OMG - Ignorance or Stupidity

Last night I heard two comments that demonstrate either ignorance or stupidity.

1. TSA Official on Screening fiasco - He said that when the passenger was leaving the terminal that they had the right to force him through screening under the administrative search provision of the Fourth Amendment. Huh? The whole TSA Act is one huge violation of the Fourth Amendment, IMHO.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In other words the only time you / your property can be searched / seized is if a judge issues a warrant saying that you / your property can be searched. To the best of my knowledge the TSA does not have an exigent exception.

2. Wolf Blitzer on Earmarks - Wolf stated that getting rid of Earmarks effectively gave the Executive Branch control of the budget. Huh? I thought it just got rid of buying votes by attaching pork to legitimate legislation. The Congress still appropriates the money and the executive can still veto.

How stupid does the government / news media think we are?

Why does the government state the unemployment rate at 9.x%? The other number that is often divulged is the U-6 number which is 16.x% and that number does not include:
1 - self-employed workers whose incomes are a fraction of what they were.
2 - full-time employees who have accepted short-term, low paying contracts without benefits.
3 - many would-be workers who are going back to school

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Originally Posted by dbasnett

How stupid does the government / news media think we are?

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Mind you, it may not be you who are stupid. It may be the officials themselves. Which is a greater cause for concern. You see, ruling over idiots may not be much of a challenge, but being ruled by idiots is surely a disaster.

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Originally Posted by honeybee

Mind you, it may not be you who are stupid. It may be the officials themselves. Which is a greater cause for concern. You see, ruling over idiots may not be much of a challenge, but being ruled by idiots is surely a disaster.

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My point exactly. That is why when I vote I don't have a problem voting for the not incumbent. To me it is a selection between the tweedles, de or dumb. Does it really make a difference? I don't think so.

I think more people would vote if you can vote AGAINST someone instead of for someone. Subtract a vote from the person you like least.

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Originally Posted by dbasnett

How stupid does the government / news media think we are?

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Pretty stupid. Worse yet, they are right. It has been proven time and again, on both sides, that it is entirely possible to motivate a very loud, vocal, and ignorant, segment of any particular base. Since the squeekiest wheel gets greased the most, it is only necessary to whip up one segment sufficiently for you to get something through.

Consider your TSA example. It's fake security. Somebody puts a bomb in a shoe...and now we all go sock-footed through security. Somebody puts a bomb in a vial...and now we can't take any liquids above a small amount. Somebody puts a bomb in their underwear...and now we get strip searched. Of course, those security measures never caught anything because they came in response to something they didn't catch, and the terrorists just switched to a method that wasn't being screened. Those sensors only pick up external devices, so the next bomb will be an arse-bomb. Heck, that's already used for smuggling, so why not? Of course, that will lead to a whole new TSA promotion: Security and Prostrate screens for one low low price!!

On the other hand, as long as they are going to go with such an intrusive screening, they have a valid justification for forcing it, since otherwise it would allow terrorists to 'ping' the system until they found a loophole. Since the security is fake, it isn't justified, but if the security was real it could be.

Unreasonable search has a long and interesting history in the courts, but it is really getting strained these days. For instance, it is not considered unreasonable search to look into the back of a pickup truck, even one with a cap. However, it is unreasonable search to open a cooler in the back of the pickup. The court has ruled that looking through a window isn't unreasonable, but opening a container is. So what about the use of thermal imaging and some of the new wall penetrating radar devices that are on the market now? How about the TSA full body scanners? These are areas on which the court has not ruled (as far as I know), but will eventually have to.

Welcome to politics in the USA, to become a Legislator and/or a Politician you must possess a severe lack of common sense.

Also a lack of morals.

I see they are showing some of the Charlie Rangel hearing. How about that, even when they are caught red-handed they cling to the power.

Did any of you see the John Stewart piece on John McCain and his position don't ask, don't tell? I was laughing so hard I was crying.

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I think more people would vote if you can vote AGAINST someone instead of for someone.

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I like the general thinking but I can see a problem with that. Really good politicians tend to polarise opinion (or more accurately, innefective and bland politicians don't offend anyone). By having a negative voting would mean that middle of the road politicians would prevail every time. We'd get the guys that nobody didn't want rather than the guys that some people did want. I wonder if a system where you cast two votes, one pro and one con, might work.

Good idea. I like that one, it has potential, although most likely would never be implemented.

I have another idea i would like to add to that.

Make politicians legally obligated to follow through with any pledge they actually make during an election campaign.

Then we might get an end to politicians saying one thing to get elected, and then doing another once they are actually in power.

YEAH!! Charge them with fraud!!!

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Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers

I have another idea i would like to add to that.

Make politicians legally obligated to follow through with any pledge they actually make during an election campaign.

Then we might get an end to politicians saying one thing to get elected, and then doing another once they are actually in power.

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We should also make these changes while we're at it:
1. Politicians are subject to all the laws like everyone else, no exceptions.
2. Being a politician is not a career, after so long they must obtain a regular job like everyone else.

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Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers

I have another idea i would like to add to that.

Make politicians legally obligated to follow through with any pledge they actually make during an election campaign.

Then we might get an end to politicians saying one thing to get elected, and then doing another once they are actually in power.

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I expect that would have the exactly wrong result. Nobody can fully determine what options they will have available until they are in office. Therefore, if they were legally bound to any promise they made, you would get no promises that were substantial. Right now, you get substantial promises that may or may not ever get carried out as circumstances warrant. Make it legally dangerous to guess wrong as to what can be accomplished and what do you get? In every case that I am aware of where some such was tried, the result is risk-averse behavior. In this case, nobody would promise anything, and quite likely, the major activity would be preventing anybody from getting anywhere. It might not be entirely bad, but it would be entirely unproductive.

As for voting, I prefer rank voting or share voting over a single vote system. They all have their issues, but single vote is the worst. Rank voting would be where you rank the candidates from 1 to X, where X is the most desirable and 1 is the least. The candidate with the most points wins. Share voting would mean giving each voter something like five points. They can then put all their points on one person, or spread points across a couple people. Once again, the candidate with the most points wins.

Both of those systems will more accurately reflect the will of the people, even in a two party system, but they also may favor bland.

Rank voting may have potential. Share voting would be useless. The voters that don't know better will put all their votes in the same basket. The voters strongly tied to a party will also throw all their votes into one basket. The leftover will have little impact.

That may be the case, but it would still be an improvement over the current system. Rank voting would also have potential problems. If you are talking about voters that "don't know better", their ranking would be spurious. They would probably have a top and a bottom, but they might not have any view in the middle.

However, the key to both systems is that it would really break us out of our current binary system. You almost never get a chance to cast a meaningful vote for any other than an R or a D. Therefore, if you really hate either the R or the D, but don't actually like the other one, your best strategy is still to vote for the other one because there either is no other alternative, or the other alternative has no chance. However, once you enter into either rank or share voting, then two candidates, while still possible, makes little sense. In share voting, the base would cast 100% of their shares behind their party candidate, but that doesn't really matter. The Ds in America have less than 30% of the voters, and the Rs have even less. The majority are independent. No party can win any election on the national level by only motivating their base. Therefore, even in two party share voting, it would be the split of the independents that would decide the election, but it would be more nuanced than it is now.

To be onest I've long thought that the biggest problem with US democracy is that it's effectively limited to two parties rather than the voting system (although, of course, the two party phenomenon is a by product of the voting system). Because that means every positive vote is, in essence, a negative vote, you get the blandness we're describing. Everyone just gravitates to the middle.

We've got the same problem in the UK. I think it's probably not quite as bad because we seem to do a little more to encourage independents than you guys but, to be honest, there's not much in it. We've got two real parties (Conservative and Labour), one wannabe (liberal) and a bunch of voices in the wilderness (quite literally in the case of the Green party). Everyone knows that only the Tories or Labour are ever going to win so they've both moved steadily to the middle, to the extent it's hard to tell them apart now.

Our last election was interesting because it ended in a hung parliament so the Tories and Liberals formed a coallition, which is wierd because they're almost diametrically opposed on most issues. The funny thing is, they seem to be doing pretty well on the whole. It hasn't been perfect and they've inevitably upset people from both their camps (we've had student riots in the last fortnight, although students are nowehere near as good at it as they were in my day), but they've mostly been able to stick to their basic moral principles while tempering each others worst excesses. And the liberal voice in government has been quite refreshing. All this makes me think that proportional representation is probably a good system and not as unworkable as many people believe. It gets more indpendent voices into the government while still allowing the main party to drive the main agenda.

I have said this before, and I will say this again. If tweedle dee / dum is incumbent don't vote for them. If we all did this simultaneously they would get the message. You might argue that the incumbent is better, but IMHO, they are all greedy, arrogant, and shortsighted. Where are the politicians like JFK, who died on this day in 1963, that spark national unity with words like,

“…I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

and

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”

The USA is a nation focused on tress, while the forest is rotting around them, and apathy and malaise by its citizens allow this to occur. Our government is like the man standing in a rattlesnake pit swatting at flies.

How funny is it that two people (Geitner / Rangel) closely related to the appropriation and spending of our tax dollars forgot to pay taxes?

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Our last election was interesting because it ended in a hung parliament so the Tories and Liberals formed a coallition, which is wierd because they're almost diametrically opposed on most issues. The funny thing is, they seem to be doing pretty well on the whole

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but they've mostly been able to stick to their basic moral principles while tempering each others worst excesses. And the liberal voice in government has been quite refreshing.

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I have to say FD this is one thing on which we disagree, for me i haven't seen a single new Tory policy that's different than when Thatcher was in Power, it seems to me that what is actually happening is that the Tories are able to pursue a much more conservative agenda then they would ordinarily be able to because they have the Lib Dem's in power with them taking most of the stick.

To me neither of them are curbing the others excesses. The Lib Dem's got in a couple of their own policies into the coalition agreement but have had to massively compromise on everything else.

I will be very interested to see what happens over the next year or 2 when we have huge public sector job loses. Now some will say that the state is to big and needs cutting, which is all very well and maybe partly true (although exactly what should be cut could be argued also - i do not see the wages of the top managers in the public sector falling by one jot), but to cut it by the huge numbers that they are talking about while we are still in a global recession is a recipe for unrest.

I believe that the Tories are actually massively benefiting by having the Lib Dem's in power with them, but as for the Lib Dem's, i believe that they will lose a large amount of votes at the next by-elections and at the next general elections a large number of those currently in the cabinet will lose there seats !

U-Turns like Tuition fees (considering the Lib Dem's won a number of seats in areas with large university populations) are what is killing them. Students were a huge part of there vote at the last election and they have just shafted them.

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All this makes me think that proportional representation is probably a good system and not as unworkable as many people believe. It gets more indpendent voices into the government while still allowing the main party to drive the main agenda.

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Despite disagreeing on virtually everything else in your last post, i am for proportional representation too, i think it would be a good thing, and would allow people to actually vote for the person they want rather then someone else for tactical reasons.

Well, this is an aside, but I thought I would try and see what you all think about this point:

When you are ruling a nation, your policies have to be shaped differently than if you were ruling a company or just a household. I guess we all agree on this point. Apart from many other differences, one important difference is the timespan. For any effective strategic decisions, you would have to consider a much longer timespan than otherwise. For e.g. if a country wants to become energy-independent, i.e. to be able to produce captive energy to satisfy all its demands, it would typically be looking at a plan that will take 25-30 years to be complete, while its benefits can last for another 30-50 years. Similarly for drinking water or any other needs.

While drawing up such a plan, the country would invariably have to depend on external agencies: foreign governments or firms, import of technology and equipment and so on. While doing so, it may have to make some short term sacrifices, as long as they help the country achieve the ultimate objective.

Who can decide if the plan drawn up by the government is good enough? Is it we, the common people who are too busy living our daily lives? Is it the opposition parties who are too busy planning for the next election? Let's say the plan includes some deal with a foreign government that the opposition parties decide they don't like. So they go on a rampage, blocking the deal or otherwise attempting to throw it off the rails. Even though the deal may eventually go through, it will have derailed the plan enough to cause another cost / time overrun. With a country's budget, this overrun could easily be in billions of dollars.

How do we avoid this in a democracy?

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I have to say FD this is one thing on which we disagree, etc

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I don't disagree with most of what you're saying but I think I may not have been particularly clear in my post so I'll try to explain a bit better.

The important thing to remember is that the Tories 'won' the last election in so far as they had the highest vote count. The Lib Dems really didn't some anywhere at all and they actually went backwards on previous results. This was a real shame after the promise they showed in the early debates. I'm a natural Lib Dem so I'd have loved to see them do better but I'm forced to acknowledge that they're only really in government at all because they happened to still have enough of a vote to push the tories over the line.

With that in mind I have to accept that this parliament will be driven primarily by the Tory agenda, that's what the public voted for. What I'm looking for the Lib Dems to do (and I believe they have done, reasonably well) is limit the extent to which that agenda is applied. So, for example, we've got an immigration cap because that's the Tory agenda, but it's been set at the highest level that the independent consultations were recommending. The burden of the debt recovery is being shouldered primarily by service cuts rather than tax rises because, again, that's the Tories agenda. But the balance swung back toward tax by 2 or 3 percent* as a result of the Lib Dems pulling in the other direction.

The tuition fees issue is an interesting one. The Libs really did set their stall up on that and do appear to have U-Turned. I'm not sure that U-Turn is really real though. I'm willing to bet none of the Libs wanted the rise and were arguing against it behind closed doors. The trouble is there are so many pundits and political opponents just gagging for the coallition to fail that public criticism of the increase would be taken as 'cracks in the coallition'. I think that's one of the biggest weaknesses of a coallition system (not just this one), because both parties ARE the government, they cannot publicly dissent from the government line, even if the privately do so. That sucks, frankly, but it is the reality of democratic politics. I think proportional representation would be much better in that regard because a certain amount of dissent would be expected.

BTW one thing that seems to have got lost in the furore about the rise in tuition fees is the cynicism in the rules on repaying the student loan. There are two changes I find really objectionable: 1. The interest rate charged is now higher than inflation (it used to be tagged to inflation, making it a zero interest loan in real terms) and 2: You will now have to pay a charge if you want to pay your loan off early. Those two changes shift the student loan from being a way of recovering the cost of your education to a way of actively making money out you as a student.

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How do we avoid this in a democracy?

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You can't. Seeing a pet project through to completion is actually something a dictatorship is much better at than a democracy. Just look at Stalins 5 Year Plans. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be a price worth paying though.


*Just to clarify that figure because it might be missleading otherwise: I'm refering to the balance of where the savings and gains came from in the budget. The Tories wanted it to be almost exclusively from service cuts. As it's turned out the bulk is still coming from Service cuts but there has been an incrase in tas as well. That doesn't equate to a tax increas of 2 to 3 % or a service budget cut of 2 to 3 %, it's a swing from one source to another of 2 to 3 %.

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The important thing to remember is that the Tories 'won' the last election in so far as they had the highest vote count. The Lib Dems really didn't some anywhere at all and they actually went backwards on previous results

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Well some people would dispute the idea that they won, and say really they were just first amongst losers, but yes they did have the most votes out of the 3 main parties.

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With that in mind I have to accept that this parliament will be driven primarily by the Tory agenda, that's what the public voted for

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Did they ? the majority of people actually did not vote conservative so to say there agenda was what people voted for is not quite true. Of course they are the larger party in the coalition but you would have thought that when they couldn't win outright against a virtually unelectable Gordon Brown, they may have a little more humility and compromise maybe a little more.

It seems to me that the Tories are getting rather the better end of the deal in this coalition, and it is the Lib Dem's that are having to break rather more of there principles then the other way round.

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What I'm looking for the Lib Dems to do (and I believe they have done, reasonably well) is limit the extent to which that agenda is applied. So, for example, we've got an immigration cap because that's the Tory agenda, but it's been set at the highest level that the independent consultations were recommending. The burden of the debt recovery is being shouldered primarily by service cuts rather than tax rises because, again, that's the Tories agenda. But the balance swung back toward tax by 2 or 3 percent* as a result of the Lib Dems pulling in the other direction.

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The immigration cap is a bit of a red herring for me, and a load of nonsense policy, everyone with any sense knows that the vast majority of immigration comes through the EU about which we have no control, and the only reason the Tories are pursuing it is after there talk of being tough on immigration in the election they need to be seen to be doing something however ineffective and counter-productive.

As for the burden of the debt recovery, to me it seems that the less well off are going to be paying quite a bit more proportionally, and most of that is through service cuts.

I have to say the one policy that the Libs Dem's have got through that is a really big one of their's is the raising of the Income Tax limit, which i think is a really good policy (even though it has very little effect on me personally).

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The tuition fees issue is an interesting one. The Libs really did set their stall up on that and do appear to have U-Turned. I'm not sure that U-Turn is really real though. I'm willing to bet none of the Libs wanted the rise and were arguing against it behind closed doors.

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There is lot of the anger here is due to there being a large number of Lib Dems who campaigned in university towns & campuses and won partly on the basis of signing pledges to abolish tuition fees never mind freeze them.

Yes i know that there is a lot of opposition to it in the Lib Dems ranks, but Clegg has been positively creaming himself over the Tory policy.

Although not really a Lib Dem, i have always liked a lot of there politicians (edit - as much as you can like any Politician) and i have to say most of them have acted in a reasonable way since coming in to office, but to me Nick Clegg has been acting like he is a member of the conservative party since he has come to power rather then the leader of the Lib Dems.

Do you not feel slightly embarrassed about him ?

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Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers

Did they ? the majority of people actually did not vote conservative so to say there agenda was what people voted for is not quite true. Of course they are the larger party in the coalition but you would have thought that when they couldn't win outright against a virtually unelectable Gordon Brown, they may have a little more humility and compromise maybe a little more.

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It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that the Tories got a higher proportion of the vote than Labour did in the last election. Because of the way parliamentary boundaries are set up, Labour don't need as much of the vote to gain a majority as the Tories do.

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Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers

There is lot of the anger here is due to there being a large number of Lib Dems who campaigned in university towns & campuses and won partly on the basis of signing pledges to abolish tuition fees never mind freeze them.

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I wonder whether the problem with the Lib Dems is that they never genuinely expected to get into power - and therefore set their policies up to be different rather than practical.

NSA, I agree with just about everything you're saying. I think the only point on which we really differ is on whether the election results give the tories the right to push their own agenda harder than their coallition partners. Actually, scratch that - it's not about the right, it's about the ability. The Lib Dems, whether I like it or not, would not be pushing any part of their agenda at all if they hadn't joined the coallition. The reverse is not true of the Tories - they'd have simply formed a minority governement. They'd have been weak, but they'd still be calling the shots. I think that outcome would be farther to the right if the coallition hadn't been formed. I really wish the Lib Dems could put their agenda front and central... but that's just not the reality.

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Do you not feel slightly embarrassed about him ?

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Yes... sadly. Personally I'd like to bring back Kennedy. He may have been drunk but he always felt honest (you can always trust a Scotsman... even if only to get lathered and hang around train stations:p). I haven't felt that way about either Cambel or Clegg.

By the way, what is it about politicians called Kennedy that pre-disposes them to being drunk. Co-incidence? I think not. I blame the CIA:afrog:

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I wonder whether the problem with the Lib Dems is that they never genuinely expected to get into power - and therefore set their policies up to be different rather than practical.

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I'd put it slightly differently. They never thought they'd get in so they could afford to be idealistic rather than practical. I think their opposition to increases in tuition fees, replacing trident, caps on immigration etc. was genuine.

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I think the only point on which we really differ is on whether the election results give the tories the right to push their own agenda harder than their coallition partners. Actually, scratch that - it's not about the right, it's about the ability. The Lib Dems, whether I like it or not, would not be pushing any part of their agenda at all if they hadn't joined the coallition. The reverse is not true of the Tories - they'd have simply formed a minority governement.

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Oh they definitely have the ability to push through there agenda and are proving that, i wonder though whether the Lib Dem's haven't just (metaphorically speaking) got in bed with the devil.

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Yes... sadly. Personally I'd like to bring back Kennedy. He may have been drunk but he always felt honest

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Yes bring back Kennedy, actually even a drunk Kennedy was better then many of the other MP's in Westminster.

Maybe that's the answer only MP's that can work while drunk should be allowed to run the country, we get them all stonkingly drunk and kick out any that fall over.

Prime Ministers Questions should start with a couple of pints and sambuca chaser !

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Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers

Yes bring back Kennedy, actually even a drunk Kennedy was better then many of the other MP's in Westminster.

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Charles Kennedy is my local MP - well, local to my family home, anyway. I was gutted when they forced him to quit, as I would agree with you - he always came across as honest. He also wasn't full of his own self-importance - some of his appearances on Have I Got News For You were brilliant: witty and self-depracating, and never smarmy or smug.

I don't see the problem with having a leader who drinks as long as it doesn't influence their work. Churchill is regarded by many as our greatest PM, but I bet he could drink Charlie under the table.