VOTING WITH YOUR BOOT

VOTING WITH YOUR BOOT http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/20/the-end-of-republicans-and-democrats-and-your-libertarian-future.html “Is it going to take $100 million? I have no idea,” he said, before suggesting that might be a lowball number. Convincing people that something is happening that isn't really happening is expensive. Why not take the $50 million he plans to waste on politics and invest in new energy tech companies? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/21/bob-mcdonnell-corruption_n_4639480.html "Because if it were applied as the law of the land, then nearly every elected official, from President Obama on down, would have to be charged for providing tangible benefits to donors." Every elected official should be charged with a crime. They're all guilty of something. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAuxXvNVhgA What Sheldrake says about scientific dogma absolutely applies to political thought. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/15/george-takei-sets-phasers-to-reform.html “The core of what our democracy is about ‘We the people,’ ‘All men are created equal.’ When we have a situation like the Koch brothers, [who] can donate multimillions of dollars to a campaign…you’ve got to fight fire with fire,” Takei told The Daily Beast. “‘We the people’ can fight that challenge with fire. We can’t each afford a million-dollar contribution, but we can afford $3. And there are a lot more of us, those who can afford $3.” More of the same. Takei is no visionary like his old boss Roddenberry. Einstein said you can't fix problems with the same thinking that created them. Takei obviously thinks otherwise . . . . and he's wrong. Being concerned about campaign finance reform is a foolish waste of time. All the campaign contributions in the world aren't going to turn New York City Council Republican or the Texas legislature Democrat. The whole political feeder system has been corrupted. Campaign dollars flow to the obvious winners before the fact. They are bribes. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/10/hey-boomers-millennials-hate-your-partisan-crap.html "Conducted this past spring among a representative sample of nearly 2,400 18-to-29-year-olds, the Reason-Rupe Poll finds that younger voters aren’t just less beholden to two parties dreamed up before the Civil War, they speak a radically different political language too. " http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/28/dawn-of-the-age-of-oligarchy-the-alliance-between-government-and-the-1.html For the most part, the oligarchs have lined up with Obama from the start. Indeed, at his first inaugural, notes one sympathetic chronicler, the biggest problem for donors was to find sufficient parking space for their private jets. As an observer at the left-leaning Huffington Post put it, “the rising tide has lifted fewer boats during the Obama years -and the ones it's lifted have been mostly yachts.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2014/05/05/how-election-lab-works/ Models are, by their nature, data driven. (That's why models tend to get better the closer the election gets. There's just more raw material -- poll numbers, fundraising numbers etc. -- to mine.) Because of that reality, models tend to favor elements of races that can be easily quantified (presidential approval, GDP growth, fundraising) and diminish less easily quantifiable factors like candidate quality and the sort of campaigns being run on the ground.