry and $18k isn't actually that big a deal to a Congressman. A Congressman whose doing it right raises the $23k difference every month. Since only 205 of them voted against the bill, as long as Civil Libertarians pony up $5 million they'll actually turn a profit.
So you've basically got it backwards. They got $41k because they were going after the tough-on-terror voters who actually like the NSA program (support goes up from 30%ish to 40%ish if you mention it's supposed to be looking for terrorists). The others got $18k because they were going after the kind of voter who hates the NSA program.
Also, keep in mind that unless you live in India all these fundraising numbers are supposed to be an order of magnitude greater then you're used to. US Congressional districts average 750,000 people, and there are only two serious candidates in each district. Which means that if Congressional candidates spend $0.50 or $1.50 trying to communicate with every individual in the district they're gonna have a $500k budget. Since they have to do this every two years they have to raise $250k a year. Most countries have much smaller districts (both Canada and the UK are about 100k), more parties (and thus more candidates), so spending per voter per election is about the same for a lower house candidate in any industrialized country.
What's different about the US is that a) elections happen every two years (most countries it's four, altho the Aussies have House elected every other year), and b) we also have Senate races and a Presidential race all going on at the same time.
The Defense Industry lobbyists were smart enough to know which candidates actually liked them, therefore they gave twice the money to those candidates. It's almost like the articles is saying they actually ask candidates what they think BEFORE they cut a bunch of checks.
If you look at the actual numbers the ridiculousness of the "campaign contributions as bribes" theory gets even clearer. A House race costs at least $500k. In extreme cases (ie: Bachman) they cost millions. That's $700 a day for a cheap race. You'd rather have $40k from defense contractors then $18k, but the difference is only 32 days of fundraising for the guy with the cheap $500k race. Somebody like Bachman brings in $22k in under a week. Note that by international standards $500k is a really cheap election for the 750,000-person districts we have. Canadian pols spend in the $50k-$100k range, but a) there are generally three serious candidates in every riding so that works out to $150k-$300k per riding, and each riding only has 100,000 people in it.
In other words if you're a Congressman you pick a side. If you pick the anti-NSA side you get geek donations, grassroots buzz from Civil Libertarians, and a little defense industry cash (Honeywell et al. want to maintain a relationship with you, so you do get that $18k). If you pick the pro-NSA-side you get to be tough on bad guys on TV, and you get a little more defense industry cash. You do not change a side just because somebody offers you a lot of money, because that would look terrible on TV ("He's an EVIL FLIP-FLOPPER"), the new voters you were appealing to wouldn't actually vote for you because they wouldn't trust you, and the ones you stabbed in the back are gonna hate your guts.
Since the GOP won the last go-round tough-on-bad-guys got more votes then Civil Libertarians.
Keep in mind that a) "not pursuing" is a vast improvement over pursuing, because people tend to get killed when Bulgaria pursues the idea that that Dobruja does not belong in Romania, and b) the territorial disputes you mention cover a tiny fraction of Europe's landmass.
Prior to WW2 the Hungarians, for example, really wanted the entirety of the Hungarian bit of Austria-Hungary to be put back in Hungary. They wanted almost all of Croatia, 1/4 or so of Romania, something like half of Serbia's land area, and a good third of Slovakia. The Romanians had territorial disputes with two of their other neighbors, which means they were seriously considering war with three of the six countries on their borders every damn day. If you add up the Tyrol, various sections of Turkey that the Greeks wanted, the most of Poland that various non-Polish ethnic groups/nations wanted, the German bits of Schleswig-Holstein, all of Belgium and Switzerland (both survived the 19th mostly because nobody wanted to fight another war over where the borders of France ended, so letting two non-ethnic nation states take up a good chunk of the French border was a brilliant idea), Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland etc. you've got a huge chunk of Europe.
I believe you may need a grammar lesson. "Annex" means formal border-change. The US is not trying to make Honduras or Venezuela the 51st state.
China is trying to make several islands controlled by non-Chinese nations Chinese territory.
More to the point: who gives a shit? Just because the US is wrong in one area of the world, that does not imply that everyone who disagrees with us is always right. Most importantly, the fact that we bully (or attempt to bully, I don't know if you noticed but it hasn;t worked since the 90s) Latin America does not mean the Filipinoes deserve to be bullied just because they hate us less then Peru does.
One of the major achievements of the post-WW2 New World Order was that it got rid of almost all territorial disputes. Before WW2 everybody in Europe had claims on most of their neighbors, which made for an extremely unstable military situation. Nowadays almost nobody has claims on anybody's continental territory, which makes for a lot less international warfare. The major exceptions are Israel/Palestine, and Kashmir.
There are still plenty of maritime disputes, including islands, but it's a lot better then 1932.
It's not just Apple suggesting a counterfeit:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57594449-37/iphone-related-death-in-china-could-be-linked-to-fake-charger/
Granted, a guy listed as "phone expert" on Chinese media isn't exactly conclusive, but given that China actually had fake Apple stores for awhile I would not be surprised if some idiot who didn't know what he was doing made deadly chargers and slapped an Apple logo on them.
OTOH iPhone 4 has been out for three years. And it didn't kill anyone until Ma Ailun.
I would trust a charger from almost any company that puts it name on said charger. It might not be the exact specs that are perfect for my electronics, but it won't kill me. If it did that there's be litigation, and publicity, and the company would go kaput.
The problem with a fake Samsung, or Apple, or whatever charger is that it's probably from somebody who doesn't know how to make a safe charger (or they'd make their money under-cutting Apple/Samsung/etc. in their own name), and it's definitely from somebody who doesn't care whether the charger is safe because the cops aren't supposed to be able to figure out who actually made the damn thing.
At least $40.
I can find Apple charges from OtherWorld for $55, but suggested retail on all Apple laptop chargers is $80.
Fake AC Adapter is the least unlikely explanation. It only takes one idiot (and he doesn't have to be particularly idiotic), the others are incredibly unlikely, or take multiple idiots.
First the incredibly unlikely. The iPhone 4 has been out for almost exactly three years (first units shipped July 24, 2010). By now there have to be a 100 million of the damn things floating around. If they were dangerous we'd have dozens and dozens of dead Apple fans. It's possible Apple re-designed their AC Adapters really recently, but if that were the case somebody involved in the story would have mentioned it.
Second, a multiple idiots scenario. First an idiot at FoxConn screws up and manufactures a batch of AC Adapters with defective safety equipment. Second a bigger idiot at FoxConn decides to make little on the side by selling deadly AC Adapters cheap. Since Apple can;t continue to do business with people who endanger it's customers this guy is risking company to make a minuscule amount of money, which makes him quite possibly the biggest idiot in the history of human-kind.
Third, the one-idiot scenario. One idiot makes shitty, unsafe AC Adapters. People aren't suicidal, so they don't buy them. He is stupid, so he doesn't think the problem is he sucks at his job, he thinks the problem is people don't trust him enough. So he slaps the Apple logo on the next batch. Given that China gave us counterfeit Apple Stors I;d be stunned if some fast-talking hustler hadn't decided to make cheap AC Adapters he could sell for genuine Apple prices to yokels.
I won't die of shock if it turns out that it was not a counterfeit AC Adapter, because people can be incredibly stupid sometimes, but there's a reason the Chinese seem to be zeroing on that explanation:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57594449-37/iphone-related-death-in-china-could-be-linked-to-fake-charger/
As for the difficulty of finding the damn things, it really depends on a) how hard the Chinese look, and b) how good the counterfeiter is. If the Communist party decrees that every iPhone AC Adapter in the country will be taken to the County courthouse where an electrical engineer will test with his voltmeter, then they'll all be found within a matter of weeks. This is China, it is run by actual Totalitarians, if they decide to crush the dumbass who made this particular AC Adapter he will be crushed. Period. If the counterfeiters screwed up the font or something it's possible they won't need to do that to catch all the bad AC Adapters. Counterfeiting well enough that customers at a bazaar think it;s genuine until they get it home isn't hard, counterfeiting well enough so those customers can;t figure it out even after the local news anchor has told them where you screwed OTOH...
I've been to Scandinavia. I visited cousins in Gothenburg in the late 90s.
I will agree the Scandinavian states are far lily-white, are a lot less white then they used to be, and are much more welcoming of diversity and new immigrants then damn near anybody else. However, that does not mean they are not currently incredibly white compared to most of the world. They're much more diverse (and better at dealing with diversity) then much of Europe, but they ain't blacker then Nigeria or Browner then the Saudis.
If you have a strong secular tradition, you don't freak out when some chick shows up wearing a headscarf. Hell, you don't ban yamakas either. You don't respond to the legalization of gay marriage with massive demonstrations and record low approval ratings for the president.
What you guys actually have is a "we're at school, we'll pretend we're not all Catholic," tradition.
I didn't say that. I did say that when faced with the choice of an Anglophile government in Rwanda or a genocidal government, the French chose the murderers.
To this day most French press coverage of the incidents focuses on alleged false accusations against specific Rwandans, not that Chirac sent in French troops to protect a Rwandan government that clearly murdered hundreds of thousands. They then spent a decade insisting the woman who probably planned it was innocent, and when finally they arrested her French Courts cleared her. According to the French justice system hundreds of thousands of people hacked themselves to death because Lady Genocide never wrote anything down.
I believe the US has used it's power over the internet to seize a bunch of online gambling sites, some bittorrent sites, screwing with Antigua, etc. It's a lot less US Government action then I'd expect knowing the US Government, which implies somebody is trying to be very honorable, but it has happened.
The problem with turning this kind of thing over to a committee (aka: the UN) is that depending on the culture of the committee it could mean everybody gets everything they want, or nobody gets anything they want. If it's the latter it's good for internet freedom because Antigua can go back to gambling. If it's the former the Dalai Lahma can't have a website.
That they haven't done so already?
I suspect the problem is that everyone uses the US DNS standard, and the US doesn't abuse the standard much, so to switch over to something else you'd have to teach grandma a whole new internet, and you'd only avoid a small amount of abuse.
That's kind of the problem with figuring out who should run the internet. Clearly France/Russia/China should be kept away, because all three are even better at hypocrisy then us.
The newish democracies of Latin America/Africa/Asia don't have long track records, so we can't really judge whether they're France or Iceland in ethical terms. Eastern and Southern Europe are in same boat.
Which basically leaves us with Northern Europe.
And I'm not sure turning the internet over to the whitest, most Protestant, countries in the world, with a total population of roughly 100 million, is more democratic then just leaving it with the brownish, multi-religious, 300+ million US.
The difference is that with one corrupt country we ALWAYS have to do what that one country says, but with a group of countries (corrupt or not) stuff only gets through if enough countries vote for it.
Have you ever heard the term "horse-trading?"
The Islamic countries hate Jihadwatch. So does India, because people who rile up Muslims threaten the stability of India. China has this list of websites that it wants banned. They add Jihadwatch.
India + Islamic countries + China = majority = no freedom of speech for Chinese dissidents or assholes racist against Muslims.
Once you give people the power, it's damn nearly impossible to take it back from all of them.
Fact is, even if the UN did take over the Internet, or worse, we still have the knowledge, technology, and capability, to construct our own, new Internet, elsewhere. And simply move computers onto it. Apparently, having private networks in the home is BEYOND impossible for the average consumer.
RIP oppressive jackasses; worldwide communication is beyond your stranglehold.
Yeah, that works great for white hipsters.
For everyone else, including most of India, all of China, etc. that ain't happening.