That's an interesting and valid point. I guess my hope would be that retail politics would negate some of the effects of gerrymandering and political machines. Not sure if it would work out that way in the real world, history suggests that it would not.
It would be interesting to see what would happen with a computer driven algorithm, say (just thinking out loud here) that you start West to East, aiming for equal population districts that follow defined political boundaries and geographical features (rivers?) to the extent possible. You'd still have uncompetitive districts and flukes of geography, but perhaps there would be less of them.
I just don't know, smarter people than me have tried and failed to solve these problems. It'll probably take a combination of different things, gerrymandering reform, more representation, term limits, etc, and even then we'll be lucky if it buys us a few decades of semi-functional Government before the partisan asshats screw it up again. Jefferson was on to something with the tree of liberty, as was Washington when he condemned political parties, but the former would require Americans to get off the couch and give a damn, while the latter's advice was ignored before he was even in the ground.
Barack Obama is not a Centrist in the American political spectrum. He might be when compared to the left-wing parties of Europe, but when looked at through an American political compass he falls to the left. In fact, he beat someone closer to the Center than him (Hillary) during the 2008 primaries, almost solely on the basis of his opposition to the Iraq War, a classical left vs. center issue. Bill Clinton didn't start out a Centrist either (though he never as far to the left as BHO), in terms of policy or platform, that change was forced on him after the 1994 mid-terms. To his credit he actually listened to the electorate, which is more than you say about BHO and Nancy Pelosi, who rammed the ACA down the throats of the American public after a Republican managed to win a Senate Seat in the bluest of the blue states while running against it.
I'll defer comment on Ted Cruz because I know little about him. As far as Rand Paul goes, I'm not certain I'd qualify him as an 'extremist', on a lot of issues he's managed to figure out the pulse of mainstream America (polling against our interventionist foreign policy commands majorities of both parties and Independents, but non-interventionism has scant support among the elected officials in either party). To answer your question though, I think he's a household name for the same reason Charles Schumer is. He's got a good PR operation, the media loves to cover him, and he never turns down the opportunity to be in front of a camera.
New Hampshire is great in that it's small enough for retail politics to be effective (one of the few good arguments for allowing it to keep the first Presidential Primary, IMHO), and to keep the formation of political machines at bay. One could try and replicate that experience for the larger States by increasing the size of the House, though that's going to run into the same roadblock (nobody in power wishes to see their power diluted) as those proposals that seek to do away with Gerrymandering.
In reality I think we need to see both things happen, a reform of the district drawing process, and an increase in representation. I'd say increase the size of the House to at least one thousand members, which can be done with a simple Act of Congress. I would also argue for giving each State three Senators instead of two (this would require a Constitutional Amendment), so that each State would have a Senate seat at play in every Federal election.
Thank you, for providing the MSNBC point of view, which has immeasurably enhanced the dialogue, and for completely missing the point....
Please complete the picture by bringing one of your Fox News watching friends (assuming you keep company with those disagree with you politically) to the conversation.
would rightfully get them primaried in the next election?
And therein lies the problem. Primary elections are the "true" election in most Congressional districts (Democrat and Republican), thanks to gerrymandering. Primary elections are universally low turnout affairs that are dominated by the true believers, the types that get all of their news from MSNBC or Fox, who are least inclined to seek accommodation with the other side. The consequence of this is that we end up with hyper-partisan hacks that don't even represent the mainstream of their gerrymandered district, much less the country as a whole.
I'm not blaming the GOP, the exact same thing happens in gerrymandered blue districts. Nancy Pelosi doesn't represent the mainstream of the Democratic party, much less the United States, yet she is the voice of the Democrats in the house.
I don't know what the solution is. Some will argue that we need a third party, but that's no guarantee of a different result. Indeed, it makes it possible for the same hyper-partisan hacks to win as before, only now they'll have won with 40% of the vote instead of 50.1%. My hometown (Binghamton, NY) ended up with a left-wing asshole as Mayor, who won two three-way elections, and pushed his asinine left-wing agenda despite 60% of the city voting against him. (Hint for Matthew Ryan if your egotistical self finds this post with a Google search: People don't vote for Mayor to make statements about the Iraq War, they vote for him to fix the fucking potholes, keep the parks clean, and to try and attract employers to the area)
I don't understand why the "exchanges" were necessary to meet the goals of the ACA. Subsidies for the poor can be provided without the Government being a gate-keeper (I don't have to buy my groceries from a Government run "exchange" to use food stamps) and the individual mandate/minimum coverage requirements would have worked equally well with insurance sold directly to consumers. Indeed, group policies don't come from the exchanges, and you can still buy individual policies directly from insurance brokers (albeit without the option of a subsidy), and both still have to meet the minimum essential coverage requirements of the ACA.
The exchanges are a great example of the Progressive tenancy to favor centralized Rube Golberg solutions, rather than just setting the parameters of the marketplace and getting the hell out of the way. Say what you will about private enterprise, but any halfway competent for-profit corporation would have figured out how to deploy a rating website with four years of lead time for testing and development.
I think that most Americans can be found in the middle of the two extremes (far-left/far-right) but our political system is set up to reward those who pander to the extremes (Gerrymandering + closed primaries in most states), so we wind up with this system that swings back and forth between the two, rarely settling in the middle where most of the electorate lies. Divided Government used to bring outcomes in the middle (Reagan/O'Neil, and Clinton/Gingrich) but now it just seems to bring grandstanding and stalling (Bush/Pelosi, Obama/Boehner), as each side waits to beat the other in the next election, while kicking the serious issues of the day down the road, to be dealt with after they have a "mandate" from the voters. Each side misreads the smallest win as a "mandate" for their platform, ignoring the fact that 49.9% of the country voted the other way. BHO's "mandate" in 2008 can be boiled down to three words: "Don't be GWB", not "Dust off every Progressive idea that's been on the bookshelf since the 60s." Similarly, John Boehner's "mandate" in 2010 was "Don't be Nancy Pelosi", not "Give the keys to the Tea Party."
There are some benefits to the two party system in the United States, compare the (relative) stability of our system to some Parliamentary Democracies, but we're in pretty big trouble if we can't take the two parties back from their respective extremes. I'm not sure how this happens, when each party keeps bleeding elder statesmen, House primaries are dominated by rabid partisans living in echo chambers, and even the Senate (where gerrymandering is a non-issue) looks to be on a downward spiral wherein statesmen are out and partisan hacks are in.
What makes you think Hitler would have been selected to rule in a monarchy? He had no formal education, a fairly unremarkable military career, and didn't come from royal blood or a well-connected family. Many of the classical Conservatives in Germany (particularly those with a Prussian background) disdained him for these reasons. They supported him because he was better (in their eyes) than the Wiemar Republic, and his initial bloodless successes were enough to silence those who wished for a return to the monarchy and who might have had the political connections to stop the NSDAP from taking Germany over the cliff.
I hope you pointed out to her the impact she's having on the environment by drawing breath and suggested a few painless ways that she could immediately and permanently reduce her carbon footprint. If suicide is too much to contemplate, people like her are always free to give the hunter-gatherer lifestyle a try. Something tells me that civilization would look pretty good after a few days of persistence hunting.
You mean the "corporate media" like the New York Times, that used this as yet another opportunity to blame climate change?
For many in the Philippines, the damage here exemplifies a broader paradox: A storm consistent with some scientists’ warnings about climate change has done tremendous damage to an island that is one of the world’s biggest success stories of renewable energy, and to a country that has contributed almost nothing to the global accumulation of greenhouse gases.
Yep, they really sound like shrills for Big Oil with that piece.
Nukes could render the earth permanently uninhabitable to humans, bringing all human progress to a dead stop.
You drastically overestimate the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons can end civilization as we know it. Exterminating the entire human race? Not bloody likely. Homo Sapiens are persistent little fuckers that have survived natural catastrophes far in excess of anything we're capable of doing to the blue marble with modern technology.
The living will envy the dead and all that jazz, but the human race would almost certainly survive.
Now feel free to ignore this, but imagine someone like Harry Reid being hit by a hellfire from one of those that is untraceable.
Where do we send the thank you card?;)
Its only a matter of time before others use them against the US
Not likely. Any reasonably developed country with a decent intelligence apparatus would be able to trace the drone back to its source. Conventional rules of conduct still apply when the attack isn't anonymous.
They won the Winter War in the same manner as the Russians have historically won all of their major wars, by drowning their enemies in Russian blood.
Look up the casualty ratios on the Eastern Front, even after the Red Army effectively broke the Wehrmacht's back they still managed to lose two or three Russians for every German they killed. The ratios in the beginning of the war are even more depressing, yet they regard some of those battles as their finest hour.
If the Americans eat less meat, drive less and consume less resources, I'm sure that's going to have a very positive impact on their health too
Do you know anything about biology, sports medicine, or nutrition? Protein is the least problematic thing in the typical American diet. The problem with the American diet is almost always an excessive intake of carbohydrates. There's a lot of reasons for this, the biggest one being the fact that carbs are cheap. A pound of generic pasta is $0.99 in most American grocery stores. You try feeding a lower middle-class family of four or more without resorting to an above average proportion of refined grains. It's not easy. Hell, I'm a single person with no dependents and a fair amount of disposable income, and my diet is still 50% carbohydrates, which is probably below average for Americans as a whole yet still quite high from my vantage point.
Carbs are cheap, quick to digest, and relatively un-filling, a nasty combination that makes it very easy to run a caloric surplus. Not so with proteins. You ever try to eat >2,500 calories a day on a high protein diet? It can be done, but it's not easy.
I believe the most successful tactic the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact forces could have used to invade Western Europe would have been to make their first echelon forces to be thousands of snack & ice cream trucks. That would have quickly rendered the Western defences helpless for the following tanks.
I know you're being a wise-ass, but the inverse of what you're describing did actually happen during the Winter War. There was an attack where the Soviet troops finally broke through Finnish lines, and appeared to have the Finns routed, only for the attack to come to a screeching halt when the half starved Soviet troops stumbled upon the Finnish field kitchens. They stopped to raid these supplies and gave the Finns to regroup and kick their ass.
The Finns also went out of their way to target Soviet field kitchens during the conflict, which exacerbated the already pathetic condition of the Soviet troops, who were being asked to fight in -40 degree weather on a diet that was barely sufficient for barracks duties. You need a very high calorie diet to survive in those temperatures, never mind effectively fight, and the Soviet rations oftentimes consisted of moldy bread. No meat, no fats, no hot soups, you try surviving in sub-zero temperatures on a diet of bread and see how long you manage to last....
A minor nitpick, but 'anti-bacterial' in that context doesn't always refer to drugs. Those hand sanitizers that are so popular are marketed as 'anti-bacterial'. They use alcohol to achieve this effect, and to the best of my knowledge there isn't a bacterium on this planet that has evolved resistance to ethanol applied in sufficient concentrations to denature proteins....
Don't be silly. He's hiding out because he's afraid of the United States. That's why he was freely roaming the streets of America's closest ally, a country with long-standing extradition agreements with the United States, and only decided to seek refuge after exhausting his appeals in the Swedish investigation.
The Republicans are unique in their ability to drive a supposedly "world leading" country into a failed state hellhole for large portions of the population.
You need to visit Somalia to see what a "failed state hellhole" really looks like.
As a middle age male, I'm wondering why I need prenatal coverage in the ACA mandated min levels of insurance coverage. One size does not fit all.
You should also be asking why insurers have to charge the same for men as women, in spite of women having higher healthcare costs. Then ask why the same principle hasn't been applied to auto insurance, where men invariably pay more than women.
Except 38 Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors decided not to bother
I guess passing a major piece of social legislation effecting 20% of the economy on a completely party line vote was a bad idea, eh?
The word you're looking for is "buy-in". The GOP didn't get any. Did you seriously expect cooperation from crimson red states? That was pretty naive....
Here's one in my area, funded by your tax dollars. Similar institutions can be found across my State.
There is no charge to Broome County residents for STD testing and treatment.
"I'm poor" is not an acceptable excuse to engage in sexual intercourse while having an unknown HIV status. "I'm a selfish asshole who only thinks about my own gratification" is the most likely explanation.
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Why would you two trade families when you can get married and have the worst of both worlds at the same time?
That's an interesting and valid point. I guess my hope would be that retail politics would negate some of the effects of gerrymandering and political machines. Not sure if it would work out that way in the real world, history suggests that it would not.
It would be interesting to see what would happen with a computer driven algorithm, say (just thinking out loud here) that you start West to East, aiming for equal population districts that follow defined political boundaries and geographical features (rivers?) to the extent possible. You'd still have uncompetitive districts and flukes of geography, but perhaps there would be less of them.
I just don't know, smarter people than me have tried and failed to solve these problems. It'll probably take a combination of different things, gerrymandering reform, more representation, term limits, etc, and even then we'll be lucky if it buys us a few decades of semi-functional Government before the partisan asshats screw it up again. Jefferson was on to something with the tree of liberty, as was Washington when he condemned political parties, but the former would require Americans to get off the couch and give a damn, while the latter's advice was ignored before he was even in the ground.
You mean the article that refers to a political party with tens of millions of Americans as a "cult"? That article?
Clearly a source that's interested in elevating the dialogue.... thank you for twice missing the point.
Barack Obama is not a Centrist in the American political spectrum. He might be when compared to the left-wing parties of Europe, but when looked at through an American political compass he falls to the left. In fact, he beat someone closer to the Center than him (Hillary) during the 2008 primaries, almost solely on the basis of his opposition to the Iraq War, a classical left vs. center issue. Bill Clinton didn't start out a Centrist either (though he never as far to the left as BHO), in terms of policy or platform, that change was forced on him after the 1994 mid-terms. To his credit he actually listened to the electorate, which is more than you say about BHO and Nancy Pelosi, who rammed the ACA down the throats of the American public after a Republican managed to win a Senate Seat in the bluest of the blue states while running against it.
I'll defer comment on Ted Cruz because I know little about him. As far as Rand Paul goes, I'm not certain I'd qualify him as an 'extremist', on a lot of issues he's managed to figure out the pulse of mainstream America (polling against our interventionist foreign policy commands majorities of both parties and Independents, but non-interventionism has scant support among the elected officials in either party). To answer your question though, I think he's a household name for the same reason Charles Schumer is. He's got a good PR operation, the media loves to cover him, and he never turns down the opportunity to be in front of a camera.
New Hampshire is great in that it's small enough for retail politics to be effective (one of the few good arguments for allowing it to keep the first Presidential Primary, IMHO), and to keep the formation of political machines at bay. One could try and replicate that experience for the larger States by increasing the size of the House, though that's going to run into the same roadblock (nobody in power wishes to see their power diluted) as those proposals that seek to do away with Gerrymandering.
In reality I think we need to see both things happen, a reform of the district drawing process, and an increase in representation. I'd say increase the size of the House to at least one thousand members, which can be done with a simple Act of Congress. I would also argue for giving each State three Senators instead of two (this would require a Constitutional Amendment), so that each State would have a Senate seat at play in every Federal election.
Thank you, for providing the MSNBC point of view, which has immeasurably enhanced the dialogue, and for completely missing the point....
Please complete the picture by bringing one of your Fox News watching friends (assuming you keep company with those disagree with you politically) to the conversation.
would rightfully get them primaried in the next election?
And therein lies the problem. Primary elections are the "true" election in most Congressional districts (Democrat and Republican), thanks to gerrymandering. Primary elections are universally low turnout affairs that are dominated by the true believers, the types that get all of their news from MSNBC or Fox, who are least inclined to seek accommodation with the other side. The consequence of this is that we end up with hyper-partisan hacks that don't even represent the mainstream of their gerrymandered district, much less the country as a whole.
I'm not blaming the GOP, the exact same thing happens in gerrymandered blue districts. Nancy Pelosi doesn't represent the mainstream of the Democratic party, much less the United States, yet she is the voice of the Democrats in the house.
I don't know what the solution is. Some will argue that we need a third party, but that's no guarantee of a different result. Indeed, it makes it possible for the same hyper-partisan hacks to win as before, only now they'll have won with 40% of the vote instead of 50.1%. My hometown (Binghamton, NY) ended up with a left-wing asshole as Mayor, who won two three-way elections, and pushed his asinine left-wing agenda despite 60% of the city voting against him. (Hint for Matthew Ryan if your egotistical self finds this post with a Google search: People don't vote for Mayor to make statements about the Iraq War, they vote for him to fix the fucking potholes, keep the parks clean, and to try and attract employers to the area)
I don't understand why the "exchanges" were necessary to meet the goals of the ACA. Subsidies for the poor can be provided without the Government being a gate-keeper (I don't have to buy my groceries from a Government run "exchange" to use food stamps) and the individual mandate/minimum coverage requirements would have worked equally well with insurance sold directly to consumers. Indeed, group policies don't come from the exchanges, and you can still buy individual policies directly from insurance brokers (albeit without the option of a subsidy), and both still have to meet the minimum essential coverage requirements of the ACA.
The exchanges are a great example of the Progressive tenancy to favor centralized Rube Golberg solutions, rather than just setting the parameters of the marketplace and getting the hell out of the way. Say what you will about private enterprise, but any halfway competent for-profit corporation would have figured out how to deploy a rating website with four years of lead time for testing and development.
I think that most Americans can be found in the middle of the two extremes (far-left/far-right) but our political system is set up to reward those who pander to the extremes (Gerrymandering + closed primaries in most states), so we wind up with this system that swings back and forth between the two, rarely settling in the middle where most of the electorate lies. Divided Government used to bring outcomes in the middle (Reagan/O'Neil, and Clinton/Gingrich) but now it just seems to bring grandstanding and stalling (Bush/Pelosi, Obama/Boehner), as each side waits to beat the other in the next election, while kicking the serious issues of the day down the road, to be dealt with after they have a "mandate" from the voters. Each side misreads the smallest win as a "mandate" for their platform, ignoring the fact that 49.9% of the country voted the other way. BHO's "mandate" in 2008 can be boiled down to three words: "Don't be GWB", not "Dust off every Progressive idea that's been on the bookshelf since the 60s." Similarly, John Boehner's "mandate" in 2010 was "Don't be Nancy Pelosi", not "Give the keys to the Tea Party."
There are some benefits to the two party system in the United States, compare the (relative) stability of our system to some Parliamentary Democracies, but we're in pretty big trouble if we can't take the two parties back from their respective extremes. I'm not sure how this happens, when each party keeps bleeding elder statesmen, House primaries are dominated by rabid partisans living in echo chambers, and even the Senate (where gerrymandering is a non-issue) looks to be on a downward spiral wherein statesmen are out and partisan hacks are in.
We're much more likely to end up with Hitler.
What makes you think Hitler would have been selected to rule in a monarchy? He had no formal education, a fairly unremarkable military career, and didn't come from royal blood or a well-connected family. Many of the classical Conservatives in Germany (particularly those with a Prussian background) disdained him for these reasons. They supported him because he was better (in their eyes) than the Wiemar Republic, and his initial bloodless successes were enough to silence those who wished for a return to the monarchy and who might have had the political connections to stop the NSDAP from taking Germany over the cliff.
I hope you pointed out to her the impact she's having on the environment by drawing breath and suggested a few painless ways that she could immediately and permanently reduce her carbon footprint. If suicide is too much to contemplate, people like her are always free to give the hunter-gatherer lifestyle a try. Something tells me that civilization would look pretty good after a few days of persistence hunting.
You mean the "corporate media" like the New York Times, that used this as yet another opportunity to blame climate change?
For many in the Philippines, the damage here exemplifies a broader paradox: A storm consistent with some scientists’ warnings about climate change has done tremendous damage to an island that is one of the world’s biggest success stories of renewable energy, and to a country that has contributed almost nothing to the global accumulation of greenhouse gases.
Yep, they really sound like shrills for Big Oil with that piece.
Nukes could render the earth permanently uninhabitable to humans, bringing all human progress to a dead stop.
You drastically overestimate the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons can end civilization as we know it. Exterminating the entire human race? Not bloody likely. Homo Sapiens are persistent little fuckers that have survived natural catastrophes far in excess of anything we're capable of doing to the blue marble with modern technology.
The living will envy the dead and all that jazz, but the human race would almost certainly survive.
Now feel free to ignore this, but imagine someone like Harry Reid being hit by a hellfire from one of those that is untraceable.
Where do we send the thank you card? ;)
Its only a matter of time before others use them against the US
Not likely. Any reasonably developed country with a decent intelligence apparatus would be able to trace the drone back to its source. Conventional rules of conduct still apply when the attack isn't anonymous.
They won the Winter War in the same manner as the Russians have historically won all of their major wars, by drowning their enemies in Russian blood.
Look up the casualty ratios on the Eastern Front, even after the Red Army effectively broke the Wehrmacht's back they still managed to lose two or three Russians for every German they killed. The ratios in the beginning of the war are even more depressing, yet they regard some of those battles as their finest hour.
If the Americans eat less meat, drive less and consume less resources, I'm sure that's going to have a very positive impact on their health too
Do you know anything about biology, sports medicine, or nutrition? Protein is the least problematic thing in the typical American diet. The problem with the American diet is almost always an excessive intake of carbohydrates. There's a lot of reasons for this, the biggest one being the fact that carbs are cheap. A pound of generic pasta is $0.99 in most American grocery stores. You try feeding a lower middle-class family of four or more without resorting to an above average proportion of refined grains. It's not easy. Hell, I'm a single person with no dependents and a fair amount of disposable income, and my diet is still 50% carbohydrates, which is probably below average for Americans as a whole yet still quite high from my vantage point.
Carbs are cheap, quick to digest, and relatively un-filling, a nasty combination that makes it very easy to run a caloric surplus. Not so with proteins. You ever try to eat >2,500 calories a day on a high protein diet? It can be done, but it's not easy.
I believe the most successful tactic the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact forces could have used to invade Western Europe would have been to make their first echelon forces to be thousands of snack & ice cream trucks. That would have quickly rendered the Western defences helpless for the following tanks.
I know you're being a wise-ass, but the inverse of what you're describing did actually happen during the Winter War. There was an attack where the Soviet troops finally broke through Finnish lines, and appeared to have the Finns routed, only for the attack to come to a screeching halt when the half starved Soviet troops stumbled upon the Finnish field kitchens. They stopped to raid these supplies and gave the Finns to regroup and kick their ass.
The Finns also went out of their way to target Soviet field kitchens during the conflict, which exacerbated the already pathetic condition of the Soviet troops, who were being asked to fight in -40 degree weather on a diet that was barely sufficient for barracks duties. You need a very high calorie diet to survive in those temperatures, never mind effectively fight, and the Soviet rations oftentimes consisted of moldy bread. No meat, no fats, no hot soups, you try surviving in sub-zero temperatures on a diet of bread and see how long you manage to last....
But with anti-bacterial soaps all the time?
A minor nitpick, but 'anti-bacterial' in that context doesn't always refer to drugs. Those hand sanitizers that are so popular are marketed as 'anti-bacterial'. They use alcohol to achieve this effect, and to the best of my knowledge there isn't a bacterium on this planet that has evolved resistance to ethanol applied in sufficient concentrations to denature proteins....
Don't be silly. He's hiding out because he's afraid of the United States. That's why he was freely roaming the streets of America's closest ally, a country with long-standing extradition agreements with the United States, and only decided to seek refuge after exhausting his appeals in the Swedish investigation.
.... not the NSA. Think of how much better off we'd all be. ;)
The Republicans are unique in their ability to drive a supposedly "world leading" country into a failed state hellhole for large portions of the population.
You need to visit Somalia to see what a "failed state hellhole" really looks like.
As a middle age male, I'm wondering why I need prenatal coverage in the ACA mandated min levels of insurance coverage. One size does not fit all.
You should also be asking why insurers have to charge the same for men as women, in spite of women having higher healthcare costs. Then ask why the same principle hasn't been applied to auto insurance, where men invariably pay more than women.
Except 38 Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors decided not to bother
I guess passing a major piece of social legislation effecting 20% of the economy on a completely party line vote was a bad idea, eh?
The word you're looking for is "buy-in". The GOP didn't get any. Did you seriously expect cooperation from crimson red states? That was pretty naive....
* I actually live in the UK but for once I'll refrain from the we have free healthcare, you obligatory insensitive clod joke.
I don't think you know what the words "free" or "refrain" mean.
Here's one in my area, funded by your tax dollars. Similar institutions can be found across my State.
There is no charge to Broome County residents for STD testing and treatment.
"I'm poor" is not an acceptable excuse to engage in sexual intercourse while having an unknown HIV status. "I'm a selfish asshole who only thinks about my own gratification" is the most likely explanation.