Early Retirement Extreme Forums

WOW!
59 plus posts. My little non-political, "quite political", post got some comments, or what?
Remember my disclaimer, "non-political". In author legalese, it is my self imposed understanding that if you place a disclaimer on a subject, your good to go with what you write. (I am open to comment on that).
Or is that a sneaky way of having one's cake and eating it too?

Just found this comic that is relevant to this discussion:

http://abstrusegoose.com/183
@HSpencer Nothing wrong with having none's cake and eating it, if one can pull it off.
@dpmorel I agree that multi-party systems don't make for very effective governments. But that may often be a good thing, I like it when dangerous men are ineffective.

Define effective. One party governments makes for a very effective government, or at least one without opposition. Why, when I'm king of the world, you'll get a taste of efficacy!
With the current US system (electoral college), the winner is determined by certain states. In a multiparty system, the winner is determined by certain parties a lot of them which are right between the big parties. Professional politics then becomes a game of convincing these smaller parties to ally with your side. It creates more checks and balances and I think that's a good thing.
In my ideal world there would be not parties at all. Each politician would then be free to vote according to his own mind. You would then have 435 different opinions being represented instead of two.

I agree with the following presented above:
a) no more left vs. right, but corporations vs. you (us)
b) there really are no attractive candidates (at least where I live)
The attack ads are terrible this year, and seem (to me at least) to be so easy to pick out the half-truths they are all based upon. It is sad some folks will actually fall for the ads and take them as gospel.
I think I will lean towards voting out the incumbent, all else being equal. It would be nice to see the other parties somehow get a greater voice though.

@Kevin M
My guess is this coming mid term will accomplish the most shocking incumbent house cleaning of all time!!! It's shaping up that way.

Christine O'Donnell not clear on church-state separation.

I think most of the contentious issues that people fight over are pretty irrelevant... I would think people would be more concerned about the vanishing Bill of Rights than semantics over religion (evolution, abortion, orientation). *sigh*
@KevinM: LOL, yay me for never watching or listening to anything live... I gotta say though, the idea that someone is running an attack ad on the concept of something called an "aqua buddha" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
ALL HAIL THE AQUA BUDDHA!

@JohnnyH - here (Missouri) the latest issue is one of the Senate candidate's brothers allegedly got $100M+ for his wind farm. But the other candidate supposedly has taken the most money from lobbyists since he's been in Congress. Lesser of 2 evils anyone? Neither is the incumbent - I think I'll vote libertarian.

From here:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=169769
"The Tea Party was initiated as a political protest against the unlawful and in fact unconstitutional usurpation of power from the Congress and The People in the form of extortion-led bailouts of enterprises that had engaged in acts that I, and many others, believe were at least civilly actionable and in many cases crossed the line into criminal activity."
Since then, it has clearly been absorbed by the mainstream Republican, Foxnews party...
Seems like the argument is AGAIN squarely on deadlocked, mostly non-issues that never go away: guns, God and gays.

@JohnnyH
Good points above.
GUNS - I have plenty of them. I believe they are the reason we live in a free country, and have at least some protection from the ones who would subvert us and our way of life, both externally and internally.
GOD - Freedom to worship as you will is another reason we live in a free country. That freedom is protected, as only a last resort, by the guns.
GAYS - Live and let live, but I see no reason to usurp our American morals and culture for the sake of Adam and Steve, or even Adam and Fido.
(now I will probably get hammered)

@HSpencer: I understand that everyone has opinions on these things, and that some of them are pretty strong.
What I don't understand, is how these fairly stagnant issues become the focus of elections when things like trillion dollar bailouts, devaluation of the currency, mass corporate fraud, wars of aggression and homeland security threatening liberty of citizens are essentially ignored.
For example, Tea Party "leaders" Palin and Beck (shudder) were huge proponents of the TARP bailout... That was only a few years ago, just how ignorant can people be?
Sad really, I guess maybe we deserve to be serfs.

I guess I don't get why the Tea Party even happened, when the Libertarian party already stands for similar issues?
My guess - Palin & Co just wanted a catchy marketing campaign to get people voting Republican again.

Palin & Co. didn't create the Tea Party. They just took it over.
Secondly, a lot of the crazies in the Tea Party would not have been welcome in the Libertarian party.