I honestly thought that sentence was going somewhere different.
Well, yes, there are a number of other ways you could finish that sentence that I would not disapprove of.
Pretty sure he’d lose running against Joe Exotic.
This.
The fact that presidential pronouncements should be made known through Twitter is absurd. It’s a shameful example of how we’ve all normalized and now take for granted that thump walks around with underpants on his head.
He has steadily lowered standards of civility, decorum, morality, and proper conduct, and we’re just used to it now.
It bothers me most when he walks in wearing grandma’s lacy panties on his head. I mean, they must be hers – these are things I would rather not dwell on …
Oh, everyone will get used to that soon.
Given that Trump voters were in the privacy of voting booths in 2016, how exactly would you ban Trump voters from voting again in the future?
Ideally, shoot them. People who lack critical thinking skills to the extent that they could vote Trump for president are clearly a social burden and a danger to themselves and others.
Also, note the thread title: “Post-Trump reforms you’d like to see”; not “Post-Trump reforms you have any reasonable expectation of seeing.”
Do not post threats or state or imply that any individual or group is deserving of harm. Knock it off.
[/moderating]
foolsguinea:
Yet, somehow, he managed to get voted to Congress six times and to the Indiana State House once.
Do not confuse “I don’t like him” with “He’s not likeable.”
The essential problem with political office is that the people who want to do it are bottom-feeding scum, and people with integrity can’t enter without becoming fundamentally corrupted by the existing campaign finance boondoggle inflicted upon us by Citizens United (aka you need to spend $10M to have a credible shot at becoming a senator, and that $10M comes with strings).
So I propose the following federal election structure:
-
All current senators and congresscritters kicked out of office and them + registered lobbyists are never able to serve in any political office (both parties).
-
The US map is divided geographically into the appropriate number of population areas (divided into 50 areas for senators and 435 areas for congress) using a computer algorithm that minimizes the area’s perimeters. This ensures federal representation happens at the “neighbors and similar people” level rather than the divisive and essentially pointless state level.
-
Senators and congress persons representing the areas above are randomly drawn from the pool of adult (non-federal) voters in those areas during the appropriate 6 and 2 year term cycles. They are paid 2x their current salary at the time of selection, and there are laws in place such that their employers can’t fire them (much like FMLA). It’s kind of like a more lucrative and longer-lasting jury duty.
-
There are strict bans on lobbying and industry quid-pro-quos, with monitoring of pre/post political-career finances and jobs (ie if you go into office a school janitor and a year after you exit you’re a VP at Northrup Grumman, that’s obviously a red flag, or ditto if you entered with 10k in assets and exit with 500k in assets). There’s an independent office set up to monitor, audit, and track these things that works in tandem with the IRS.
-
Every 4 years the president is chosen randomly from the pool of serving Senators and Congress people.
And there we’ve eliminated gerrymandering, lobbying, campaign finance corruption, PAC’s, endless and mostly pointless political robocalling and ads, and the self-selection bias of petty tyrants who enter politics for power and prestige and personal enrichment.
Sure, we no longer “elect” people at the federal level, but we currently don’t “elect” the president already, and IMHO the current system is far worse due to all the corrupting influences that the proposed system eliminates.
I’m rather happy too.
- North and South Korea are talking to each other.
- Unemployment is very low.
- The economy is strong.
- Taxes are lower.
I voted for Gary Johnson.
People in your “Middle America” group are entitled to representation just as much as you are. I am in “Middle America” and while I didn’t vote for Trump, I nearly did. I voted for Gary Johnson. I am educated to the university level (International Affairs), a licensed pilot, business owner, and lived overseas for 12 years.
I am sorry if I “degrade our democracy”.
Any chance of you changing your name to Bartleby ?
While this method is unbiased and elegant, it also highlights the ridiculousness of having exclusively geographically based Congressional districts: there’s no regard for local interests, just contiguity.
I mean, it’s procedurally fair, and in many cases it will have more representative outcomes, too. But in some cases it will have weird outcomes because of clustering. If we’re making a stab at this particular windmill, I’d rather see an even better solution (there are lots) – one that recognizes that we live in a country where we belong to communities that are geographically dispersed but nevertheless have strong and important interests.
(There is a reason that NextDoor is such a godawful social networking site – and I hate almost all of them.)
CGP Grey’s short video on the split-line method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A
RangeVoting.Org’s page showing examples of split-line district divisions: RangeVoting.org - Gerrymandering and a cure - shortest splitline algorithm
Do you work in GIS?
Much is easy with available GIS systems. Lat and Long of every address is available, but not very accurate. Mostly you would want to geocode ranges along streets. This accounts for new structures that may not be in the database (provided that the street is there). And there is also the problem of multiple home owners. They get to vote twice?
And as far as mailing addresses go, not everyone has a mailing address or delivery to their home. They get it (like I do) at a PO box. I have to register to vote and prove where I live. And then give a valid mailing address (that is not my houses address, or even in the county where I live).
I agree that using ‘geographical boundaries such as rivers’ is problematic.
You could drop a grid on the area and have each grid cell expand until it contains the required number of structures/addresses. That becomes problematic when one structure may be a condominium or apartment complex that only has one physical address, but multiple units without individual addresses. And that does not overcome the problems above.
Every 10 years, I help verify census bureau addresses for a small county. It’s not easy. Even with over 100 pages of instruction from the Census Bureau, I had to call them three times to clear some things up.
This took a staff of three a month to do it this time (we are getting ready for 2020 census). We have a sophisticated and mature GIS system. Even with everything I can do with spatial analysis, joins, relates and every trick up my 25 years of GIS knowledge sleeve, and DB design, there are still a lot of individual, screwed up addresses that need an eyeball. 101 Lake View, or 101 Lakeview? Who is wrong here when both addresses exist? Neither? Both?
Identifying, and finding those addresses is the key.
I’ve seen you say things far more sinister than that here on this messageboard.
The quote is about the naiveté of idealists and revolutionaries in assuming that “The People” will rise up and follow them into their brave new world of rainbows and lollipops. As the quote notes, “The People” are often short-sighted, ill-informed, selfish, nasty and occasionally downright stupid, and will often make choices against their own interests for those and other reasons even if the better alternatives on offer are genuinely better alternatives and not just aspirational pipedreams. That is not “sinister”; it is a fundamental observation of the human condition and applicable to humans of all political ilks.
Bill Maher put it well. He pointed out that many more specifics are needed in terms of what a president can and cannot do. In the past, the “you just don’t do that” principle (tradition/decency/whatever) “controlled” the power of a president, but Trump is the first guy in the White House who will literally do ANYTHING to exercise his power and control everything around him. For example, he talks about things like “pardoning himself” (dictator) and being immune from an Obstruction of Justice charge because, as president, he supposedly is in charge of everything.
I think it is time for the Constitution to go into far more detail in outlining and defining Presidential power and its limits. Trump has graphically shown that a president with the mentality of a dictator is a very dangerous thing.
I get what you’re saying… but up until now, relying on a President’s good judgment, humility, “tradition/decency” has worked. Trump is THE glaring exception. Yeah, Nixon broke the law, but he was brought to heel. I’m wary of instituting a new controls based on the insane behavior of one extremely loose cannon. Presumably, this is why we have checks and balances. We don’t need new controls, just some functioning gonads in the legislative branch. More regulations and guidelines won’t restore leadership in Congress.
On a smaller scale, I can think of work situations I’ve been in where one or two people flouted a rule, and the boss decided that now there has to be a new rule for everyone on this topic. IOW rules created based on the lowest common denominator of behavior concerning something that had never been a problem before.
Not going to get into specifics, but I think the executive branch should be greatly pared down, with more power going back to the legislative branch. I don’t think non-elected officials should be able to determine national policy. I also think they should get rid of presidential pardons (I’ve thought this long before Trump). That just seems like a “king” type thing and I don’t like it.