Tea Party Questions

And the guys who booed the gay solder were, what? Voicing their disapproval of the internet technologies that have so de-emphasized real, face-to-face human contact?Get a grip on your shit, dude. Ron Paul was asked if people should die as a result of contracting extremely unlikely but serious illnesses when its in our collective power to save them, and the crowd answered for him: yes. That happened. As much as you'd like to spin it otherwise, that's how it went down in front of millions - well, ok, thousands - of American viewers.

Even for things that people aren't responsible for? That makes no sense.

Could you identify the contradiction you apparently see here?

So, your view is that Paul Revere rang bells and fired shots to warn the British that they couldn't take the guns of the colonists in violation of a Second Amendment that wouldn't exist for twelve years? The British who were only just arriving in secret?Those British? That Second Amendment?Only with a charity of reading that extends greatly into the absurd can the mish-mash Sarah Palin spewed possibly be reconciled with historical fact. If that's the kind of curve Robert Allison grades on in his classes, I wish I'd had him for American History I. I mean, look at the logic-chopping he's doing here:

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Revere isn't trying to alert the British, but he is trying to warn them. And in April of 1775, no one was talking about independence. We're still part of the British Empire.

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The colonists were British, therefore Palin was correct to say that Paul Revere rode to warn the British?Come the fuck on. Nobody thinks that's what she meant. She wasn't talking about the colonists when she said "British", she was talking about the redcoats.To conclude that Palin accurately represented history is deeply stupid, no matter how many grade-inflating sophists you can marshal to your side.

I don't deplore partisanship; quite the opposite. The purpose of elections is for voters to express their choice as to the future agenda of the government. If both parties converge on the mushy middle, what choice are voters given? Kang vs. Kodos? The best bipartisanship is bipartisanship by alternation - the winning party gets to enact their agenda, and if the voters don't like it, next election they can vote the bums out and vote in new bums to reverse that agenda.People fault our politics on the basis of parties or personalities, but it's the system which is flawed. Political polarization can work in the United States - it works better when polarized parties are able to present voters with a meaningful choice between two competing agendas. The problem is the system which requires the permission of the minority to govern combined with elections that reward the minority for obstructionism, and therefore, in practice favors conservativism. (The degree to which the United States' major population centers are drastically underrepresented in Congress is a major problem as well; if you live in a city, your vote just doesn't count as much.)

Not in any meaningful sense. Even in democracies with significant third-party activity, they break down into two opposing coalitions on nearly every issue. Now, sometimes the coalitions change based on what issue it is, but voters, per issue, are presented with two options.Two is better than one, in my opinion. When "centrism" rules the day, what use are elections when you get a "centrist" either way? Alternate voting systems have much to recommend them, I don't disagree. I'm not terribly interested in election reform because, for the most part, it only really matters at the margins. And regardless of how you reform elections, you still have the enormous problem of a federal government that is burdened by an incredible status quo bias due to the antimajoritarian rules of the Senate. It's not just the filibuster; it's Dennis Hastert's "majority of the majority" requirement for the House, it's single-senator anonymous holds on all Senate business, it's the constitution of the Senate itself which substantially overrepresents rural conservatives, and so on. But clearly it doesn't have that result. Compromise isn't always possible. What compromise is possible, for instance, between people who recognize the enormous danger of global warming and people whose personal fortunes depend greatly on enormous continued subsidies of fossil fuels? There really is a problem here where it's like a wolf and a sheep trying to "compromise" on what's for dinner. It really is the case that the American body politic is trying to negotiate competing and mutually exclusive interests of different segments of the United States.Compromise doesn't work and we don't need it to work. We can have "compromise by alternation" where voters can select an agenda and if it works, great - we keep going like that. If it doesn't, throw the bums out and try a new agenda. That's how democracy works in every other country. No other democratic nation has survived under our system, where the minority party can obstruct the majority, block the agenda, and then reap electoral victory on a platform of "reforming the Washington gridlock." No, absolutely not. That's why the system needs to be reformed such that the minority party can't hold the agenda hostage. I mean, it's all very well and good to wish that the minority party would weaken itself by not using every legal means of politics at its disposal, but why would they do that? 1) From a cynical standpoint, they reap no electoral gains from compromise and great gains from obstruction. 2) From an ideological standpoint, the politics of the majority are fundamentally destructive to America and they must be opposed by any legal means. 3) It's not like, if they play nice, the majority party is going to remember and play nice when the tables are turned. They'll have the first two reasons not to, after all. This isn't the iterative prisoners dilemma because congressional seats change hands - it's different prisoners every election. If the GOP was reduced to 40% of the House and Senate, and the rules of those two bodies were reformed to be majoritarian, it wouldn't matter if they tried to be obstructionist or not - they would have no power to obstruct.That's what I'm advocating - reforms to the system so that elections matter and the minority party can't obstruct a democratically enacted agenda. I'm asking you not to accept the system.

And I wish more "progressives" would view Senate by-laws in this light.Who were the 60 senate votes for public-option health care, Drone? Who were the 60 senate votes for universal single-payer? Please be specific and name the senators.

We have among the highest rates of medical malpractice and medical errors in the Western world.

That doesn't reduce the insurance drain on the system, it just shifts the burden to patients. Now they're the ones who need to be insured against expensive medical issues arising from medical malpractice.