I guess that's what I was trying to say, essentially, even if I didn't express it well. I don't know if it's something fundamental to X, or if its in the toolkits, or what. But it seems as though there's no easy way to separate the menus from the remainder of the window content. AFAICT, they are one composite "thing" with no way to separate them if desired. There is no way for the wm to "grab" the menubar and place it elsewhere.
If someone (Apple or anyone else) could come up with a window manager that followed the shared-menubar style UI of the Mac, it would be a big step in the right direction. X apps simply don't "fit" in a Mac environment. The feel is completely wrong, due to wrong UI element placement and appearance. Mac users (rightly) see X11 apps as a last resort. It's like running GNOME apps in a KDE session, or vice versa, but even worse. Different, not-entirely-compatible mechanisms of doing the same things are at work, and it's not seamless.
If there is a wm that supports Mac-style menubars, I'd love to know about it. Anyone?
...but the European model is no better. I think the problem with US health insurance is that so much of the financing of it is an ugly kludge to work around income tax.
First, it's given as an employee benefit rather than paying cash so that the employer contribution is not taxed. But that ties you to an employer, because there's usually a waiting period before benefits (including insurance) kick in at a new job. Paying the full price to extend the previous coverage those couple months is no fun.
Second, "flex plans" are an obvious hack around income tax. But again, it's under the employer's control, so you are not at liberty of changing jobs without risking your health savings. I know, I've lost a substantial chunk that way.
Third, the reason that medical care has gotten so expensive is that for the most part insurance pays it, and since we don't pay the majority of the premium ourselves, why not go in for every little sniffle? There's no incentive not to try to get more out of the system than you put into it.
Pay employees cash, make them fully responsible for their own care, and you'll see them make sensible use of medical resources. Prices will come down, guaranteed. Yes, some people will elect not to get insurance and that's not a bad thing! It may be the smartest decision for them.
The problem is that we are taxed on income, and even legislators are smart enough to realize that diminishing someone's ability to take care of his health is idiotic, so they finagle all the gimmicks to get around it. But putting a band-aid on a broken system doesn't work. It would be so much easier to simply get rid of income tax! Spend your own money as you wish without gov't skimming an arbitrarily-sized chunk off the top. Tax consumption (sales) instead, to promote savings and investment (wealth building), which would get help reduce the insane amounts of consumer debt that plagues most Americans now. Plus, think of all the bureaucracy that could be eliminated and all the wasted hours of tax preparation that would be regained. That's three very obvious (and very large) points for simplifying the tax system.
And before people start screaming "regressive tax! what about the poor?!", all you have to do is exempt food, clothing, and medicine from tax. Gov't should not be in the business of making your life harder for you to maintain, so the essentials are given a pass. The poor (or anyone) could live truly tax free if they wanted to live a subsistence existence.
That's just Approval Voting in reverse. The biggest problem with it (IMO) is that there is no specific definition of what the acceptability threshold is. For example, I might not like to see any of the candidates in office (they all suck) but given that one of them is going to win, I do have some preferences (ranking). Or maybe I'd approve of any of them (they're all good) but again I stilll have preferences. These are just the two extremes, but they illustrate the point.
IRV improves the perception of a 3rd party's chances, but in the final analysis it's unlikely they'll actually win much more until they gain enough popularity to be one of the top two parties. As the parent said, IRV has many of the same problems as plurality voting; it's just more cleverly disguised.
Think about it: right now, everyone pretty much decides who the "important two" candidates are going to be beforehand (a runoff performed in the media and in public perception) and votes for one of those two. They do these because they intuitively understand that a single vote can only choose between two different options. Compare this to IRV, which simply makes that process explicit.
Let me illustrate. Let's say you have a Liberal, a Conservative, and a Moderate. L and C have the typical polarized campaign, whipping all their loyalists (of which there are many) into a frenzy. M has a small continent of people, but charts out a middle ground between the others. Both L and C candidates would obviously prefer M as a second-place choice than "that other guy". Yet because M has few first-place votes, he is dropped and we end up with an extremist winning. M, the concensus candidate, is the obvious "common sense" choice to the objective outsider. You can't throw away part of someone's ballot and expect to get "honest" results. Someone's preference of 2nd-place-guy over 3rd-place-guy is significant - you can't just throw that away!
Yes. Repeat after me: there's not enough money in the world to make me happy if I wake up every day hating and dreading what I have to do. Life's too short to be miserable.
because its more rational for two similarly aligned parties to group up than for them to all be for themselves. [...] splitting the votes on one side of the center divide wouldn't give either party on that side enough votes to win
Those are exactly the problems with the voting system that I'm trying to describe.
Whenever you form a political alliance or coalition, you sacrifice something. It's the nature of compromise. Parties shouldn't have to compromise - they ought to be able to stand for their principles. Once you get someone in office they may have to compromise in order to craft legislation - that's how the game is played. But simply to field a candidate with a fair chance shouldn't require compromise. The principles the candidate stands for may make him unelectable, but the system itself shouldn't be stacked against him simply because he's not an incumbent or doesn't have the right label after his name.
All this is a result of the single-member plurality districts that the US uses.
Absolutely. I don't have a problem with single-member districts (for Congress*) but plurality voting is about the worst voting system imaginable. The only thing it has going for it is simplicity. But really, preferential systems (like Condorcet) are not that difficult to figure out - can you rank the candidates in the order you like them? Sure, I knew you could.
*Another idea for reform, in the state legislatures, is to introduce Proportional Representation in one house. Most follow the bicameral model of Congress, but forget that Congress has different modes of representation in each house. Having two houses slows things down a bit, but if you're only going to look at bills the same way two times, it serves little point. In Congress, the People (House of Reps) look at it, then the States (Senate) do too. At the state level it would make sense to do similarly. Have localities (districts) look at it to make sure it works for all areas of the state, and have ideologies (parties) look at it to see if it fits a diverse range of political views. Purely districted representation guarantees that minorities (ideological minorities, which in my opinion are more salient than skin color or some other criteria) aren't represented. You may have someone local to go and complain to, but if they'll never come around to your POV, are you ever truly represented?
As an American, I can say that you're pretty much accurate there. The voting system has led to a two-party system, which has led to bitter, bitter partisanship like you describe - despite the fact that the Duopoly is essentially a single monster with two heads. Now that the election is over, it will return to being the back-patting good ol' boy club.
The OP is right - divided government is good. So then why can't we get some stronger third parties? I, for one, would love to see no single party with a majority in either house. A coalition government seems like it would be much slower to pass new laws as well, which is a good thing for freedom. Nobody in this country looks beyond the "us vs them" of election day to the deeper (though mundane) issues of voting methods that could actually fix the problem we all complain about. All my fellow Americans know how to do is swing the pendulum back and forth. The system itself doesn't allow (much less encourage) real challenge to occur. Voting doesn't make much difference, because there are no choices, so the USA has one of the lowest rates of involvement of any free country.
My analysis is that voters wanted a change. They rejected the leadership of GWB and took it out on Congress, but it isn't necessarily an endorsement of Democrats. I think there are a lot of disillusioned Republicans out there, that would have taken the opportunity to vote Constitution or Libertarian if the media had bothered to inform them of these alternatives. But the media seems to be in collusion with the Duopoly, because those bitter two-way feuds make good news.
My motivation is not the paycheck. But my primary obligation is to support my family. If the position doesn't pay enough to do that, I cannot consider running for the office.
I choose to homeschool my kids. Are the feds going to cut me a check, too?
Why the inefficiency of sending them money just to get it back? Just do it all locally - we don't need a big wealth-redistribution system at all. Heck, schools ought to be funded by tuition and private grants - if you want a passle of kids, it's your obligation to raise them properly. With what I pay in property taxes every year that is earmarked toward schools, I could go a long way to decking out the spare room into an ed center.
I wanted to run. But it's too darn expensive to even file the paperwork! However, the federal offices (where I feel I'd fit best) have nothing to do with that. State offices don't pay squat, so I can't even consider running for those.
How about just enacting a preferential voting system, so you can always rank the candidates? You can put your ideologically best choice (who doesn't have a hope of winning) as #1, and still put the "mostly OK" incumbent (or whomever) at #2, where he still beats everyone else.
Who knows, maybe you'll find that lots of other people also think that guy who had no hope of winning was actually a good idea, and he will win.
Ehhh, anyone who supports public financing I'd have to oppose on principle. The incumbent advantage is a problem, yes, but this is not the solution. You make a contest fair by reforming the rules of the game itself, not by forcing your opponents to help you out.
If you're open to suggestions, let me know. I've spent a good deal of time in the past 5 years thinking about it.
You don't really want #1. What you really want is an environment that fosters stronger third parties. With more/better options available, the ballot box itself serves as your term limiter - which is what it is intended to do. The reason we have a culture of incumbency (we reelect something like 98% of those schmucks) and a Duopoly is the electoral environment: enact a preferential voting system, remove (ballot, debate) access restrictions on third parties, get rid of campaign finance limits on individuals - then you'll have an incumbents turned out more regularly, and greater interest in politics (solving #3) besides.
The problem is that the incumbent Duopoly has no interest in opening the system to anyone else. As long as they can keep passing the ball back and forth between them, they're OK with that, all the bitter partisan rhetoric aside. The two big parties in the US are not really all that much different. They just campaign that way.
I'd still be using Word 5.1a... if it were updated to run on OS X rather than classic Mac OS. Barring that, I'd have kept plugging away with Office 98 if Classic.app had worked reliably for me - but it wasn't a great solution for my nontechie wife. So I broke down and bought Office 2004 for Mac. (Thankfully I was a PT student at the time.) And now, isn't it swell that Apple went Intel, once again relegating me to less that optimal performance on my next computer unless I upgrade software. Three computers, three purchases of basically the same software. Maybe by 2009, NeoOffice will finally be mature enough to satisfy our expecatations.
This is the single area that the Mac has failed me. Were I running Windows, I could probably still run Word 2 from 15 years ago. There's no new functionality I use now that I didn't have then. Only updates for modern standards, like Unicode, have been useful.
As a part of what most people would probably call "the religious right" I have to disagree with you, here. Homosexuals are free to share their views. I just don't want them forced upon me through political action. If sex is such a private matter, why is there such an "in your face" element to it?
It's hard to be a pro-gun site and not be blocked, too. You need not necessarily be promoting violence or have any images of people even using guns, much less anything that's been shot by a gun. All you need to do is show guns positively and the blockers think, "Oh, horrors! Kiddies might go on a rampage!" and you're on the blacklist. Of course, anti-gun sites are fine, and get right through. Hard for a schoolkid to get any balanced information.
If one is going to filter (let's just assume for the moment that filtering is inevitable), then one needs to distinguish between responsible sites that talk about the political issues involved and the ones that glorify the elements of that issue that some find unsavory. There's a big difference between NRA.org and WatchMeBlastEverythingThatMovesIntoBloodyPulp.net - you can't lump them together as "gun sites" and block both.
the Republicans are already so far right that the only more-right third parties are likely to be ultra-wackos
The GOP has been giving ground to the leftists for decades. Witness that after the mid-80s that eliminating the Dept of Ed was no longer an issue. Witness that spending is more out of control under GWB than with even notorious Democrats like FDR and LBJ. Returning to a hard money standard hasn't been seriously brought up since the 60s. These are issues that conservatives traditionally cared about, and much of the GOP base still does, but the GOP leadership ignores them. You could be seeing that the GOP may be more vocal in giving lip service to right-wing ideals, but that's all it is. The GOP is more about growing the "big tent" in order to win a few more votes, to keep themselves in power.
You misspelled "game theory". In a plurality system
Then it should be quite apparent that we need to change the rules of the game, right? As I stated elsewhere we need to implement a system that's fair to all candidates and parties based on the strength of their message, not the strength of their partisan apparatus, which benefits entrenched incumbents.
do you think I should follow my conscience and just cast write-in votes from now on
Now you're just getting silly. Obviously one needs to relax one's ideals somewhat - you will never agree with anyone else more than you agree with yourself, but if everyone ran for every office and voted for himself...that's pointless and ridiculous. But you don't have to relax them to the point that your sacrifice your principles altogether. If you truly can't stomach any of the candidates enough that you'd be "ok" with him/her being in office, by all means cast a write-in vote. It's the "100%-or-nothing" type of extremism that keeps much of the third party movement splintered and ineffective, unfortunately.
There be a law saying contributions can ONLY come from individuals.....no corporations, no special interest groups at all.
Hmm, no. I'd agree with no corporate donations (because the fusion of political and economic power is very very dangerous) but political preservation/advancement of SomeInterest is certainly a legitimate activity for a group about SomeInterest.
If I belong to a chess club and my right to play chess were ever threatened, I'd expect to be able to work in concert with other chess players - collectively, through the chess club organization - not as a bunch of individuals, which is far less efficient. I send in my dues, and the chess club takes care of the details. We all have busy lives, and delegating responsibility to specialists is how we cope. Make sense?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting! This actually removes the menus from the window?
I wish I had time to look into how this is done and hack a similar ability into Blackbox. Then I'd be set!
I guess that's what I was trying to say, essentially, even if I didn't express it well. I don't know if it's something fundamental to X, or if its in the toolkits, or what. But it seems as though there's no easy way to separate the menus from the remainder of the window content. AFAICT, they are one composite "thing" with no way to separate them if desired. There is no way for the wm to "grab" the menubar and place it elsewhere.
If someone (Apple or anyone else) could come up with a window manager that followed the shared-menubar style UI of the Mac, it would be a big step in the right direction. X apps simply don't "fit" in a Mac environment. The feel is completely wrong, due to wrong UI element placement and appearance. Mac users (rightly) see X11 apps as a last resort. It's like running GNOME apps in a KDE session, or vice versa, but even worse. Different, not-entirely-compatible mechanisms of doing the same things are at work, and it's not seamless.
If there is a wm that supports Mac-style menubars, I'd love to know about it. Anyone?
...but the European model is no better. I think the problem with US health insurance is that so much of the financing of it is an ugly kludge to work around income tax.
First, it's given as an employee benefit rather than paying cash so that the employer contribution is not taxed. But that ties you to an employer, because there's usually a waiting period before benefits (including insurance) kick in at a new job. Paying the full price to extend the previous coverage those couple months is no fun.
Second, "flex plans" are an obvious hack around income tax. But again, it's under the employer's control, so you are not at liberty of changing jobs without risking your health savings. I know, I've lost a substantial chunk that way.
Third, the reason that medical care has gotten so expensive is that for the most part insurance pays it, and since we don't pay the majority of the premium ourselves, why not go in for every little sniffle? There's no incentive not to try to get more out of the system than you put into it.
Pay employees cash, make them fully responsible for their own care, and you'll see them make sensible use of medical resources. Prices will come down, guaranteed. Yes, some people will elect not to get insurance and that's not a bad thing! It may be the smartest decision for them.
The problem is that we are taxed on income, and even legislators are smart enough to realize that diminishing someone's ability to take care of his health is idiotic, so they finagle all the gimmicks to get around it. But putting a band-aid on a broken system doesn't work. It would be so much easier to simply get rid of income tax! Spend your own money as you wish without gov't skimming an arbitrarily-sized chunk off the top. Tax consumption (sales) instead, to promote savings and investment (wealth building), which would get help reduce the insane amounts of consumer debt that plagues most Americans now. Plus, think of all the bureaucracy that could be eliminated and all the wasted hours of tax preparation that would be regained. That's three very obvious (and very large) points for simplifying the tax system.
And before people start screaming "regressive tax! what about the poor?!", all you have to do is exempt food, clothing, and medicine from tax. Gov't should not be in the business of making your life harder for you to maintain, so the essentials are given a pass. The poor (or anyone) could live truly tax free if they wanted to live a subsistence existence.
That's just Approval Voting in reverse. The biggest problem with it (IMO) is that there is no specific definition of what the acceptability threshold is. For example, I might not like to see any of the candidates in office (they all suck) but given that one of them is going to win, I do have some preferences (ranking). Or maybe I'd approve of any of them (they're all good) but again I stilll have preferences. These are just the two extremes, but they illustrate the point.
IRV improves the perception of a 3rd party's chances, but in the final analysis it's unlikely they'll actually win much more until they gain enough popularity to be one of the top two parties. As the parent said, IRV has many of the same problems as plurality voting; it's just more cleverly disguised.
Think about it: right now, everyone pretty much decides who the "important two" candidates are going to be beforehand (a runoff performed in the media and in public perception) and votes for one of those two. They do these because they intuitively understand that a single vote can only choose between two different options. Compare this to IRV, which simply makes that process explicit.
Let me illustrate. Let's say you have a Liberal, a Conservative, and a Moderate. L and C have the typical polarized campaign, whipping all their loyalists (of which there are many) into a frenzy. M has a small continent of people, but charts out a middle ground between the others. Both L and C candidates would obviously prefer M as a second-place choice than "that other guy". Yet because M has few first-place votes, he is dropped and we end up with an extremist winning. M, the concensus candidate, is the obvious "common sense" choice to the objective outsider. You can't throw away part of someone's ballot and expect to get "honest" results. Someone's preference of 2nd-place-guy over 3rd-place-guy is significant - you can't just throw that away!
Yes. Repeat after me: there's not enough money in the world to make me happy if I wake up every day hating and dreading what I have to do. Life's too short to be miserable.
Whenever I've tried to enter entities, they are stripped out too.
Hmm, tested that with preview. I guess lt and gt must be treated differently than other entities. :P Lame, slashcode, lame.
Those are exactly the problems with the voting system that I'm trying to describe.
Whenever you form a political alliance or coalition, you sacrifice something. It's the nature of compromise. Parties shouldn't have to compromise - they ought to be able to stand for their principles. Once you get someone in office they may have to compromise in order to craft legislation - that's how the game is played. But simply to field a candidate with a fair chance shouldn't require compromise. The principles the candidate stands for may make him unelectable, but the system itself shouldn't be stacked against him simply because he's not an incumbent or doesn't have the right label after his name.
Absolutely. I don't have a problem with single-member districts (for Congress*) but plurality voting is about the worst voting system imaginable. The only thing it has going for it is simplicity. But really, preferential systems (like Condorcet) are not that difficult to figure out - can you rank the candidates in the order you like them? Sure, I knew you could.
*Another idea for reform, in the state legislatures, is to introduce Proportional Representation in one house. Most follow the bicameral model of Congress, but forget that Congress has different modes of representation in each house. Having two houses slows things down a bit, but if you're only going to look at bills the same way two times, it serves little point. In Congress, the People (House of Reps) look at it, then the States (Senate) do too. At the state level it would make sense to do similarly. Have localities (districts) look at it to make sure it works for all areas of the state, and have ideologies (parties) look at it to see if it fits a diverse range of political views. Purely districted representation guarantees that minorities (ideological minorities, which in my opinion are more salient than skin color or some other criteria) aren't represented. You may have someone local to go and complain to, but if they'll never come around to your POV, are you ever truly represented?
Stupid slashcode, stripping out the angle brackets...
As an American, I can say that you're pretty much accurate there. The voting system has led to a two-party system, which has led to bitter, bitter partisanship like you describe - despite the fact that the Duopoly is essentially a single monster with two heads. Now that the election is over, it will return to being the back-patting good ol' boy club.
The OP is right - divided government is good. So then why can't we get some stronger third parties? I, for one, would love to see no single party with a majority in either house. A coalition government seems like it would be much slower to pass new laws as well, which is a good thing for freedom. Nobody in this country looks beyond the "us vs them" of election day to the deeper (though mundane) issues of voting methods that could actually fix the problem we all complain about. All my fellow Americans know how to do is swing the pendulum back and forth. The system itself doesn't allow (much less encourage) real challenge to occur. Voting doesn't make much difference, because there are no choices, so the USA has one of the lowest rates of involvement of any free country.
My analysis is that voters wanted a change. They rejected the leadership of GWB and took it out on Congress, but it isn't necessarily an endorsement of Democrats. I think there are a lot of disillusioned Republicans out there, that would have taken the opportunity to vote Constitution or Libertarian if the media had bothered to inform them of these alternatives. But the media seems to be in collusion with the Duopoly, because those bitter two-way feuds make good news.
My motivation is not the paycheck. But my primary obligation is to support my family. If the position doesn't pay enough to do that, I cannot consider running for the office.
I choose to homeschool my kids. Are the feds going to cut me a check, too?
Why the inefficiency of sending them money just to get it back? Just do it all locally - we don't need a big wealth-redistribution system at all. Heck, schools ought to be funded by tuition and private grants - if you want a passle of kids, it's your obligation to raise them properly. With what I pay in property taxes every year that is earmarked toward schools, I could go a long way to decking out the spare room into an ed center.
Ha! I've often joked that we'd have a better government if we selected some people at random from a phone book...
I wanted to run. But it's too darn expensive to even file the paperwork! However, the federal offices (where I feel I'd fit best) have nothing to do with that. State offices don't pay squat, so I can't even consider running for those.
How about just enacting a preferential voting system, so you can always rank the candidates? You can put your ideologically best choice (who doesn't have a hope of winning) as #1, and still put the "mostly OK" incumbent (or whomever) at #2, where he still beats everyone else.
Who knows, maybe you'll find that lots of other people also think that guy who had no hope of winning was actually a good idea, and he will win.
Ehhh, anyone who supports public financing I'd have to oppose on principle. The incumbent advantage is a problem, yes, but this is not the solution. You make a contest fair by reforming the rules of the game itself, not by forcing your opponents to help you out.
If you're open to suggestions, let me know. I've spent a good deal of time in the past 5 years thinking about it.
You don't really want #1. What you really want is an environment that fosters stronger third parties. With more/better options available, the ballot box itself serves as your term limiter - which is what it is intended to do. The reason we have a culture of incumbency (we reelect something like 98% of those schmucks) and a Duopoly is the electoral environment: enact a preferential voting system, remove (ballot, debate) access restrictions on third parties, get rid of campaign finance limits on individuals - then you'll have an incumbents turned out more regularly, and greater interest in politics (solving #3) besides.
The problem is that the incumbent Duopoly has no interest in opening the system to anyone else. As long as they can keep passing the ball back and forth between them, they're OK with that, all the bitter partisan rhetoric aside. The two big parties in the US are not really all that much different. They just campaign that way.
I'd still be using Word 5.1a ... if it were updated to run on OS X rather than classic Mac OS. Barring that, I'd have kept plugging away with Office 98 if Classic.app had worked reliably for me - but it wasn't a great solution for my nontechie wife. So I broke down and bought Office 2004 for Mac. (Thankfully I was a PT student at the time.) And now, isn't it swell that Apple went Intel, once again relegating me to less that optimal performance on my next computer unless I upgrade software. Three computers, three purchases of basically the same software. Maybe by 2009, NeoOffice will finally be mature enough to satisfy our expecatations.
This is the single area that the Mac has failed me. Were I running Windows, I could probably still run Word 2 from 15 years ago. There's no new functionality I use now that I didn't have then. Only updates for modern standards, like Unicode, have been useful.
As a part of what most people would probably call "the religious right" I have to disagree with you, here. Homosexuals are free to share their views. I just don't want them forced upon me through political action. If sex is such a private matter, why is there such an "in your face" element to it?
It's hard to be a pro-gun site and not be blocked, too. You need not necessarily be promoting violence or have any images of people even using guns, much less anything that's been shot by a gun. All you need to do is show guns positively and the blockers think, "Oh, horrors! Kiddies might go on a rampage!" and you're on the blacklist. Of course, anti-gun sites are fine, and get right through. Hard for a schoolkid to get any balanced information.
If one is going to filter (let's just assume for the moment that filtering is inevitable), then one needs to distinguish between responsible sites that talk about the political issues involved and the ones that glorify the elements of that issue that some find unsavory. There's a big difference between NRA.org and WatchMeBlastEverythingThatMovesIntoBloodyPulp.net - you can't lump them together as "gun sites" and block both.
Thank you! Someone else has seen the light!
The GOP has been giving ground to the leftists for decades. Witness that after the mid-80s that eliminating the Dept of Ed was no longer an issue. Witness that spending is more out of control under GWB than with even notorious Democrats like FDR and LBJ. Returning to a hard money standard hasn't been seriously brought up since the 60s. These are issues that conservatives traditionally cared about, and much of the GOP base still does, but the GOP leadership ignores them. You could be seeing that the GOP may be more vocal in giving lip service to right-wing ideals, but that's all it is. The GOP is more about growing the "big tent" in order to win a few more votes, to keep themselves in power.
Then it should be quite apparent that we need to change the rules of the game, right? As I stated elsewhere we need to implement a system that's fair to all candidates and parties based on the strength of their message, not the strength of their partisan apparatus, which benefits entrenched incumbents.
Now you're just getting silly. Obviously one needs to relax one's ideals somewhat - you will never agree with anyone else more than you agree with yourself, but if everyone ran for every office and voted for himself...that's pointless and ridiculous. But you don't have to relax them to the point that your sacrifice your principles altogether. If you truly can't stomach any of the candidates enough that you'd be "ok" with him/her being in office, by all means cast a write-in vote. It's the "100%-or-nothing" type of extremism that keeps much of the third party movement splintered and ineffective, unfortunately.
Hmm, no. I'd agree with no corporate donations (because the fusion of political and economic power is very very dangerous) but political preservation/advancement of SomeInterest is certainly a legitimate activity for a group about SomeInterest.
If I belong to a chess club and my right to play chess were ever threatened, I'd expect to be able to work in concert with other chess players - collectively, through the chess club organization - not as a bunch of individuals, which is far less efficient. I send in my dues, and the chess club takes care of the details. We all have busy lives, and delegating responsibility to specialists is how we cope. Make sense?