Running for President...

First WeirdlyWired sorry for stealing your thread

It is not the amount of time the contact required, that does the damage, but the size of the political contribution.

I agree the amount of time is not the issue. It’s the “hey senator why don’t you come out to my place in the Hamptons for the weekend I have some policy points that I would like to go over with you.” That is an issue. And is the type of access that the average citizen does not have, which is why I don’t think it is a bad idea to limit access to group events that are either officially on the record or can be recorded by the people and media such as town halls.

I also think that all donations no matter how small should be public record.

Here E,

I hate to do this, but you have no actual idea what you are talking about, because the sources you're using are very likely not local.
The official statistics show that there were around 70000 crimes or attempted crimes by Refugees in Germany over the last year. Given that there are currently 1 million refugees in Germany, this equates to about .07 crimes per refugee, which compares favourably to the overall crime rate in Germany (.08 crimes per citizen). So, whatever else they are, they certainly aren't worse than the people already living here.

You made my point the majority of the refugees are good I never stated otherwise. I only pointed out that it is the ethical responsibility of elected officials to put the citizen before the non-citizen. And that if your government tried to do a better job of it then maybe they would have impacted a lot fewer than 70K of your countrymen and women and their families. And this is not a dig at Germany our country is has the same problem except it is some ware around 15 to 17 million, and let’s give the benefit of the doubt and apply that same .07 to them that would be about 1.12 million crimes over the decades and that is not counting repeat offenders or people that were deported and came back.

Let’s take your numbers if you put 10k refugees on one town with an approximate crime .07 per refugee that would be about 700 crimes committed and depending on how big or small that town is that is a major impact on that community that could have been drastically reduced by slowing down the process and doing your best to vet them.

And if you do that are you going to identify all of the malcontents at the border, nope but if you could cut the 70K down to say only 40K wouldn’t it have been worth it.

Also let’s remember some of these victims lives will never be the same ever, permanently altered or even shattered, we are not just talking about simple burglaries and nonviolent crimes here we are talking about rape, murder, child molestation, human trafficking, DUI’s and Hit and runs killing or ever crippling people. Granted these crimes are probably on the majority but out of 70K crimes in a year I bet they still add up to thousands. And we can reduce these crimes by slowing down the illegal-immigration/refugee process and doing our due diligence. Do our own citizens commit these same crimes YES! they do but here is the difference they are already here we cannot stop and vet them at the border.

I never said or implied that we should stop legal immigration or accepting refugees. I never said or implied that they are mostly bad in fact I said the exact opposite.

All I said was that it is the ethical responsibility for the government to put its citizens before non-citizens. I do not see a problem with that do you?

Your approach seems to be well we can’t read their minds so let’s just let everyone in and we will catch them once they have committed a crime then do something about it.

The thing I'm trying to get at is that, no matter what parts of the media may be trying to sell you (or, rather, the parts of the german political spectrum that roughly equate to the Trump/Tea Party movement in the US), in actuality most of the people coming here are just as law-abiding as the rest of us.

Again never said otherwise, most people are good I agree. Thanks for the stereo type though maybe you should do some research on what the Tea Party movement was really about and the types of people that were involved in it and not get all of your information from the DNC and main stream media.

In the absence of true mindreading capability, there is no way to stop people from coming into the country under false pretenses. Given that, I see no reason to bar people from entry just because they might be idiots; We have a functioning police and judicial system that can deal with those.

Yes we cannot read people’s minds. But we can look at their social media accounts who/and what type of people they communicate with on a regular basis and hell interview them with someone that extremists would have a difficult time dealing with such as a woman or a wonderfully flamboyant gay person and try and identify any subconscious ques. We as in the western world have many many ways of trying to vet someone and if we are unable then turn them around.

Are we going to get them all no, it’s is not possible like you said we can’t read their minds but as an elected official it would be my duty to try.And my current feeling is they are not.

You are not addressing the point I made, I note. You know that the system isn't perfect, and so I have to conclude that you're willing to accept a number of false positives that would lead to people being deported without cause.

I did…..NO system is perfect and can’t be because we as a society are not perfect also it is impossible to be fair to every person all of the time. So again when a false positive is identified then corrective action is taken, laws and process are looked at and modified to either reduce or eliminate the occurrence.Thant is the best we can do in a fair society.

I wonder if you would be that tolerant of mistakes if you or your family were at risk.

Yes………..I grew up in Ca the majority of my friends are Hispanic and some were born here by parents that were not here legally and they treat me and I look at them as family and would be devastated if they were deported which is why I came up with a way to make every one legal citizens over time once the boarder is secure…as it can be.

Look, it's like this: The conservative movement in the US is richer, whiter, older and more male than the current average American is. If this trend continues (and it shows no sign of stopping), then the conservative voice will vanish into irrelevance.

Wrong, look at what is happening at college campuses around the USA. We are the new radicals we are the ones bucking the system while the man is trying to silence us. A touch of exacerbation here but my point still remains conservatism is only one aspect of a wide variety of similar beliefs that includes Republicans, Libertarians, Constitutionalist and many others and we are not all the same skin color gender sexual orientation or wealthy. Look here is an admittedly small sample and you would have to take my word for it but the people in my life remember my Hispanic friends I told you about well most of them would be considered libertarians or constitutionalist a couple of them are gay too, we are all in our 30’s too so not old and the majority of my peers at work who are between their 20’s and 30’s are not white or rich would fall into one of these categories. Now my peers at work who are in their 50’s and are mostly white males would fall into some spectrum of democrat. We are not what we are as portrayed as being but we do have our 10% of Fing nut cases just like any group and because it fits the media’s stereotype those are the ones that get the most attention. and it is Us not just conservatives that make up group like the Tea Party.

As for me I think I am some weird hybrid of a Constitutionalist Libertarian Conservative.

This is something that cannot be allowed to happen, as democracy without alternatives and dialogue is just oligarchy with better PR. So, the conservative movement will have to change with the times: It cannot survive if it spends most of its energy on fighting a change that is irreversible. If this means compromising on some core beliefs, then so be it; it's not as if that's an unprecedented thing (see for example how southern racists shifted their vote from the democrats to the republicans in the fifties and sixties).

It’s not as clear cut are you seem to think.

“It’s true that a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, shepherded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to passage. But who voted for it? Eighty percent of Republicans in the House voted aye, as against 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, 82 percent of Republicans favored the law, but only 69 percent of Democrats. Among the Democrats voting nay were Albert Gore Sr., Robert Byrd, and J. William Fulbright.”

“Okay, but didn’t all the old segregationist senators leave the Democratic party and become Republicans after 1964? No, just one did: Strom Thurmond. The rest remained in the Democratic party — including former Klansman Robert Byrd, who became president pro tempore of the Senate.”

And this is in response to the point you are trying to make.

“These Republican gains came not from the most rural and “deep south” regions, but rather from the newer cities and suburbs. If the new southern Republican voters were white racists, one would have expected Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to be the first to turn. Instead, as Gerard Alexander notes in “The Myth of the Racist Republicans,” the turn toward the GOP began in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. Eisenhower did best in the peripheral states. Alexander concludes: “The GOP’s southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the . . . Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, young, non-native southern, and concentrated in the growth points that were
the least ‘Southern’ parts of the south.””

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/3 ... ona-charen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwqhoVIh65k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-QwMUjD8xg

I am not asking conservatives to become a carbon copy of liberals. But you guys need to figure out a way to deal with the perception problems you have, and one way to start with this is to start talking to people and stop silencing them (see for reference recent changes to election procedures proposed by Republicans under the guise of improving the security of the vote but which incidentally also reduce the part of the voter pool which is more inclined to vote democrat).

Who are we silencing what outlet of the main stream media do we control? Every time we try and articulate our ideas in the media we get labeled racists or sexist before we even have a chance to complete our idea.

And what changes to election law would reduce the voter pool? Voter ID please. Everyone in the US over the age of 18 needs to have some form of official ID to do every day things. Getting on an airplane ID, picking up a prescription ID, cashing /depositing a check ID, going into a federal government building ID, renting a car ID, buying alcohol ID, buying cigarettes ID, going into a Bar ID and I can name many many more times where we need to have it, so the majority of our people do and this goes to my point earlier before we can even get our message/idea out we get labeled racists and people stop looking at the idea or what it’s trying to accomplish and call it a guise of improving security.

“Riley said "black voter turnout in 2012 exceeded the rate of white voter turnout, even in the states with the strictest voter ID laws," despite the Democrats claiming the voter ID laws suppress the black vote.

While there is debate about the reasons why -- and if the phenomenon will last -- Riley's statistic checks out. Census data shows that indeed, for the first time ever, black voter turnout was higher nationally than white voter turnout, and at least just as high in the states with strict voter ID laws.

We rate this claim True.”

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/st ... rnout-eve/

“A recent study of the the 2010 and 2012 primaries and general elections shows that voter ID laws did not disproportionately decrease minority turnout. The study, conducted by University of California San Diego political scientist Lindsay Nielson in data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, found the following: (emphasis bolded)

In primaries, she reports, whites and minorities vote at approximately similar rates; turnout declines for people of all races from 43 to 31 percent, as ID requirements become stricter. Turnout among voters over age 65 declines from 57 to 48 percent in primary elections; among those ages 35 to 64, it drops from 42 to 34 percent; the young vote decreases from 30 to 22 percent. Income makes no difference; turnout declines about 10 percent both for people who make more than $40,000 per year and those who make less. She found similar results when the income cutoff was set at $20,000 per year.”

http://www.dailywire.com/news/7992/5-st ... on-bandler

And the study is here but behind a pay wall.
http://prq.sagepub.com/content/early/20 ... 2913514854

Don’t Believe Voter Fraud Happens? Here’s Some Examples

http://dailysignal.com/2015/05/22/ydont ... -examples/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAe6xa3rgb4

The thing about medical insurance is that you do not know what you are going to need. Maybe you live out your days in the best of health, in which case you'll have wasted a lot of money, maybe you'll contract an exotic disease not covered by your health plan, in which case you are quite royally fucked. Health care which doesn't cover everything might as well not exist; It is outrageous that a civilized country would accept losing people to preventable medical issues out of an overzealous belief in the individual.

We are by no means perfect we have many many faults and there are millions of things that we could do better as a nation but our belief in the individual is the core of who we are and what has allowed us to achieve so much.

Also According to Wiki on German health insurance.
“the government is responsible to ensure access by those who in need, subsidiarity, policies are implemented with smallest no political and administrative influence, and corporatism”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany

and you

“There are 118 health care insurance providers which are part of the social security system”

Granted I have just scratched the surface and I am still learning, but it appears that Germany does not have a purely Socialist healthcare system they blended a Socialist program with a free market solution. And got the best of both worlds. And this type of program goes with I said earlier about the government solution should be the last one to be considered and if deemed required as limited as much as possible which is what you guys did.

What seems like a more socialist healthcare program than your medical system is our VA and it is in shambles and has been for decades.

IG Report: 300,000 Veterans Died While Waiting for Health Care at VA (these numbers are most likely smaller but it’s hard to tell by how much because of poor record keeping.)

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015 ... re-va.html

Colorado VA hospital $1 billion over budget

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /24964551/

Hey gcomeau,

No, that is your practical responsibility. Ethics has not a thing to do with it.

I see your point but I also think that it is the correct ethical choice for an elected official to put the citizen’s needs before that of a non-citizen.

Ethics:

1. pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.

2. being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession:

“Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.”

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resou ... is-ethics/

Ethically any persons responsibility is to aid those who need it. Only the practicality of not being able to do that for absolutely everyone requires us to curtail who we do and do not extend that aid to and prioritize some over others, but that is an unfortunate reality to be subject to when required not some kind of ideal to be pursued.

I 100% agree…this is what I have I have been ineloquently trying to articulate. Maybe I should have put it this way earlier. Sometimes reality has to temper compassion so we can help more over time instead of the few right now.

I can see no imaginable ethical argument you can present in favor of letting suffering people suffering for the simple reason that they don't have the right country on their passport.

The ethics of the situation are founded on the obligations/responsibilities of the elected official whose job is to put the safety/needs of the citizens before the non-citizen it sucks and is an unpleasant thing to contemplate but it is still true.

This is imperfect but bear with me, I kind of see it like this you and your child are in the middle of bum f**k nowhere weeks away from civilization with very little in way of food and water. You come across a stranger going the opposite way who is worse off than you, what do you do? The ethical choice or responsible choice is nothing you have an obligation to your child. However the compassionate choice to share what you can.

I don’t want to let the suffering people suffer but there are wolves among the suffering people and we need to do our best to weed them out first before we let the suffering in. is this an unreasonable position to have? I personally don’t think so

“It is true that the vast majority of refugees are good and decent people who are fleeing the carnage wrought by the Islamic State militant group. They are not advocates of Islamic radicalism; they are the victims of Islamic radicalism. The danger is not coming from them, but from Islamic radicals who are using them as cover to infiltrate operatives into the West.”

http://www.newsweek.com/how-isis-smuggl ... ees-453039

“BERLIN — An Algerian couple, suspected of planning a terrorist attack in Berlin and arrested on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic State, entered Germany late last year and applied for asylum as Syrian refugees — part of a pattern of terrorism suspects entering Europe under the guise of fleeing war, the German authorities said Friday.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/world ... .html?_r=0

Great. They already have this process of screening you may have heard of so that takes care of that. They are not, nor have they EVER, just let 100% of immigrants free flow into the nation at will.

Nice sarcasm. Nope your right we do have laws and processes in that regard it would be nice if our elected officials would up hold them.

“Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Congress that Homeland Security was embarrassed by the number of illegal immigrants not showing up for their deportation hearings, but instead of cracking down on the immigrants, the department ordered agents not to arrest them in the first place — meaning they no longer need to show up for court.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -illegals/

Or because we don’t even attempt to control our boarder like we should in our case.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... ss-border/

Let’s also look at England and France were there are no go zones for police or that if they want to patrol a certain neighborhood they need to contact the local imam

Discredited right wing mythology. And the E has already addressed the inaccuracies in your views about immigrant crime rates in Germany.

and last I read in England there are 80 sharia courts.

If by 80 you mean 0.

There are of course in any religion going to be various administrative bodies that tell the faithful how to behave, there are in England, there are in the U.S., there are anywhere you have any religion that claims the authority to tell believers how they are supposed to behave. But none of them have any civil or criminal authority. At least not in England. They are not "courts". People trying to spread hysteria by calling them "courts" are deliberately misleading people into thinking they have been given *any* kind of legal authority when they have not.

I have a vague understanding of some foreign political/legal systems and their cultural significance in their society couple that with my limited time (single dad here) and news resources it would be stupid of me to be 100% sure of a topic when I know my understanding is incomplete. Which is why I said I would defer to E, and I also indicated that I was not sure how they (sharia courts, now that I have some time to read more, councils and such.) related to the grater society (i.e. England as a whole). So please take your time and read what I wrote. As for discredited right wing mythology, as you can read below not quite, exaggerated sure but both side of the political spectrum do this and the left has a much larger media organ……which is why I do my best to read all sides and try and pull out the facts…when I have the time.

However there is some concern that there might be a problem with some of these councils and communities.

“Similarly, the government now says that "there is evidence of a problem, but we have an inadequate understanding of all the issues involved". It has commissioned a review into whether Sharia is being "misused or applied in a way which is incompatible with the law", to report in 2017.”

https://fullfact.org/law/uks-sharia-courts/

Chief Inspector of Constabulary
“Tom Winsor said police officers were simply never called to some neighbourhoods, where law-abiding people rather than criminals administer their own form of justice”

He said: ‘There are some communities born under other skies who will not involve the police at all. I am reluctant to name the communities in question, but there are communities from other cultures who would prefer to police themselves.

‘There are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own.

‘It’s not that the police are afraid to go into these areas or don’t want to go into those areas,’ he said. ‘But if the police don’t get calls for help then, of course, they won’t know what’s going on.’

Honour killings, domestic violence, sexual abuse of children and female genital mutilations are some of the offences that are believed to be unreported in some cities.

Last December, three members of a self-styled ‘Muslim Patrol’ vigilante group were jailed for harassing, intimidating and assaulting people in East London while claiming they were enforcing sharia law.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... stems.html

Again, ethically the citizenship of a person in need is completely irrelevant. The name of a country on the passport in a person's pocket has precisely squat to do with ethics.

I think for you and me your statement is true, but for an elected official who has the Obligation/responsibility to put the safety and wellbeing of his or her citizens first that it can become an ethical issue for them if a choice can endanger the safety and wellbeing of the citizens.

Ok gcomeau be patient with me here you have put things in a way that I understand but still have questions and what is obvious to you is not necessarily so for the rest of us.

No, there really isn't. Not in a free market system when we're talking about health insurance. The incentives are all backwards. It is stunning to me that people don't get this, because it is so incredibly obvious.

If we were talking about goods like produce or cars or televisions your point would be valid.

If we were talking about services like travel booking or investment advice or legal representation your point would be valid.

But. Not. Insurance.
The thing that incentivizes lower costs and better products in all those other things is that the customers you want to attract are the customers most in need of what you are selling. The customers who will use the most of it. Because the more they use the more money you make. So all your incentives are to serve the greatest demand by meeting *those* customers needs better than the competition.

Ok but in this case wouldn’t the customers’ needs be more services/ greater coverage for the lower price? I know that when my health care elections come up every year that is what I am looking for but I will admit that if the services/coverage is significantly greater for a little more price I pay it because the overall value is greater.

Do insurance companies want, as customers, the people who use their insurance the most?

NO. They. Do. Not. Because those aren't the people they make money off of. Those are the people they LOSE money on.

I agree if you payout more than you take in you company fails. But If my above point is true then wouldn’t the company with the best price for coverage ratio draw in the most people allowing that company to absorb the cost of the people that require that most actual service and allow said company to still make a profit. (With this question I am assuming that we here in the US have allowed insurance companies to compete across state lines so the potential consumer base is around 322 million and several companies are vying for our cash.)

So the incentive is exactly backwards. They have no reason to strive to tailor their businesses to the people who need their services the most, they have every incentive to drive those customers away while trying desperately to convince the people who need their services the *least* to buy them. Which does society no good, that is working against the needs of society.

I agree that it is not in the company’s best interest to bring in high demand customers. And that some limited government intervention would be necessary such as not allowing coverage denial for preexisting conditions and maybe even setting a cap on how much more a company can charge for a high demand customer.

Left to its own, a free market will always always always always ALWAYS create an insurance system that is optimized to do one thing and one thing only... suck the maximum amount of cash out of people's wallets while providing the minimum amount of benefit.

Which is why in every single instance developed nations who strongly intervene in insurance provision with the public sector have FAR superior systems to the boondoggle that is the American system and it's insistence on trying to maximize private sector participation. And that will never change as long as Americans are unable to shake this silly dogma that the private sector does everything better.

The only way that would happen is if they start acting more responsibly with our tax dollars.

Now gentlemen its my daughters first birthday this weekend so I'm out and look forward to see how you guys rip me apart on Monday.

It's not voter ID laws that are the problem. In principle I agree with them.

It's the restrictions and difficulties to obtaining such ID that is the problem

It seems that one invariable follows the other.


This is something I would change.

Probably by making drivers licences federal issued not state issued. A change I'd make over here in Oz too.

Link SS, drivers licence, and fingerprints.
That should cover all the bases

Sent from my SM-G920I using Tapatalk

Annachie wrote:It's not voter ID laws that are the problem. In principle I agree with them.

It's the restrictions and difficulties to obtaining such ID that is the problem

It seems that one invariable follows the other.


This is something I would change.

Probably by making drivers licences federal issued not state issued. A change I'd make over here in Oz too.

Link SS, drivers licence, and fingerprints.
That should cover all the bases

Sent from my SM-G920I using Tapatalk

More voting fraud is carried out in the courthouse than by either "voter misrepresentation or multiple voting. The Clerk of court, or the voting commissioner purges entire voting registrations by zip code or precinct number a week before voting.

Voting commission moves precinct location with no prior public notification, so all the non-drivers that took the bus to the local high school where they had voted for the past 5 elections suddenly find they have to take another bus to an even smaller fire station a bit off the bus line, where, oops, the commissioner can only find 3 precinct workers where there were 6. How else do we actually need to discourage those pesky Democrats from voting?

barkerpa3466 wrote:You made my point the majority of the refugees are good I never stated otherwise. I only pointed out that it is the ethical responsibility of elected officials to put the citizen before the non-citizen. And that if your government tried to do a better job of it then maybe they would have impacted a lot fewer than 70K of your countrymen and women and their families. And this is not a dig at Germany our country is has the same problem except it is some ware around 15 to 17 million, and let’s give the benefit of the doubt and apply that same .07 to them that would be about 1.12 million crimes over the decades and that is not counting repeat offenders or people that were deported and came back.

How much of a better job could they have done though? We have an ethical duty to take in refugees and provide them with shelter until they either become citizens or return to their home, and given that it is impossible to know ahead of time whether any given refugee or immigrant will become a criminal, I think the existing vetting procedures are adequate to make sure that the real hard cases don't make it here.

Let’s take your numbers if you put 10k refugees on one town with an approximate crime .07 per refugee that would be about 700 crimes committed and depending on how big or small that town is that is a major impact on that community that could have been drastically reduced by slowing down the process and doing your best to vet them.

10000 people is quite a lot more than the average city is getting. My hometown, a city of 150000 people, has taken in just a little over 1400 people; this sort of ratio is representative for the richer parts of the country. In our case, assuming the crime statistics work out, this would mean a hundred crimes more than what would otherwise happen, but this is within the normal spread of such things.

And if you do that are you going to identify all of the malcontents at the border, nope but if you could cut the 70K down to say only 40K wouldn’t it have been worth it.

No.

Also let’s remember some of these victims lives will never be the same ever, permanently altered or even shattered, we are not just talking about simple burglaries and nonviolent crimes here we are talking about rape, murder, child molestation, human trafficking, DUI’s and Hit and runs killing or ever crippling people.

No, we are not. Most crimes committed by refugees are very definitely petty theft or burglaries; violent crimes also make up about a 5th of the crimes committed, but these are crimes mostly committed against other refugees. Rape and all that? Less than 1%, which (speaking statistically once again) falls under the standard variances of these things.

Granted these crimes are probably on the majority but out of 70K crimes in a year I bet they still add up to thousands. And we can reduce these crimes by slowing down the illegal-immigration/refugee process and doing our due diligence. Do our own citizens commit these same crimes YES! they do but here is the difference they are already here we cannot stop and vet them at the border.

No, we can't, because we (as mentioned previously) have no way of predicting which immigrant will be a normal person and which will turn out to be a criminal.

Your approach seems to be well we can’t read their minds so let’s just let everyone in and we will catch them once they have committed a crime then do something about it.

There are people we can and should (and are) be turning away at the border. But they make up such a miniscule percentage of the whole that I do not see a reason to make the vetting process worse.

Thanks for the stereo type though maybe you should do some research on what the Tea Party movement was really about and the types of people that were involved in it and not get all of your information from the DNC and main stream media.

What stereotype? That these movements are ultraconservative nationalist movements that try to correct an evil that only exists in their minds? That they are made up of people so deeply entrenched in their safe spaces and echo chambers that they believe themselves to be the purveyors of truths that others dare not speak? That they are largely made up of people belonging to demographic groups that used to be utterly dominant but now have to deal with new voices who disagree with them?

Yes………..I grew up in Ca the majority of my friends are Hispanic and some were born here by parents that were not here legally and they treat me and I look at them as family and would be devastated if they were deported which is why I came up with a way to make every one legal citizens over time once the boarder is secure…as it can be.

While also doing your very best to make sure that the means these people's parents used will not be viable for those coming after you.

There's a description for this philosophy. Do the words "Fuck you, got mine" ring a bell?

Wrong, look at what is happening at college campuses around the USA. We are the new radicals we are the ones bucking the system while the man is trying to silence us.

No, you really aren't. Read the demographical statistics.

A touch of exacerbation here but my point still remains conservatism is only one aspect of a wide variety of similar beliefs that includes Republicans, Libertarians, Constitutionalist and many others and we are not all the same skin color gender sexual orientation or wealthy. Look here is an admittedly small sample and you would have to take my word for it but the people in my life remember my Hispanic friends I told you about well most of them would be considered libertarians or constitutionalist a couple of them are gay too, we are all in our 30’s too so not old and the majority of my peers at work who are between their 20’s and 30’s are not white or rich would fall into one of these categories. Now my peers at work who are in their 50’s and are mostly white males would fall into some spectrum of democrat. We are not what we are as portrayed as being but we do have our 10% of Fing nut cases just like any group and because it fits the media’s stereotype those are the ones that get the most attention. and it is Us not just conservatives that make up group like the Tea Party.

You are mistaking anecdotes for data.

Who are we silencing what outlet of the main stream media do we control? Every time we try and articulate our ideas in the media we get labeled racists or sexist before we even have a chance to complete our idea.

It's called freedom of speech. You may have heard of it. It means that people are free to criticize you, and you're going to have to deal with it.

And what changes to election law would reduce the voter pool? Voter ID please. Everyone in the US over the age of 18 needs to have some form of official ID to do every day things. Getting on an airplane ID, picking up a prescription ID, cashing /depositing a check ID, going into a federal government building ID, renting a car ID, buying alcohol ID, buying cigarettes ID, going into a Bar ID and I can name many many more times where we need to have it, so the majority of our people do and this goes to my point earlier before we can even get our message/idea out we get labeled racists and people stop looking at the idea or what it’s trying to accomplish and call it a guise of improving security.

Except when you have documented cases of republican officials combing the voting data to see which voting methods were used predominantly by people of color or people who vote democrat, and then try to remove those options.

Granted I have just scratched the surface and I am still learning, but it appears that Germany does not have a purely Socialist healthcare system they blended a Socialist program with a free market solution. And got the best of both worlds. And this type of program goes with I said earlier about the government solution should be the last one to be considered and if deemed required as limited as much as possible which is what you guys did.

One point you missed: Public health care insurers are forbidden from making a profit. They are very definitely not a free market solution. In legal parlance, they are defined as "Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts", which means that they are self-administrating bodies that the state has delegated part of its responsibilities to. In a very real legal sense, this is a "government solution".

Our medical system is underpinned by the government Medicare, funded by a small levy on wages.
This covers GP visits and specialists, however some doctors do claim a gap (upgrading from Volvo to Mercedes). There are free hospitals and services.
Then we have the second tier covered by both profit and nonprofit organisations. These provide quicker and more elective care on top of the base.
I pay $280 a month to this level for the works, including dentist optometrist physio etc, and private hospitals.
From studies our system is much better than the US, cheaper, more efficent, fairer, and no one suffers if in dire straits regardless of money or lack of it.

Annachie wrote:It's not voter ID laws that are the problem. In principle I agree with them.

It's the restrictions and difficulties to obtaining such ID that is the problem

It seems that one invariable follows the other.


This is something I would change.

Probably by making drivers licences federal issued not state issued. A change I'd make over here in Oz too.

Link SS, drivers licence, and fingerprints.
That should cover all the bases

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Well now there is the "Enhanced ID" Brand new thing confirms your identity and your citizenship. I realize it wad 50+ years ago, but I did have to show up to DMV with my birth certificate to even get a learner's permit. I suppose that was not enough for today's Conservatives. Now I had to drag it up with mt social security card + proof of insurance to renew my license. nd, apparently even that is not enough to qualify. I hope I don't need affidavits from my parents.

Perhaps we should just revert to the old Soviet internal passports.

Well, you do have sovereign states

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Annachie wrote:Well, you do have sovereign states

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And enhanced ID is passed by Congress. Maybe it is further evidence of voter suppression by the GOP? I mean RFID chips in your drivers license to constantly broadcast your name address SSN etc., + location for every police department spook shop and ID thief 24/7. And the cost to each state for the RFID chips in the first place must be passed on to "the Consumer/Citizen" and required to vote. Backhanded poll tax much.

talk about Anton Zilwicki's gathering way more information than they can possibly use!