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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:07PM
from the interesting-but-not-surprising dept.
from the interesting-but-not-surprising dept.
Three of the four major candidates for United States president have responded to America's Top 20 Presidential Science, Engineering, Technology, Health and Environmental Questions. The nonprofit advocacy group ScienceDebate.org has posted their responses online. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jill Stein had all responded as of press time, and the group was awaiting responses from Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.
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U.S. Presidential Candidates Answer ScienceDebate 2016 Questions
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The Official Colorado State Vegetable is now the "state legislator".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dogeball on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:15PM
Regarding point 1, USA needs to break out of its two-party duopoly, which permits the Republicans and Democrats to collude on a wide range of issues while offering only an illusion of choice; "what flavour would you like your military-industrial complex? Religious or Corporate?".
So even though it is true that Stein is polling at 3%, dismissing her isn't warranted for two reasons:
1) Having stable 3rd party candidates is healthy and should be encouraged, and it is only through media exposure that their support can grow
2) The green party are considered by many to have cost Al Gore the presidency. A minor party needs to be taken seriously when they have enough support to swing elections.
I consider it unfortunate that many American's response to 2000 was to shy away from voting 3rd party, rather than recognise that they had seized a portion of power away from the main parties by letting it be known that their votes could not be taken for granted. It is vital to democracy that minority views are heard and acted upon by government, else you end up with a cycle of increasing tyranny and lawlessness.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:23PM
Allow a very different [wikipedia.org] third party to demonstrate how to replace an establishment party:
Founded in the Northern states in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, modernizers, ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers, the Republican Party quickly became the principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party and the briefly popular Know Nothing Party. The main cause was opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise by which slavery was kept out of Kansas. The Northern Republicans saw the expansion of slavery as a great evil. The first public meeting of the general "anti-Nebraska" movement where the name "Republican" was suggested for a new anti-slavery party was held on March 20, 1854 in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. The name was partly chosen to pay homage to Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party.
The first official party convention was held on July 6, 1854, in Jackson, Michigan. By 1858, the Republicans dominated nearly all Northern states.The Republican Party first came to power in the elections of 1860 when it won control of both houses of Congress and its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president.
Of course, that's only half the story. One of the establishment parties [wikipedia.org] was crumbling.
After 1850, the Whigs were unable to deal with the slavery issue. Their southern leaders nearly all owned slaves. The northeastern Whigs, led by Daniel Webster, represented businessmen who loved national unity and a national market but cared little about slavery one way or another....
The election of 1852 marked the beginning of the end for the Whigs.... The Whig Party's 1852 convention in New York City saw the historic meeting between Alvan E. Bovay and The New York Tribune's Horace Greeley, a meeting that led to correspondence between the men as the early Republican Party meetings in 1854 began to take place.
Attempting to repeat their earlier successes, the Whigs nominated popular General Winfield Scott, who lost decisively to the Democrats' Franklin Pierce. The Democrats won the election by a large margin: Pierce won 27 of the 31 states, including Scott's home state of New Jersey. Whig Representative Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slain. The party is dead—dead—dead!" Increasingly, politicians realized that the party was a loser.
In 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which opened the new territories to slavery, was passed. Southern Whigs generally supported the Act while Northern Whigs remained strongly opposed. Most remaining Northern Whigs, like Lincoln, joined the new Republican Party and strongly attacked the Act, appealing to widespread northern outrage over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Other Whigs joined the Know-Nothing Party, attracted by its nativist crusades against so-called "corrupt" Irish and German immigrants.... [Breaking up long paragraph.]
Historians estimate that, in the South in 1856, former Whig Fillmore retained 86 percent of the 1852 Whig voters when he ran as the American Party candidate. He won only 13% of the northern vote, though that was just enough to tip Pennsylvania out of the Republican column.... After 1856 virtually no Whig organization remained at the regional level. Twenty-six states sent 150 delegates to the last national convention in September 1856. The convention met for only two days and on the second day (and only ballot) quickly nominated Fillmore for president, who had already been nominated for president by the Know Nothing party.... Some Whigs and others adopted the mantle of the Opposition Party for several years and enjoyed some individual electoral successes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LaminatorX on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:46PM
The rise of the original Republicans isn't really comparable to what we have today though. The key thing that allowed Lincoln to triumph in 1860 was that not only had the Whigs ceased to exist and been replaced by the Republicans and the Constitutional Unionists, but the Democratic Party was also fractured, held two conventions, and fielded two rival claimants as the Democratic Party nominee. It was a four-way race with no unified establishment party on the field.
No current political movement or issue is capable of fracturing one of the current parties to that extreme extent, let alone both of them at once. A split in the Republican party between the Trump-ists & the Koch-Brothers-and-Bible-Thumpers coalition might happen, you can see that in the in-fighting between the House Freedom Caucus and Speaker Ryan.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @09:03PM
No current political movement or issue is capable of fracturing one of the current parties
Let me start by reminding everyone that, this election cycle, The Big 2 have offered us the most-disliked candidates in USA history.
...and some good news: The Green Party has qualified for the ballot in 44 states (plus DC) and there are 3 more states that will count your write-in vote for Dr. Stein.
Graphic here [jill2016.com]
I recommend View + No Style (Blinking text)
If you want to hear Jill speaking, Eric Mann interviewed her this month.
The interview is from 3:30 - 38:00 (64 percent of the download) [kpfk.org]
From 38:00 - 46:30 is Eric commenting (80 percent)
46:30 - 50:00 KPFK stuff & L.A. Stuff
50:00 - 54:00 is about NYPD & NYC's pseudo-Progressive mayor
54:00 - 55:00 Nina Simone sings
.
For many decades, most USAians have gotten their "information" via TeeVee.
As long as access to privately-owned media remains expensive, there is minimal chance for a non-Red and non-Blue candidate to get his message out that way.
We should mention that, before Reagan, TV and radio stations were considered to be held by private parties "in the public interest" and they were required to present programming which was balanced and served to inform The People by airing differing views.
You won't hear that on Lamestream Media these days.
Amusingly, there's a "public" radio station in SoCal that has a program they call Left, Right, & Center. [archive.li][1]
I tried to listen to it and what I heard was Clearly-Right, Very-Right, and Extremely-Right.
Ralph Nader notes that 2 Reactionaries have gotten more air time than a whole slew of thinkers whose ideas you *should* be hearing. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
[1] The S/N comments engine still NEEDLESSLY fucks with punctuation in URLs.
.
What is needed to straighten out the USA is a constitutional amendment.
Some folks advocate for one that says "Money is not speech and corporations are not people".
I recently heard Ralph Nader (who has run numerous times as a 3rd-party candidate) specify a better amendment:
All public elections will be publicly financed.
Playing field leveled.
.
Additionally, Thomas Jefferson advocated a constitutional convention once a generation to review|upgrade|replace that document.
Getting rid of vestiges of 18th Century Plutocracy such as the Electoral College seems apt.
A ranked voting ballot and uniform voting|registration[2] laws across all the states also seem like great ideas.
Making Election Day a national holiday seems intelligent.
A bunch of other countries have a bunch of great ideas.
USA needs to pay attention.
[2] Even better: No registration at all; you're automatically registered on your 18th birthday.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:01AM
No current political movement or issue is capable of fracturing one of the current parties to that extreme extent, let alone both of them at once.
Right now maybe. But both parties are fracturing.
A split in the Republican party between the Trump-ists & the Koch-Brothers-and-Bible-Thumpers coalition might happen
I'd say the most significant split is between those members with political or economic power ("establishment") and their marginalized followers. Same goes for the Democrat party side.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:40PM
Most voters can only think in the short-term, so all they seem to be willing to do is vote for 'the lesser of two evils'. But decades and centuries of a corrupt duopoly will do far more harm than several 'greater evils' getting into power, and that is why most of our effort must be focused on changing our voting system, and the best way to do this appears to be to terrify the two parties by using the perception of the spoiler effect as a weapon. Unless someone thinks that mindlessly voting for the 'lesser evil' in every election will somehow be more likely to motivate The One Party into giving up its monopoly on power, but I would be very interested in how that would happen.
But terrified and irrational people (most voters) will probably not do this in the foreseeable future, as they are too focused on what is happening directly in front of them.