Categories
politics technology

Straight Party Tickets

While thinking about the importance of voting my mind led me back to a personal belief that voting a straight party ticket with one mark is a bad thing for government. I have nothing against someone choosing to cast all their votes for one party, but they should do so for each candidate – parties are not supposed to run the government, elected individuals are.

The only argument that I can imagine in favor of the straight party option on a ballot is that someone might accidentally vote for the wrong candidate when they mean to vote for candidates from a single party. Imagine that they vote D, D, D, D, D, D, R, D where that R was a candidate for the school board that they accidentally mixed up the name since there was less advertising for that race.

This is where technology can help us. Since we have already moved to touch-screen voting machines (here in Utah as well as many other places) we could change the straight party selection so that instead of casting our votes for us that selection would make the candidates from our chosen party stand out (change color, larger font – there are plenty of options) but the voter would still be expected to select the individual candidates for their votes to be cast in each race.

Categories
politics State

Join the Game

When we recognize that most “news” is really entertainment it’s easy to see that politics is really a sport. John Florez is absolutely right in saying It’s time we all join the game and back some rookies. Assuming that more people actually join the game sometime before election day John suggests:

Maybe this time voters will elect those candidates who will work in the public’s interest rather than being influenced by special interest money; and who will concentrate on exercising their “oversight responsibilities” — monitoring and enforcing the laws they pass — that incumbents have ignored. Maybe they can do “take-aways” regarding outdated and cumbersome laws that now fatten government at taxpayers’ expense and bog it down with process and no results.

Until voters stop reading incumbent’s mailings and start rooting for those who really believe government belongs to the people, the lobbyists will continue making their “drops” and make government work for them. Unless voters consider legislative candidates who take their oversight responsibilities seriously, rather than allowing them to write more laws, our government will get fatter. Voters who keep voting for the same team without looking at the player’s performance become part of the problem. Accountability is trash talk unless someone is there to make sure things get done and there are consequences.

Even if many voters take the time to get informed and participate in the process it’s possible that many incumbents would win and return to the seats they already hold. It’s all too easy for each incumbent to blame “the system” or their fellow legislators (especially those in the other party) for any existing problems that the voters see. That is why the invitation to “back some rookies” is important. In Utah that generally means that you should support a democratic party candidate. The only exceptions would be if there is some reason why the democratic candidate is not qualified for the position they are running for, or if there is a rookie on the Republican side of the race. If there are two qualified rookies then any vote you are comfortable with is a good vote, otherwise give preference to any rookie who looks like they are up to the job they are seeking over any incumbent.

We need to establish a pattern of voters kicking out incumbents (it’s not good enough to just have a regular turnover of incumbents retiring) so that candidates who win (thus becoming incumbents) will have a large incentive to be responsive to the voters rather than the party or anyone with deep pockets.

Categories
culture

When Entertainment Rules

Today in church the bishop gave a lesson on how to recognize and avoid the deception of the devil. One of the points that struck home with me (which was limited to that time when I was not chasing my son – I can’t wait for nursery) was how much of that deception comes in the form of apparently benign enticements which distract us from the truth. I made a mental connection with this comment from a liberal blogger:

The mainstream media in this country focused on the Presidential race like it was a football game. Clinton gains a first down but is called for off-sides. Obama gets called for a late hit. Ew, that’ll cost him. Oh no, Hillary fumbles the ball and turns the ball over to Obama.

That kind of thinking and effort seems to be par for the course for our so-called liberal media, which more resemble a propaganda network for the regime in power.

This reminded me of the message of Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book is over 20 years old and it’s still completely accurate. The difference between 1985 and 2008 is that we have more tools available to combat the passive ingestion of entertainment packaged as information. I don’t think that having a press that is nationalistic in its focus is inherently bad, but I fully agree with my blogging colleague that:

We have commercialized the press to the point that their reporting is gauged for viewership rather than accuracy and relevancy. This truly alarms me.

Categories
National politics

Sitting Out the Final Period

Seeing all the recent commentary on the Democratic Primary contest I have seen the pattern of less and less substantive discussion and more and more trash talk (by trash talk I’m not referring to the tone of the “discussion” but rather the way that it looks just like trash talk in sports – it has nothing to do about athletic ability and everything to do with getting in your opponent’s head).

Democrats have been saying for most of the primary season that they were thrilled to have such a large slate of well qualified candidates. Now that their contest has been narrowed to two candidates and no room for substantive discussion I’ve decided to quit paying attention to the primaries. Once we get into the general election I’m sure I’ll have some opinions to offer on the candidates, the issues, and the election process. Until then – I’ll focus on more local politics.

Categories
culture

Initiative vs Policy

It’s easy to find people describing the moral argument against government run social programs (forced charity encourages selfishness) but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more compelling logical argument for the negative consequences of substituting an institutional approach to a problem for a solution based on individual initiative than this one.

With no hint of bias in his tale, Scott relates his observations of the changes that took place as a charitable action by some individuals employees at the IRS to help one of their co-workers became institutionalized. Soon employees began to actively opt out of participating inbecause of the changes that came from trying to make the program fair for everyone.

Categories
life Local politics

Thwarted

I had planned on participating in last night’s caucus meetings, but life intervened and I was not able to. That being said, I am still interested to learn what happened in those caucus meetings for my precinct (Lehi-08). I would love to know the outcome of the Republican and Democratic caucuses, especially the Democratic caucus I planned to attend. If anyone was at one of those, or knows how to get information on who was elected to positions in either party in this precinct please let me know.

Categories
life

Things Unknown

It’s amazing how an difference so small that we can’t even predict it can very noticeably change the outcome of a standardized process. I saw this in action today while baking cookies.

Laura and discovered that the cookies cooked differently on the two cookie sheets we have. We could put the dough on one cookie sheet and place it in the oven and then fill the second cookie sheet and place it in the oven. We could then take the second cookie sheet out when its cookies were done and
remove the cookies before the cookies on the first sheet finished cooking. Same oven, same batch of dough, different cookie sheets (though they were both the same size – there were no differences to make us think they would cook differently).

As I thought about that it struck me how often  there are small differences that we can’t account for in advance.I suspect this is one of the reasons that standardized programs run by large bureaucracies are so universally inefficient.

Categories
National politics

Bill Clinton Endorses Obama

I chuckled at the NBC report that Bill Clinton said the following about a general election campaign between Hillary Clinton and John McCain:

“I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country,” said the former president. “And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

Bill must not have spent much time in this country to honestly think that any election with the name Clinton on the Democratic ticket would be focused enough to allow people to “actually ask themselves who is right on these issues.” Then I got to this part:

Bill Clinton spokesperson Matt McKenna clarifies the former president’s comment: “Actually, as is indicated by the quote itself, President Clinton was talking about the need to talk about issues, rather than falsely questioning any candidate’s patriotism.”

I’ll take McKenna at his word. If President Clinton was talking about the need to talk about issues then he was endorsing Obama because an election with Obama leading the Democratic ticket has a much better chance of being allowed to address issues than one with Clinton.

Categories
National politics State

A Timely Request

Kip, at the Wide Middle, invites others to share Questions for the Candidates. This comes the very day that I have a question that I would ask any congressional candidate.

What part, or parts of the Change Congress movement would you pledge to support (if any). The four principles of the movement are that:

  1. Candidates and congressmen should accept no money from lobbyists or PACs
  2. Congress should vote to end earmarks
  3. Candidates should agree to run publicly-financed campaigns
  4. Congress should support reform to increase Congressional transparency

Candidates and citizens can pledge to support any combination of the above principles and citizens should hold candidates responsible for their campaign promises (this pledge and others).

Categories
politics

The Wide Middle

I just discovered The Wide Middle today and I think that the concept of “open source public policy” is an example of how more political discourse ought to take place – based on the assumption that we agree on more things than we disagree on and that we can find solutions where we identify problems. I hope that the discussion takes off – I certainly plan to contribute where I can.