From the Great State of Arizona (not to pick on the sane people trapped there):
Then there was Sylvia Allen, a real estate broker from the town of Snowflake, who, in 2008, was appointed by the local Republican Party to finish the term of a respected conservative who had died in office. Allen, who retained her seat in an election that fall, has since gained minor notoriety after calling for more uranium mining, saying in a speech that "this earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with." She also has complained that trees are "stealing Arizona's water supply" and sponsored a new law that allows carriers of concealed weapons to forego safety training and the indignity of background checks.
Those damned trees! And:
A similar crew was elected to the house, including Frank Antenori. "I despise expansion of government into people's lives," he said on the campaign trail. "K-12 is meant to prepare kids to enter the world. . . . We need to spend less time teaching how to put condoms on cucumbers and more time on balancing a checkbook."â¯
Clearly he doesn't spend a lot of time actually talking to real kids.....
State and local governments are often less responsive to citizens' needs: most people don't vote in these elections and know very little about the candidates. It's difficult to find out what these officials are doing through the local press. At least when a federal official does something outrageous, it's more likely to be covered.
Of course, maybe that's the whole idea of 'turning government over to the states'....
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Wow. That's a new theory. The Great Water Theft
The whole thing about trees is wrong, except in special cases. The case of melaleuca trees in the everglades is one of them.
http://plants.ifas.ufl.edu/node/264
But somehow I doubt she had that in mind when she made the statement.
Now that I think of it, she may have a point.
What DO they do with all that water that they're always sucking out of the ground? I just cut down the tree in my front yard to find where it stores the water AND THERE WAS NOT WATER IN THE TREE!!!!
CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN WHAT IS GOING ON HERE??? WHERE IS OUR WATER GOING???!?!!?
/Conspiratree theorizing
/Humor
I learned about balancing a checkbook in the 4th grade, but never received formal education on condoms. How does putting a condom on a cucumber help? Trees are actually water pumps in disguise, particularly mesquite trees which can put roots down 150 ft.
So what's the point of this OP? There are a couple of nuts in Arizona? That proves what? After all, this website is crawling with nuts.
Why not mention the levelheaded Arizonans that want to stop illegal aliens from over-running their state? There's nothing crazy about that, and there are a lot more of them than the idiots you cited.
You guys want more federal government?
Really?
Are you serious?
Nobody is that bone-achingly stupid. (You're not, are you?)
We need about 1/10th the government we have, and then that would be too much.
Thomas Paine wrote, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
Well, boys and girls, it's here. Worst arrived about two years ago when the Liar-in-Chief was elected.
The emphasis for #5 is definitely on the word "little", as in tiny. Common sense isn't.
So...there should not be more regulation of, say, dishonest banks? What about the levels of arsenic in the water of parts of Arizona?
As for immigration, I bet many of your congresscritters voted for the same NAFTA treaty that meant the death of a lot of Mexican farming businesses, leaving several million additional Mexicans in a state of poverty and few other means of making a living than going to el Norte or joining the gangsters (which incidentally get much of their weapons from Arizona. Not all, but a considerable fraction). So why don't start by holding those politicians to account?
#6
You might have a point. Maybe I should have used "A little more common sense than is typically found on this blog."
#7
Where did you get all that crap? More regulation? No, Hell, no. Enforce the regulations that are already on the books. You want to regulate something? Let Congress have oversight of the Federal Reserve.
Arsenic? Go take some. It would help you. In the meantime. let the states handle everything not delegated to the Federal government. Suggestion: read the Constitution and the first ten Amendments.
NAFTA? Immigration? So we should open our borders for these poor peons? How about all the American workers who saw their jobs go to China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Taiwan, India, and Pakistan? I guess you think they should continue to support the illegal alien peons even though they're out of work themselves? Idiot.
Gangsters? Weapons from Arizona? Idiot! No one except a government agency can buy those weapons you saw on the lamestream media evening news in the USA. Submachine guns, assault rifles, grenades, RPGs, rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, and landmines cannot - repeat CANNOT - be purchased in the United States. Not even by the Frito Bandito.
Most of those weapons you saw on CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS came from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belgium, Israel, Bulgaria, and other nations via the international arms market. The ones that didn't came from the Mexican Army itself.
You want to know what percent of weapons come from the US? Less than one percent. See, your lamestream media quoted the percent of weapons traced by the BATF, not the percent of all weapons taken in Mexico. Hell, they don't trace machine guns, etc because they cannot be purchased here in the first place.
See, I don't trust any politician. Left, right, democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, fascist, communist, or libertarian. Politician is a synonym for liar, self-aggrandizing liar.
Give a politician power, and he will use it for his own benefit.
No, what we need are term limits (6 and 4), and that's just a beginning.
The trouble is, littlecommonsense,s that humans are probably hardwired to be political. After all our closest relatives, the chimps, are very political. They have been seen organizing themselves into cliques inside the individual troops on the basis of perceived shared common interest and even ignoring their intra-troop alliances in order to unite and deal with threats arising from troops outside their own. And, while chimps and humans societies obviously aren't in complete correlation, as social apes we do probably share inherent psychological structures that facilitate the self-organizing of individuals into groups.
So the question isn't whether humans organize into groups with political objectives but how they organize themselves. We can have an organization based purely on economic grounds, where leadership (and there will always be a leadership) is conferred by how much wealth they control or you can have that tendency somewhat mollified by democratic forms of organization where the leadership has to pass through the filter of public opinion and interests.
It seems to me that local forms of government most closely resemble those intra-troop cliques we see in chimps, where the rewards of power are doled out to the members of the clique and withheld from those outside it. It is a naturally more fertile ground for corruption. National government is different, since the number of individuals and groups is so great and the range of interests so diverse that it is hard for policy to be written that favors one group over others without the others raising a big stink about it. It makes national government more cumbersome but also makes it less likely to favor one group over another (although it obviously isn't impossible).
Balancing a checkbook? What fucking decade is this? Who the hell uses a checkbook for anything any more?
Dunc, I learned about checking accounts in the fourth grade in 1945. In those days, all business in Texas was conducted by check. Today, I get irritated if someone in line in front of me in the store is paying by check.
State and local governments are often less responsive to citizens' needs: most people don't vote in these elections and know very little about the candidates.
One would hope that if state and local governments were more powerful, people would pay more attention to them.
Dunc: Balancing a checkbook? What fucking decade is this? Who the hell uses a checkbook for anything any more?
Assume that's shorthand for "paying attention to your expenditures from your checking account, whether they're paid by direct deposit, debit card, or withdrawn from the ATM". I haven't written an actual check in more than two years, but I still refer to going and checking my banks webpage as "balancing my checkbook".
Michael, how is it then that you do not seem to know that looking up your balance on line is a much simpler and somewhat different task than balancing a checkbook?
One involves remembering passwords (and being aware of phishing schemes), the other involves keeping a column for deposits vs a column for withdrawals and keeping track of what the balance *ought* to be when some idiot hangs on to your check for 5 months without cashing it. It would be a waste of time to teach the latter skills-- which are what balancing a checkbook actually is-- instead of securing online transactions and taking precautions against identity theft, which is the main skillset needed for the modern world.
"It seems to me that local forms of government most closely resemble those intra-troop cliques we see in chimps, where the rewards of power are doled out to the members of the clique and withheld from those outside it."
City Hall was the birth of the political machine. I concur completely that the more local the politics, the more corrupt.