4 ms·

I am not American, so I am not an as immersed in your politics as many of you so take it with a grain of salt but this is my opinion. Obama is about the most d

by Trufa 13y ago

I am not American, so I am not an as immersed in your politics as many of you so take it with a grain of salt but this is my opinion. Obama is about the most dangerous thing that could have happened to your government. Why? In most of the world outside from the US, after Bush's second term, you simply couldn't defend him. My family tends to be very pro USA (blindly), but with Bush, it got to the point that it was not "politically correct" any more to defend him, just about anybody criticized him. But then comes Obama, likable and with a promise to make things better, everybody likes him, and in between promises and small steps forwards, he/his goverment/others/whoever slip in huge blows to human rights, privacy and freedom. In my eyes, Obama is Bush with better PR. And why is this dangerous, because with bush at least most people knew they wanted better, and now for most, this is good enough or even good, and it's not.

sounds 13y ago
Bush : wolf :: Obama : wolf in sheep's clothing ?
bmelton 13y ago
The problem isn't really with Obama, it's that the American people haven't done much against the government's attempts at power grabs. There are a variety of reasons for why not, ignorance being high on the list, but perhaps the most prominent reason is that we expect our government to keep us safe, for better or worse. If Americans are just now getting upset about this, it's ultimately our own fault, as this was the fairly logically expected result of the Patriot Act, and we haven't really done enough to get rid of it. The 'right' response would have been to vote out every single Senator and House Representative that voted for such an egregious overstep on our liberties, but in reality, that ignores a whole slew of other interests those politicians may have supported. If, for example, I am gun-toting civil rights advocate, a Senator that votes against an assault weapons ban comes out slightly ahead, even if that same Senator also voted for the Patriot Act. If I'm a gay man, looking for federal recognition of marriage, I'm in the same boat. Someone who votes for gay marriage, but also against privacy, comes out ahead. The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues. The real bitch of the matter, of course, is that Republicans are almost certainly going to scream 'outrage' to this new knowledge, even though it was Bush's policies that implemented their capability. Meanwhile, democrats will likely 'defend Obama' because it would otherwise reflect negatively on the party to not do so. In sort, it's political ammunition. The outrage we see won't even be universal. You'll probably see exceptions on either side (Lindsay Graham, Republican from South Carolina has already said this information "doesn't bother" him), and ultimately, if the 'blame' can be assigned in such a way that it advances someone's political agenda, that's what'll happen.
- robomartin 13y ago
  > The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues Perfectly stated. Not sure what the solution might be other than removing layers of influence from politicians hands. What should they really be doing? Perhaps we ought to hyper-compartmentalize their jobs. Te US Constitution is great, but it was written centuries ago. C'mon folks, a lot of it does not align with modern reality. For example, healthcare laws ought to be in the hands of a team with relevant domain expertise. Why are we allowing ignorant representatives to have any say at all? Why is it that we dump it all on the laps of the Senate and the House. Most of those people are lawyers. Patent law is an example of the shit they can create. The House? Holy shit! Have you seen the kind of people who land those jobs? Why do they have so much power? Te problem you allude to would be resolved if we divided-up decision making along domains. Now you can publish basic qualifications for each domain and create prerequisites for each position. Then people, if they care enough, would be able to vote for domain-specific representation. I could then vote for someone who thinks along my lines when it comes to healthcare, gun control, budgets, building bridges, social programs, military spending, etc. different people, each with less overall power yet far more understanding and command of their chosen domain. I want doctors to set healthcare laws, not lawyers or politicians. I want engineers and entrepreneurs to create intellectual property laws, not lawyers. I want qualified financial experts to set fiscal policy, not lawyers, politicians or the President. I want infrastructure experts to manage our infrastructure, not some politician who owes union thugs for their votes. I don't want unions nearly anywhere and particularly not in education. It simply makes no sense to have the same person have rule-making power over topics ranging from encryption, surveillance and healthcare to education, defense and social concerns. They can't possibly be good at making decisions in all domains and they keep getting voted into office by catering to large groups behind major causes who they become prostituted to. Perfect? Nope. Nothing is.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    At the risk of losing whatever credibility I might have gained by my previous post, an alternative suggestion would be to simply take the power of legislation for non-legislative realms out of the hands of politicians. Without getting into the merits of how large a government ought to be, it's not really debatable that the government isn't very good at providing services like the ones you described. There are pockets where the government has set up 'businesses' that have done well, the USPS has historically been pretty efficient, the Hoover Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority, etc., but those are the exceptions to the rule, and arguably, the latter two have only worked well because Congress has left them alone, while the former (USPS) has floundered recently because of political decisions with Congress driving. This isn't necessarily meant to be the stereotypical "Get rid of big government" rallying cry that it might sound like, as I don't generally have a problem with the government setting up businesses that benefit interstate commerce, but the Hoover Dam and TVA have proven that there are ways to do that not involving government's continued interaction. Funds could be set aside for the promotion of general welfare and businesses/policies could be established that would be able to operate as federally owned businesses (in which federally owned is a far more efficient outcome than federally run). The federal government seems to have forgotten about their past successes, or have forgotten that too often, their over-involvement has led to failures like the USPS, so I'm wary of new government enterprises subject to all the inefficiencies of Congress (Affordable Care Act being a prime example), which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm against the premise of health care for all, but says that letting that be a government-run enterprise is the least efficient way to get there. Getting to federally owned instead of federally run is another way to get to your stated position, as, so long as we're able to keep political appointees away from the helm of these businesses, they'll be run by competent staff, and be able to fairly compete in the free market as equal competitors to that market, which will help prevent collusive policies, crony capitalism and the like from predatory cost inflation on things like health care.
dclowd9901 13y ago
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. Democrats have traditionally been about large government and nanny-state policies. Something weird happened in the Bush leadership where we got the traditional conservative laissez-faire policy toward military and the private sector, but also large government/nanny-state policies indicative of Democrats. The result was actually something coming very close to an outright fascism. I know that's one of those words people throw around a lot, but we were coming close to that definition with the level of power the federal government was wielding domestically, and how much power they also gave back to private sectors, doing things like prosecuting citizens criminally for tort offenses. So, no, Bush !== Obama. Obama is actually playing right out of the traditional democrat handbook, but the world has changed, and the New Democrat (TM) is an individual that wants the social freedoms traditional progressives offered without the nanny-state. Obama's losing the NDs in droves. Libertarians keep trying to Co-opt this group, but it's not going to happen. We have a two-party state, and it's statistically infeasible to have anything but. I'd rather morph the group that didn't seat Bush into what I want than try to bootstrap a whole new party. Party politics is far too entrenched in this country for anything else to happen.

by Trufa 13y ago

sounds 13y ago

Bush : wolf :: Obama : wolf in sheep's clothing ?

bmelton 13y ago

The problem isn't really with Obama, it's that the American people haven't done much against the government's attempts at power grabs. There are a variety of reasons for why not, ignorance being high on the list, but perhaps the most prominent reason is that we expect our government to keep us safe, for better or worse. If Americans are just now getting upset about this, it's ultimately our own fault, as this was the fairly logically expected result of the Patriot Act, and we haven't really done enough to get rid of it. The 'right' response would have been to vote out every single Senator and House Representative that voted for such an egregious overstep on our liberties, but in reality, that ignores a whole slew of other interests those politicians may have supported. If, for example, I am gun-toting civil rights advocate, a Senator that votes against an assault weapons ban comes out slightly ahead, even if that same Senator also voted for the Patriot Act. If I'm a gay man, looking for federal recognition of marriage, I'm in the same boat. Someone who votes for gay marriage, but also against privacy, comes out ahead. The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues. The real bitch of the matter, of course, is that Republicans are almost certainly going to scream 'outrage' to this new knowledge, even though it was Bush's policies that implemented their capability. Meanwhile, democrats will likely 'defend Obama' because it would otherwise reflect negatively on the party to not do so. In sort, it's political ammunition. The outrage we see won't even be universal. You'll probably see exceptions on either side (Lindsay Graham, Republican from South Carolina has already said this information "doesn't bother" him), and ultimately, if the 'blame' can be assigned in such a way that it advances someone's political agenda, that's what'll happen.

robomartin 13y ago
> The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues Perfectly stated. Not sure what the solution might be other than removing layers of influence from politicians hands. What should they really be doing? Perhaps we ought to hyper-compartmentalize their jobs. Te US Constitution is great, but it was written centuries ago. C'mon folks, a lot of it does not align with modern reality. For example, healthcare laws ought to be in the hands of a team with relevant domain expertise. Why are we allowing ignorant representatives to have any say at all? Why is it that we dump it all on the laps of the Senate and the House. Most of those people are lawyers. Patent law is an example of the shit they can create. The House? Holy shit! Have you seen the kind of people who land those jobs? Why do they have so much power? Te problem you allude to would be resolved if we divided-up decision making along domains. Now you can publish basic qualifications for each domain and create prerequisites for each position. Then people, if they care enough, would be able to vote for domain-specific representation. I could then vote for someone who thinks along my lines when it comes to healthcare, gun control, budgets, building bridges, social programs, military spending, etc. different people, each with less overall power yet far more understanding and command of their chosen domain. I want doctors to set healthcare laws, not lawyers or politicians. I want engineers and entrepreneurs to create intellectual property laws, not lawyers. I want qualified financial experts to set fiscal policy, not lawyers, politicians or the President. I want infrastructure experts to manage our infrastructure, not some politician who owes union thugs for their votes. I don't want unions nearly anywhere and particularly not in education. It simply makes no sense to have the same person have rule-making power over topics ranging from encryption, surveillance and healthcare to education, defense and social concerns. They can't possibly be good at making decisions in all domains and they keep getting voted into office by catering to large groups behind major causes who they become prostituted to. Perfect? Nope. Nothing is.
- bmelton 13y ago
  At the risk of losing whatever credibility I might have gained by my previous post, an alternative suggestion would be to simply take the power of legislation for non-legislative realms out of the hands of politicians. Without getting into the merits of how large a government ought to be, it's not really debatable that the government isn't very good at providing services like the ones you described. There are pockets where the government has set up 'businesses' that have done well, the USPS has historically been pretty efficient, the Hoover Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority, etc., but those are the exceptions to the rule, and arguably, the latter two have only worked well because Congress has left them alone, while the former (USPS) has floundered recently because of political decisions with Congress driving. This isn't necessarily meant to be the stereotypical "Get rid of big government" rallying cry that it might sound like, as I don't generally have a problem with the government setting up businesses that benefit interstate commerce, but the Hoover Dam and TVA have proven that there are ways to do that not involving government's continued interaction. Funds could be set aside for the promotion of general welfare and businesses/policies could be established that would be able to operate as federally owned businesses (in which federally owned is a far more efficient outcome than federally run). The federal government seems to have forgotten about their past successes, or have forgotten that too often, their over-involvement has led to failures like the USPS, so I'm wary of new government enterprises subject to all the inefficiencies of Congress (Affordable Care Act being a prime example), which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm against the premise of health care for all, but says that letting that be a government-run enterprise is the least efficient way to get there. Getting to federally owned instead of federally run is another way to get to your stated position, as, so long as we're able to keep political appointees away from the helm of these businesses, they'll be run by competent staff, and be able to fairly compete in the free market as equal competitors to that market, which will help prevent collusive policies, crony capitalism and the like from predatory cost inflation on things like health care.

dclowd9901 13y ago

I'm not sure it's quite that simple. Democrats have traditionally been about large government and nanny-state policies. Something weird happened in the Bush leadership where we got the traditional conservative laissez-faire policy toward military and the private sector, but also large government/nanny-state policies indicative of Democrats. The result was actually something coming very close to an outright fascism. I know that's one of those words people throw around a lot, but we were coming close to that definition with the level of power the federal government was wielding domestically, and how much power they also gave back to private sectors, doing things like prosecuting citizens criminally for tort offenses. So, no, Bush !== Obama. Obama is actually playing right out of the traditional democrat handbook, but the world has changed, and the New Democrat (TM) is an individual that wants the social freedoms traditional progressives offered without the nanny-state. Obama's losing the NDs in droves. Libertarians keep trying to Co-opt this group, but it's not going to happen. We have a two-party state, and it's statistically infeasible to have anything but. I'd rather morph the group that didn't seat Bush into what I want than try to bootstrap a whole new party. Party politics is far too entrenched in this country for anything else to happen.