while his policy views are rather out-of-sync with mine,
What you don't believe your gun is what protects your right to free speech etc?
I support 2nd Amendment rights to keep and bear arms as originally intended by our Founding Fathers. I realize that without these Constitutionally guaranteed rights, all other rights are vulnerable to usurpation by an overreaching Federal Government.
To be fair, being named "Dick" hasn't hurt many politicians with English speaking voters.
Google translates the post's title as "Click law, asshole!" which I am rather fond of and will now try to work into everyday conversation.
2: I was thinking, the one silver lining to his getting elected, if he does, is the unlikely possibility that he'll co-sponsor legislation with Anthony Weiner.
Don't forget his bipartisan work with Boehner.
Just when I think that Fox News can't possibly get any more batshit insane, I see Crazy Pam Geller on there (just minutes ago!) railing about the "Islamicization" of America. A woman who actually hangs out with Euro-fascists is now being taken seriously by Fox News.
Huh. I know a guy by that name. My Spanish wasn't good enough to laugh at him for it until now. Thanks, Stanley!
8: Happy to help your noble cause, good sir.
Since this appears to be the politics thread, I'll vent here:
If picking the Lt. Gov. of Pennsylvania requires having tape recorders call me a half-dozen times during the primary, our system is broken and I'll have no choice but to put "my balls itch" as a write-in for every contest on the ballot.
A half dozen times during "the primary" (what is that, a four-month period)? That doesn't sound like much.
I only got one call. The reason given for voting for him was that he's "the only candidate from West Central Pennsylvania". I forget which candidate it was for.
11: In the last four days, I've gotten nearly as many phone calls as I did during the same Thursday to Sunday period before the 2008 presidential election (except those calls were often actual humans). The actual contested primaries for Senator and Governor are one thing, but I'm getting more calls about Lt. Gov. than the races that actually matter.
In other political news, the Tea People want to repeal the 17th Amendment? I hadn't heard that one yet.
13: Huh? This just gets weirder and weirder.
12: I was going to say that we have gotten more calls than I can recall for any November election. But there are five registered voters who use our house as their primary address. Have not noticed them being heavy on the Lt. Governor's race, however.
13, 14: It's cast as a states' rights issue. Ron Paul has pushed it for some time.
We could go all German style and do away with senators altogether, turning the states into parliamentary democracies elected by PR (sort of) with each state's government having a set number of votes in an upper house semi-weighted by population.
Yeah, that's a long-standing shibboleth of libertarians and other "world is going to hell" types - a Heinlein story had someone's grandfather thinking that plus the 16th Amendment had been the downfall of the Republic.
Repealing the direct election of senators seems like it would increase the power of the states and, in particular, the power of low population states, but since I am Becks-style* I can't quite parse it out.
Repealing the 17th doesn't give more power to a state like Utah, per se,** but it does give more power to the Utah state government. So the local elections, where the tea party feels more powerful, become a bigger deal. If we can control the local government, we can control the nation.
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*Do we have to retire the phrase if she no longer comments here?
** Holy shit, I just wrote "per say" and let it stand for a long while.
Becks is still around, rob, even if she's not so much with the commenting. You can be Becks-style.
These days being tierce-style seems like more fun.
Another option. See, there are options now, is all.
I guess I can see a progressive argument for repealing the 17th Amendment, along the lines of "Senate races are increasingly about pitting two extremely wealthy individuals against each other in a media contest, so if you put the decision in the state house, you'd be taking a lot of the monied special interests out of the picture." But seriously, who would believe that? You'd just be increasing the corruption in state legislatures, and massively, massively adding to the power of state senate majority leaders and house speakers. So the big money would just get dispersed a little more widely at the statehouse, and wouldn't enrich the TV stations and direct marketers to quite the same degree. Although of course there'd still be huge "Call your state representative/state senator/governor to appoint Claudius J. Terwilliger US Senator today!" campaigns.
And as if the decisions about who runs for Senate in any given state aren't mostly made in smoke-filled rooms at the state capitol anyway.
Off the top of my head, I'm having a hard time coming up with an argument against abolishing the Senate altogether via constitutional amendment. It probably doesn't have legs, but I think I'd be okay with it. And maybe someone can go troll the Paul websites with that idea as a better solution or something.
If we ever got to the point that such a thing would be possible, I think it would be both possible and advisable to bundle in national popular vote for the presidency.
Also, we should make ponies eligible to be elected president, regardless of where they were born.
27: You always have to take a good thing too far. It's radicals like you that give election reform a bad name.
Didn't someone graph google hits for "abolish + [x]th amendment" not so long ago? Ah yes, here we are. Beyond the obvious one, the 17th and the 22nd are local maxima. 22nd? Ah, term limit. Hey, it would have saved us Bush but given back Reagan going senile in office.
30: Whoa. Who are the repeal-the-Second-Amendment people? I don't tend to care about gun rights one way or the other, but that graph result seems odd.
33: Wow, that's nutters. I've long taken the "well regulated" part to mean simply that ammunition should be available only through heavily taxed state-run commercial locations, similar to ABC liquor stores in Virginia. We're under-interpreting the damn thing.
33, 34: It is clear to me that anything approaching an originalist interpretation of the 2nd has to take account of how the whole national defense function is organized. And I realize that I am not exactly sure what "security of a free State" precisely refers to.
You'd just be increasing the corruption in state legislatures
Which hardly seems possible, despite being true.
31: so, two houses of representatives? what's the point?
37: That neither of them is the Senate.