A friend of mine from Australia (a country not known for logical or sane elections, themselves) emailed me after the caucus and said “wow, so the Republicans chose Cruz as their candidate!”. I explained the long, painful primary system and how we have to do this state-by-state for the next three months, and he was horrified.
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Yeah the primary schedule was fine in the days before TV, internet, instant communication which actually wasn’t all that long ago. Today though not so much reason for it. One of things I am jealous of other countries for is the quite short campaign time periods. This now damn near 2 year long presidential thing is getting old.
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I don’t get it. It’s just constant electioneering, with the midterms as well. And so much money just wasted. And having so many other elected positions that (to an outsider) don’t seem like they need to be (like, for example, county clerks…). I’m not sure I understand why Representatives have such short terms, either. I’d rather see 4 or 6 year ones, and term limits.
Campaign funding badly needs reforming. That Citizens United ruling was a disaster.
I’m not familiar with other countries, but compare the US with the UK system:
(older, but not massively out of date)
Stupid unintended consequences of the First Amendment. One reason why I’m a little wary of written constitutions.
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Exactly, this is Iowa, a state with towns that occasionally elect Jovial Mayors and such quirks of small scale local direct democracy.
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I used to vote for Ted Kennedy regularly. It’s the same machine, it just has her in it’s sights now.
Look at it this way. If six monkeys … if six monkeys … the law of averages, if I’ve got this right, means that if six monkeys are thrown up in the air long enough, they would land on their tails [he throws another coin to Rosencrantz] about as often as they would land on their…
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- Abolish Citizens United.
- Redistrict using math and geography
- Use ranked-voting (instant runoff)
- Hold the primaries over a three-week period
- Make the very first primary a collection of four states, maybe Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nebraska.
- Fine any congressperson who misses more than 20% of votes
- Make a four-year moratorium on lobbying after stepping down from office
- Other stuff…
It’s amazing how nice this democracy could be if the laws that governed elections and politicians were made by someone other than politicians.
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Hell, I’d like to see a lifetime ban on earning income (or a 100% tax) after leaving office, along with a continued salary (it could honestly be a pretty big one). I know it sounds extreme, but I think there are a lot of people leaving office to very well paying positions at friendly companies as sort of after-the-fact bribes.
Not the first place I’ve said it, but if Corporations have the same rights as people, I’d start with arresting all the large shareholders of Goldman Sachs and a couple other giants for slavery (with the mandatory restitution). Okay, I wouldn’t but it’s a nice thought, I’d just pass legislation that clarified that while corporations had some powers of individuals there were not people and had no rights. It’s so crazy, corporations are defined by statutes, the government could literally declare them not to exist anymore. How the hell could they have human rights?
More like stupid intended consequences of a politicized judiciary. The rulings on the First Amendment make no sense and are totally partisan (i.e. for the corporatist party). If free speech is so inviolable, why not strike down copyright law and trademark law? The First Amendment doesn’t say corporations are people, and, in fact, I don’t think the founders liked corporations much from what I’ve read (they distrusted them as kind of wannabe non-state governments).
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In the UK it’s called Losing Your Deposit and it only happens if you don’t get 5% of the vote.
No, he’s talking about not showing up to do your damn job once elected. A la Marco Rubio.
Edit: I looked it up. Could he be more blatant about how little a shit he gives about being a Senator? I know he’s not running for election, but this has to be dereliction of duty. I guess his remaining time is so short it isn’t worth recalling him.
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Oops! I’m not having a good day, I should have realised that.
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I like your proposals, but it’s too complex and will never fly. The focus on quarterly financial statements and the political attention economy let all master plans end with
3 ???
4 Profit!
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Untrue! Electing a government via fisticuffs is a proud and honoured tradition.
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Up till recently, I thought the probable influence peddling via the Clinton Foundation was a much bigger black mark against HRC than the email business.
But I’m not so sure now. It’s increasingly difficult to maintain the position that Petraeus committed a crime and Clinton did not.
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I’m not sure how the email server issue is going to play out.
One of the things that doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of play is that email is a notoriously insecure protocol in the first place. I don’t care how good the security on Clinton’s server was, the underlying protocol uses a store and forward method. It’s like the US mail, only with the mail getting a carbon copy at every post office it passes through. There are government networks that allow classified email, but the servers, routers, and rest of the network are all either under direct control of the government or contractors who have clearance and can therefor be prosecuted for leaking information if it gets out.
Then there’s Clinton’s statement that has bugged me from the beginning that none of the information sent or stored on the server was “marked” as classified. The Idea that the Secretary of State doesn’t know when what she is discussing is classified is disconcerting.
The Clinton campaign has also fielded a statement that too much information gets marked with a classification, and I’m in complete agreement on that matter. It’s too bad we’re all probably going to have to wait 25 years or so for things to be declassified before we really understand what this whole issue was really about.
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