money, money, money

Well you have just described how easily you got around the roadblocks to voting, and you had no problem so you don’t so why anybody else should. Of course the big difference is that you are not poor. What is a nominal fee for you could easily be a day’s worth of food for a poor person. They move a lot, their lives are messy, they probably don’t have the wherewithal to keep track of a birth certificate.

Once again everything is harder for a poor person, they probably don’t have a car, maybe not a phone, if they are several states from their birthplace a trip back home is going to be a difficult trek. I don’t know where these state ID places are, but I expect they are not too conveniently located, let’s go to the google. OK I googled around for five minutes and could not find a list of SOS offices.

By the way while I was at the google I came across this document http://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Applying_for_lic_or_ID_SOS_428_222146_7.pdf?20140312074053 which reveals that it takes more than a birth certificate to get a state ID. It takes at least five different kinds of documents.

I think I’ve made my case that these voter ID laws make it much harder for the poor to vote than anybody else, and since I’ve twice stated that no threat of voter fraud by individual people exists, and you’ve accepted this without rebuttal both times, that you agree with this, so that leaves the only reason for all this voter ID crapola is to keep poor people from pulling that dem lever.

Of course if it turned out that poor people tended to vote republican it would be the dems that were pushing the voter ID option. And if they did they would be in the wrong. As it is it’s the reps pushing that option, and they are wrong, well if you believe in the constitution they are.

Money, money, money. Obama outmoneyed McCain in 2008, and I’m pretty sure he outmoneyed Romney in 2012, if not it was pretty close. Not all rich white people are republicans. If you took a stroll among the lakefront liberals you would find fancy ass house after fancy ass house and all of them with big fat Obama signs stuck in their front lawns. And I know you don’t watch Fox because otherwise you would be whining about George Soros a really rich dem backer who the Foxies see as the antichrist. While rich people are generally republicans there are rich democrats too.

Right now we are having a republican primary for governor in Illinois. There are four candidates, three with minor credentials, they have held office before, or they ran for one, they all have minor name recognition. Then there is this other guy, Rauner, who nobody has ever heard of before. He is a multibillionaire, and has poured his dough into his campaign, he skips a lot of the debates, does not give any interviews, just buys these ads that run relentlessly on tv. And he is outpolling the other three combined.

In a fascinating Illinois twist he is one of those Springfield money men. You know when they are sloshing the money bucket around, he always got his share, he palled around with guys who are in jail now. Of course he never mentions this and since he doesn’t give interviews and skips most of the debates he doesn’t have to answer any for any of it. Since this is a republican primary he naturally is running as sort of a vague tea partier (see, here in Illinois even our tea partiers are faking it). The only issue that he seems to emphasize is being anti union.

Well, you may say, that is an issue alright, there are plenty of anti union people around these days, a political campaign is an airing of ideas, aren’t all these commercials with him parading around in his Carhart coat just another form of that free speech which so many Americans have fought and died for?

Of course I have different ideas of the meaning of free speech, but say it was. But then it seems like a person would wonder well how anti union is he? What has he done in the past that shows his anti union credentials (he has made big bucks off of union pensions)? Isn’t this something I would want to know? Well tough shit Jack, he isn’t giving any interviews, he is skipping debates, he doesn’t need to do any of those things because he is spending money.

What if when we ran an election everybody was limited to a certain amount of spending? If you wanted to get your message out, you would have to go to the debates, you would have to give interviews. You would have to sit down and answer questions from time to time. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

Big money doesn’t mean that much in big elections, but in smaller elections it screams, and I would think you would have a sneaking suspicion that these unelected guys who are putting out the big bucks are going to want something for it, and that seems like a bad idea to me.

Pity the Poor Democrats!

I don't know what it costs to get a copy of your birth certificate, but I'm sure it's a nominal fee. Some years ago, my brother in law moved with his family to Arizona. After they got there, they found that they had to show their birth certificates to do almost anything in that state, which they never had to do in Michigan. They had to send home to get their copies and, after that, they just carried them in their wallets or purses and didn't think anything of it.

My mother gave me a copy of mine when I left home, and I carried it in my wallet for years. When I started developing back trouble, I was advised to make my wallet as thin as possible, so I put my birth certificate and a bunch of other stuff that I never used in a drawer and forgot about it. When I was looking for work after the paper mill closed down, one of the places at which I applied wanted to see my birth certificate, so I dug it out of the drawer and put it in the folder that contained my resume and other job search stuff. There it sat for decades, until I applied for Social Security and they wanted to see it. Well, I had forgotten where I had put it and couldn't find it, so I Googled the Cook County Clerk to find out how to get a new one. They said it was an easy process, and I seem to remember that the charge was something like 15 dollars. Then I remembered where my certificate was, so I never did have to get a new one. I had already applied for a new Social Security card, but it turned out that my old one was in the same folder with my birth certificate. I don't know why I'm telling you all this, but it seems that, in this day and age, everybody should have a copy of their birth certificate and Social Security card and not forget where they put them. Who knows, you might run for President of the United States some day, and then everybody will want to see stuff like that.

Okay, so you might have to travel a little distance to get your state ID card, but you would have to do that anyway to register to vote in the first place. Before the Michigan Secretary of State took over voter registration the township clerks used to do it. Township clerk is a part time job in these parts, and most of them work out of their homes, so you would have to phone the clerk first to find out when they would be home, otherwise you might make the trip for nothing. With the current system, the Secretary of State branch offices keep regular hours, which makes it more convenient. The only time you have to change your voter registration is when you change your address, and then you have to change it on your driver's license too, so you would be going there anyway. Oh, that's right, all you poor Democrats don't have driver's licenses, well you must have some way of getting your asses around! In the cities you have busses and trains and, in the rural areas you have your family, friends, and neighbors who can give you a ride. You have to travel about once a week to get essentials like food and beer anyway, so just stop at the Secretary of State on your way through town. How hard can it be?

Okay, time to segue into a new topic. I was thinking about this the other day, but I don't remember if we've talked about it before. Oh well, you never get tired of those old classics. Answer me this if you can: If big money buys the elections, and all the rich people are White Republicans, then how did we end up with a Black Democrat for President of the United States?

By the way, I finished that book today, and it was so much fun to read that I was sad when it was over. I'm sure you would like it too.

moving on

That sounded a little peculiar, that you never heard of anyone having a problem with the voter ID in Michigan, so I googled ‘voter suppression in Michigan’ and I found plenty of people who had a problem. But then it was mostly dems who had the problem, and hell, we are always complaining, especially when we are stuck in a blue state turning red.

The thing is some people don’t have a driver’s license and those voter ID’s you have to get a copy of your birth certificate and that costs money, and these are not that many places where you can get the voter ID, and that can mean travel by people who don’t have cars, and that can cost money too.

Well what the hell, what kind of person doesn’t have a driver’s license, or a birth certificate or would have a problem paying for a copy and would have a problem traveling to some other city?

That would be poor people of course, who generally vote democratic. Well they say they are protecting voter integrity, but when the pesky reporter mentions that there are almost no documented cases of voter fraud in recent years, they quickly change the subject. And of course it is only Republicans who push this kind of issue.

Hah, that thing about having to answer whether or not you are a citizen reminds me of those loyalty oaths of our youth. Before you could conduct business with the government it seemed like you always had to promise not to violently overthrow the government. Of course if you were a commie, or anarchist or something, who wanted to overthrow the government you had absolutely no problem with lying to it.

Does it feel like maybe we have done this one to death? Do you think we should move on to another topic?

Microchips? Microchips? We Don't Need No Stinking Microchips!

One of he problems with being a genius is that you tend to over think things and make them more complicated than they need to be. All you would need to ID yourself so you could vote on the internet is the same driver's license or state ID card that you now use to vote in the real world. Instead of showing your ID to the lady at the table, you would just swipe it through a card scanner like a credit or debit card. I don't know if you guys have this in your state but, in Michigan, you don't have to fill out your name, address, etc. when you buy a hunting or fishing license anymore. The license agent just swipes your ID through a card scanner, which is plugged into a computer terminal, which is directly connected to the DNR. Then the computer prints out your license and all you have to do is sign it. If, for some reason, you are not eligible to buy that particular license, the computer will refuse to issue it and tell you why. Doing something similar with voting wouldn't make it any harder to vote, it would make it easier. You could vote from the comfort of your own home and not have to stand in line to do it. In the event of a computer glitch, you would have to go see a real person to straighten it out, but you have to do that now anyway.

We've had to show a picture ID to vote in Michigan for a decade or more, and I've never heard of anyone having a problem with it. If you don't have a driver's license, you can get a state ID card for free from the same Secretary of State's Office that handles drivers licenses and voter registration. A few years ago they tried to add a line to the ballot application that asks you if you're a U.S, citizen, but the courts struck it down, saying it was an invasion of privacy. Huh? If you're not a U.S. citizen you're ineligible to vote anyway, and anybody who wanted to scam the system could just lie on the form. "Much ado about nothing"! - (Shakespeare?)

I agree that anybody who is too stupid to vote for a congressman would also be too stupid to vote directly for a bill to become law. Like I said before, you can't make the world idiot proof. The concept of direct democracy has nothing to do with people being stupid, it's all about making the system more efficient. We wouldn't have to scrap the Constitution, all we'd have to do is amend it, replace the part about Congress with a part about direct voting by the people. The good news is that we'd get rid of all those useless congressmen. The bad news is that it won't work anyway.

In a real world conversation the other day, I found out why direct democracy won't work. Instead of four or five hundred congressmen submitting bills for consideration, you'd have like 200 million people doing it. Some of these proposals would duplicate each other, and others would be so poorly worded that they would be misleading or down right incomprehensible. I said before that you would still need something like a board of canvassers to sort all those proposals out. What I hadn't considered was that the current boards of canvassers only have to do their jobs every two years when there's an election coming up. These new guys would have to work on it full time all the time, as there would be a lot more proposals to deal with. I don't know how many people it would take to do this job, but  it's not unreasonable to believe that it would be more than the total number of congressmen we have today.

Maybe that's why we have a congress in the first place, to sort through all the wishes and wants of the people and try to make a cohesive program out of them. Maybe they could do a better job and maybe not. Many of the people don't even know what they want, and others keep changing their mind about it. Then there's the people who want pie in the sky, but they want it without a crust or filling. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

mob rule by joystick

Plato, Plato thought up, direct democracy. Not that big a deal, if he hadn’t put it into writing, the next guy down the pike would have. It’s a simple idea just sitting there on the road to civilization. I remember reading a letter to the editor in the U of I student newspaper on the subject maybe thirty years ago when computers were just beginning to become ubiquitous.

It seems like computers are what’s giving this idea it’s current popularity. It sounds so easy. If you can buy a book on Amazon why can’t you vote the same way?

Well there are problems with implementation, but the biggest problem is the one that came to Plato maybe five minutes after he thought it up, most people are stupid. I daresay I’m sure the founding fathers were well aware of this problem when they wrote up the constitution. For a guy who reveres the constitution you seem to spend a lot of time thinking of alternatives to it.

Those microchips though, that seems pretty heretical for a libertarian. Most of those guys can’t even deal with a national identification card. It’s also not popular among some of the more lefty elements of my own party. Myself I think it’s no big deal. This Snowden thing, I think he was right to expose government wrongdoing, but I don’t mind that much the government spying on us.

Back to those microchips, no matter how carefully you implemented it, there is no way to prevent them from being fucked with. Anyway voter fraud, in the sense of people voting who shouldn’t be, or people voting more than once is not a very big problem. If you have been following this controversy where the reps are trying to make it harder to vote, you know that sort of fraud almost never happens. The kind of fraud where some government group fakes returns happens far more often and is much more powerful, and doing things by computer would make that so much easier.

I can’t visualize that plan of yours, especially the part about how we can knock out congress and still have the constitution. The congress is probably half of the constitution, so if you tear that out, you will only have half left, and then you will have to change everything else around to make up for that absence, and in the end you may have some piece of paper, but it will not be the constitution.

Hah, debate on tv, bars, coffee shops, street corners, makes me think you don’t get out much.

Have you seen the level of debate that goes on in those venues? And the internet, I know you have seen the level of debate (present company obviously excluded) that goes on there.

I’ve heard that joke before of course, I’ll wager it goes back to the invention of the automobile.

There is a similar one about a bus full of lawyers going off a cliff and the tragedy was that there was an empty seat. It used to go around with a more politically incorrect set of victims.

I think your problem in short is, that you think people are too stupid to vote for congress (and I agree with you here), but you think they are smart enough to sit at home and run the country plinking on their computers (which is where I disagree with you).

Direct Democracy

This direct democracy thing is not my idea, and it's not Kevin Bleyer's original idea either. I don't know who thought it up, but it's been around for awhile. I came across it shortly after I first started on the internet, about 2001 or 2002, and I don't know how long it had been around before that. To my knowledge, there is no organized movement currently pushing for this thing, it's just a utopian vision for the future.

Implanting the microchips in everybody, however is my idea, it just came to me the other day while I was thinking about Bleyer's book. Of course, great ideas occasionally are thought up by two or more different people who know nothing about each other, like Isaac Newton and that other guy who simultaneously invented calculus, so I can't guarantee that somebody else isn't working on it as we speak, but I am not aware of it if they are. A far as I know, the chips they are currently using in animals are "read only" chips. They are programmed before implantation and are usually used to identify the animal's owner in case the critter gets lost or stolen. That doesn't mean some hacker won't figure out how to get into them, but somebody else should be already working on that. I can't think of everything, you know. The purpose of the chips in the first place would be to solve the problem of voter I.D., which is probably why we aren't already voting on the internet.

With direct democracy, there would be no congress, we the people would be our own congress, which is kind of what Bleyer proposed. He didn't go into it any further than that, but I know from my previous discussions how it would work. Laws would be proposed by initiative petitions, the same way they already are in many states. That could be done on the internet too, although we would still need something like a board of canvassers to keep the process from getting chaotic. Once a proposal has been approved and publicly announced, it would be debated on the internet, TV, bars, coffee shops, and street corners by anybody who wants to. After a predetermined period of time, say 90 days, the proposal would be voted on by the general public. You wouldn't have amendments and other parliamentary maneuvers, just an up or down vote. Amendments could be proposed after the fact by the same initiative process, as could total repeal.

When I first heard of this concept, I was against it because it sounded a lot like pure democracy, which is basically mob rule. The more I think about it, though, it wouldn't necessarily have to be that way. We could still have a constitution, bill of rights, court system, and president. The only thing made obsolete would be congress, which nobody likes anymore anyway. This reminds me of a story:

One day there was this big traffic jam on one of the roads leading into Washington D.C., total gridlock it was. A motorist saw this guy who was walking along the line of stalled cars, stopping briefly to talk to each of the drivers. When the guy came to him, he explained that a group of terrorists had kidnapped the entire U.S. Congress and were holding them for ransom. If the ransom was not paid, the terrorists were threatening to soak all the congressmen with gasoline and light them on fire. He further explained that he was taking up a collection among the motorists and asked if this guy wanted to contribute. "Well", he replied, "How much have all the others been contributing?" The solicitor looked at his clipboard and said, "Oh, about two gallons each."

The Beaglesonia ballot

I think internet flaming is more simple than you say. It doesn’t involve that deceptive trapping, you just jump on something somebody said innocently and hammer them about it and get personally insulting. Something like there is a discussion on oh, the late great Shirley Temple (joking, couldn’t abide her), and maybe you would say such and such was your favorite movie and out of nowhere somebody says that is the crappiest movie that ever existed and anybody who thought it was any good is an idiot and a traitor and probably a pederast.

I had something like that happen to me maybe five years ago where a friend of a friend on fb wrote that she was going to Texas, and I used to live there and I recommended that she bring back some Wolf chili and smoked beans, because these were things I loved when I lived there. Then some friend of hers somehow took this as an insult, like I was calling her some kind of hillbilly or something, and wrote something really insulting about me. I think I wrote something back trying to be both a bit humorous and conciliatory, but she took that as another insult and flamed me twice as hard about that. Eventually I think the woman who was going to Texas just took the whole thing off the page.

But what was strange about it, was even though I had no idea what kind of person my flamer was, but surely she was unhinged, and not worthy of my time, but I was seething. I knew better, but I was seething. If a perfectly sane, calm person like myself can be so affected, what about all those Tom, Dick, and Harry’s out there?

You know there are some people out there who like to seethe, and so I guess the internet is a place where they can seethe to their hearts consent. Going along with your original definition of flaming, I can think of something I sometimes do.

Sometimes these seethers are pretty normal in most respects, but there is something that just sets them off. I think even reasonable folks like you and me have things that set us off, and I certainly am not going to tell you what sets me off.

But anyway, a guy walks into the bar and you know he hates, oh Shirley Temple, and you know this, and you are a little bored, so you just casually mention, “Boy that Shirley Temple, some great little hoofer, huh?” And now you have some entertainment for awhile. Oh it’s a mean thing to do, but sometimes a guy gets bored.

Here’s the thing about your everybody votes thing. This country is full of people who won’t even let their kids get vaccinated for diseases that can kill them and you think they are going to let Dr Beagles put a chip into their bodies? Hmm. Maybe we could flip a little switch on the chip so that this subliminal message “Guns suck,” would be directed to their subconscious, that would be a pretty good idea.

Here’s another thing, and here is something I wonder. How come we can run all our commerce, stuff gets bought, stuff gets sold, on the internet, yet we can’t vote on it? I suppose it has something to do with trust.

We all know that ballot boxes disappear, then reappear with everybody signing in with the same handwriting in the same color of ink, in alphabetical order, and this is a terrible thing of course. But at least there are paper ballots, at least there is something solid there, at least it takes a lot of work. But I think it’s the specter of the guy who manufactures the voting machines, the guy with the curling moustache and the sinister cat in his lap, accepting a sack full of money from a commie, a dem, a rep, whoever, and laughing his sinister laugh and flipping a switch. Hey for an extra ten bucks can you flip the switch on the chip in Beagle’s head and make him quack like a duck? No prob.

Still another thing is what would be the mechanism? Would there be a congress that would make laws and then the people would vote on them? Or could anybody present a law and that would be voted on? How about I propose a law at three in the morning after the super bowl when most of the country is sleeping it off, that gay pet marriage become mandatory in all freeholds that begin with the letter B?