Each of the (many) political parties chooses (nominates) one person to be their candidate for President in the general election in Nov. The big two do this partly through the mechanism of primary elections, which happen at different times chosen by each state's legislature. Each party has its own rules for what the results of a primary mean exactly, but in general they determine the number of delegates sent to the national party convention. This convention is where the nominee is chosen, and the delegates are the only people allowed to vote at the conventions. The results of the primary election in their state usually (but not always) determine who the delegates from that state have to vote for at the convention. Superdelegates are also allowed to vote at the convention, but are always free to vote for whomever they choose. These people are longtime party officials and insiders, and enough of them are given convention votes to ensure that the winner of the most primary elections can still lose the nomination should that be what the elites want. Remember, the USA is not now and never has been a democracy like Athens was, we fear the mob just as much as the Roman Senate did. So, as the article points out, nothing is written in stone yet, because no real votes have actually been cast. Some of the delegates are bound by law, and some of the supers have made public promises that they would have a hard time going back on, but the fat lady has not yet sung.
I'm truly impressed with the way you derived Paul's philosophical position on the full implications of tens of thousands of pages of legalese from fewer than 20 characters restricted to Y or N./snark
Seriously, several of those federal interventions in abortion policy that are supposedly fliflops, are votes on banning federal funding for abortions. Which is entirely consistent with the principle that the federal government should not be involved in abortions. Funding = involvement. Consider the possibility that some of that "flipflopping" on abortion may be due to a failure to flipflop on whether the government should be allowed to break the Constitution.
IANRP ( I Am Not Ron Paul), but I'm going to put words in his mouth based on my understanding of his positions.
2597 and 1094: It's what the man believes, and it's consistent with basic biology (A fetus is alive, and it is unarguably human. You can legitimately argue whether or not it should have full legal protections identical to an adult, and that's a discussion we should have, but creating a mythical transformation point from non human to human somewhere between conception and birth is a laughable failure to grasp high school biology). He could argue the Constitutionality based on the Congressional power to conduct the census (The power to count a thing by necessity includes the power to determine what does and doesn't count as that thing). Regardless of your beliefs on the issue, a straight up or down vote on a bill like this in Congress (or my preference, state legislatures) is almost infinitely preferable to the current situation where 9 old lawyers answerable to no one decide whatever the hell they feel like and impose it on all the rest of us. Paul's bill, crackpot as it seems, would force a settlement of the issue so we could get on with other things in this country instead of this same tired fight coming up every election and dividing us yet again.
1095: Put an end to a blatant violation of the 10th amendment. Government should follow the law. Christ, you'd think the last 7 years would have made that PAINFULLY obvious to everyone.
300: See above, just change Article 3 for Amendment 10. State courts were supposed to be primary (read the Federalist papers and see for yourselves, even the big government Federalists promised that order of court supremacy in order to get the Constitution ratified)
We the People Act: See Amendments 1 and 10, especially 10. Not a power given to the federal government, courts or no courts. IIRC, 3 of the ratifying states had established state religions when the Bill of Rights was adopted, so it clearly was not intended to prevent states from making up their own minds on the subject. I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but unless there is an amendment to fix it, it's the law of the land and government should obey it.
"Against homosexual rights" and "supported laws to discriminate against homosexuality federally": More like against allowing the Federal government to have any say on or knowledge of the matter of who people sleep with one way or the other. Although I admit I haven't dug as deeply into this aspect of his record, so if you can contradict me on that interpretation I'd be interested to see your evidence.
Paul is a long way from perfect, but even the positions I violently disagree with him on are rationally argued and internally consistent with respect to his understanding of the Constitution, which overrides all other considerations for him. After 8 years of the Constitution being "just a goddammned piece of paper", I think restoring that principle to government is the absolute priority. We can sort out differences in opinion later, once our freedom to have differences in opinions is safe again. (Military Commissions Act, Homegrown Violent Radicalization act etc.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't YouTube have some sort of mechanism for removing videos that are promoted by spam? Paul's campaign depends heavily on YoutTube since most reporters won't waste their time on such a long shot candidate. If his videos were flagged as spam and removed, wouldn't that shut him up? That seems to me to be the simplest and most practical motive for hiring a botnet to send such obvious spam. A supporter would have to be so stupid as to defy credibility to think spam like this would HELP their candidate, and while I know that's a common perception of Paul's fans, I'm not prepared to write them off as THAT dumb.
IAIFAUE (I Am In Fact A UAV Engineer), and the main way we pitch our products is that they do missions thta are too dull, dirty, dangerous, or expensive for human crews. For examples, flying in a circle for 10 hours watching the same spot waiting for someone to come out (dull) and flying a sampler through a cloud of stuff and determining that it is, in fact, nerve gas (dirty and dangerous).
Stole your car, no, but if they borrowed it and committed a vehicle-related crime in the state of Maryland, you already are liable for that crime unless you choose to rat out your friend.
Mod parent up for being exactly correct, this is precisely what we get for playing IP games. Unfortunately I can't source this from memory, but I read not long ago in international news coverage of this issue that Russians have essentially admitted this stance is a direct result of US diplomats in the back pocket of the MPAA raising hell about AllOfMP3.com and resisting Russia's application for membership in some international trade organization on the basis of unpaid royalties. Russia countered by demanding the US, as a member of said organization, abide by its IP laws and pay Russia royalties for all the AK's the CIA has had manufactured and distributed over the years. Russia doesn't want to collect money from Outer Bungholistan, they'd have to pay in goats anyway. It's specifically tit for tat with the US. If Russia has to pay royalties for US IP copied and distributed to US customers, the US should have to pay Russia for Russian IP copied and distributed to US puppets.
GalCiv II has given me the worst beatings I've ever taken in a strategy game. Shogun: Total War managed to spring a tactical ambush on me once (although in fairness my grip on tactics was much worse back then). Both of those AIs gave me a challenging game experience as a player, which is what "good" AI should be judged by. However, if we're talking about "impressive" AI, nothing I've seen in the gaming world can compete with Paradox's EUIII. Yeah, I know, each individual AI nation makes a lot of bonheaded moves. But the game is managing the armies, navies, economic, religious, colonial and foreign policies of up to 300 nations, every game day when a game year can go by in a minute or two, on a 1.9GHz processor. Considering the number of cycles and the amount of memory avaiable for each AI opponent, it's simply amazing to me. I really think that should be the basis of comparison, not so much the level of play the AI achieves, but the level of play it achieves with the resources available to each AI player. If nothing else, that standard makes it meaningful to compare old games against new ones.
DUI in MD = 0.05 BAC, DWI =0.08 BAC. Refusal to submit for testing results in an automatic conviction for DWI.
You can be automatically convicted of something because the fuckwits wrote the law that way and no one has forced the issue. The Constitution is literally just an old yellow piece of paper in a glass case a few miles from me. The only way it can affect government is if voters read it, know it, and punish politicians that ignore it. The most useful thing you can do to fight against this sort of thing is educate people about what the Constitution actually says.
Last I checked, lobsters have roughly 2.5 times as many chromosomes as humans (119 vs 46) How come we eat them and not the other way round? More DNA is irrelevant.
Problem is that riders are amendments just like real amendments are, so the power to line item veto amendments means the President can throw the baby out with the bath water.
The scope thing is already incorporated into the rules of the House, a bunch of proposed amendements to this bill got struck down in the house on points of order for exactly that reason.
Line item veto would allow the President to strike down *relevant* amendments at a whim as well as irrelevant ones, which was the concern I was trying to express earlier. Functionally the ability to remove any or all of the compromises necessary to get a bill through Congress is the same as the ability to rewrite the bill. SCOTUS did good to stirke this down IMO.
No, two wrongs don't make a right. The President should not have the authority to gut legislation at his personal whim, instead Congress should be forced to stop inserting irrelevant riders.
Hoyer, my US rep, can say whatever he wants on the House floor. The fact is that the actual text of the bill simply says that the 22nd amendment is repealed. No ifs, ands, buts, and especially no exceptions for Bush. The scaremongering is not entirely unfounded. Republicans need a 2/3rds majority in the House (close), the Senate (not quite as close) and 34 states (again, close) before they can start printing "W in '08" bumper stickers. All I can figure is that they've used the FBI's new powers to find some pretty juicy stuff on the Dems who are sponsoring this bill so that it's not quite as transparently obvious a power grab.
Slashdot Mirror
Each of the (many) political parties chooses (nominates) one person to be their candidate for President in the general election in Nov. The big two do this partly through the mechanism of primary elections, which happen at different times chosen by each state's legislature. Each party has its own rules for what the results of a primary mean exactly, but in general they determine the number of delegates sent to the national party convention. This convention is where the nominee is chosen, and the delegates are the only people allowed to vote at the conventions. The results of the primary election in their state usually (but not always) determine who the delegates from that state have to vote for at the convention. Superdelegates are also allowed to vote at the convention, but are always free to vote for whomever they choose. These people are longtime party officials and insiders, and enough of them are given convention votes to ensure that the winner of the most primary elections can still lose the nomination should that be what the elites want. Remember, the USA is not now and never has been a democracy like Athens was, we fear the mob just as much as the Roman Senate did.
So, as the article points out, nothing is written in stone yet, because no real votes have actually been cast. Some of the delegates are bound by law, and some of the supers have made public promises that they would have a hard time going back on, but the fat lady has not yet sung.
I'm truly impressed with the way you derived Paul's philosophical position on the full implications of tens of thousands of pages of legalese from fewer than 20 characters restricted to Y or N. /snark
Seriously, several of those federal interventions in abortion policy that are supposedly fliflops, are votes on banning federal funding for abortions. Which is entirely consistent with the principle that the federal government should not be involved in abortions. Funding = involvement. Consider the possibility that some of that "flipflopping" on abortion may be due to a failure to flipflop on whether the government should be allowed to break the Constitution.
IANRP ( I Am Not Ron Paul), but I'm going to put words in his mouth based on my understanding of his positions.
2597 and 1094: It's what the man believes, and it's consistent with basic biology (A fetus is alive, and it is unarguably human. You can legitimately argue whether or not it should have full legal protections identical to an adult, and that's a discussion we should have, but creating a mythical transformation point from non human to human somewhere between conception and birth is a laughable failure to grasp high school biology). He could argue the Constitutionality based on the Congressional power to conduct the census (The power to count a thing by necessity includes the power to determine what does and doesn't count as that thing). Regardless of your beliefs on the issue, a straight up or down vote on a bill like this in Congress (or my preference, state legislatures) is almost infinitely preferable to the current situation where 9 old lawyers answerable to no one decide whatever the hell they feel like and impose it on all the rest of us. Paul's bill, crackpot as it seems, would force a settlement of the issue so we could get on with other things in this country instead of this same tired fight coming up every election and dividing us yet again.
1095: Put an end to a blatant violation of the 10th amendment. Government should follow the law. Christ, you'd think the last 7 years would have made that PAINFULLY obvious to everyone.
300: See above, just change Article 3 for Amendment 10. State courts were supposed to be primary (read the Federalist papers and see for yourselves, even the big government Federalists promised that order of court supremacy in order to get the Constitution ratified)
We the People Act: See Amendments 1 and 10, especially 10. Not a power given to the federal government, courts or no courts. IIRC, 3 of the ratifying states had established state religions when the Bill of Rights was adopted, so it clearly was not intended to prevent states from making up their own minds on the subject. I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but unless there is an amendment to fix it, it's the law of the land and government should obey it.
"Against homosexual rights" and "supported laws to discriminate against homosexuality federally": More like against allowing the Federal government to have any say on or knowledge of the matter of who people sleep with one way or the other. Although I admit I haven't dug as deeply into this aspect of his record, so if you can contradict me on that interpretation I'd be interested to see your evidence.
Paul is a long way from perfect, but even the positions I violently disagree with him on are rationally argued and internally consistent with respect to his understanding of the Constitution, which overrides all other considerations for him. After 8 years of the Constitution being "just a goddammned piece of paper", I think restoring that principle to government is the absolute priority. We can sort out differences in opinion later, once our freedom to have differences in opinions is safe again. (Military Commissions Act, Homegrown Violent Radicalization act etc.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't YouTube have some sort of mechanism for removing videos that are promoted by spam? Paul's campaign depends heavily on YoutTube since most reporters won't waste their time on such a long shot candidate. If his videos were flagged as spam and removed, wouldn't that shut him up? That seems to me to be the simplest and most practical motive for hiring a botnet to send such obvious spam. A supporter would have to be so stupid as to defy credibility to think spam like this would HELP their candidate, and while I know that's a common perception of Paul's fans, I'm not prepared to write them off as THAT dumb.
IAIFAUE (I Am In Fact A UAV Engineer), and the main way we pitch our products is that they do missions thta are too dull, dirty, dangerous, or expensive for human crews. For examples, flying in a circle for 10 hours watching the same spot waiting for someone to come out (dull) and flying a sampler through a cloud of stuff and determining that it is, in fact, nerve gas (dirty and dangerous).
Stole your car, no, but if they borrowed it and committed a vehicle-related crime in the state of Maryland, you already are liable for that crime unless you choose to rat out your friend.
Please, please go ahead and try to find in the Constitution the Congressional power that justifies this. I like watching mental gymnastics.
Ron Paul, and one other Republican. Yet again, Ron shows that he's one of the only people in government that doesn't deserve to be spat upon.
Mod parent up for being exactly correct, this is precisely what we get for playing IP games. Unfortunately I can't source this from memory, but I read not long ago in international news coverage of this issue that Russians have essentially admitted this stance is a direct result of US diplomats in the back pocket of the MPAA raising hell about AllOfMP3.com and resisting Russia's application for membership in some international trade organization on the basis of unpaid royalties. Russia countered by demanding the US, as a member of said organization, abide by its IP laws and pay Russia royalties for all the AK's the CIA has had manufactured and distributed over the years. Russia doesn't want to collect money from Outer Bungholistan, they'd have to pay in goats anyway. It's specifically tit for tat with the US. If Russia has to pay royalties for US IP copied and distributed to US customers, the US should have to pay Russia for Russian IP copied and distributed to US puppets.
GalCiv II has given me the worst beatings I've ever taken in a strategy game. Shogun: Total War managed to spring a tactical ambush on me once (although in fairness my grip on tactics was much worse back then). Both of those AIs gave me a challenging game experience as a player, which is what "good" AI should be judged by.
However, if we're talking about "impressive" AI, nothing I've seen in the gaming world can compete with Paradox's EUIII. Yeah, I know, each individual AI nation makes a lot of bonheaded moves. But the game is managing the armies, navies, economic, religious, colonial and foreign policies of up to 300 nations, every game day when a game year can go by in a minute or two, on a 1.9GHz processor. Considering the number of cycles and the amount of memory avaiable for each AI opponent, it's simply amazing to me. I really think that should be the basis of comparison, not so much the level of play the AI achieves, but the level of play it achieves with the resources available to each AI player. If nothing else, that standard makes it meaningful to compare old games against new ones.
DUI in MD = 0.05 BAC, DWI =0.08 BAC. Refusal to submit for testing results in an automatic conviction for DWI. You can be automatically convicted of something because the fuckwits wrote the law that way and no one has forced the issue. The Constitution is literally just an old yellow piece of paper in a glass case a few miles from me. The only way it can affect government is if voters read it, know it, and punish politicians that ignore it. The most useful thing you can do to fight against this sort of thing is educate people about what the Constitution actually says.
It is a crime in Maryland. Refusal to comply with the brethalizer results in an automatic DWI (worse than DUI) conviction. 5th Amanda? What?
Last I checked, lobsters have roughly 2.5 times as many chromosomes as humans (119 vs 46) How come we eat them and not the other way round? More DNA is irrelevant.
Problem is that riders are amendments just like real amendments are, so the power to line item veto amendments means the President can throw the baby out with the bath water.
The scope thing is already incorporated into the rules of the House, a bunch of proposed amendements to this bill got struck down in the house on points of order for exactly that reason. Line item veto would allow the President to strike down *relevant* amendments at a whim as well as irrelevant ones, which was the concern I was trying to express earlier. Functionally the ability to remove any or all of the compromises necessary to get a bill through Congress is the same as the ability to rewrite the bill. SCOTUS did good to stirke this down IMO.
No, two wrongs don't make a right. The President should not have the authority to gut legislation at his personal whim, instead Congress should be forced to stop inserting irrelevant riders.
Hoyer, my US rep, can say whatever he wants on the House floor. The fact is that the actual text of the bill simply says that the 22nd amendment is repealed. No ifs, ands, buts, and especially no exceptions for Bush. The scaremongering is not entirely unfounded. Republicans need a 2/3rds majority in the House (close), the Senate (not quite as close) and 34 states (again, close) before they can start printing "W in '08" bumper stickers. All I can figure is that they've used the FBI's new powers to find some pretty juicy stuff on the Dems who are sponsoring this bill so that it's not quite as transparently obvious a power grab.