(12-21-2017 07:02 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(12-21-2017 12:31 AM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-20-2017 09:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(12-20-2017 09:12 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-20-2017 05:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My problem with your "solution" is that I think it will be turned into the same problem we have today. The R's and D's will get free air time and nobody else will. It's pretty easy to set a threshold level of perceived support to qualify for the free time, and to set that level high enough to create a barrier to entry. How do you implement it to keep that from happening?

Then you obviously didn't read the post. All candidates got space to present their visions. What I didn't mention was that they couldn't use the free time to criticize one another so much as to lay out their agenda. Stump speeches were the time for muckraking. As for the entry point it's been on the books until H.W. Bush. Get the requisite number of signatures to get your name placed on the ballot. The total was once a national one for national elections. H.W. made sure it was per state and grandfathered in the Republicans and Democrats. Strike his legislation and return to the original. Then limit the space and appearances to a certain amount or limit of time and restrict the presentations to what you will do, and how you will accomplish it. That frees the election process up to new ideas and new approaches. Then the people choose. Those who've taken over the country don't like ideas that they don't approve of so we get two parties of candidates who they already own. Everyone else is dismissed, or even if they qualify aren't invited to the debates (corporate TV policy), and usually can't afford commercial time on television.
Make the elections free as far as message goes and we will finally get reforms and a new vision.

But who decides who is a candidate and who isn't? Do the Greens get this? Do the Libertarians? Do the Communists? Does the Constitution Party? Where do you draw the line?
And what constitutes the forbidden criticizing each other? If republicans had self imposed that rule and followed it, Donald Trump would not have been their nominee.

Are you willfully being obtuse? Any candidate who can acquire the requisite number of signatures of registered voters can run. That's how it was initially set up.
As for what constitutes forbidden criticism the media governs it for the time they give (and remember they do this as a public service). They set the parameters for advancing your point of view or agenda and restrict air time or space if it is violated.
As in every election since the dawn of democracies and republics the mudslinging is reserved for private speaking engagements and stump speeches. You can't stop it, but you can limit it to those realms. Debates should include all candidates and they are moderated. The electorate determines the candidates, not the danged parties. The process should be same for all of them regardless of party affiliation, and it once was.

No, I'm not being obtuse, willfully or otherwise, but I think you are. Unless we can round up a few angels, you are proposing a system that will be run by human beings, and thus subject to the biases that humans introduce.

Suppose they just set the number of required signatures so high that nobody but two candidates can meet them. Then what?

And the media governs what is or is not forbidden criticism? So if the media favor candidate A, he gets to call candidate B a witch because, of course, that's not forbidden criticism because candidate B hasn't proved that she isn't one, but candidate B cannot say that she has a better health care plan because that is a dog whistle that candidate A is a racist.

And no, don't tell me that sort of stuff won't happen. It happens now in how ballot access is granted and how the nightly news gets edited. If, say, a libertarian had had full ballot access in the Alabama senate race, he might well have been elected given what went down. But he didn't. We can run a story about how despicable Donald Trump is because he is truly despicable, but we can't run a story bout how Hillary broke the law because Comey said that he would not recommend prosecuting her.

Where are you going to find the angels to run your system fairly and impartially? Hint: You're not.

Look, I'm the last guy who believes in angels among politicians. I've worked with and against them. I'm just stating that the system has been hijacked and it was hijacked with outside funding more than a century ago. But the most egregious influence over the process has occurred in the last nearly 40 years. When the number of requisite signatures was established as the criteria for getting your name on the ballot the country was small, a proportional number would be easy to ascertain.

I'm just saying if you want to clean up the cesspool you start by retracting the legislation that made it that. You give voters the ability to back candidates not put up by the machines. There will never be a perfect process but what we once had was vastly superior to what it has become.

Have dead people voted in the past? They sure as hell did under L.B.J. and I doubt he was that innovative. Have absentee ballots miraculously appeared at the last moment, of course. But never before has the electorate been so eliminated from deciding by petition and then ballot the names that were before them.

I wrote in Nick Saban in the Alabama senate election. I figured that way I wasn't voting for a long term Clinton supporter nor was I voting for Moore. Heck if Saban had won it would have made all Auburn folks happy!

The issue is that outside of the upper echelons of party power brokers in the state we don't even control the nominees here! At the national level for the last 30 years it's hard to find a candidate for president that didn't have ties to two families.

Our original system never worried about the dominance of one family because of their anti-monarch sentiments and because the job was seen as truly public service and mostly at the expense of the family business. But they did leave an open system whereby those not supported by the early parties could gain access. And all parties had go through the same ballot access procedures. Not any more.

The means of redress are as legally simplistic as the legislation that changed them. Never has this been an argument about the deplorable state of human ethics. We will never have perfect people. But we can have a fairer system.

Ballot access, and the elimination of corporate funding in elections, and equal campaign event access (debates, air time, etc.) is essential to correcting the intentional inequities that have been legislated in by the current two parties who are not serving the public as much as they are turf protecting and perk protecting.

If you start with the premise that people are anything other than flawed you will end up with the justification for totalitarianism every time.

Your methods here are a form of quibbling and pettifogging. A standard is a standard and it is either equally applied or not. Calling someone a witch is not even relevant if the parameters are that you are limited to discussing your ideas and how you will accomplish them. Elections are about ideas for governing when they correctly conducted. They were never intended to be reprise of Jerry Springer.

We have been without standards for election conduct for so long now that it will be a shock to reestablish them. And guess what, we won't, until the public has access to run candidates in opposition to those of the two parties. That's why the process has to be addressed first.

Orderly transference of power is becoming less and less of a reality. When that breaks down civil conflict will follow. Our nation was never designed to be of one mind. We were designed to be governed in a competition of ideas, not ideologies. Compromise was intended. Those who can't accept that whether from the left or right are obstacles to how free people are governed.

And for the record where is your support for stating Trump is despicable? And who says that Director Comey is impartial? I didn't vote for either Clinton or Trump but so far there is not any proof that either is criminal, but sadly there is a dearth of evidence that they are good. But having been close enough to it before the best mantra is trust no one. Most of them operate like the rules don't apply to them and until somebody holds the smoking gun they don't listen either.

The whole gist of my initial post is that we no longer have a government that is interested in the people, let alone one that is there to serve the public and we won't have one as long as the majority of the money they receive comes from corporate sources and as long as candidates outside of their party sphere are obstructed so intentionally.