Yah, I’ve considered those things but still feel 100% for going forward with these sports.
First World Problems: Thread about freedom derails into discussion on whether or not to go kayaking this weekend.
Haha, nice.
Well, this thread took quite the derailment.
Take this with a grain of salt as I am Canadian, but from up here I find the “both parties are just as bad” argument extremely unconvincing. Your Republican party seems to be held hostage by a radical base that is dead set on pushing counter productive, fiscally irresponsible and near draconian policies that would get laughed out of any other developed country. It just boggles my mind.
I’d love to see an actually fiscally responsible 3rd party thrown into the mix.
You want to see what is the problem with the US and why you will never get any fisal responsibility? No problem just go to any member of Congress’s personal web site and see what the post most prominantly. It will be all the legislation showing how they provided X dollars to help Y group and how they got tax breaks for Z group.
to test my theory I choose the first Congress person that came to mind Chuck Schumer. Guess what “featured news” was. That he introduced a bill to give tax breaks to upstate NY biz. I did the same thing with other random members with similar results.
The point is they find it very importannt to tell you about the goodies they got for you. You will nevr get a fiscaly responsible candidate when people view the world this way. most of these bills just move money from one party to another and do little but help them get elected again by allowing them to show what good they have done for you.
I would love to see someone say how they did not work to bring x dollars to thier state to fund any projects but instead spent thier time working on closing down various govt agencies.
One need look no further than a couple of years ago when the Pentagon wanted to cut several programs that no longer had relevant military uses (yes that’s right, the Pentagon actually wanted to cut some programs and wasn’t looking to divert the money elsewhere within their budget either) and Congress would not let them because the programs provided jobs in several legislative districts important to powerful members of Congress on both sides of the isle. I realize jobs are important, but it’s not like that money would have just disappeared. It would have been spent on something that might have been useful and maybe even created other, better jobs.
bump
Well, if a base gets closed, and that money is used to create jobs somewhere, the problem is that the Congressman/woman will get labled by those who lost their jobs as the person that put them in the unemployment line. However, the people who got the new jobs will typically figure that they got the job because of their own talent and ambition and abilities, So letting a base (or closely related industry) close “on your watch” is just a negative expectation game for a member of Congress. Moreover, you need to get other Congressionals to support you when you want to do something, so you have to be careful not to close bases in other people’s districts, or they won’t want to support you when you are trying to get money for your highway improvement program or whatnot.
As for why does it always come down to a choice between two evils, there are at least three answers to this:
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We are living in a time where there are no good choices for us right now. We’re really just deciding who is going to f*ck whom while we start taking away things that had been (unrealistically) promised. Whose entitlements get taken away, and who pays? Social Security? Medicare? Drug Benefits? Military? 3% tax cuts for the highest tax bracket? Employment? Education? Fire and Police? Health? That’s what this election will decide, in a very sloppy, and probably incomplete, way.
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The way our voting system is structured, we have congress (and arguably the presidency) structured into single-member districts (where the president’s district is the entire country). When you have voting structures like this, they almost always evolve into two-party dominant systems. This is because if you don’t get 50%+1 vote, you don’t get anything this round. Therefore the two parties serve to coordinate voters so that they have the best chance of fielding a candidate that can win.
If a third viewpoint opens up, it’s generally more productive to try to get it incorporated into one of the major parties, rather than launching out all on ones own, because it is just too hard to get to the 50%+1 hurdle in any length of time. This is actually how the Tea Party is operating, more as a faction within the Republican party attempting (and largely succeeding, in my view, though this can be debated) in trying to take over the entire apparatus.
When you have had third party candidates, they have tended to be Republicans and Democrats who are disaffected with the existing party or did not win a primary election and have therefore decided to try running as their own candidate to capitalize on their individual popularity. It usually doesn’t work, and tends to divide the vote between themselves and the party they are ideologically closest to (Nader/Gore/Bush, Perot/Bush/Clinton, Anderson/Carter/Reagan, T.Roosevelt/Taft/Wilson). Occasionally it can work in small states like Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, because in smaller environments, you don’t need quite as elaborate an organization to win, and so smaller candidates have better chances.
In many European systems, you have proportional-representation, which says that if you pass a minumum hurdle of say 5%, you get seats in the parliament proportional to the number of votes that you got. This tends to result in multiple parties representing many different platforms, but then introduces complexities in creating governing coalitions.
There are also differences between presidential and parliamentary systems as well.
- Democracies generally need to have real majorities in order to govern, not just pluralities. In order to do this, someone has to have more than 50% of the voting power. So it generally comes down to a choice of two people for head-of-government even in proportional representation systems, and especially in presidential systems.
Meh
whoa whoa whoa… whoa
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I still approve this message. While I’m not happy with the O man, I would only be marginally less unhappy with MItt. Let’s hold our breath and hang on for the next 4 years.
idk, I thought moving the rate of medically covered people in America from 83% to 95% was pretty good
The irony of having the purported leader of the free world grappling with such great difficulty with a socialdemocratic issue that other Western countries passed without a fraction of the fanfare.
^ purported? Who else could even attempt to claim the title without being laughed out of the universe?
Secretary General of the UN? Bernanke?
I’ll give you Bernake, but Sec Gen of the UN is a joke.
Bump for Greenie.
I don’t know who this person is, or if they’ll ever be back. But I would like some qualification to this comment.
Politics discussions should be banned on any non-politics forum.