What in the world has any citizen of Missouri ever received of any benefit from the fact that Presidential candidates are chosen by the public in primary elections? There is so much wrong with this system that it takes a long time to enumerate them all.

1. A primary election with more than two candidates that results in a winner-take-all result is not fair to the electorate. This results in a state's delegates all going to a candidate that nowhere near a majority of the state's population supports. A primary winner should have to have greater than 50% of the vote to win.

2. Primary elections do not draw anywhere near a plurality of the electorate to the polls. This results in a very small slice of the population deciding where a states delegates cast their first ballot votes at the convention. The disadvantage of this is obvious if you watch the Republicans try to out-torture and out-christian each other to attract the troglodyte Republican primary voter.

3. Viable and desirable Presidential contenders are eliminated from consideration by issues other than their support by the electorate. Historically, a candidate could line up supporters in state delegations and the contest for candidate took place at the convention. Convention delegates were politically informed and vested in the political process. The current process decides the issue of the candidate by starving them of money.

4. Money plays too great a role these days in the Presidential primary, because the candidate is forced to buy expensive media time to reach all potential primary voters. If a study were done of the cost per vote in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries it would show that much more is spent per actual vote cast than in any other election. The over-influence of money in the process forces the candidates to cultivate unhealthy (to the republic) connections to sources of funding that demand access for it.

5. Most state delegates to the political conventions have no purpose in the nominating process. Due to money starvation, all of the candidates but one have quit the attempt to get nominated before the convention. Only the voters of two or three states actually get any influence on the outcome. This has the effect of tilting the field even more toward the extremes of the political spectrums, causing the majority of the electorate to feel as though they have no real choice in the ensuing election.

Missouri citizens send delegates to the national conventions and hold a presidential primary. Why? What good does it do the Missouri Democratic Party or the state to support this failed process? I think that our time and money would be better spent on recreating the organization to build a strong relationship between the populations of our various neighborhoods and the state government.

Habeus Corpus for TERRORISTS

Why is it so hard for people to get their heads around the idea that even people accused of being terrorists are INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. At any time, someone can accuse you of something terrible, say child molestation, but the government is required to treat you as though it is not true until proven otherwise. They can't lock you up, assume it is true, and never give you a chance to defend yourself against the accusation. Why is terrorism different?

I got published in the Boston Globe

Wow! I wrote this letter but never heard back...just saw it on the Globe's site.

Mark Danner's Commencement Speech

I just read the most fascinating article on Salon, the full text of the commencement speech at Berkely by Mark Danner. In it, he fully deconstructs the effects of the Administrations ignoring reality for the 'realities' that it creates in making history. That statement makes a lot more sense if you read the speech.

I took a lot of time to write a letter concerning one of the 'winger comments about the speech. If you read the letter from 'Anonymous' (of course, arent all right wing thinkers Anonymous these days?) then you will see why I had to reply. The Speech stands on its own merits. My comments are HERE

New Face of American Democracy

Spectacle. Excitement. Good video. Now that the 2008 Presidential race is in full swing, in 2007, we have all of that and more to look forward to. Threre are more than ten official and unofficial racers on each side of the aisle, embarking on the much-trodden path to the White House. In just seven short months, the first of the lucky inhabitants of Iowa will get to cast a ballot for whoever remains of this host. Then the citizens of New Hampshire get a cut at the crowd that remains for them to choose. The following states and voters who may or may not get a meaningful say is hard to determine at this early date. At the present moment state legislatures all over the nation are trying to determine if it in the state's best interest to spend the millions of dollars to conduct a statewide special election to decide who the state's various Democratic and Republican convention delegates will cast their first-ballot votes for.
This is all very different from the way that these things were conducted in campaigns past. The first candidate selected by primary voters was Senator George McGovern in 1972. After Vice President Hubert Humphrey had been selected in the 1968 convention after not having run in a single primary election, McGovern headed a commission that reformed the nominating process. The 1972 convention picked McGovern and the 1976 Convention that selected Jimmy Carter was the last convention where the Candidate was not known beore the convention started.

Now the only drama in the process takes place a full year and a half before the convention. Now candidates beg for money from big corporate contributors and the ones that cant draw enough money from contributors are forced to quit, many times before a single vote is cast. In this way, money has come to replace political capital. A candidate like George W Bush can starve any and all opponents of the means to attract voters, removing their ability to persuade, because now the campaign is like all elections, except far more vast. The campaign for the modern presidential nomination entails travelling all over the nation, not just in one state. It involves purchasing tons of media time and employees for every primary that they plan to compete in. It involves persuading an uninvolved public about usually trivial matters, in comparison to the weighty matters that will actually be decided in running the Executive Branch.

Contrast this with the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. The political front runners were assured of the first ballot votes of the delegations from their own states. All of the participants were involved, informed and engaged. There were no primaries at all. The nominee was not decided until many ballots had been cast. (In fact, the most ballots ever cast in a nominating convention was 103, in 1924.) None of the front runners won the nomination.

Let's think a moment about what the current process gets us. Potential candidates must test the waters to see if there is enough 'public' support for thier candidacy. This of course means that they are finding out if there are any donors for their cause. Possibly a dozen will determine that they might take the chance. The media begins to focus on the candidates, looking for any personality quirks, foibles, or gaffes. Any sentence uttered could mean instant doom to their chances. Little attention is paid to the ideas involved. Much attention is paid to how much their grooming or clothing costs.

In campaigns recently past there may be three states whose delegates will be chosen by popular vote. Iowa will hold a caucus where sleepy Iowans will gather at caucuses around the state and cast votes that are non-binding (except in the mind of campaign financers). Then, typically it is off to New Hampshire, where a real presidential primary will occur. This election features the ability of voters to vote in the other party's primary. So we have the prospect of voter's whose candidate is reasonably certain taking advantage of the opportunity to select their candidate's opponent. Next it has been "off to South Carolina" or "Super Tuesday" or whatever. The next stop is usually the last for ever candidate except the nominee. So, as a general rule, the delegates to the national convention are going to a party. The voters of possibly three states get to do the job that formerly took the delegates of fifty states many rounds of voting to do. Delegates that were picked by millions of Americans to represent their states at the national convention have been stripped of every value that this process used to provide and now are reduced to a cheering backdrop for a candidate that was picked by large donors betting that their contributions are buying the ear of a President.