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[Vactor]

Are you talking about the lawyers?

If so you should know that most legislatures nowadays have a legal institution that advises them, and drafts their bills for them.  It would be quite chaotic if you had school teachers trying to draft an airtight law.  In the Wisconsin legislature there are actually a handful of institutions, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the Legislative Council, and the Legislative Reference Bureau.  These are all staffed by non-partisan career public servants, who take their duties very seriously.  At least in Wisconsin there is no shortage of sound legal advise. Don't mistake the policy issues drafted into bills and laws as being symptomatic of there not being enough explanation of law available to lawmakers.

They are made well aware of legal foundation of a proposed piece of legislation, but the drafters are there to draft the bills that the people we elect want to introduce.  If an elected member of a legislature wants to introduce bills that state that everyone needs to commit murder, they get a bill that lays out the legalese necessary for a law that fulfills that.  It is up to the electorate to decide what kind of legislation they want introduced, not the legal council of the legislature.

[Truean]

A trans reading of Disney's Little Mermaid

Frankly yes. I'm honestly surprised they didn't go into the widespread theory of how mermaids relate to MtF transgender children. Makes perfect sense if you think about it. A mer... merperson's? sex isn't defined by their bottom fish half but rather the top: merman or mermaid.... Transgender kids don't like and often hate their bottom half and like the idea of something with a sex that is not defined by that. Given that you're dealing with complex stuff and kids, it's a way they can relay this.

http://www.mermaids.freeuk.com/
http://www.childrensdayton.org/cms/familywise_doctor_ramey/b3fd6116614089a6/index.html
http://gavigirl.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/mermaids-and-transgender-women/
http://mommyish.com/stuff/do-transgender-little-girls-have-a-fascination-with-mermaids/
http://masculineheart.blogspot.com/2008/10/boys-life-transgender-children.html

Truean, wow... just wow... I never realized it was quite that complicated. Although I should have known and I definitely knew it was more so than I was implying with my last post. Sorry if I caused you to have to type all that out.

It's all good. I do this sort of thing all the time. My typing was not caused by you. Now if I could just find a way to legally slap the shit out of convince my clients to willingly pay when they have the ability to when I do work like this after they expressly ask me to save them from the consequences of stupid shit they have done.... It's even better when they win and won't pay willingly....

You're fine though, trust me.

A person should only be allowed to be a member of a legislature if they know what the crap the law is. Either they should have to be a lawyer or have a damn good one they have to run anything by before they say something

Except that that isn't really feasible or entirely desirable.

As someone who worked in a legislature for 3 years I can tell you that they absolutely have top notch lawyers that they run these things by, who tell them that the bill doesn't stand a chance as law.  Many bills are introduced without any expectation of it being signed into, or staying law.  An elected politicians actions are done to have the majority of votes cast in the next election to be for them.  The electorate gets the legislature it deserves.  If they desire illegal/unconstitutional laws being passed and then struck down in court, that is what they get.

What I meant was more along the lines of finding people. For every cool person like Truean that actually gives a shit about their cases and works hard, I'd wager for 2-3 of the scumbag money-maker types. And really, one term is time enough to wreck a few things and stonewall others.

Yups. Frankly this is a problem with the legal profession: how law is taught, paid for, provided, etc. I wish you could see a video of a real law school class room that doesn't realize its being taped. I constantly raised my hand. My classmates sat there soiling themselves at the prospect of being called on, because who the hell are we kidding, they didn't read anything. Even if they did, they sure as hell didn't understand it. Even if they understood it, they were terrified to explain it if they knew how.... You can't say "Pass" in a courtroom. Rather you can, but you suck if you do as the lawyer and bad things happen.... Your freedom depends on if this person knows what the hell they are doing can fake it well enough.... [sigh] Also, the grades don't measure crap, or rather they do. I say this as a person who pulled a 4.0 GPA one semester in law school and made dean's list a couple times. It's utterly meaningless in determining what you know/can actually do....

Are you talking about the lawyers?

If so you should know that most legislatures nowadays have a legal institution that advises them, and drafts their bills for them.  It would be quite chaotic if you had school teachers trying to draft an airtight law.  In the Wisconsin legislature there are actually a handful of institutions, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the Legislative Council, and the Legislative Reference Bureau.  These are all staffed by non-partisan career public servants, who take their duties very seriously.  At least in Wisconsin there is no shortage of sound legal advise. Don't mistake the policy issues drafted into bills and laws as being symptomatic of there not being enough explanation of law available to lawmakers.

They are made well aware of legal foundation of a proposed piece of legislation, but the drafters are there to draft the bills that the people we elect want to introduce.  If an elected member of a legislature wants to introduce bills that state that everyone needs to commit murder, they get a bill that lays out the legalese necessary for a law that fulfills that.  It is up to the electorate to decide what kind of legislation they want introduced, not the legal council of the legislature.

This is the crux of the problem: these lawyers only get paid if they cater to their corrupt as hell bosses in office. Accountants, lawyers and other professionals lack the independence they really need to do their proper jobs. You want a real solution for this? The accountant/lawyer gets paid no matter if he pisses off his stupid political boss or not so long as he really puts in the effort (see my last post) as to why the demand isn't possible.... Example, Haddle.

Explanation:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Haddle was an accountant for a company that had a tiny little... approximately $10 Million tax fraud a la Enron style executive looting. Haddle, being a decent accountant and human being, reported this to his bosses and was promptly fired....

They hired him for a job and then fired him for doing it:
Let me say that again more clearly because it bears repeating: They hired him to be an accountant watch numbers and report anything suspicious. As an accountant, he watched numbers and reported anything suspicious. That's exactly what he was fired for.... "At will employment" my ass; Haddle is a CPA (Certified PUBLIC accountant). He has certain ethical duties not to Enron style screw the rest of us. He upheld that duty and ... was fired for it.

"Officially" Haddle was fired for testifying under subpoena, as a company accountant, that the company was crooked as hell. The statute they worked this under was a witness tampering/intimidation one. Basically, the company argued, successfully until many appeals later, that the witness tampering intimidation statute required the tampering/intimidating crook party to deprive the witness of an "interest" which they said didn't include firing him. By the Justice Scalia. bullshit approach of "the plain text/founder's intent" this did not apply to poor Haddle's at will employment job. So the moral of the story to corporate america was "fire anyone who testifies against you." That is until the more reasonable side of the court bullied Scalia into shutting the hell up and making the decision unanimous.....

Though Haddle eventually won, it totally wasn't worth it. He had to go all the way up and down the courts, finally get to the supreme court and he wound up with about 6 months pay, because the company folded up as a result of the fraud he was fired for reporting....

Summation, somehow this time and resource wasting cycle of only looking like you're doing something in office to get reelected has to stop. There's a perverse benefit to trying to pass laws you know or should know have no damn chance of surviving to look like you're doing something worth another term in office. Blaming the courts is also foolish ( a la Rick Perry). They are an equal branch of Government but even the basics of the judicial branch aren't taught in civics or government classes in most high schools, so people don't really know what they are....

I wish I knew how to solve this, but in today's culture respectful disagreement is dead. Insults are in vogue. We're not fighting over what to do; we're fighting over who to blame, which solves exactly nothing. No one will agree to anything that even mildly inconveniences them and if you raise taxes on those who can totally afford it then god help you....

"Everyone else's stuff is shit; your shit is stuff." ~George Carlin

I know people who are dead set on the idea that welfare is just a system utterly infested with frauds. It isn't. Really this is called hating poor people. I know people who are dead set on the idea that corporations are inherently evil no matter what. They aren't. Really this is hating rich people (though in the past 30 years a lot of this is deserved). Overgeneralizations suck. I've seen and counseled good companies as well as bad. I've seen some of the worst and best human beings happen to be poorer than you can imagine.

Asking a lawyer to write a valid law expressly and only to please one unconstitutionally political view while screwing the other is like asking someone to solve an addition problem using only subtraction of positive numbers.... It doesn't work and wastes time.

[Descan]

Hey, Truean. Would it be possible to get everyone on welfare? Like, everyone gets food, water, a home, a high-school education, and an internet connection (come on, it's the modern world. You need an internet connection to be a part of society at this point.)

And anything else they want they have to get a job and work for it?

I don't think it'd be all that possible, especially in America. (maybe Canada or Sweden? Or one of the other welfare states)

[Vactor]

The drafting of an unconstitutional bill breaks no laws, passing and signing into law something that is unconstitutional is also not illegal or corrupt.  A legislature is given the authority to pass out the will of the electorate.

The problem here is not the institutions of the legislature being co-opted into illegal behavior, it is the desires and priorities of the electorate.

If the electorate demands utter garbage from their elected officials, its what they deserve and get.

[sluissa]

The drafting of an unconstitutional bill breaks no laws, passing and signing into law something that is unconstitutional is also not illegal or corrupt.  A legislature is given the authority to pass out the will of the electorate.

The problem here is not the institutions of the legislature being co-opted into illegal behavior, it is the desires and priorities of the electorate.

If the electorate demands utter garbage from their elected officials, its what they deserve and get.

I would argue that the electorate isn't being listened to here. Congress has historically low approval numbers and yet they're still not changing their tune one bit. We've tried Republicans, we've tried Democrats. Those are the only two choices we're given, and yet they both suck. (Theoretically, yes, we do have more choices, but there are so many institutional roadblocks and speedbumps to having more than two parties it'd take a major shakeup to allow it. I'm hoping for that kind of shakeup, but I don't see it coming, yet.)

These people can do the idiotic and unpopular things, as long as they just stay slightly less unpopular than the other side in their state. And that's easy when you're not in a swing state. Each side has spent so long demonizing the other side in their strong states that there are some people out there who actually believe. "Well, it's a choice between this guy that we don't like, or essentially the end of the world."

[Vactor]

We've tried Republicans, we've tried Democrats. Those are the only two choices we're given, and yet they both suck.

You should read the article I linked some time ago by an ex-GOP staffer.

In it he lays out how generating a sensibility like this in the electorate is a win for Republicans, something they have been working hard at doing. 

When you have a two party government, with one party being the party who's goal is creating a failed government, you have a problem.   This is why a Republican majority in the senate is 41 out of 100, and democrats holding 59 seats is still a minority party.

Realistically speaking we have yet to see a single party controlled government under the Democrats in recent history.  Even the year and a half between 2008 and 2010 they were unable to enact their desired policies because of easy mode senate filibusters.

The biggest failure of the Democrats is not their policies, but their inability to make the GOP take responsibility for their irresponsible stewardship of the country.

Just Two years after retaking the Government from the GOP that brought the country to what felt like the brink of armageddon, the electorate handed congress back to the GOP because the democrats were unable to enact their policies because the GOP obstructed them.

Who is the problem?

[Bauglir]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the system is. It encourages this short of bullshit by its design. Of course, it's that same design that prevents that whole tyranny of the majority thing and this is just people taking advantage of that to try and enforce a tyranny of the minority, but my point is that this is a profitable thing to do.

[sluissa]

I do believe that the democrats, under the two party system, tend to be the "lesser of the two evils." But they still get caught up in all of the same systemic shit that the Republicans revel in. Even with that high praise, I still think the democrats, as a whole, tend to be not worthy of leadership. Maybe if they had no obstacles outside of their own party, since they seem to be enough of an obstacle to themselves, but that will never happen, and you can't have a party of parties try to go up against such a combined force as the Republicans.

The Republicans tend to be one (although lately closer to two) voice(s) from a relatively narrow section of the political spectrum. The democrats are a catchall party that tend to grab people all the way from somewhat conservative but more moderate views all the way out to those that would identify communist if it wasn't such a hated word. When you have opinions from such a wide spectrum, it's hard to come up with a united voice.

Until we get away from the two party system and let people vote on other parties without feeling like they wasted their vote, then I don't think this is going to change. The best we could hope for is the fading of one party only to be replaced, nearly or completely, by another. This has happened a few times throughout the US history. It might happen again, but what you end up with is a party, by a different name, and possibly an outwardly different ideology, but just the same old members.

[ChairmanPoo]

There's no lesser evil. I honestly think that the whole thing is a zero-sum screwjob. Parties tug at issues one way or the other, but the idea is to keep them in the air, not solve them. Besides, the constitutents of the two parties have more things in common than against each other, so it's no wonder they team up against perceived threats.

Btw: This statement applies to European parties as well

[SalmonGod]

Obama received more corporate campaign donations than McCain and has been more hostile towards dissent and information than pretty much any other president.  I don't think the Republicans are entirely to blame for his supposed failures... The two parties jointly own major components of the election system, after all, and actively work together to keep anyone else out.

I don't think we can move forward until people overcome these delusions.

[G-Flex]

more hostile towards dissent and information than pretty much any other president

This is a very, very, very, very, very strong statement. Care to back it up?

[kaijyuu]

Yeah I'd say (for example) the laws against speaking against WWII way back then were FAR more "hostile towards dissent and information". That was Truman, I believe.

[Truean]

Hey, Truean. Would it be possible to get everyone on welfare? Like, everyone gets food, water, a home, a high-school education, and an internet connection (come on, it's the modern world. You need an internet connection to be a part of society at this point.)

And anything else they want they have to get a job and work for it?

I don't think it'd be all that possible, especially in America. (maybe Canada or Sweden? Or one of the other welfare states)

My point was: Hating welfare as inherently corrupt and saying everyone on it is lazy is based upon incorrect information and thus bad. While welfare is not perfect, the other option is to let people starve. Either we aren't prepared to do that, or worse, if we are nothing good comes of that....

Answer: O politically it's impossible. In a perfect world there wouldn't be homeless people and the math would add up so no one went hungry or without shelter, etc. Perfect worlds don't exist, much like the frictionless environments physicists favor, and relying on them in theory is a fatal flaw of any plan. High school educations in America actually illustrate the point really well. Everyone is entitled to a high school education but what they get isn't great.... Apply that last sentence to all the things you asked about.... Even if everyone did have a baseline housing/food allowance, what they got wouldn't be that great as a total understatement.

Plus, a real problem with our political systems is reliance upon oaths and standards because "corruption shouldn't happen." This is like being a physicist trying to work things out in a frictionless environment. Corruption will happen if you don't beat it back, of course it shouldn't. People who say that are entirely missing the point. That's like relying on a witness' oath to keep them from lying on the stand. It's stupid, doesn't work, and you need cross examination to keep people honest (or at expose lies). We don't openly, easily and obviously have any idea how to simply track where everything goes, so proving anything is neigh impossible. This applies to both government and corporations... thus both can be as corrupt as they want, because we won't pay for someone to watch them that we can watch (thus WE watch the watchers).

As I understand it, Russia has few political/judicial rights compared to their economic rights, but it doesn't always work smoothly over there for similar reasons. If it works at all....

The drafting of an unconstitutional bill breaks no laws, passing and signing into law something that is unconstitutional is also not illegal or corrupt.  A legislature is given the authority to pass out the will of the electorate.

The problem here is not the institutions of the legislature being co-opted into illegal behavior, it is the desires and priorities of the electorate.

If the electorate demands utter garbage from their elected officials, its what they deserve and get.

The act itself is not criminal, but it violates a law: the US constitution. "Congress shall make no law," is the beginning to an important amendment.... Thus, legally Congress shouldn't make laws barred by that amendment. Doing so is illegal as against the highest law of the land from which all others spring, the Constitution. There is no remedy beyond striking the law down. This is sad. The constitution is supposed to restrain government where its express text says so....

Your point about the electorate wanting garbage is well taken. These politicians are pandering to someone and keep getting (re)elected for it.... I really wonder what would happen if it were explained to them exactly why they can't have what they want. I took one look at the Arizona Immigration bill and bet someone $10 it wouldn't survive court review. http://haydenlaw.com/2011/04/appeals-court-strikes-down-arizona-immigration-law/. Though some politically biased people still think the court wasn't right, it absolutely was applying federalism correctly. It is a national level function of government dealing with foreign policy and immigration. Letting Arizona do this is like letting Ohio declare trade tarrif taxes or war on Canada: stupid. The people in that state should've been focusing on Congress, who could actually legislate in the area they care about....

The problem is an uninformed electorate and a system wasting time pandering to legally or financially impossible desires.... it isn't any one person's fault, the whole system creates and sustains incentives for this problem.

Seconded. Yes, very yes.

Your article about the Ex GOP staffer is also on point, I remember it well, rather long, but he really tried to make his point thtough examples, which has merit.

If you take an oath to serve the people and then purposefully screw up/waste time in a manner that benefits you by keeping you employed, then isn't that corrupt? That's not serving anyone except yourself and the whole "0% viable law" thing wastes tons of time and resources.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Stocks-rise-sharply-on-solid-apf-785431975.html?x=0
Will these companies hire someone already or are they waiting for more piles of money before they do...?

[sluissa]

Obama received more corporate campaign donations than McCain

This, was caused by the fact that Obama decided to forgo public funding of his campaign which would have limited the amount of private funding he could have recieved. McCain instead took the public funding route. I think that it still would have ended up the same way, but that the numbers mention would have ended up much closer if McCain had gone entirely private funding for his campaign.

Taking public funding, however, was part of McCain's stance in the campaign. Not something he could have just changed his mind on.

[SalmonGod]

more hostile towards dissent and information than pretty much any other president

This is a very, very, very, very, very strong statement. Care to back it up?

"than pretty much any other president" was too strong, I admit.  I formally withdraw that part of the statement.  I still believe he's been harsher than most, especially based on his stances on Wikileaks and Bradley Manning and his obvious double speak between his condemnation for that issue while simultaneously supporting related events, such as the Arab Spring.

I was especially disgusted when some amateur journalists managed to gain entry to a fairly exclusive political event (IIRC those details) and confronted him directly on camera about why Daniel Ellsberg is regarded as a hero, while Manning is being tortured in solitary confinement.  Obama's only response was "because the information stolen by Ellsberg wasn't classified the same", which is a blatant lie.

I'll dig up more on the subject if you wish.  I just don't have that much time at the moment.