ThatDamnedPanda
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Joined: 1/26/2009
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DarkSteven
quote:
ORIGINAL: Thadius
Well the first Tea Paty candidate was just elected to the New York legislature. He is expected to be certified sometime this week.
Not the sort of third party I had in mind. The tea partiers as far as I can tell are one note Johnnies. But at least they seem to understand fiscal restraint.
They seem to understand the concept of fiscal restraint - at least on an emotional level - but on a rational level, they don't seem to have very good ideas of how to govern a country in accordance with that concept. As you say, they only know one song - "Cut taxes! Cut spending!" Well, OK, fine, but which taxes? Which spending? I haven't seen anything from them that suggests to me that they know how to make intelligent judgments about what's worth funding and what's not, or how to fund it.
Right now, when i see Tea Partiers, more often than not all I see is a disorganized, semi-literate, relatively ignorant rabble shouting in the streets about how angry they are. Alright, that's fine for a starting point, but that's pretty much all they've got. The next phase for them is to think through the issues and craft some sensible solutions for the issues that are making them angry, and until they do that, I see them as more of a symptom of what's wrong with this country than a potential cure.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DarkSteven
We may be heading for a variant of the European system under which there are so many parties that they all cut deals after the elections, hopefully only for legislative issues and not for pork distribution.
As chaotically dysfunctional a system as that may be, it would almost certainly be much less catastrophically dysfunctional than the system we currently have. I'd certainly be willing to give it a go. What's the worst that could happen? It wouldn't work? Well, what we're doing now doesn't work either. I'm just not sure that this could work in America as well as it does in European social democracies, because let's face it - we, as a people, do not like to cooperate with others. We expect others to cooperate with us. I fear that a system in which 4, 5, or a half-dozen parties all had a seat at the table would just result in total gridlock between 4, 5, or 6 conflicting sets of interests instead of just 2.
But like I said, why not give it a go? What have we got to lose? We're heading straight for the rocks anyway, how could it be any worse?
_____________________________
Panda, panda, burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Made you all black and white and roly-poly like that?
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RE: Obama's chickens have come home to roost! - 
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