I hope libertarians don't take this the wrong way, because I think there are lots of libertarian types on this board with compelling, thoughtful and rational criticisms of the American government, but I think one thing that brews nascent libertarian feelings among many is they're basically gamed and duped by the kind of propaganda you've referenced above, just in a different way: that is, both parties engage in this kind of insane and hysterical demagoguery to fire up the base (Barack Obama is raising the deficit so high that the Chinese are going to come and murder us all then steal our lawn furniture to collect on their IOUs, or conversely, Sarah Palin will nuke your town if you let her become President and she catches wind of your neighbor making fun of Trig).

Some people hear the messages coming from all sides that government is this terrible force of dastardly evil ("...when it's in the wrong hands, so vote for us!"). For whatever reason, it doesn't compel them to join one of the partisan camps, but they internalize the meta message as sincere and a genuine threat ("holy **** these politicians are all terrible and are awful people with crazy, insane, awful motives, hell-bent on destroying us!") and boom, you've got yourself a libertarian.

I mean I follow the news, and studied this stuff in college, and even tried to work professionally as one of the people who's job it is to frighten people into voting. And I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about this very thing (how elites use gamesmanship to frighten the **** of people into voting for them). So I mean you'd think I'd pretty immune to it, because I get how much of it is insincere and stuff. But even I turn on the TV during election season, and after half a dozen or so political ads ("John Dingell loves illegal immigrants and giving all of your jobs to them, because he hates America" etc. etc.), I basically hate and am frightened by pretty much everyone in government.

I'm not an expert on WWI or the Treaty of Versailles, but, iirc, their entire military was basically disbanded by foreign powers. They were forbidden from having armaments and fortresses and an army and the like. I think there was a clause that said "Ye forces shall only equip super soakers and nerf guns." IDK what kind of humiliation you want.

Vinnie Chase turned environmentalist

quick question: Is a violation dismissable if the date of the violation written on the promise to appear slip is wrong?

the violation was paid for with my bail so afaik i dont owe any more money. I just have to go to court to see the judge.

cliffs:

signed an agreement to appear

date of the violation is wrong on it

??

I'll vote this guy for President.

no. What matters is on the actual ticket/violation/complaint/whatever, not some ancillary paper

Also, DVaut - your post makes a lot of sense but I'm curious what you think of someone like Gavin Newsom (mayor of SF, champion of gay rights, currently running for the mostly-meaningless position of Lt. Governor in CA). He seems like the type of guy who would be easy for voters on the left to get behind, but I feel like he's too liberal to win a state or national election for governor/senator. Is it because someone like him that wants to OMG FREE TEH GAYS AND PROBABLY BLOW UP OUR COUNTRY fires up the right to insane levels that completely overcome whatever the left can muster up?

of the three papers i was sent home with. this one looks like it is the actual ticket. The other two papers mainly deal with the cash bond.

You're basically right.

Montius seems to be confused about the Dolchstoßlegende, which the German military promoted to give the impression that they were never defeated on the field, but by non-patriotic forces at home. Therefore stab-in-the-back legend. At the end of WWI Germany was unable to continue to fight..

Contrary to Montius claims it was exactly the fact that German troops were allowed to surrender on foreign territory without driving them back to Germany and occupying it that led, among a lot of other factors, to WWII.

Well, I think that's part of it for sure. There's no question that while some partisan political figures are very good at whipping up their own base into a frenzy, those same people are often very good at frightening the other side into action. See Sarah Palin. I'm not advocating that strident partisans will win in any district if they just ratchet up their partisanship -- what I am trying to argue is that's the interplay that's at work here: which side's sympathetic voters are being compelled to action (namely voting), and which aren't.

That doesn't always mean rabid partisan = success, just that "the game" is basically casting yourself as stridently partisan to voter sympathetic your side without setting off alarm bells to voters who are sympathetic to opposing interests, and conversely, setting off alarm bells that your opponent is a rabid partisan to voters inherently sympathetic to you. What's not happening is a grand Changing of Minds every 2 years, where masses of voters are changing their partisan allegiances because the UE rate is up 1% this year.

In Newsom's specific case, I think he's got a very bright future and I suspect he's basically what much the next generation of liberal politicians will look like: entrepreneurial background, basically supportive of private/public partnerships, not wedded to organized labor, friendly to business interests, but stridently progressive on social issues.

But I think some of Newsom's political profile doesn't fire up a bunch of the Democratic base, particularly organized labor, who see him as too business friendly or whatever.

I don't think most of the country has caught up to Newsom's social progressivism and I do think much of the Democratic base is still tied to organized labor, so I'm not convinced he's "too liberal", just too unorthodox/heterodox to really energize all of the Democratic leaning cohorts the way say Obama or Clinton did, both of whom maintained enough economic populist bonafides to not alienate organized labor.

In another twenty years or so, as the last generations of Democrats who identify themselves with the party due to the perception that it serves organized labor interests and protectionism dies off, my guess would be that Newsom type would prevail over a Jerry Brown type in a statewide Democratic primary in California. But not yet.

Not that I think this board is a wonderful barometer or anything, but it's probably a not terrible one at forecasting the political allegiances of educated white twenty-somethings in the US in the distant future. You see the right leaning types attracted to Rand Paul esque characters, ie, basically completely unmotivated if not turned off by the social conservatism, and motivated by economic libertarianism and laissez faire capitalism. That's what's animating the youngins with right leaning tendencies. If I had to guess what the GOP and its politicians are going to look like in 30 years, I'd say something like that. And I think the Democrats are going to look something like Newsom: unmotivated by pandering to organized labor, which is has been dying a slow death. Not especially interested economic populism like high tariffs and a dismantling of unfettered global trade, but still highly interested in private/public partnerships and economic Third Way schemes to provide for robust welfare programs. I'd expect continued calls for a more progressive income tax, and probably support for robust regulatory schemes to enforce green laws and stuff.

I just don't think we're there for a while. Another generation or two.

What do you think you would have said 20 years ago about the future influence on Dem/Repub ideology that the same population segment (young educated people) would wind up having on their parties? Is the social conservatism of today's right, for example, really a product of the educated youngsters of 20 years ago? I feel like it's the uneducated portion of the Republican base that pushes that kind of narrative and I don't know if that's ever going to go away, which seems necessary before libertarian types like Ron Paul can ever succeed in winning primaries across the whole party.

(thanks for posting all this btw, it's very interesting to read)

Wow you mean Republicans actually had control of Senate and House during times of a budget surplus. Who woulda thought it. Oh wait POTUS rules by fiat so never mind.

I am not a reg around these parts and in no way an expert in politics. I would not consider myself to abe a Democrat, but am more left leaning on most issues than right.
I just want to fling my 2 bets in to the Nevada senate race and say that I realize that Harry Reid may not be the person you want, but don' replace him with an insane person. Please Nevada voters! Research Sharon Angle and how her actions betray her statements. She is not for Democracy. She is a religious zealot right out of Guys & Dolls (The evil version).
Please Nevada, don't vote for Sharon Angle because you want to vote out Harry Reid. Here's a list of other Senate candidates (also congressional for Henderson).
Flame away.

Out of curiosity if Angle wins what legislation do you expect her to initiate as a Senator. How will it compare to the legislation that Al Franken has introduced as a freshman Senator? How about someone I know more about, Tom Udall?

That's a great point. I'm not concerned for the legislation she will bring as much as what she represents--The more extreme right-wing moral and religious fringe of the Republican party that has little to do with conservative political value and personal liberties. It has more a stance of tyrannical self-righteousnous and religious elitism (that's code for prejudice).
I am from IL and although I do not plan on voting for Mark Kirk, I would not be totally inhappy with him as one of our Senators based on his voting record (although once you become a Senator the political pressure to vote with your party is ratcheted up quite a bit).

1) You'd have certainly found neo-cons on college campuses 30 years ago, raised under the Cold War mentality that democracies never wage war aggressively and that the US ensured peace with an active military presence overseas, that counterculture and leftist forces had betrayed the US, that the Geat Society had failed. Basically I suspect that 2p2 Politics forum of 1975 would have a lot of Irving Krisolites in the same way we now have the Ron Paul fan club.

2) Decent amounts of contemporary conservative and evangelical Christianity can actually be traced back to college campuses of the 60s and 70s. From

The Encyclopedia of Christianity, Volume 5:



I'm also reminded, just because of my connections to the University and the area, of the Word of God, which was an extraordinarily popular evangelical community made up of students at the University of Michigan and other colleges in southeastern Michigan that reached its zenith ~30 years ago:

So yeah, it sounds passe and anachronistic now, but there actually was a lot of campus evangelism and alot of conservative Christians were evangelized on college campuses ~30 years ago; turning to Christianity was a popular reaction to counter-culture for a lot of college students at the time. Some of it was explicitly politically conservative at the time, and some only became so over time, but the long and short is that these movements on campuses were popular during the era when many of the current 50-and-60 something GOPers were coming of age.

Chances of her or any freshman Senator introducing "significant" legislation are pretty low in my view, at least in first half of tenure. She'll be a voting machine if she wins and it will be for the Repub agenda mostly. Harry Reid on the other hand ...

Really her religious views don't matter at all as far as how she's likely to vote. But I fully concede that mandating health insurance for every US citizen is an expression of support for personal freedom and liberty.

Yeah, there are no potentially disastrous consequences with packing Congress with nutjobs because incumbents have reelection rates that are merely in the 90s on average. Vote this one in. You'll get a better candidate in there next time.

I've been accused indirectly of voter intimidation by the Democrats (I'm working as an election challenger for the Repubs) in my locality. A brief article appeared in the local paper stating the Repubs were intimidating voters at heavily Democrat early polling sites. I'm assigned to perhaps the most heavily Democrat early voting site in the area. I basically just show up about 15 minutes before site closes to get a tally of the voting machines and the spoiled ballots etc. Talk to the workers there about everything but politics and the election. Turnout is really low at this site compared to other sites in the area. The Dems have had ZERO challengers at this site during the early voting period.

No I disagree. Too many Al Franken's would be dangerous. And we definitely don't want an uber nanny state mandating people buy things that the pols think they should have. Get too many nutjobs in their and their likely to pass laws like that.

Quick question that's going to sound needlessly personal but is basically just trying to demonstrate something from my other posts ITT:

Did you volunteer as an election challenger for the GOP 2006 and 2008? If not, why not? Just didn't feel that compelled to do it?

No nanny states! Ban online poker and gay marriage! Vote GOP!

Freedom now, no more Mosques!

I just wanted to send a plea to Nevada undecided voters and those who may be on the fence. I cannot change or convert any right wingers. I can only pray that the fiscal conservatives will finally break from the religious right and start "The Conservative Party" that separates morals from values and religion from life. Thank god I'm an atheist.