AMERICA is BROKEN NOW SHUT-UP and FIX IT!

My proposal for reforming campaign finance is brutally simple. Any other political funding, direct or indirect, would be illegal. This would also force parties to re-engage with voters. Not in the least. The corruption of our politics by private money costs us hundreds of times more than a funding system for which we would pay directly. The next crucial reform is to help voters make informed choices.

1. Our democracy is broken, debased and distrusted – but there are ways to fix it.
2. Sous la Terre, loin du Ciel (French Edition);
3. Mastering Tort Law (Carolina Academic Press Mastering).

Germany provides a brilliant example of how this could be done: It is trusted and consulted by millions. Switzerland offers the best example of the next step: It produces a graphic showing whose position most closely matches your interests. There is some excellent civic technology produced by voluntary groups elsewhere such as Democracy Club , Crowdpac and mySociety in the UK. But without the funding and capacity of the state, it struggles to reach people who are not already well informed.

Divided We Stand

Once these reforms are in place, the next step is to change the architecture. As both US presidential elections distorted by the electoral college system and UK general elections allowing a minority of the electorate to dictate to the majority suggest, this should start with a switch to proportional representation. Ideally, in parliamentary elections this would mix the national with the local by retaining constituency links, such as the single transferable vote or the additional member system. Such systems might have worked well in small city states with a limited franchise sortition was used in ancient Athens and medieval Venice and Florence.

But in populations as large and complex as ours, these proposals are a formula for disaster. Perhaps, in a fair and accountable system, we could learn to love them. But I believe that both approaches could be used to temper representative democracy. A new terminal, staffed by American Customs officials, connects directly with a spur of the Kansas City Southern railroad.

There, nonunion laborers load ships with minerals mined through the American West, including lithium and soda ash, heading largely to East Asia, and unload bananas and smartphones from Ecuador and China heading for the landlocked states of the Red Fed without ever once passing through Blue Fed territory.

And then came the first humanitarian crisis.

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When the families of West Virginia workers started overloading schools and hospitals across the border in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Blue Fed began to impose residence requirements for many of its social services. The conditions were often dire. Tent cities around Palm Springs saw the first American measles outbreak in a generation, and in the Spokane bidonvilles, dozens of children froze to death during a harsh winter. On the other side, some of the progressive activists who played crucial roles building early support for the health-care compact argue that the Blue Fed has an obligation to promote its values even beyond its borders.

The debate rages across the region: What obligation do they have to other Americans who have democratically chosen to pursue a very different way of life? The Blue Fed backed down, publicly revoking its invitation, but only after the Red Fed agreed to jointly lobby Congress to create a series of regionally restricted work visas.

When Hurricane Rigoberto came through the Gulf of Mexico, leaving large portions of Houston underwater for months — the first trillion-dollar natural disaster, at least when the cost of the subsequent malaria outbreak is included — the Red Fed demanded a bailout from the federal government. The Pentagon lost its authority to act as a nonaligned arbiter of the national interest.

Maybe It’s Time for America to Split Up

When, months later, intelligence agencies issued a report pinning the crash of the western renewable-energy grid on a North Korean cyberattack, Red Fed cities saw some of their largest mass protests in years, all against a rush to war. As concerns about climate change have grown more dire, other countries have become intent on punishing dissenters from the international order, and the Red Fed is now a global villain. China announced most-favored-region trade policies that would give Blue Fed exporters an advantage over domestic rivals when selling into the Chinese market.

These trade-related conflicts squeeze Illinois, which wants to export Caterpillar tractors to China under favorable conditions but lags behind West Coast and New England states in transitioning to GMO-free agriculture. Although a founding member of the Blue Fed, Illinois at times felt geographically isolated, surrounded by Red Fed or neutral states. Illinois withdrew from the Blue Fed and helped to form the Great Lakes Federation, which stretches from Philadelphia to Des Moines and up to Duluth, with a permanent capital in Chicago.

As the year judicial truce is about to expire, the Midwest controls the balance of power in a Congress that may be forced by the Supreme Court to revisit some of its earliest assumptions about returning power to the states. There is another real-life contemporary example of a semi-secession: It, too, began as little more than a thought experiment. What if we could reject a far-off governing structure that no longer seems responsive to our interests in favor of local authority that can more closely match our aspirations and sense of identity as a people? There must have been something thrilling about getting to cast a vote for self-determination.

Yet those who are now forced to make that reverie real are pulling back from their former self-confidence about it. As it was for a majority of Britons, it is easier to imagine breaking up the United States than figuring out how to make it work — whether through bold new policies or merely a functioning version of consensus politics.

The seeming inelasticity of our system of governance also guarantees a security and predictability that we take for granted. A snapshot of what the nation would look like if it cleaved in three today. Disneyland, Statue of Liberty Red: Dollywood, Mount Rushmore Neutral: Yosemite, Rocky Mountain Red: Yellowstone, Grand Canyon Neutral: Less than 24 hours after it began, a Kentucky special session on pension reform ends with nothing accomplished.

A panel of federal judges announced Tuesday that it is dismissing all of the 83 ethics complaints brought against Justice Brett Kavanaugh regarding his behavior during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Their dismissal did not question the validity of the complaints but concluded that lower-court judges do not have the authority to investigate or punish Supreme Court justices. Traditionally, a presidential reelection committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it.

Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump reelection campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory.

Brokeback Mountain

The goal is to create a single, seamless organization that moves quickly, saves resources, and — perhaps most crucially — minimizes staff overlap and the kind of infighting that marked the relationship between the Trump campaign and the party. While a splintered field of Democrats fight for the nomination, Republicans expect to gain an organizational advantage. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination.

Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.

President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to create a unified combatant command for space operations, Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday. This will clearly take a while. Was the 44th president really a liberal Republican all along? Democrats warming to market-based mechanisms for achieving progressive goals, while Republicans abandoned progressive goals they used to share.

Both developments were occurring under Clinton, of course. What makes the characterization of Obama as anything other than a standard liberal Democrat a bit questionable, though, is the context: Like all ideologues, conservatives will have to choose between being regularly competitive or occasionally winning big and then wreaking havoc until they are expelled from office. Conservatives soured on one-time heroes Reagan before he became a saint again and George W.

Bush when they tried to do things to make conservatism more durable.

As I think Jon has said on many occasions, conservatism can never be wrong to these people, so they have a tendency to eat their own as an alternative to ideological adaptation. The experience of older African Americans like Rogers, for whom habits honed over decades of addiction are no longer safe. A New York state ban on nunchucks that was put into place over fears that youth inspired by martial arts movies would create widespread mayhem is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, a federal court has ruled. Judge Pamela Chen issued her ruling Friday in a Brooklyn federal court on the martial arts weapon made famous by Bruce Lee.

The appointment of GOP Rep. The Senate in the th Congress will have the highest number of all-women delegations in history. Kristin Gillibrand is still facing blowback from donors from her strong, early stance against Franken. A Yemeni woman has been granted permission by the U. Flynn decides to delay sentencing in order to get more consideration for cooperating with Mueller. This article on fake sponsored content from TheAtlantic is a must read! A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. But the hardest deal to land is your first, several influencers say; companies want to see your promotional abilities and past campaign work.

So many have adopted a new strategy: Fake it until you make it. Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption carefully written in that particular style of ad speak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize. Well, everybody knew Kyl was a placeholder. But appointing McSally was probably a strategic gamble that made sense to Republicans.

On the one hand, she just got through losing a Senate race. I had also read that some regarded her senate campaign as a lackluster one. Others might have to recount remarks made in , when every other Republican was mocking or bashing the dude. Arizona along with Georgia, Texas and North Carolina are sunbelt states slowly trending purple or blue, depending on how you look at it. Some minds are open, and even in those that at first seem firmly shut, I discovered potential crossover topics — getting money out of politics, for example, or rebuilding our infrastructure, reducing nonviolent prison populations, limiting violent video games for children, expanding renewable energy, compromising on town square statues and avoiding nuclear war.

As of October , the Bridge Alliance had three million supporters. In the past, we had ways of mixing up Americans who differ by class, race, and region — lines along which we now often vote. More than four decades back, the compulsory draft offered that mix for men, and labor unions provided that for many workers, while public schools offered it to many children.

• Nitschke.
• Brokeback Mountain - Wikiquote;
• Ugly Face.
• The Wish Machine?
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• Particles In A Stream D-Day And After;

Today we need to create new ways to bridge our differences. A national service program could place young Americans of every race, region, and religion in a yearlong service project somewhere far from home. We could also set up a nationwide high school domestic exchange program — high school seniors from the South could spend a month with families of students in the North, and the North could, in this way, go South.

Coasts could go inland, the inland head to the coasts. Students could prepare for this by learning active listening and epistemology — how we know what we know — as well as history and civics. Students could lay solar panels on school roofs, build parks, plant gardens. But in this dream, as students wash dishes, hammer nails, and plant seeds, they take on the questions that so bitterly divide us. Are we drifting away from democracy? Who do we imagine to be cutting in line ahead of us?