Summations Only

I support that too. But I'm not about to let the fact that Ron Paul agrees with me on a few items (for completely different reasons, I might add) that most politicians do not trick me into supporting a man who thinks that returning to the gold standard is actually a good idea, or that a woman's right to choose or a gay person's right to exist or a black person's right to attend the same school as a white person should be determined on a state-by-state level.

Basically.Americans tend to believe that American is "exceptional," that what works for other nations will not work for us, and that America is the best regardless of any evidence to the contrary.The "socialism" nonsense is more soccer-holliganry than actual debate. "We" are "capitalist," "they" are "socialist." We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. We don't need to know what those words actually mean, we don't need to know if a given policy actually has anything to do with "socialism." All we need to know is that the other team says it's good and our team captain says it's bad.

You might, actually, by focusing on exactly that "I paid into it" mentality. Sure, it's not precisely accurate (her tax dollars were not saved for her use; she paid for the previous generation of retirees, just as those of us working now pay for her), but it's close enough for a debate.Just as "she paid into" SS and Medicare, the poor "pay into" social services like unemployment, fire and police protection, SS, Medicare, and so on. Under a public health option, everyone would also "pay into" the service, just as she "paid into" Medicare. Even the unemployed "pay into" these services, because their unemployment check is itself taxed for income, and then taxed through sales taxes to be redistributed into social programs.If it's okay for her to receive benefits from programs that she "paid into," it then must be okay for other programs to be "paid into" by everyone so that everyone can also receive benefits. Logically, if she opposes public health care or other typical "socialist" policies, she must also refuse to accept Medicare and SS.Of course, I've never tried to convince a 65-year-old of anything, with the possible exceptions of ICANT/Buz who may be older than that. And of course we know how well that works.

Healthcare costs are driven upwards by several factors. A large one is prescription medications - a single-payer government near-monopoly on healthcare, as by far the largest consumer of prescription medications, has sufficient negotiating power to reduce the cost of medication from Big Pharma (which of course they don;t want...). Another is the fact that we really do need more people paying into the system - insurance is never about paying into the system so you can take pack what you paid (if that were the case you'd use this new thing they have called a "savings account"). Insurance of all types is based on those who are not currently receiving benefits paying for those who do need the benefits with the assurance that they, too will receive the benefits if needed someday. In the current paradigm we have many who can't afford to pay premiums or who are healthy and so don't buy insurance...and this drives the premium price even higher, because the healthy pay for the sick in return for the guarantee of reciprocation if/when necessary. It's why the Obamacare mandate is in there, and it's functionally similar (but more complicated, and with Constitutional questions, and far more difficult to control, and with the for-profit middlemen) to simply taxing everyone in a single-payer system.But the largest problem is likely the fact that something like 1/3 of every dollar paid in insurance premiums goes to claims filing. If you cut out the for-profit bureaucracy whose vested interest is to deny care to maximize profit and replace it with the doctor and patient making the decision of what care is needed, we automatically chop out all of that expense.Every other first-world nation somehow manages to afford universal healthcare. It's a rather odd facet of the "American exceptionalism" brainbug that causes Americans to believe that we're simultaneously "better" but "can't afford" what every other nation does. Ron Paul is an interesting man. By interesting, of course, I mean he's batshit insane but remarkably self-consistent. I absolutely believe that the man holds to his principles in every case, and that he would seek to defend the Constitution.Unfortunately his interpretation of the Constitution is amazingly distorted from what basically anyone else thinks the same words mean. He has quite a few great policies, but rather than reaching those positions the way you or I would, he reaches them by misinterpreting the Constitution. He doesn't want to end wars because of any ethical or financial or diplomatic issue - he just thinks the Constitution requires military isolationism. And thinks that most of the federal government is unconstitutional as well. Among other things.He's like a kid on a math test who gets a few right answers on hard problems, but still needs to be marked down because the work he shows for those problems is completely wrong...and made him get all the rest of the answers, even for easy questions, wrong as well.

It can potentially make a very, very large difference.Do you recall Florida in the 2000 election? "Hanging chads," and Bush taking the state by the skin of his Supreme Court ruling? I do.The Green Party split the Democrat vote in Florida. If even a quarter of those who voted Green (knowing that their candidate had no chance of winning from polling and past trends) had instead voted Democrat, we would have avoided the Bush presidency. While we very well may still ahve wound up in a war with Afghanistan, we almost certainly would never have invaded Iraq. I can see no policy where Gore would have made a worse decision than Bush, and at least a few where the outcome would have been better. And at the very least, several hundred thousand Iraqis would almost certainly be alive today.I agree that it's bullshit. I agree that it's not right. But the American presidential election is a winner-takes-all affair. Voting for the guy you really like often just winds up taking away a vote from the guy you at least don't hate. A vote for the Green Party in Florida in 2000 was just another vote for Bush, effectively...and I don't imagine that any of those Green voters preferred Bush to Gore.So here's the deal: I don't like Obama. He's managed to at best disappoint me on some matters, and on a plurality of others I find him to be reprehensible. He mishandled the healthcare debacle (while what we're getting is better than it was, it's still ridiculously awful compared to what we should have gotten with a Democrat House, Senate, AND Presidency). He took nearly his entire first term to get us out of Iraq, and that only happened because Iraq refused to continue to give Americans legal immunity, not because Obama decided it was time for us to leave. Guantanamo Bay is still open for business. Nobody who ordered or performed torture has or will be prosecuted. We violate the sovereignty of other nations and blow up their citizens with no due process (including innocent civilians, a drone cannot tell a Taliban member from a random Afghani citizen, and we've fired missiles at weddings) as a matter of course. The USA PATRIOT Act is still in force, and the executive branch under Obama continues to make massive power grabs. Obama signed a law that allows anyone to simply be imprisoned indefinitely without trial, in direct violation of the Constitution and basically all of American law since the beginning.I really, really don't like him. He gets a few things right. Just a few. But usually it's when he has no other choice anyway (Iraq), and most of his efforts when he moves in the direction I'd like are done sluggishly and halfheartedly.I'd very much rather not vote for him. Give me a viable 3rd party candidate. Hell, give me Dennis Kucinich! I'd even give Hillary a try, she strikes me as having more of a spine, and universal healthcare was a major issue of hers back when she was First Lady.But look at reality: Obama is going up against either Romney (most likely) or Gingrich (ha!) in 2012. Some number of third party candidates will also run and utterly fail to collectively win more than 10% of the vote put together. Their names will not matter, they will not win a single state. They will serve only to take actual voters away from either Obama or the Republican candidate.I hate Romney and Gingrich. I hate them both, because I think they will be exactly the same as Obama on all of the things I just talked about...without even sluggish and halfhearted attempts toward anything I actually agree with. I feel like both parties want to fuck me, but the Democrats will at least use lube, and the Republicans have multiple STDs.I cannot have what I really want. It will not happen; polls tell me that even if a third party were to have a candidate I could fully support, that candidate will not win. The next President of the United States will be either a Democrat or a Republican, end of story.If I were in a swing state (and I'm not, thankfully), a vote for a third party would be another vote that Obama does not have...making the threshold for a Republican victory one vote lower. A vote for the candidate I really want is effectively a vote for the candidate I hate the most.Florida in 2000 was not the only closely-won swing state to have determined an election. Its happened several times throughout history. While I don't think Obama will have much trouble against either Romney or Gingrich, it's possible that we could see some states close enough that the 3rd-party votes would have been relevant to the election as a whole.When I vote, I vote according to not only my conscience in isolation, but also taking into account the likely outcomes of my vote. American Presidential elections are a Prisoner's Dilemma, and choosing what I want the most without considering the consequences of other people's choices (as learned through polling and historical trends) can result in a more negative outcome than if I chose #2 on my list.

I'd be much more interested in changing the system to something that doesn;t force me to suppress my moral outrage at the political activities of a monster to prevent a worse monster from taking office. Seriously, I feel like Japan, voting for Godzilla to destroy half of Tokyo so that (insert monster here) doesn't destroy it all.What I'd like would be, at a minimum, to start voting Senators and Representatives from third parties into power. It's smaller scale, more local, far less money involved, especially for Representatives, and so the person we want can actually have a chance to win. If a single third party can build up structure and supporters through more local victories, they can scale up to the national level over time, and we can finally have a choice other than the Republicrats or the Demoblicans for the Presidency.What I'd like even more than that, real change to the underlying system of how we elect our government officials, would unfortunately require Constitutional amendments and possibly a genie with more than three wishes available.

The effect is the same. But these were people who actually overcame the major hurdle - they defeated voter apathy and voted. If they had been more aware of their fellow voters through polling, they may have taken a very slightly differnte course of action. Were I in their place, preferring Green but also preferring Gore to Bush and knowing that Florida was a swing state, I would have voted for damage control rather than idealism and cast my vote for Gore.You know how polls talk about "likely voters?" They're the ones who count. And you don't get much more "likely" than "actually voted," even if they essencially threw those votes away. I consider them to be slighly more at fault than those who simply didn't vote at all - we know with near certainty that the Green voters would have preferred Gore to Bush.

It's really, really not. No, it does not. The 60-vote requirement is only a requirement to defeat a filibuster, which the Republicans simply threaten left and right. A majority vote still passes bills to be signed by the President; a filibuster simply prevents that vote from happening.But you may have noticed that there have been no filibusters, only threats to filibuster, which has thus far been sufficient to cause the Democrats to attempt bad-faith compromising at every turn (until they accept a bill that gives the Republicans more than they were demanding in the first place). The results may be a bit different if the Democrats were to have forced the Republicans to actually filibuster (which requires a member of the body to speak continuously, else the vote can proceed; past filibusters, when they used to actually happen instead of just being threatened, have consisted of congress-critters reading from phone books or dictionaries for days straight). Make them carry through on their threats, don't just bend over. I don't give two shits, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. I don't care what it "looked like." Obama is the Commander in Chief. Responsibility for the military while he is in office rests squarely on his shoulders. He could have ordered a rapid reduction of force in Iraq the day he took the Oath. He did not. We are finally out of Iraq in the last year of his first term.I complained that we should have been out of Iraq sooner, and you're response is that we obeyed our own timetable - how silly, because that timetable was the problem. And the reason for that timetable was the expiration of the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, which protected American contractors (working for the State department) and soldiers from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

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As reported on Saturday, October 15, 2011, the Obama Administration had decided not to have American forces stay in Iraq (barring some last-minute move in the Iraqi parliament when they returned from a break in late November 2011 shortly before the end-of-the-year withdrawal date) because of concerns that they would not have be given immunity from Iraqi courts, a concern for American commanders in the field who also had to worry about the Sadrist response should troops stay and the general state of Iraq's readiness for transfer of power.

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If the Agreement had been extended by Iraqi parliament, Obama would have left troops in Iraq longer.So what do we have? Obama campaigned partially on ending the Iraq war...but the only withdrawal timetable he used was the one created by the Bush administration, and he would have kept troops their longer if the Iraqi parliament had allowed the continued legal immunity for American contractors! If Bush had been in office for a third term, we would likely have seen identical results!I don't think it's "bullshit" to fault Obama for this, when he absolutely could have ordered every American soldier home and we could have been completely out of Iraq within months of his taking office. The President is Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Congress decides funding for bases and the military in general, but Congress does not tell soldiers what to do. That's under the authority of the Commander in Chief. If Obama had actually wanted, he could have ordered every Guantanamo detainee released back to their home countries. He did not. Obama is responsible for every day that every prisoner has spent in that prison since the day he took office. Congress can interfere with the actual base closure, and they could interfere with bringing the prisoners to the US mainland, but they have no authority to block the President from ordering US military forces to transport the detainees back where they came from or to a 3rd party nation willing to take them in. Provide evidence, immediately, that it would be illegal to prosecute those who ordered and committed acts of torture, which are violations of (among other things) the Geneva conventions. Your position rests upon the presumption that the torture was at least controversially legal, and it was not so. From the Geneva Conventions:

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Persons taking no active part in hostilities, including military persons who have ceased to be active as a result of sickness, injury, or detention, should be treated humanely and that the following acts are prohibited:

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violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
taking of hostages;
outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; and
the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

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The Unites States signed this treaty, making it law.We aren't talking about acts of questionable legality at all here, crash. If it's "illegal" to prosecute people for breaking the law, then apparently Administration officials are also immune to prosecution for rape or murder. Strawman. US drone strikes, even the assassination of Osama bin Laden, constitute illegal violations of foreign sovereignty. I'm outraged that people are sentenced to die within hours by a drone controller and his superiors with no evidence and no defense in violation of his home nation's own laws.What would happen, do you think, if a foreign nation started flying drones over American airspace and firing air-to-ground missiles at US citizens, claiming they were "terrorists?" I think we'd declare war, because firing missiles on citizens of a foreign nation is an act of war. The only reason the US gets away with it is because everybody else is afraid we'll declare war on them and turn them into Iraq or Afghanistan.It is indisputably true that US drone attacks into Afghanistan and Pakistan have slaughtered innocent civilians, including at least one wedding. There have been multiple stories in the news regarding the lack of virtually any target verification prior to authorization of a drone strike - if you're wearing traditional clothing and you're a group of men, especially if you have a weapon (or an object that looks a bit like a weapon from the air), that's all that's required to launch a missile and kill you and potentially your family. Barack Obama, as Commander in Chief of the United States Military, has the authority to order those attacks to continue or be stopped. He therefore bears full responsibility for every civilian killed in a drone attack.There is no reason you can provide that will justify the slaughter of innocent civilians in this manner. None. I don't care if 10%, 20%, 50%, or 80% of the targets were actually aligned with the Taliban or al Qaeda - if the tables were turned, American citizens would be thrown into a bloodthirsty rage for revenge. The actual text of the law, crash, is this:

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The detention sections of the NDAA begin by "affirm[ing]" that the authority of the President under the AUMF, a joint resolution passed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, includes the power to detain, via the Armed Forces, any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," and anyone who commits a "belligerent act" against the U.S. or its coalition allies in aid of such enemy forces, under the law of war, "without trial, until the end of the hostilities authorized by the [AUMF]."

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The actual law does not exclude American citizens - and it shouldn;t legally apply to non-Americans, either. The text as written authorizes the President to indefinitely detain anyone - all he has to do is accuse a person of supporting al Qaeda. He doesn't have to prove it, because the law itself prevents a trial from being necessary. The person illegally thus detained has no recourse, because he doesn't get access to a lawyer because his detention is secret, and so the Supreme Court will never, ever hear a case on the matter to rule on its Constitutionality! Signing statements are not legally binding. Congress makes laws, not the President; the Courts interpret laws, not the President. A signing statement is at best a guideline for future administrations, but they are under no legal compulsion to agree. Even Obama isn't legally obligated to follow his own signing statement.Obama, tomorrow, could order you arrested for supporting the Taliban, and you could be imprisoned indefinitely and secretly for the rest of your life with no appeals, no access to a lawyer, no due process. All he has to do is make the accusation, because you don't get a trial to defend yourself. I don;t believe Dennis Kucinich would have allowed drone attacks to continue. I believe he would have ordered the Guantanamo detainees released. I don't believe he would have signed the NDAA. I believe we would have exited Iraq faster, and possibly may have exited Afghanistan as well. As I very specifically said, crash, Obamacare is better than what we had. It's just not good enough. Sure, folks with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage, several million young adults are able to still be on their parents' health insurance, and so on. But the system itself is still broken, with health providers having a very clear and strong incentive to simply deny care whenever they can get away with it.And while Congress passes the laws, Obama did precious little to help the process. He didn't submit his own plan, he didn't veto plans that didn't go far enough. Of all your points against me, this is perhaps the most legitimate one...but Obama was the one who pushed for a healthcare reform bill in the first place, and I hold him at least partially responsible for the gigantic mess that resulted.

Doesn't he have a totally-not-coordinating-in-any-way SuperPAC? I thought everyone did these days. No legal restrictions on those at all.

I very strongly suspect that the ration of sane to insane individuals on the matter of politics would be horribly depressing. At least in the States. I've said for a long time that Americans are like soccer hooligans in politics, basing support on a particular "team" rather than a consequential analysis of policy.I'm also fairly certain that cuts in several directions, including both "mainstream" parties, and some others.But then I'm rather cynical on the matter of sanity for the entire species across most topics, not merely politics.

...No, because those same people will support anyone who is not Obama. The only question was which particular not-Obama to have on the ballot in the real election.I get where you're coming from, but the "big bads" you're suggesting are behind such a conspiracy have a much, much simpler way to get what they want:Donate massive amounts to the campaigns of both "mainstream" parties such that both the Democrats and Republicans are beholden to you to get elected.And that's exactly what we see. Goldman Sachs doesn't care one bit whether Obama or Romney is the next President, because both are on the payroll.There's just no need to ensure the re-election of a specific President by somehow making sure that every opponent has either the brains or the charisma (sometimes both) of cat feces. That's the amateurs way to take over the country. A real manipulator finds a way to win regardless of who gets the Oval Office.

It's not so much that we're being influenced to vote Democrat or Republican, dronester.The real influence is to marginalize 3rd parties. The system is stacked against them.What we have are two "mainstream" parties that both very strongly support Big Business. The conflict over social issues like welfare or contraception or abortion, while important to you and me, are a distraction. The appearance of conflict provides a real alternative in that I really do support Democrats over Republicans, simply because 80% bad is still better than 90% bad. The inclusion of a choice allows Americans to either not notice or consciously ignore the fact that, whichever of the Big Two you vote for, the same people really win in the end. Big Finance, Big Military, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma...either way they win in the end.And the few of us who see the patterns grudgingly vote for the least bad viable choice, because we see no option for rapid change with a deck so stacked and when we have no major media outlet with which to capture the 30-second attention span of the rest of the nation.

I've heard rumors surrounding a semi-conspiracy-theory tactic supposedly undertaken by Ron Paul supporters - to install as many Ron Paul supporters as delegates as possible, such that in the case of an open vote at the Convention Ron Paul might be nominated despite not winning a single state. That sounds a bit too...I don't know how else to describe it but to say "conspiracy theory" to sound likely to me, but it does sound sufficiently plausible as a general tactic.At this point the result is not clear-cut, and so there really could be an open vote, and an open vote could very well result in Gingrich or Santorum getting the nod depending on the leanings of the individual delegates themselves. Without any conspiracies, since they're both more popular with Republicans than Paul (I'm still shocked and dismayed at the number of Paul supporters among self-identified liberals and moderates, who clearly aren't paying any attention at all).

This is an incredibly low standard to exceed. I've spoken to un-medicated schizophrenics that I would consider "more sane" than Bachmann.

I'm not sure that the Tea Party can be wholly blamed on the Republican Party.That probably sounds weird at first glance. Allow me to explain, and please, if anyone has better information than I, correct me. This is just my best current understanding of the chain of events that led to the Tea Party caucus.The Tea Party began as a mostly grassroots movement, not terribly different from Occupy in that respect, though with perhaps slightly better coordination. They represented a more fiscally conservative, generally libertarian subset of people who also normally would usually comprise part of the Republican voter base. I remember a strong message to lower taxes and prevent new ones, and I also remember multiple organizational units popping up, each one representing the "Tea Party." Again like Occupy, the whole thing seemed to be herding cats who agreed that mice are tasty and taxes are bad, but there was a large amount of variety outside of that. There were teabaggers who were just racist and didn't want a black President; there were teabaggers who were social as well as fiscal libertarians and didn't oppose gay marriage, etc.Wealthy parties including the Koch brothers took notice of the Tea Party, and began injecting funding and organization...and began shifting the message. Where Occupy has largely fallen apart (though not completely), the Tea Party now had a stronger foundation, not of supporters, per se, but money and organization go a long way.Many of the original Tea Party leaders fell by the wayside, leaving the Koch-funded organizational structure on top. The message became more directed, and activity began to focus on elections. More social as well as fiscal conservatism and indeed fiscal libertarianism, less focus on social libertarianism. At this point the Tea Party began to more resemble the ultra-right-wing of the Republican base, with none of the more moderate factions.If I were an election manager in the Republican National Party, I would have been pretty scared at this point - the Tea Party represented at this point a substantial part of the Republican base, and was focused on a message even further to the right than the Republicans had been used to. There must have been some serious worry about a party split (I recall some speculation on that front in fact). The Republican National Party would have had virtually no choice but to support Tea Party-supported candidates in order to prevent such a split.And so the Tea Party remained a part of the Republican Party, and Republican candidates in many areas shifted further to the right, sometimes harshly.The Republicans remain beholden to the Tea Party because the teabaggers now represent a significant number of their seats in Congress. Much as I dislike Boehner, I don;t think he was the mastermind behind the current game of chicken in Washington - he had a deal to pass a debt ceiling increase and then he went back on that deal because he was too pressured by the Tea Party caucus.And so now we're playing Russian Roulette over a budgetary battle where the now-even-more-conservative Republicans have sour grapes over being unable to repeal Obamacare, and so they threaten to just burn down the whole football field if their opposition doesn't just let them win anyway.And all the gerrymandered redistricting efforts around the country make sure that, even though virtually everybody hates Congress as a whole and in fact has a higher opinion of canine feces (according to one actual poll, apparently, which is hilarious and sad and frightening all at once)...they still really like their own representatives and we're unlikely to see very many seats change hands.Welcome to America. Land of the self-interested, home of the stupid.If I had the money to pull off a move and a guarantee of employment, I'd be seriously considering moving to Switzerland or Sweden or Norway or someplace similar. A lot of them arent even progressive when they can be. I've signed a petition or three lately, participated in some political email campaigns, and the responses I get back from my Democratic, "liberal" congresscritters is honestly not terribly different from what I'd expect from most Republicans. Just more of the same "protect American freedoms and interests at the expense of everyone else, keep throwing around our military because it's a really big hammer and every problem is a nail after all" nonsense.