Maybe this bi-partisan system is fucked....

(whispering - Ron Paul anyone?)

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Hey what does that (R) they always put after his name mean?

Ahem greenparty ahem

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Proud LGBTQQ Individual

Responsible? I think he is the only one that is a responsible and sensible human being. I have a feeling he has not been bought by Walmart or EXXON

Oh hell no.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Yep. Totally sensible. He wants to eliminate the departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Interior. Makes perfect sense.

We don't need anyone to handle nuclear safety, we can close all the national parks, and promoting economic growth? Who needs that!

Who said green party??

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just call me Brad

Twitter @BUrbanowicz13

I'd like to eliminate the Department of Education too.
It's pointless. Public education is the most local of governmental services and even people on the left and teachers unions rail against standardized tests.
Everyone hates no child left behind.

One of the other dozens of Federal bureaucracies can handle dishing out the cash to school districts.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

I don't disagree with the DoE for the most part.

Advocating that the rest of those departments be completely removed is just crazy.

It means: Ron Paul (If I don't have a fucking letter here the American sheep people are too stupid to vote for me).

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Why not push that responsibility to the states? Preservation can be done by committee - if a national park spans multiple states, then they come together to work on it.

Also, it seems that for each of those departments (nationally), every state has their own version of it anyways.

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States rights only goes so far.

We tried the super powerful states / minimalistic central government thing once before. The Articles of Confederation. It failed because states couldn't agree on shit. Does anyone really thing with 50 states and our toxic political environment that it would work again?

The answer is no.

I like to think we've matured as a Republic since then and we also have many more shared beliefs and a strong interdependence, which did not exist then.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Maybe so, but the current political discourse in this country doesn't allow us to agree on anything. If you don't demonize and belittle everything your opponent says, your party establishment will replace you with someone who will.

Duh...bipartisanship is for pussies

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Well first of all, the Green Party is more than one individual. I'm sure there are plenty of conservatives you don't like.

But on that note, yeah, I thought it was a huge mistake to nominate someone who has been a member of the green party for about half (4 yrs) the amount of time I have (7 years).

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Proud LGBTQQ Individual

Oh I agree, but she was nominated to be President.
I would say at the very least that should draw some skepticism about the Green party nomination process...but I bet Ralph Nader would think so too.

While both major parties have their share of whack-jobs, they just usually don't rise to that level.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

At a Republican candidate forum outside Fort Worth a conservative radio host moderating the panel commented on the Occupy Wall Street group by saying, “This is the first occupation many of these people have seen in years.”

I support what the Occupy folks are about, but I have to admit, that's pretty quippy.

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th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

Well, after an initial protest or march, and then camping out for several weeks in a park, it might be pretty safe to say the people sticking it out are unemployed. I know what the current occupiers in my town are about, and it includes stink-pot mash and body odor.

Look at the kind of people we send to Washington and to our respective, if not respected, statehouses. Not the political party, but the profession represented.

We elect lawyers.

I've got nothing against lawyers. They are the white corpuscles of our legal system. However, their chief employment skill is winning arguments. In school they were involved in forensics, played on quiz bowl teams, belonged to debating clubs, joined Model United Nations. They are talkers.

Hey, I'm not knocking it. I'm the sponsor of the Model UN club at the high school where I teach and am mostly a gasbag myself.

The point is, they got really good at the art of rhetoric and winning arguments, so now that they are in the legislatures and congress they think they have actually accomplished something by winning a verbal dispute or scoring points on the other party with some clever sound bite or manipulating the system through the use of creative parliamentary procedures.

The problem with a country run by a high school debate team is that, right now, at this point in our history, we need people who can actually do things, not just win arguments. Yes, we have a competitive election system where people focus on and exaggerate the fine distinctions between themselves and their opponents in order to get elected. But once elected the only way to get anything done is through cooperation and compromise.

If the election never ends, then governing will never begin. And if that is the system we want, what is the point of elections at all?

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th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time