That’s not necesarily true, they have their own kookie issues. The NHS recognizes homeopathy as a legitimate treatment (it’s big in Europe) and is actually pushing to have more people treated with it - why? Well, because it’s cheap. If you can get some idiot to go home with $5 worth of empty pills instead of an expensive surgery he needs, that’s a way to cut some costs. And it may not be as sinister and cynical as I made it sound - legislators and administrators can be guillable idiots who actually believe in it and decide they know better than medical science what to dictate. So legislator time is spent on issues like that.
No, that’s only 54% of those- who by age group alone- could possible vote.
"Much of the above analysis is predicated on voter turnout as measured as a percentage of the voting-age population…n 1972, noncitizens and ineligible felons (depending on state law) constituted about 2% of the voting-age population. By 2004, ineligible voters constituted nearly 10%. Ineligible voters are not evenly distributed across the country - 20% of California’s voting-age population is ineligible to vote"
The only important # is what % of registered voters voted.
I also respect Gov Schwarzenegger & PJ O’Rourke.
I’m sorry to do this, but I lost all respect for George Will when he continuously uses misleading quotes to deny AGW:
The damming misleading quotes and reprehensible behavior of Will starts at 4:16 in that video.
For the ones that can’t check the video, this quote from the comments in this article eviscerating Will and other pundits reports what the video shows:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/15/george-will-global-cooling-warming-debunked/
The problem was, the quote “Earth may be heading for another ice age.” was not in the cited New York Times article that was actually named “Warming Trend Seen in Climate”. :smack:
I forgot to mention another related fink in that video.
Senator Inhofe loves to BS.
The Youtube video mentioned in the last post shows Inhofe dropping the “in 20,000 years” part during the senate hearings on the matter.
One difference between US and UK political culture that I think tends to be overlooked is the law of libel. Although some of the differences are lately being worn away, I think it remains the case that US law is more forgiving of political discourse that is simply insulting.
I suspect that part of the difference in volume is that political power in the US is more broadly diffused; there are proportionately many more offices to be fought over. Our federal system adds a separate level of regional government. Our executives and legislatures are separate. There is much less party discipline in our legislatures, which means that any legislator can defy his or her party if it is in their individual interest to do so: witness the Blue Dogs, Ben Nelson, or Olympia Snowe.
Judges are often political actors in our system because of the power they wield. Some of our state judges are even elected. Are prosecutors elected in the UK? Clerks of the court? School boards?
Does the UK have direct referenda (i.e., where the people vote to enact a new law)? I don’t know.
(N.B. I’m not saying one system or the other is better; I’m just identifying differences.)
Religion is not entirely absent from British politics. Certainly, it’s more limited, but also it arises in different ways.
Blair’s God comments anger families of Iraq casualties.
Gloves are off as Ken accuses Boris of 7/7 smear on Islam.
I think the distance across the Atlantic can make it easy to focus only on certain highlights. By contrast, bear in mind that sex scandals are just as common in British governments. UK politics turned explosive over fox hunting. Tony Blair was attacked over where his children went to school. The anti-vaccination scare became so widespread that there’s now a spike in measles in the UK. It was a minor political crisis when many people thought the Queen was insufficiently demonstrative in grieving for Diana.
No in all cases, they’re all salaried state jobs.
Yes but it’s very infrequently used because getting 60m people to vote on a single issue is considered an extremely heavy handed way of resolving policy. Generally it’s considered that whoever is in power has the right to make decisions due to democratic mandate (of course this is completely untrue due to the our voting system where it’s frequently the case that majority governments are voted in by a minority of the population). This government has promised/threatened a national referendum on several issues in its time but has yet to have a single one.
You’re right on those issues being probably much bigger in the time they got on screen than they should have, the exception being where Blair sent his children to school as this was tied to a big contradiction in the Prime Minister’s position on selective education (i.e. he and his government were totally against it yet he was sending his children to a selective state school, seemingly very “do as I say not do as I do”).
What was the last national referendum? The Maastricht Treaty?
The last one I know we had was on Britain remaining in the EEC back in the 70s - I don’t think there was a referendum on Maastricht.
Just checked and indeed the only UK-wide referendum was in 1975. There have been local referenda since then, however (like in London where we got to vote on creating the office of mayor).
Homeopathy is indeed funded by some PCTs, as is acupuncture. Of course no GP would refer someone who needed an operation to a homeopath, but if they want to send someone to a homeopath in stead of dosing them with mind-bending anti-despressents ( having been forbidden from issuing sugar pill placebos), that’s fine by me.
For what its worth, private insurers over here are increasingly covering alternative medicine, for much the same reasons.
I’m not entirely sure what a school board is, are we talking board of governors (i believe these are partly elected in some obscure manner) or Local Education Authorities (which I think are appointed by locally elected politicians)?
A school board is the equivalent of a local education authority. They are generally created on a county-by-county basis; US counties tend to be less populated than British (or at least English) ones, since the country as a whole is less crowded.
I translated school board to mean director of education of a local authority, those people are indeed appointed by the local councillors (who are themselves elected locally). But education director is a full time professional job, part of the local government civil service, and you wouldn’t get someone who knew nothing about education doing it.
I’m sorry for not being clear, but the confusion I created kind of answers my question. A school board over here is typically a quasi-legislature for a locality’s school system, setting policies and determining appropriations. The administrator of the school system, who actually runs it on a day-to day basis, would be called something like the Superintendent of Schools. I think that is typically an appointed position held by an education professional. Board members will usually have some expertise in education, but it’s not a requirement – like any legislators, they are free to be ignoramuses. 
Actually, it’s usually a job requirement.
The inheritance tax issue is another debate full of such complete bullshit it’s hard to know where to start. The vast majority of estates are not taxed; when they are taxed it is only the portion over $3.5M that is taxed at the 46% rate – not the entire estate; it is not a double tax and in many cases, because of the $3.5M exemption, capital gains are not taxed at all; and the transfer of the estate resets the “basis” of the assets so the beneficiaries of the estate are getting a net benefit.
The conservatives have mucked the debate up so badly that even my ultra-liberal sister was getting worked up about the potential taxes on my mother’s estate that is worth less than $1M.
Oh, and the above is not even relevant for 2010 because there is no estate tax in effect at all currently.