Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

I got an sms message from her campaign asking if they could count on my vote.

I replied “stop” to all political SMS except this one.

The worker and I shared a few exchanges about specific rhetoric their candidate had used. I let them know I had voted for the candidate during the primary but would not in the general.

The person offered me a 10 minute call with the candidate, and I took it.

I do not know why the candidate would say this.

Possibly they calculated I was unlikely to repeat this, or if I did it would not break through to affect votes (it was very late in the game).

Oregon is a two party consent call recording state, perhaps they calculated I was not recording or would not share it if I was.

My conclusion is that like Donald Trump, this person is a narcissist. It goes with the rhetoric and even double speak.

But I am very curious about their campaign manager. I have considered asking them for a phone call to discuss the candidates campaign, and to try and sort out what the manager had done versus what came from the candidate.

The two-party system problem seems to be a consequence of "first-past-the-post" voting.

For example, some posters in reddit's /r/conservative were very insistent in attacking libertarian voters, pinning on them the responsibility of Trump's election loss. Their rationale was that they felt libertarian voters threw their vote away by voting on a candidate who had no chances of winning, thus robbing their candidate of support that they felt he would otherwise have if no libertarian candidate ran for president.

Consequently, they argued that the only rational approach to the elections would be if all like-minded voters concentrated their vote on not-so-good-but-popular somewhat like-minded candidate so that they could have at least a chance of electing someone who, even though might not be the best candidate in the voter's opinion, was closer to support some of their views.

Without primaries, Barack Obama would have never been President but Donald Trump wouldn't have been either.

Curtailing domestic warrantless surveillance is another issue that many liberal candidates support.

Libertarians generally dislike military spending as much as they dislike social security, so progressive candidates that would shrink the DOD ought to be a good fit.

Any particular D candidate that I could suggest will also have positions that Libertarians don't agree with, which is part of my point. Disagreeing with conservative stances on non-fiscal/regulatory issues doesn't stop them from supporting those candidates, but the converse practically always stops them from supporting Ds.

It's almost as if they don't actually care about individual freedom and liberty at all, but just about their freedom to make a buck without anyone getting in the way of them exploiting workers, polluting the environment, etc.

Huh. Imagine that.

I get that you want to come off as an enlightened centrist here but you’re gonna have to be specific. What’s the liberal Koch brothers and what’s the liberal Tea Party?

New rule: if you don't condemn child rape every Monday morning then until you do it is assumed that you are in favour.

Tiny furors like the "who's wearing an American flag lapel pin" are is too often motivated by political opportunity rather than any real question of where the parties stand on topics. And yes, Democrats do it to Republicans as well, just generally not as frequently. Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies.

That's why we end up with dead police who walk into ambushes, dead black guys who make the mistake of relaxing in their own apartments when lady cops burst in guns blazing, burned stores, dead little old ladies who go to bible studies while black, and dead walmart shoppers who made the mistake of being minority while looking for a San Antonio Spurs dart board at the wrong time.

Extremists are just dangerous people. We should really be bringing the hammer against all these groups wherever we find them, but again, they are protected by their patrons. So they walk the streets tatted and masked up waving around AR's because they know their benefactors will not allow our counter-terrorism units to do what military sense would demand in a sensible world.

There's a valid discussion to be had about whether Charles Koch is full of crap, but I don't think it's wrong for newspapers to report on what people with power say.

Thus it brings into question anything they claim and all claims should be treated with skepticism.

In the long run I have no doubt that Greenpeace will have caused more damage than the Koch family. We could have clean energy right now if it weren’t for the decades of nuclear fear mongering, and the Koch family isn’t even opposed to nuclear.

I mean, if we are going to be bringing up a single datapoint then allow me to raise a counterpoint.

Nuclear energy is still safe. For example, it is still safe against possible natural disasters (Onagawa) [1]

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...

If you want not to have Trumps anymore, you need to get rid of the factors that lead to Trump happening, and that's not going to be done calmly given the opposition of the DNC and other established interests.

As a non-american, the best shot you had of establishing long-term stability was Bernie Sanders. The way things are going, the Democrats will continue alienating themselves from more and more of their base and the Republicans will continue ramping up fear and instability.

I'm worried that insurgent candidate like those in 'the squad' were only allowed to succeed as an olive branch to the left-populists for the purposes of maintaining a coherent anti-trump coalition.

The Republicans ran a reasonably clean primary in 2016, and got Trump, a demagogue completely dismissive of the party's interests, who catered to his base, and only helped the Republicans in circumstances of mutual interests. I don't think the party's leadership will be willing to risk something like that again, if the behavior of the Bush-era cabinet appointees he had is any indicator.

....

So why is it that Buffett himself doesn't pay more tax? It's because the bulk of his income comes from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income.

https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w...

I think a flat 20% above a certain rate is probably the most 'fair', but what needs to change is remove most loopholes that exist now. So everyone above a certain income level pays the same proportion of their income.

Of course the tax base ends up really top heavy, if you earn most of the income, you pay most of the tax. That seems fair to me.

No, "flat tax" is not what I'm describing or advocating.

Did you know that Warren Buffet paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, whilst the average tax rate for ordinary American office workers in his office was 32.9%?

For a just society we should tax working far less than taxing capital and dividend gains, not the opposite.

Another angle is that Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, has $184B. That's $550 per American, or $24 per human.

Undeniably a lot of money, but also far from a sum that would change the world if it got redistributed.

There are 19 million millionaires in the US, or 5-6% of the population.

Hhttps://spendmenot.com/blog/what-percentage-of-americans-are...

As the article notes, Trump (who was not Koch-backed) won with very little spending compared to his big-money backed conventional GOP opponents. They decided to step back and spend less in 2016 as a result, since they didn’t support either Trump or Hillary.

For people like me, I don't care what "side" a justice is on. The justices literally choose which cases they accept... Of course there will be some debate on them.

What I find absolutely horrid is that the courts are packed with nominees hand selected by a group of US senators who not only cannot represent the majority of the US population/citizenry, but are also actively antagonistic toward people's will to determine their own future (see obstructionism by McConnell during the Obama years).

Two sides of a conservative position.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/how-the-federali...

From the Federalist Society website:

" Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.

    The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order.  It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.  The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.

    This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law.  It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors.  In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community."

This text at least implies that such lists produced will be candidates favorable to libertarian or conservative ideologists.

https://reason.com/volokh/2020/11/12/video-and-transcript-of...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tYLZL4GZVbA

There should be a term limit for everyone in government like presidents do - mayors, congressmen, senators, judges...

So like a MAGA fedora?

To quote NYT: "Casinos were limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship were subject to a flat 50-person limit."

It seems reasonable to me that both should be limited to a 50-person limit, or perhaps a people-per-area limit (although I do understand that Churches are higher risk because singing spreads the virus much more than silently sitting at a slot machine).

http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2017/08/how-determinate-is-original...

We're not going to settle this in the comment section of HN, but I happen to agree with this opinion:

As the Warren and early Burger Courts faded into history, originalism drifted away from its critique of judicial activism. The political conservatives who had disliked the countermajoritarian output of the Warren and early Burger Courts developed a fondness for judicial activism once there was a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Originalism was thus transformed from a shield against what its proponents saw as illegitimate liberal decisions striking down laws adopted by conservative lawmakers into a sword that could be wielded by conservatives to strike down laws adopted by liberal lawmakers.

Originalism coupled with judicial restraint could not invalidate affirmative action, campaign finance regulations, or gun control. Abandoning judicial restraint led to an "unbound" form of originalism that licensed conservative judicial activism, even as judicial conservatives continued to complain about liberal judicial activism in cases involving such matters as abortion, the death penalty, and gay rights.

http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2019/11/why-not-to-be-originalist.h...

Do you have a non-activist originalist argument for Alito's on-going stance against legal protection of gay marriage? In Obergefell v. Hodges he stated that the Due Process clause protects only rights "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition". He's making up a justification to allow a minority of conservative opinion to prevent gay people from getting married. How isn't that activism?

The role of a judge is to sort through these contradictions to decide which principles are more important than others, even though they are all mentioned in the constitution.

So I don't see how there is an objective concept of "originalist": you have to pick some principles over others. Which ones you pick are a lot more guided by your own ideology than by the words on paper.

How is it "originalist" to take the 2nd Amendment, which refers to "well regulated Militia," and using it to say there's a Constitutional right to owning a handgun for personal protection (without safety requirements like a trigger lock or safe)? It's not, yet that's what conservatives decided, specifically Scalia in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Edit: for the downvoters, please let me know how Scalia's religious beliefs were completely compartmentalized and had no influence on him outside of a church: https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/justice-antonin-sc...