96% of Congressmen Agree: Bad Legislation Is Easier To Craft In Secret | Hacker News Reader

96% of Congressmen Agree: Bad Legislation Is Easier To Craft In Secret

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39 pointsllambda12 comments

Nice to see that Ron Paul voted against conducting these proceedings in secret.

You know, I heard somebody on NPR saying about him, essentially, "he may come off as a bit kooky, but he's been very consistent with his principles." I'm starting to think I'm willing to "throw away" a vote in favor of that.

It's nice, because Ron Paul you can legitimately vote for based on whether you agree with his politics or not, and you know he won't change his mind arbitrarily/deceptively. I disagree with his pro-life stance and his isolationist policies. But I appreciate his stance on removing ourselves from the wars on (Drugs|Afghanistan|Christmas). Thus I can weigh the pros and cons.

So many other political campaigns, I can only judge on apparent moral character and personality, since it simply doesn't seem like a priority for anyone to base their campaign on a rigid, consistent political ideology.

His foreign policy is non-interventionist, not isolationist.

There is a big difference and this is a common misunderstanding.

You're not throwing away your vote if you refuse to vote either an "evil" or a "lesser evil". If your only choices are those, then voting for either one won't make much of a difference anyway, would it? Just vote for who you truly believe in.

This is how this type of politicians get in office with the help of media. The media shows them as "front-runners" and then most people will think "well, I guess I can only vote for them so I don't throw away my vote". It's a feedback loop that feeds on itself. They show who they want you to think are the winners, prop them out in their TV debates, ignore the others, and then you will think those are the winners, too.

But the truth is nobody has the kind of ground support Ron Paul has, just like nobody had the kind of ground support Obama had in 2008. 95% of the people who support Ron Paul will go to vote for him, while maybe 50-70% of those that say now they support Gingrich or Romney, will actually go to vote, and vote for either one, unless they changed their minds by then (it seems to have happened every month since the campaigns started).

So this is why it's important to vote for who you truly believe in, and if you actually believe he will improve things for everyone, then you can take it upon yourself to spread the word about him. Don't fall in the false choice of "evil" vs "lesser evil", at least not until the final election. The game hasn't even started yet.

Kooky is the wrong word to describe Ron Paul. Lets be clear about what Ron Paul's principles are. Ron Paul wants to eliminate the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.

Many of those departments are completely unnecessary. Was the US really at risk before the Department of Homeland Security came around after 9/11? Did we learn nothing in school before the Department of Education came around in 1980?

The Department of Education first started 100 years previous, but then was demoted to part of the Department of the Interior, then Federal Security Agency, and then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. FEMA used to be part of Housing and Urban Development, and before then there were many different federal organizations involved in disaster management, with no clear leadership. DHS of course is made of a number of separate groups, including the Coast Guard.

In other words, it wasn't that there was nothing, but rather it was a reshuffling and reprioritizing of what was already there.

WTF? -2 karma for pointing out that we had federal-level organizations involved with education even before we had a DoED? And similar for the other departments mentioned?

Do you also think that before the DoD was created in 1949 that there was no federal response to defense?

Or do you justify even bad logic in support of your view of how the government should work?

"Kooky" is in the eye of the beholder.

And once again, the "conservative" representatives in my state, Michelle Bachmann, John Klein, Erik Paulsen, and Chip Cravaak, vote against transparency and freedom, and the one "liberal" representative that everyone in my party was the most deathly afraid of, Keith Ellison (because he is a Muslim), votes on the side of liberty. More and more I just want to skip the Republican caucuses next year.

Let's face it, 96% of Congressmen probably agree it would be better to make all terms including those of current members 12 years.

Look at the Bay Area concentration among those 17...

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