We are now in the second year of listening to these moron’s endless rantings! “MITT” (Willard) Romney keeps telling us that he will chase the illegal aliens away-then admits to hiring them (they work cheap). He also claims to have seen his father marching with Marin Luthor King (though he really wasn’t present).
Hillary tells us all about her great family values-dragged her mom out of a nursing home, and has daughter beaming away (not talking, fortunately). Barack Obama makes sure to tell us what a great job he’s going to do-with all that experience as a 1st term senator.
Fred Thompson (we’re not sure what he’s all about) tells us that he’s going to “change” things, and Rudy Giuliani reminds us of how he got rid of the pushcarts in NYC.
Can we just get some relief from all this? I’m sick and tired of it!
There are any number of alternative forms of governance, most of which don’t burden the citizenry with such repulsive decision-making. Indeed, they entirely relieve the citizenry of making any such choices at all.
Democracy sucks, because you have to trust the judgement of people you know aren’t as smart as you, and are eager to prove it. You can take that misery away from me when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Turn off CNN? Honestly unless your in an early primary state, the campaign isn’t that hard to ignore.
Romney is right out. The way he treated a medical marijuana patient (video on youtube) tells me everything I need to know about the slimy fuck. He can’t answer a direct question for shit and bounces around to much on where he stands on issues.
We can just sweep every other republican candidate as a terror seeking, fear promoting asshat. The others in same group want your vote because they stand for religious values before individual values. Ron Paul is one of the more “normal” ones, but will not get elected (if all the stoners want him, he doesn’t stand a chance).
Hillary, we already know is a hypocrite when it comes to national medicine.
Best bets are Barrack and Edwards as I see it.
Yeah, I work in politics (kind of) and live in campaign nerd central. I have mostly been changing channels or tuning out when all this nonsense comes on.
I’m in favor of publicly financed campaigns, and the spigot doesn’t get turned on until January 1 of the election year. And no campaign contributions before that!
snip
(cynical hat) Who won’t get elected because he is black and has a funny name.
Publicly financed campaigns are a dream that will never happen. You would have to stop all reporting of an incumbents actions outside of the campaign, and that just isn’t possible.
The grand ritual of the election has been a sick joke for quite some time. Do you wish to vote for the blue faction or the red faction of the establishment? The functional equivalent would be the Iraqis getting the opportunity to vote for either Uday or Qusay. One of the few decent feature of our system is that it trades bullets and bombs for butterfly ballots. Less innocent people die that way, at least initially.
If you want more sanity I would recommend leaving the country. There are many nations which have a far better system than ours. They tend to be weak actors on the world stage, though. It seems once you give the government that sort of power things go to hell pretty quick.
But does anyone really care as long as we’re materially comfortable? Just sit back and watch the show. I hope Giuliani wins. Think of the entertainment! Mrs. Clinton will be boring as hell, outside the right wingers foaming at the mouth for eight years. Obama could be interesting just because having a whacky neo-colonial Christian black man as POTUS would be quite a change, but I’m still pulling for Rudy.
Even more so because I butchered his name.
The people that run for President are precisely the people that you don’t want to run. I mean, who spends $200 million to get a $400,000 a year job (plus perks) except for the most egomaniacal person imaginable? These are the kinds of people that not only know better than you what you want, they set about ensuring that they have control over some heretofore unburdened part of your existence in order to establish some illusory “legacy”, so that they are “remembered”. These are people that you would not willingly invite into your own home under normal circumstances, but because they’ll have unimaginable power if they win you fellate them at every opportunity to ensure that you get some of the goodies for yourself.
You can Pit the entire Presidential candidate slate every four years before the campaign even starts, and for exactly the same reasons.
You asked for it, you got it:
I Pit the ENTIRE Presidential candidate list for the 2012 elections!
(What do you mean, “what for?”)
I seem to remember reading somewhere that in Great Britain people running for Parliament can spend no more than some ridiculously low sum, and the time is limited to something like a few months.
I agree, restrict all candidates to the sum of 1 million bucks, nobody is allowed to put advertising in any medium for them, they cannot accept the donation of any advertising from any source, the only thing they can do is public debates, and a single mailing campaign of a booklet explaining their platform. All this can start no earlier than august first of election year. [they can print up the stufff, but nothing can be delivered any earlier than august first]
The million dollars is to transport the candidate and their handler to each of the 50 debates [one per state].
Say what?
So you would restrict the free speech of others, and stop newspapers and other sources of information from putting out stories about an incumbent visiting other nations on goodwill tours, signing favorable bills and vetoing unfavorable bills?
Yes. Americans choose their president by a few basic, constant keys (with some recent exceptions):
Name
Must be Anglophone, and not-too complicated.
Eliminates: Obama & Giuliani
Exceptions: Eisenhower, but he was a war hero general
Race
Must be white.
Eliminates: Keyes and Obama 50%.
Exceptions: None.
Hair
Can’t be too bald.
Eliminates: McCain, Giuliani, Paul, Tancredo and Thompson
Exceptions: Eisenhower (but see above) and Truman (but he got in his first term as VP).
Sex
Must be male.
Eliminates: Clinton, but this key might change.
Exceptions: None
Religion
Must be Christian, and attend services.
Eliminates: (Possibly) Giuliani, because he doesn’t attend much, and probably Romney, because so many people don’t think Mormonism is really Christianity.
Exceptions: I don’t know of any recently.
Freshness
Can’t have been federally elected for too long.
Eliminates: Biden, Dodd maybe others
Exceptions: Nixon
Money
Must have a lot to get attention.
Eliminates: Gravel, Kucinich, Richardson, Hunter, and Tanchredo (withdrawn for this reason)
Exceptions: Maybe Carter
”Fringe” image
Can’t be depicted in the press as “extreme.”
Eliminates: Paul and Kucinich
The little-known leader of the Supervillain Civil Rights crusade…
I think you can eliminate Obama here, simply because his name has a furrin sound to it, and his middle name is Hussein, which means he’s one-a-them Mohammed prayin’, head bangin’, caterwaulin’ moozlims.
Publicaly financed campaigns require those who benefit from the status quo to vote against themselves. Unlike the voters ,they do not vote against their own best interests,
That’s largely because we don’t have fixed terms. The sitting Prime Minister must ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament before five years have elapsed since the previous dissolution (about four years is the average). The election is then held 17 working days later (traditionally timed to be on a Thursday). Parties are not allowed to advertise freely on the TV or radio, but are given a small number of slots on the main TV channels for Party Election Broadcasts. These slots are around five minutes long and are given to each party depending on the number of candidates they are putting up. Newspaper and billboard advertising is allowed and there is plenty of door-to-door leafletting and canvassing. But yes, the sums involved will be a lot less than in US elections - by an order of magnitude or two.
Eisenhower, Van Buren, Buchanan, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan. None of them are English names.