posted
Once a politician has been elected into office, his or her priority should no longer be their public image (which of course is important during the campaign process). They should focus on doing their job well, which means to make well thought through decisions that will have a good chance of solving or preventing societal problems. Unfortunately, it seems that they tend to be more concerned with how often they can get their face on TV. You are in government because you want to help improve the country (or state) that you represent. You are not in politics to become famous. Fame is fleeting, unless it is based on universally acknowledged achievements (which doesn't mean that everybody has to like those achievements or the person responsible for them).
A politician's reward should be (besides his salary) the feeling he or she gets when new and useful legislation is introduced. Much like it should be for any other job.
Rising to the top in politics should be based on skill. This is acquired through practice at a lower level and then being promoted based on your merits. Much like promotions (should) work within a commercial company. Or, to use another simile: You don't book a newly formed band of youths to play Wembley Stadium. You've got to earn your stripes.
Awkward similes aside, I am aware that this post very much describes an ideal situation. One that is usually not achieved due to human weaknesses (that we all have, I definitely do not see my self as a perfect specimen). That does not mean we should stop aspiring to be better (as a person and as a community).
Well, please continue with this interesting thread. Today I just felt I wanted to say a thing.
Posts: 1100 | Registered: Apr 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: The whole "signers of the declaration experience" thing should really be dug into and made into a bigger issue.
Many historians credit the political acumen of the Americans with the difference between our forming a 230 year long Republic and descending into the madness of the French Revolution. We had more than a hundred years of political institutions to lean on, the French didn't.
The idea that political novices are superior to experienced politicians has no historical precedent I can find, especially not in the revolutionary period. The Founding Fathers, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, were all very learned men, most of whom were very experienced in law and philosophy. They had a deep understanding of the issues and the ideas of the greatest thinkers of the day, grappled with those issues, and debated at a very high level.
The Presidency is not for amateurs. Frankly, high levels of government in general aren't for amateurs. I'm not saying the professionals are killing it, but the amateurs are doing terribly.
At the end of the day, government by amateurs didn't work out too well for the Athenians, either.
Posts: 185 | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
a republican cretinocracy — "Hear me, Tea Party, for I am truly the most non-establishment candidate. I have held no government post, nor am I educated in any law or political sciences. I don't understand anything about immigration law, but I know I don't like immigrants and brown people! I don't even know the difference between fungible and nonfungible goods, much less any real understanding of economics, but I think a ten percent flat tax would fix the economy! And I love Jesus, and think that letting gays marry is persecuting US somehow! I'm the common sense candidate, here to fight against those elitists! People would want to have a beer with me! Vote me for president!
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Obviously running the country is just like starting a business and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. No further preparation needed.
Posts: 1194 | Registered: Jun 2010
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quote:Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has issued an executive order forbidding any state agencies or organizations that receive state grant money from helping relocate Syrian refugees in his state.
Brownback said Monday the action was necessary because the federal government can't guarantee Syrian refugees coming to America aren't terrorists.
posted
In response to being asked why people should believe that she'll be tough on Wall Street when they are her biggest donors, Hillary Clinton
quote:I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is,” she said. “I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.
quote: “It means a strategy – we don’t have a strategy right now. This president is incrementally getting us into a quagmire, without having a strategy to defeat ISIS. This is a threat to Western civilization, a threat to our own country. We need to be merciless in this effort.”
posted
Yeah. I never thought modern Republicans could actually make Dubya sound coherent on foreign policy. But compared to what I'm hearing out of the Right, W. Bush might as well be teaching grad school poly Sci classes at Dartmouth.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:NRA-Backed Legislator: We Can’t Take Syrian Refugees Because It’s Too Easy For Them To Buy Guns
Rep. Tony Dale (R) made this argument in a television interview on Monday and in letters to Texas’ U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz (R) and U.S. Reps. Michael McCaul and John Carter (R).
“While the Paris attackers used suicide vests and grenades,” Dale wrote, “it is clear that firearms also killed a large number of innocent victims. Can you imagine a scenario were [sic] a refugees [sic] is admitted to the United States, is provided with federal cash payments and other assistance, obtains a drivers license and purchases a weapon and executes an attack?” He urged the lawmakers to “do whatever you can to stop the [Syrian refugee] program.”
But Dale is one of the Texas legislature’s most fervent gun-rights advocates. Two weeks ago, he tweeted his National Rifle Association membership renewal. In accepting an “A” rating from the group and the Texas State Rifle Association’s PAC in 2012, he observed: “Perhaps no right is more fundamental than the right to keep and bear arms.” And his campaign website vows his fealty to the Second Amendment, saying it “isn’t just an archaic document,” a “guarantor of all of our other freedoms.” And he and his colleagues in the state legislature have blocked mandatory background checks for all gun purchases.
This not the first time Dale has raised concerns about non-citizens in Texas. “I’m not saying all of these people are bad, but there are certainly people from countries of concern,” he said in March, explaining the need for legislation to create special drivers licenses for “foreigners.”
quote:Virginia mayor cites Japanese internment camps (favorably) in making case for halting Syrian refugees.
Roanoke Mayor David Bowers, a Democrat (and Hillary Clinton supporter), made that case in a statement Wednesday in calling for the Virginia city to suspend Syrian refugee aid until "normalcy is restored."
"I'm reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from [the Islamic State] now is just as real and serious a threat as that from our enemies then," he said.
In case you need a history lesson (which Bowers pretty clearly does), the Japanese internment camps are not exactly remembered as being a well-handled and reasonable reaction to a perceived threat. To the contrary, what the United States did to Japanese Americans in the 1940s is pretty universally remembered as being very wrong -- next to slavery, one of the worst blights in American history, in fact.
But don't take our word for it. Here's what, Josh Schwerin, of Clinton's campaign, had to say when The Post's David Weigel asked about supporter Bowers's statement: "The internment of people of Japanese descent is a dark cloud on our nation's history and to suggest that it is anything but a horrible moment in our past is outrageous."
quote:Donald J. Trump, who earlier in the week said he was open to requiring Muslims in the United States to register in a database, said on Thursday night that he “would certainly implement that — absolutely.”
Mr. Trump was asked about the issue by an NBC News reporter and pressed on whether all Muslims in the country would be forced to register. “They have to be,” he said. “They have to be.’’
When asked how a system of registering Muslims would be carried out — whether, for instance, mosques would be where people could register — Mr. Trump said: “Different places. You sign up at different places. But it’s all about management. Our country has no management.’’
Asked later, as he signed autographs, how such a database would be different from Jews having to register in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump repeatedly said, “You tell me,” until he stopped responding to the question.
quote:"I think we should have a database on everybody who comes into this country," Carson told reporters in the state house. Told that rival Donald Trump had proposed tracking Muslims already in the United States, Carson added that "hopefully, we already have a database on every citizen who is already here. If we don't, we are doing a very poor job."
Carson, not to be outdone... why stop at Muslims?
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:"I think we should have a database on everybody who comes into this country," Carson told reporters in the state house. Told that rival Donald Trump had proposed tracking Muslims already in the United States, Carson added that "hopefully, we already have a database on every citizen who is already here. If we don't, we are doing a very poor job."
Carson, not to be outdone... why stop at Muslims?
We have social security numbers, driver's licenses, and credit histories, so there are definitely already databases on every citizen. Is that not what Carson means here?
Posts: 1029 | Registered: Apr 2007
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quote:Originally posted by C3PO the Dragon Slayer:
quote:Originally posted by FlyingCow:
quote:"I think we should have a database on everybody who comes into this country," Carson told reporters in the state house. Told that rival Donald Trump had proposed tracking Muslims already in the United States, Carson added that "hopefully, we already have a database on every citizen who is already here. If we don't, we are doing a very poor job."
Carson, not to be outdone... why stop at Muslims?
We have social security numbers, driver's licenses, and credit histories, so there are definitely already databases on every citizen. Is that not what Carson means here?
posted
Social security numbers, credit histories, and driver's licenses have useful purposes for everyday life. To me, it sounds like Carson is referring to a database on citizens to evaluate us as possible threats. The context of his statement was databases on people coming in to determine if they're possible terrorists, not whether they can qualify for a mortgage.
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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It's that in this situation, decentralization is a very good thing.
Social Security Numbers and cards are issued by the Social Security Administration. If you want to verify someone's SSN, you have to do so through them, and there are restrictions on how you can do this. You have to hold a certain role (like employer or law enforcement) and fill out certain forms.
Likewise for Driver's License Numbers - they're issued by the state DMVs, and if you want to look up someone's DLN, you have to again hold a certain role, fill out paperwork, navigate bureaucracy.
Credit histories are aggregated by the credit reporting agencies, and while they're easily accessible to lenders, the information they give out is not so easily obtained for unofficial use.
Same for medical records, or phone records, or ISP logs, military service records, criminal records, or what have you. These are all disparate types of data collected or aggregated by discrete organizations/agencies, and while it's definitely possible, given enough time, to circumvents the checks in place and collect all that information, it takes exactly that - time and effort. It's not necessarily easy for even law enforcement to gather all this information quickly, and they (theoretically) need to go through official channels to do so.
What Carson is talking about (if he knows what he's talking about) is having this data stored and indexed in a single (or more likely centrally accessible group of) database(s) with all of that information plus information the government has no business collecting or storing about you like what religion you follow.
What that means is that anyone who has access to that database has access to all that information at the touch of a button. Putting aside ethical concerns like how easy this would make blackmail, coercion and corruption, or how the hell would you authorize anyone to be able to even look at that data with the privacy laws supposedly in place, and the Orwellian implications here... think about the implications of that database being hacked. As a victim of the fairly recent OPM breach myself, I can tell you how terrifically bad of an idea this is.
And what's crazy to me is that a lot of the folks who scream "fascism" or "Nazis!" over the very idea of a national registry of firearm owners (which, don't worry, is explicitly forbidden by law) have *no* compunction about a national level registry of people who follow undesirable religions.Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Also consider this - most of these databases aren't that useful for general public information, and many are very incomplete when looked at as a "us citizen database".
The SS administration would probably be the closest thing, but even it doesn't necessarily know much about you, other than your SSN, DOB and name. If you aren't working and not contributing to SS, and you've moved and not notified them - you're essentially lost to them until you either try to drawn on SS benefits or someone does a SS check on you for whatever reason. You could have left the country, died as a John/Jane Doe, etc... and they'd have no idea. There are also people who have no SS number because they never applied for one - SS numbers are not mandatory to be a US citizen.
Not everyone has a driver's license. You can't get one until you at least hit a certain age, and even then many people don't. There are only about 210 million driver's licenses against a population of about 320 million.
Credit histories only apply to people with credit. Again, no minors (about 80 million people) - and an estimated 26 million adults with no credit history at all.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Donald Trump suggested Sunday the half-dozen white attendees at his campaign rally on Saturday may have reacted appropriately when they shoved, tackled, punched and kicked a black protester who disrupted his speech.
"Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing," Trump said Sunday morning on Fox News, less than 24 hours after his campaign said it "does not condone" the physical altercation.
posted
The FBI/NSA/CIA/ETC ETC ETC all already have extensive databases to observe virtually anyone they decide even remotely constitutes a threat. Heck, other countries voluntarily spy on Americans and pass that info to US intelligence agencies (That's legal!).
Posts: 12931 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Insisting that the United States “would have to be strong,” Trump said that waterboarding Islamic State extremists would be “peanuts” compared with the group’s beheadings of American and British hostages.
“I would bring it back. I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us … what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head,” Trump said on ABC's "This Week" referring to the American journalist beheaded by Islamic State in August 2014. “That’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation -- and strong interrogation.”
In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration turned to waterboarding, a method in which a suspect is made to feel like he’s drowning, to try to extract information from Al Qaeda suspects. The effort proved mostly futile in producing useful intelligence about planned attacks and led to false confessions, according to the executive summary of a long-delayed Senate report that came out late last year. President Obama formally ended the program when he took office in 2009.
Trump, though, said he sees waterboarding as a useful counterbalance to the violent murders committed by Islamic State.
“You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads,” he said.
Trump also doubled down on his calls for a database to monitor Muslims and the possibility of shuttering mosques.
posted
I honestly can't tell how serious Trump is about anything. Is he really some sort of neo-fascist, or is he just cynically appealing to neo-fascists? Is he actually sincere about any of his political beliefs, or is he just trolling all of America right now?
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: I honestly can't tell how serious Trump is about anything. Is he really some sort of neo-fascist, or is he just cynically appealing to neo-fascists? Is he actually sincere about any of his political beliefs, or is he just trolling all of America right now?
I think he is what you get when a somewhat intelligent but intellectually lazy child is given 200 million dollars, and then spends the proceeding 30 years insulating himself with yes men.
Trump's "businesses," as have been frequently pointed out, amount to a series of questionable real estate ventures, and licensing deals where his gaudy image is used to hawk gaudy products to tasteless people. The projects he has actually initiated have been mostly quite costly failures (in fact, some estimates are that he has squandered something like 5-6 Billion dollars over the years on them). It's an enormous sham, carried only by his ability to be absolutely shameless.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:It is highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely that I would ever be using them.
Why is it that the more "highlys" he piles on, the more convinced I am that he would use nuclear weapons?
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: I honestly can't tell how serious Trump is about anything. Is he really some sort of neo-fascist, or is he just cynically appealing to neo-fascists? Is he actually sincere about any of his political beliefs, or is he just trolling all of America right now?
yes
quote:"Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat," Trump said to loud cheers during a rally at a convention center here Monday night that attracted thousands. "And I would approve more than that. Don't kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn't work."
"It works," Trump said over and over again. "Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing. It works."
At the rally Trump continued to claim he watched "fairly large numbers" of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, further circulating a story that was discredited by New Jersey officials years ago.
posted
I also think he's somewhat sincere, somewhat carried away with the reaction he gets at rallies, somewhat playing a joke, and mostly/always maximizing his airtime because he values the publicity.
The worst thing is that if he were somehow elected he'd carry on the same way.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
as I have mentioned before he's like a person I knew once who was such a perfect combination of nutty sincere personal beliefs, narcissistic self-estimation, and willingness to lie, cheat, or steal and do whatever it takes to make a sale and enhance his own personal intake of wealth —
that it becomes functionally irrelevant whether any part of his campaign is 'sincere' or not. It's equally awful both ways
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
When I watch him speak it reminds me exactly of how I feel when watching John Edward (the psychic) speak. They know exactly what makes those kinds of people tick and what to say to exploit it.
I'm convinced Trump knows exactly how much he's bullshitting, he just doesn't care. He gets off on 'winning' and the Presidency would be the ultimate win to feed his ego and all of the things he says are just his chess moves to get it.
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: Trump on nuclear weapons:
quote:It is highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely that I would ever be using them.
Why is it that the more "highlys" he piles on, the more convinced I am that he would use nuclear weapons?
It's kind of a silly question.
I mean, it's highly unlikely I'd use them as president either. But so long as we live in a nuclear world, I couldn't and wouldn't proclaim at the start that I never would.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Oh, I know that. As long as we have nukes, it'd be stupid to promise that we'd never use them under any circumstances. But his wording makes me think the giant troll doll doth protest too much.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
I actually think that's one of the times that he's giving the honest, obvious answer. He does that occasionally.
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: When I watch him speak it reminds me exactly of how I feel when watching John Edward (the psychic) speak. They know exactly what makes those kinds of people tick and what to say to exploit it.
I'm convinced Trump knows exactly how much he's bullshitting, he just doesn't care. He gets off on 'winning' and the Presidency would be the ultimate win to feed his ego and all of the things he says are just his chess moves to get it.
Or it's to help Hillary.
Posts: 12931 | Registered: Aug 2005
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