82_VOL_83
I hate this week!
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2012
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To your first point: who do you think is better suited for the job, given your rule on executive experience? I'm not saying you're right or wrong, just interested in the discussion.
To your second point: sure, that's subjective and debatable, though. The answer is probably that it's a mixed-bag. Some good things, some bad. But, more experience than any GOP candidate is a fact.
Listening to the HHH morning show on my ride to work today. Interesting topic they're discussing. What would be 3 questions you would ask each candidate if you were the moderator of these debates?
Mine:
1.) What is your view on Global Warming and how will you address/combat it if you were elected President?
2.) What is your plan for ISIS in Iran and other middle eastern countries?
3.) What is your plan to fix our crumbling infrastructure while also not increasing the deficit?
I thought O'Malley was the likely person to "spark" and make a serious run, but that's not going to happen. Too many people blame him for his policing-policies while in Baltimore.
Global warming in the 1 spot? And crumbling infrastructure?
We do not have "crumbling" infrastructure. Do you ever have the opportunity to travel in this country or to other parts of the world? I don't even see how one can believe this so I'd be interested to hear your thinking on this.
O'Malley's issues aren't solely his fingerprint on Baltimore. The man put a Republican in the top state office of a very solidly blue state. Hogan's election was a repudiation of O'Malley's policies.
It goes to crumbling concrete and corroded steel and the fact that nearly 70,000 bridges in America -- one out of every nine -- is now considered to be structurally deficient.
What BS. Between Clinton and Bush, nearly 1 trillion dollars was earmarked for infrastructure, similar money has been spent between Bush and Obama.
You want infrastructure improvement to progress at a faster rate? End the ability of environmental groups to block construction projects via lawsuits. Hire the contractors best able to complete the job without consideration for secondary factors like minority employment/owner, union shop, etc.
Spend more at the outset and get a job done right the first time instead of having to rebid the same job every two years.
I want to run. But I want to run to be a different kind of president. "Different" not in the traditional political puffery sense of that term. "Different," quite literally. I want to run to build a mandate for the fundamental change that our democracy desperately needs. Once that is passed, I would resign, and the elected Vice President would become President.
This is the Presidency as referendum. Our constitution, unlike some states, doesn't give us a referendum power directly. This hack adds one in. Almost never would it be necessary -- in a well-functioning democracy. But when a democracy has lost the capacity to act as a democracy, a referendum president is a peaceful means to force a change that Congress is otherwise not going to make. When the system has become the problem, we need an intervention from the outside.
We are at one of those moments now. In no plausible sense do we have a representative democracy in America today. That fact shows itself in a thousand ways -- from #BlackLivesMatter to billion dollar SuperPACs, and none more profound than the deep sense that most Americans have that their government is not theirs. "The system," as Elizabeth Warren puts it, "is rigged." And the fundamental challenge for our democracy today is to find a way to fix that rigged system.
