You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Jon Stewart brilliantly disects the State of the Union. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

>> ^VoodooV:

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^VoodooV:
The sooner we abolish parties, the better. Party politics is what got us here.

How exactly would you do that?
You'd pretty much have to take away people's right to freely assemble, or forbid politicians from saying what they think about the issues before they're elected...

Uhh...no, not quite taking it that far. Not interested in slashing the Bill of Rights. There will always be unofficial groups and coalitions and there will be nothing you can do to stop that, nor should you. But what we can do is just refuse to recognize people as Reps or Dems, we can abolish any sort of official backing. Disband the RNC and the DNC. Simply refuse to give it legitimacy. When the state of the union happens, refuse to give a "opposition party rebuttal" At the very least! abolish this whole "reps sit on one side of the aisle, dems sit on the other side" nonsense. There is nothing wrong with people getting together, but the gov't doesn't have to recognize it and give it legitimacy so that the party eclipses the person as it is now.
The founders were definitely wary of parties and rightfully so. I don't see any problem with a concerted effort to at the VERY LEAST, discourage parties. We're seeing first hand the damage that can be done when party comes before country.
That and make all elections publicly funded..period. You'd see some drastic changes for the better


I guess my point is you're not being realistic about the dynamic at work. What's that going to cure? Are blankfist and I going to accidentally start voting for the same candidates? Probably not. Will liberals and conservatives generally refuse to organize into voting blocs to maximize their influence? Definitely not.

More to the point, what mechanism would prevent unofficial voting blocs from forming in the House and Senate? Once they form, are we really making things better by forcing them to pretend they don't exist? By refusing to let people come up with some shorthand word for them like Democrat or Republican (or Green, Monster Raving Looney, etc.)? By refusing to give TV air time to someone who wants to rebut the President?

It'd be a bit like trying to ban "alliances" in the game of Survivor. You'd have to intervene in almost every conversation to successfully do it, and even then people will still constantly be trying to do it under the radar, because the advantages are just too great. And that's a situation with at most 20 people under the most Orwellian level of surveillance possible...

Publicly funded elections on the other hand are a great idea, but that's wholly different from trying to kill organized parties. Publicly funded elections are about trying to neutralize the effect of money on the electoral process, and that's the real issue, IMO.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^VoodooV:
The sooner we abolish parties, the better. Party politics is what got us here.

How exactly would you do that?
You'd pretty much have to take away people's right to freely assemble, or forbid politicians from saying what they think about the issues before they're elected...


Uhh...no, not quite taking it that far. Not interested in slashing the Bill of Rights. There will always be unofficial groups and coalitions and there will be nothing you can do to stop that, nor should you. But what we can do is just refuse to recognize people as Reps or Dems, we can abolish any sort of official backing. Disband the RNC and the DNC. Simply refuse to give it legitimacy. When the state of the union happens, refuse to give a "opposition party rebuttal" At the very least! abolish this whole "reps sit on one side of the aisle, dems sit on the other side" nonsense. There is nothing wrong with people getting together, but the gov't doesn't have to recognize it and give it legitimacy so that the party eclipses the person as it is now.

The founders were definitely wary of parties and rightfully so. I don't see any problem with a concerted effort to at the VERY LEAST, discourage parties. We're seeing first hand the damage that can be done when party comes before country.

That and make all elections publicly funded..period. You'd see some drastic changes for the better

The Correspondents Dinner is the new State of the Union.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/03/01/035233/Intel-Unveils-SSDs-With-6GbitSec-Throughput

FEB 4 2011

In his second State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called on Americans to reclaim our identity as a people who "do big things" and pledged new federal investment, particularly for scientific research.

We'll invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean energy technology. ... We're telling America's scientists and engineers that if they assemble the teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we'll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.

---

people dont forget when you're wrong qm... but you seem to

And this, dear readers, is the state of our Union.>> ^mkknyr:

Call me cynical, but I'm more surprised at the union rep's inability to throw some spin on it than the practice himself. He just sat there like a sucker without a spine.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I think that's a key point. When the US has eschewed "socialist" welfare state programs as it has generally done over the last 30 years - in favour of free enterprise and privatisation - the result has been to concentrate wealth at the top of the spectrum with the country club set. I don't see any free enterprise solution to this.

Victorian England had a lot of concentrated wealth at the top, and a huge pool of poor workers and very little regulation. That led to work houses and rampant pollution. It also (thankfully) led to a strong labour uprising that redistributed that wealth with a progressive tax system, creating a large middle-class. Bad for the rich? Absolutely. Vastly better for the whole country? Definitely, yes.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^blankfist:
@NetRunner, you offered the following as your utopian idea for new government:
1. regulated market.
2. welfare state
That's exactly what we have now. Exactly. Government regulates every single industry. Every one. We have a massive welfare state. Our economy is also going to shit and entrepreneurs cannot stay afloat with all the regulations in order to create more jobs. It's a recipe for failure.
Why not give free market Capitalism a chance? Your regulated markets and welfare state spending simply is not sustainable.

I'm starting to get curious, do you ever read my comments all the way to the end?
Maybe I need to be less whimsical. My point was that today's flawed reality is a utopia compared to your utopian proposals.
As for "why not give free market capitalism a chance", I may as well say "why not give Marxist Communism a chance"? I mean, obviously real communism has never been tried -- just ask the modern communists.
There's been no radical boost to growth during America's 30-year march to the right, and shrinking the welfare state and dismantling unions hasn't boosted the median income, so why would we ever keep marching on until we get to the ultimate extreme?
The modern progressive movement isn't on a march towards communism, it's trying to optimize society through an iterative scientific process. We look at things that have failed, or things that have worked elsewhere, and try to learn from them, and build a better mousetrap.
I don't really know what the end-state of modern liberalism looks like. I think it will always be looking to change and evolve over time as new problems and new solutions present themselves.

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner, you offered the following as your utopian idea for new government:
1. regulated market.
2. welfare state
That's exactly what we have now. Exactly. Government regulates every single industry. Every one. We have a massive welfare state. Our economy is also going to shit and entrepreneurs cannot stay afloat with all the regulations in order to create more jobs. It's a recipe for failure.
Why not give free market Capitalism a chance? Your regulated markets and welfare state spending simply is not sustainable.


I'm starting to get curious, do you ever read my comments all the way to the end?

Maybe I need to be less whimsical. My point was that today's flawed reality is a utopia compared to your utopian proposals.

As for "why not give free market capitalism a chance", I may as well say "why not give Marxist Communism a chance"? I mean, obviously real communism has never been tried -- just ask the modern communists.

There's been no radical boost to growth during America's 30-year march to the right, and shrinking the welfare state and dismantling unions hasn't boosted the median income, so why would we ever keep marching on until we get to the ultimate extreme?

The modern progressive movement isn't on a march towards communism, it's trying to optimize society through an iterative scientific process. We look at things that have failed, or things that have worked elsewhere, and try to learn from them, and build a better mousetrap.

I don't really know what the end-state of modern liberalism looks like. I think it will always be looking to change and evolve over time as new problems and new solutions present themselves.

For the record, note that we live in a Constitutional Republic. It's a government of, for and by the people and no where in the Declaration, the Constitution or Bill of Rights is there a single mention of democracy.

There is, however, in Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution the following passage: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government."

I look forward to your next straw man.

>> ^MaxWilder:

Thou shalt not fuck with Anonymous.


Had to up-vote just for that.

edit -

Also,

Thou Shall Not open your pie hole during "The State of the Union" speech.

Thou Shall Not use Interest in a monetary system; Follow to Law Three.

Thou Shall Not break the second law of thermodynamics; nor Law Three of the "Two Goats don't Equal Three, Man, Clause".

Maher didn't say that 95% of Americans got tax cuts.
Note that he said specifically, "For 95% of working families, taxes have gone down."
Obama also used the "working families" qualifier in his January 27th State of the Union speech, when he said, "We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families."

So while a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand, apparently it is more or less a correct statement.

www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2010/jan/28/barack-obama/tax-cut-95-percent-stimulus-made-it-so>> ^MaxWilder:
I don't want to come down on the side of the tea baggers... IMHO, they are brainwashed racists, and they deserve no respect. But on the other hand, I can find no information describing how 95% of Americans got tax cuts. If anybody has a link for that please let me know.

>> ^kceaton1:
He said rape twice.


Good times.

Your video, Obama Calls Out SCOTUS in State of the Union Speech, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

No, politifact is awesome. They even have a page for his entire speech.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/jan/27/fact-checking-obamas-state-union-speech/

>> ^quantumushroom:
"Politifact" is run by one of the most left-wing papers in America, but even they called The One out on his BS.

"We've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs."--FALSE

"Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections."--BARELY TRUE

Your video, TDS: Speech Therapy, F**K YOU (State of the Union) 1/28/10, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.