Independent Candidate Quotes

The Republican party is the party of nostalgia. It seeks to return America to a simpler, more innocent and moral past that never actually existed. The Democrats are utopians. They seek to create an America so fair and non-judgmental that life becomes an unbearable series of apologies. Together, the two parties function like giant down comforters, allowing a candidate to disappear into the enveloping softness, protecting them from exposure to the harsh weather of independent thought.

One of the first to reevaluate Genghis Khan was an unlikely candidate: peace advocate Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Indian independence.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

Tom Cruise, the church’s most coveted, celebrated, and protected celebrity member, and David Miscavige, the tyrannical leader and current head of the church. Ironically, for me and for most other people who have left the church and spoken out against it, the very qualities that we’ve been penalized for—defying, questioning, thinking independently—are the same qualities that made us prime candidates for Scientology in the first place.

I see you are in a dilemma, and one of a peculiar and difficult nature. Two paths lie before you; you conscientiously wish to choose the right one, even though it be the most steep, straight, and rugged; but you do not know which is the right one; you cannot decide whether duty and religion command you to go out into the cold and friendless world, and there to earn your living by governess drudgery, or whether they enjoin your continued stay with your aged mother, neglecting, for the present, every prospect of independency for yourself, and putting up with the daily inconvenience, sometimes even with privations. I can well imagine, that it is next to impossible for you to decide for yourself in this matter, so I will decide it for you. At least, I will tell you what is my earnest conviction on the subject; I will show you candidly how the question strikes me. The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest -- which implies the greatest good to others; and this path, steadily followed, will lead, I believe, in time, to prosperity and to happiness; though it may seem, at the outset, to tend quite in a contrary direction. Your mother is both old and infirm; old and infirm people have but few resources of happiness -- fewer almost than the comparatively young and healthy can conceive; to deprive them of one of these is cruel. If your mother is more composed when you are with her, stay with her. If she would be unhappy in case you left her, stay with her. It will not apparently, as far as short-sighted humanity can see, be for your advantage to remain at XXX, nor will you be praised and admired for remaining at home to comfort your mother; yet, probably, your own conscience will approve, and if it does, stay with her. I recommend you to do what I am trying to do myself. [Quoted from a letter to a friend, referenced in the last chapter of Vol 1. "The Life of Charlotte Bronte" by Elizabeth Gaskell ]

During elections, political parties lend their credibility to the public to ensure that their candidates' promises are fulfilled. Independent candidates, on the other hand, are indebted and committed to nowhere.

The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.

Roy and I independently came up with Aaron Kosminski as our likeliest candidate.

this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left,’ focused on ‘identity politics’ too much. We focused on the needs of black people, trans people, women, Latinx people. All this specialized focus divided people and left out working-class white men. That is the argument, anyways.

Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country? And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.

The expectation of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media was inconsistent with the prior trend, over fifty years, of African Americans giving 11 to 16 percent of their vote to Republican and Independent candidates in presidential elections. Among recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Al Gore in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 have received 90 percent or more of the black vote. Hillary Clinton received 88 percent of the African American vote. Stop the Steal, Inc. I

By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.

Taft explained that the great issue in this campaign is "creeping socialism." Now that is the patented trademark of the special interest lobbies. Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people. When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" on the banner of his "great crusade," that is really not what he means at all. What he really means is, "Down with Progress--down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," and "down with Harry Truman's fair Deal." That is what he means. (Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in SYRACUSE, NEW YORK (Near station, 1:25 p.m. October 10, 1952 ) trumanlibrary dot org publicpapers

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they’re corporate, but let’s face it—those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It’s next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

Here’s what presidential candidate Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama: Barack Obama is not a very good President. He said Barack Obama doesn’t do a very good job on the economy; he said that Obama’s foreign policy has a lot of holes in it; he said Obama has done a pretty poor job across the board of working in bipartisan fashion. But, Romney added, Obama’s a good guy. He’s a good family man, a good husband, a man who believes in the basic principles espoused by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is not someone you should be afraid of in any way. Essentially, Romney’s campaign slogan was this: “Obama: Good Guy, Bad President.

We need to do something that bold. Something that will upset the entire game. In 2016, we should call for an “electoral blank-out.” We vote in the national election for the presidency of the United States, but we leave the ballot blank or write in “none of the above.” This isn’t your standard call for a third-party candidate or an independent black political thrust. Nor is it a rejection of our sacred duty to vote. Exercising the franchise is sacred. Actually, I want black people to turn out for the election in record numbers without Obama on the ticket, but give our attention to other issues on the ballot. We should vote in congressional, state, and local elections.

In our desire to have a political tribe to belong to, we create an idol. When we cast aside our intellectual curiosity, refuse to adapt our opinions on policy when presented with new information, and lose our ability to view each candidate and every issue independently, we have cast our lot with a political party. We have sworn allegiance to something or someone who is not God and was never designed to be worshipped.

Adhering too blindly and unyieldingly to a particular party is detrimental to the wellfare of humanity. We should be discerning, watching for candidates who have a career of demonstrable justice, wisdom, compassion and goodness. Otherwise you become recordings of a party line incapable of standing up to an associated group should they legitimately be screwing up. It just becomes about BEING right instead of doing right.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

The official obeys whom he serves. Nominated independently of the people, elected because there is no choice between candidates so nominated, the official feels responsibility to his master alone, and his master is the political machine of his party. The people whom he serves in theory, he may safely disobey; having the support of his political organization, he is sure of his renomination and knows he will be carried through the election, because his opponent will offer nothing better to the long suffering voter

those carrying out the vision of the anointed. Families who wish to be independent financially and to make their own decisions about their lives are of little interest or use to those who are seeking to impose their superior wisdom and virtue on other people. Earning their own money makes these families unlikely candidates for third-party direction and wishing to retain what they have earned threatens to deprive the anointed of the money needed to distribute as largess to others who would thus become subject to their direction.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and he came to the Court ready to implement it.

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and

By early May 1959, it became clear that the Chinese could not stem the tide of refugees, nor would they passively accept that India was offering sanctuary to the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan refugees. It was then that Nehru, for the first time as prime minister, candidly asserted that India had to adhere to its basic values and beliefs “even though the Chinese do not like it.”7 With this assertion, and in the face of China’s virulent anti-Indian rhetoric, Nehru assented to providing accommodation and material relief to the Tibetan refugees who had begun to find their way into India. Within the month, the Indian government had begun to issue “Indian Registration Certificates” to the more than 15,000 Tibetans who had entered the country. By the end of 1962, when the Chinese had effectively sealed the Indo-Tibetan border, no fewer than 80,000 Tibetans had traveled by foot from Tibet, with most of them settling as resident refugees in India.8 China regarded India’s actions in providing asylum for the Dalai Lama and the multitude of refugees who flowed into India in the months and years following the March Uprising as prima facie evidence of India promoting Tibetan independence.

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The factors that usually decide presidential elections—the economy, likability of the candidates, and so on—added up to a wash, and the outcome came down to a few key swing states. Mitt Romney’s campaign followed a conventional polling approach, grouping voters into broad categories and targeting each one or not. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, said that “if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.” Romney won them by 7 percent but still lost the state and the election. In contrast, President Obama hired Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning expert, as chief scientist of his campaign, and Ghani proceeded to put together the greatest analytics operation in the history of politics. They consolidated all voter information into a single database; combined it with what they could get from social networking, marketing, and other sources; and set about predicting four things for each individual voter: how likely he or she was to support Obama, show up at the polls, respond to the campaign’s reminders to do so, and change his or her mind about the election based on a conversation about a specific issue. Based on these voter models, every night the campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election and used the results to direct its army of volunteers: whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say. In politics, as in business and war, there is nothing worse than seeing your opponent make moves that you don’t understand and don’t know what to do about until it’s too late. That’s what happened to the Romney campaign. They could see the other side buying ads in particular cable stations in particular towns but couldn’t tell why; their crystal ball was too fuzzy. In the end, Obama won every battleground state save North Carolina and by larger margins than even the most accurate pollsters had predicted. The most accurate pollsters, in turn, were the ones (like Nate Silver) who used the most sophisticated prediction techniques; they were less accurate than the Obama campaign because they had fewer resources. But they were a lot more accurate than the traditional pundits, whose predictions were based on their expertise. You might think the 2012 election was a fluke: most elections are not close enough for machine learning to be the deciding factor. But machine learning will cause more elections to be close in the future. In politics, as in everything, learning is an arms race. In the days of Karl Rove, a former direct marketer and data miner, the Republicans were ahead. By 2012, they’d fallen behind, but now they’re catching up again.

TIME FOR MORE TEA He does not keep the wicked alive but gives the afflicted their rights. Job 36:6 We the people. That’s what so many Americans have rallied around since the unstoppable Tea Party grassroots movement emerged. It resonates deeply with our Founders’ vision for an America created by the people and for the people, while it fights to ensure our lives are not ruled by the elites in Washington. And where do these convictions originate? We believe we’re created in God’s image and thus have God-given rights that we must protect from the destructive forces of the federal government. Even as the liberal media mock our ideals and our leaders, and even dare to mock our God, we have continued to stand for what is right. We stand because our hope comes from above, not from our TV screens and from Washington. Liberal elites put patriots down and mock them because they’re scared of conscientious, independent citizens. They look around and realize there are more of us than there are of them. They’re scared, because they see how people flock to a message of truth and hope. Patriots will keep winning because when the true biblical hope that the Founders enshrined in our Constitution is held up next to the façade of hope that this world offers, hope rooted in Christ always wins. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, support those in your community who are truly fighting to uphold our one nation under God! Get involved in a local campaign for a candidate who stands for these principles.

This is an egregious breach of journalistic ethics. It’s absolutely inappropriate, whether they consider themselves “journalists” or not. You don’t “act” the part of an independent, objective host and secretly rehearse your exchanges with a candidate. Ever. If neither gifts nor praise worked, Trump would use insults or threats. Commentators like Charles Krauthammer, Brit Hume, George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Dana Perino, Rich Lowry, Steve Hayes, Marc Thiessen, and Chris Stirewalt were derided as “dummies” or “losers” or “lightweights” or “failures” for offering their honest, albeit unflattering, analysis of Trump. Anyone who didn’t fall under the Trump spell was fair game. Plenty of straight news reporters were hit too. The Des Moines Register’s journalists were banned from Trump’s campaign events because the paper’s editorial board had harshly criticized him. The Washington Post was later banned for similar reasons. So were Univision, the Daily Beast, and others. The message was clear: cover Trump “nicely,” and good things happen. Hit him too hard, and suffer the consequences. He’d been laying the groundwork for that basic strategy for months before he launched his campaign.   In

The primary elections are the cornerstones of the plebiscitary presidency. They strip away the veneer of party unity and expose the individuality of each candidate. As contemporary selection procedures force party leaders to compete with one another in the open, they prompt them to differentiate themselves publicly and to boast of their independence of mind. Pitting potential party spokespersons against one another in public combat, these procedures undercut the credibility of the candidate's affiliation with anything other than him- or herself.

Trump’s popularity suggested that voters were hungry for independent candidates who wouldn’t spout the donors’ lines. His call to close the carried-interest tax loophole, and talk of the ultrarich not paying its share, as well as his anti-immigrant rants, made his opponents appear robotically subservient, and out of touch. But few other Republican candidates could afford to ignore the Kochs.

On January 21, 2010, the Court announced its 5–4 decision in the Citizens United case, overturning a century of restrictions banning corporations and unions from spending all they wanted to elect candidates. The Court held that so long as businesses and unions didn’t just hand their money to the candidates, which could be corrupt, but instead gave it to outside groups that were supporting or opposing the candidates and were technically independent of the campaigns, they could spend unlimited amounts to promote whatever candidates they chose. To reach the verdict, the Court accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights to free speech as citizens.

Early on in Midyear, the politically appointed leadership—Attorney General Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates—had decided not to recuse themselves. Somehow, they saw the investigation of Hillary Clinton—former First Lady and former secretary of state, current candidate for the presidency, likely nominee of the Democratic Party, who was being supported by the president of the United States, to whom they owed their jobs—as a case they could handle without prejudice. Recusal would have been a reasonable and, I would argue, better decision for those political appointees to have made. A special prosecutor could have been appointed to oversee the case, to work with the career professionals at Justice or other attorneys. It would have been an extreme choice but also a safe one. I don’t know why they didn’t do that. Instead, they made a feckless compromise. They designated career professionals in the National Security Division as decision makers in this case but didn’t unambiguously commit to abide by those people’s decisions. The leadership at Justice chose not to be involved but also not to be recused—the worst possible choice afforded by the situation. They were not far enough removed to eliminate suspicion of partisan motivation, and not closely enough involved to exercise the active discernment that such a sensitive case demanded. It was a fatal choice. Had there been a competent, credible special counsel running Midyear Exam independently—the way Bob Mueller’s Russia investigation has been run—I think circumstances might have been very different, and we would not have been where we ended up in July.

No minor-party candidate has ever won the presidency or, for that matter, even come close. For the most part, these ego-driven ‘independent’ adventures in electoral narcissism push the political process further away from their supporters’ professed goals, rather than advancing the insurgent group’s agenda or ideas.

On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future.

2000, Trump was seeking the Reform Party nomination, a movement which that year was spearheaded by retired professional wrestler Jesse Ventura. The Reform Party originated in the mid-90s as a vehicle for then-candidate Ross Perot to run for President in 1996 and it seemed the perfect vehicle for the politically ambitious, but independently minded, Donald J. Trump just four years later.

The Court in Citizens United overruled its decision in Austin and the parts of its opinion in McConnell that had upheld the ban on corporate spending. Corporations, it determined, were free to spend in elections however they liked (short of contributing to candidates). The Court’s decision in Citizens United broke from previous opinions that tolerated the regulation of corporate spending on the basis of preventing corruption. Such an interest, wrote Kennedy, was minimal in comparison to the necessity of protecting the freedom of speech, including that of corporate organizations. In short, the justices determined that corporations—regardless of their structure or purpose—had First Amendment speech rights akin to those of private citizens. They deemed the BCRA’s “prohibition on corporate independent expenditures … an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions … notwithstanding the fact that a PAC created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence.

Voters-- Republicans, Democrats, and Independents-- passed judgement on the candidates based on the same information delivered from the same sources. While American always was-- as it has always been-- quite divided, that division existed as a disagreement over a shared set of facts and a mutual understanding of the challenges.

ECB – unlike, say, the US Federal Reserve which is placed within a political structure where Congress, the President, and the Treasury supply all the necessary political counterweights – is free (indeed, is supposed) to operate in a political vacuum: the parliaments and governments of the members of the euro zone have lost control over monetary policy, while the EP has no authority in this area. Moreover, the ECB enjoys not only ‘instrument independence’ but also ‘goal independence’. When a central bank enjoys only instrument independence, it is up to the government to fix the target – say, the politically acceptable level of inflation – leaving then the central bank free to decide how best to achieve the target. In the case of goal independence, the discretionary power of the central banker is much larger. The idea that central bankers, or other economic experts, may know what rate of inflation is in the long-run interest of a country (and, a fortiori, of a group of countries at very different levels of socioeconomic developments such as the EU) is indeed extraordinary. Politicians and elected policymakers, rather than experts, can be expected to be sensitive to the public’s preferred balance of inflation and unemployment. If the public wants to trade some unemployment for a somewhat higher rate of inflation, it can make this preference known by electing candidates who stand for such a policy; but no such possibility is given to the citizens of the euro zone or to their political representatives.

The U.S. was able to impose its will and force this traditionally independent country to act, even though Switzerland has maintained its banking activities in a strictly confidential manner, for centuries. As set forth in detail in Chapter 8, America has been instrumental in the change in leadership of a number of foreign nations.  A fair analysis would have to conclude that America is by far the only real candidate for the position of “hammer of the whole world.” Who else thinks that America is the “hammer of the whole earth”?

a president has every right to choose the generals and admirals he wants, but it is also the case that he usually then gets the generals and admirals he deserves. If a president indicates by his actions that he does not want smart, independently minded generals who speak candidly to their civilian leaders, the message that generals and admirals may receive is that they should go along to get along.

You may know that a prisoner’s guilt is independent of whether you’re hungry or not, but she’ll still seem like a better parole candidate when you’ve recently had a snack.

regime also imposed a further restriction on religious parties (and independent parliamentary candidates), namely an amendment of Articles 1 and 2 of the constitution to define Egypt as ‘a state of citizenship’ and remove the reference to Islam as ‘the religion of the state’. The change in theory would have the effect of allowing women, and Christians, to run for any position, including the presidency.

There's another promising idea about what the dark matter is, which emerges from a different proposal for improving the equations of physics. As we've discussed, QCD is in a profound and literal sense constructed as the embodiment of symmetry. There is an almost perfect match between the observed properties of quarks and gluons and the most general properties allowed by local color symmetry, in the framework of special relativity and quantum mechanics. The only exception is that the established symmetries of QCD fail to forbid one sort of behavior that is not observed to occur. The established symmetries permit a sort of interaction among gluons that would spoil the symmetry of the equations of QCD under a change in the direction of time. Experiments provide severe limits on the possible strength of that interaction. The limits are much more severe than might be expected to arise accidentally. The Core theory does not explain this "coincidence." Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn found a way to expand the equations that would explain it. Steven Weinberg and I, independently, showed that the expanded equations predict the existence of new, very light, very weakly interacting particles called axions. Axions are also serious candidates to provide the cosmological dark matter. In principle they might be observed in a variety of ways. Though none is easy, the hunt is on. It's also possible that both ideas are right, and both kinds of particles contribute to the total amount of dark matter. Wouldn't that be pretty?

Introducing the No More Tears Slicer, which lets you slice your prep time in half! With the No More Tears Onion Slicer, you can slice your way through onions, dice vegetables, and slice cheese in minutes! This is one kitchen tool you don't want to do without! Order this time-saving instrument NOW for the TV-price of only $19.99! The University of Portlandia is seeking a research fellow to work on the Multilingual Metrolingualism (MM) project, a new five-year NSF-funded project led by Dr Hannelore Holmes. We are seeking a highly motivated and committed researcher to work on all aspects of the MM Project, but in particular on developing a coding system suitable for urban youth language use. Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant area of sociolinguistics or a closely related field. Proficiency in at least one of the following languages is essential: French, Swahili, Mandarin, or Tok Pisin. Candidates must also have good knowledge and understanding of discourse analysis, semiotics, and grammatical analysis. Applicants should demonstrate enthusiasm for independent research and commitment to developing their research career. The post is fixed-term for five years due to funding. The post is available from April 1 or as soon as possible thereafter. Job sharers welcome. The University of Portlandia is an Equal Opportunity

What America needs more than political reform is political courage—candidates and politicians who are not afraid to risk losing the office they hold to accomplish the greater good. The Founders were not concerned about political survival; they worried about being hanged when they signed the Declaration of Independence. Yet they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause in which they believed so strongly.

while the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United clearly paved the way for the D.C. Court of Appeals’ ruling in SpeechNow, the latter case had far-reaching implications. Indeed, in greatly expanding the ability of private citizens to collectively spend money to influence the outcome of campaigns at all levels of government, SpeechNow was an important case in shaping American elections in its own right. Effectively, SpeechNow lifted contribution limits on PACs if they neither contributed money to candidates or parties nor coordinated their activities with them. Indeed, the FEC moved quickly to clarify the new rules in advisory opinions issued shortly thereafter, which clearly stated not only that corporations could form “independent expenditure-only committees,” but that those committees could accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and unions.10 The new rules meant that PACs intending to allocate their funds only to independent expenditures—absent guidance from a party or candidate committee—could not be subject to the limitations faced by traditional, donation-focused committees.

Canadian Permanent Residency, Australia Permanent Residency, and Germany Permanent Residency: Your Path to a Better Future At ESSE India, we understand that securing Permanent Residency (PR) in countries like Canada, Australia, and Germany can open doors to unparalleled opportunities. Whether you are a skilled professional, student, or family looking for a brighter future, these countries offer exceptional immigration programs tailored to various needs. With pathways like Canada’s Express Entry, Australia’s Global Talent Stream, and Germany’s EU Blue Card, understanding the right PR process is key to your success. 1. Canadian Permanent Residency (PR) Why Choose Canada for Permanent Residency? Canada’s welcoming policies and strong support for skilled workers and international students make it a top destination for those seeking PR. The Express Entry system is the most sought-after route, ensuring faster processing and a smooth transition to Canadian life. How the Express Entry System Works Canada’s Express Entry system manages three main immigration programs: • Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) • Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP) • Canadian Experience Class (CEC) Applicants are assessed using the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS), where points are assigned for factors like age, education, work experience, and language skills. If you want to increase your chances of getting an Invitation to Apply (ITA), you can apply through Provincial Nominee Programs (PNP) like BCPNP, MPNP, or NBPNP. These programs can boost your CRS score by an additional 600 points. Latest Express Entry Updates Recent draws show the competitive nature of Express Entry: • September 19, 2024: 4,000 ITAs were issued for CEC candidates with a minimum CRS of 509. • August 27, 2024: 3,300 ITAs were issued for CEC candidates with a minimum CRS of 507. Canada Immigration Consultants in India Our Canada immigration consultants in India provide expert guidance on navigating the complex Canada PR process. With our personalized approach, we ensure that your documents meet the stringent requirements, paving the way for a successful PR application. 2. Australia Permanent Residency (PR) Why Choose Australia for Permanent Residency? Australia’s booming economy and need for skilled professionals make it an attractive option for PR. Through the General Skilled Migration (GSM) program, Australia offers several visa categories, ensuring that you find the perfect pathway to PR. General Skilled Migration (GSM) Pathways Australia’s PR process offers various visa options, including: • Skilled Independent Visa (Subclass 189) • Skilled Nominated Visa (Subclass 190) • Skilled Work Regional Visa (Subclass 491) The GSM system is points-based, with applicants scoring higher points in areas such as qualifications and work experience having better chances. Australia’s Global Talent Stream is also available for fast-tracking PR in high-demand sectors such as IT, engineering, and healthcare. Australia Immigration Consultants in India At ESSE India, our Australia immigration consultants provide comprehensive support to Indian applicants throughout the Australia PR process. Whether it’s improving your points score or handling your visa application, we ensure a seamless process. 3. Germany Permanent Residency (PR) Why Choose Germany for Permanent Residency? Germany, with its strong economy and demand for skilled workers, is an excellent option for PR. The EU Blue Card offers an efficient route for qualified professionals to live and work in Germany. After 21-33 months, Blue Card holders are eligible for permanent residency. Global Talent Stream in Germany Germany’s Global Talent Stream attracts highly skilled professionals, especially in fields like technology and engineering, helping you achieve PR faster.

In October of 2011, per the terms outlined in the district court’s order, the FEC issued a statement announcing that it would no longer enforce restrictions on contributions to non-connected PACs like the NDPAC, so long as such groups maintained separate accounts for donations and independent expenditures.13 This announcement marked the birth of the “hybrid PAC,” which can make contributions to federal candidates using regulated, limited contributions, and can make independent expenditures using unlimited contributions, including those from corporate and union sources.

It is the term “social welfare” that allows some leeway for groups who might be inclined to participate in federal politics, as it can be argued that political advocacy falls within the broad umbrella of promoting the common good. The 501(c)(4) designation therefore allows groups to conduct political activities, but it also affords an additional benefit: 501(c)(4) groups are not required to disclose their donors to the FEC. This latter point became particularly important in the wake of Citizens United. The 527 organizations that began gaining notoriety for their activities in 2004 had long been allowed to pursue political activities exclusively, and had been required to disclose their donors even before passage of the BCRA. Although the BCRA limitations on “express advocacy” constrained the 527s somewhat, the rules did provide an outlet for unlimited—albeit disclosed—contributions for issue advertising prior to 2010. There was effectively no benefit of seeking 501(c)(4) tax status during this period, however. Since the IRS prior to 2010 employed a broad definition of political activities prohibited for 501(c) groups, there was little reason to risk running afoul of the tax code. Groups with a primarily political purpose could achieve tax-free status and avoid IRS scrutiny by organizing as a 527 group and disclosing their donors.15 In expanding permissible election-related activity however, the Citizens United decision immediately made 501(c)(4)s a more attractive option for groups looking to make independent expenditures. Importantly, because they are primarily defined as nonprofit “social welfare” organizations as opposed to political committees, 501(c)(4)s are not allowed to make or sponsor advertisements naming a candidate their primary activity, meaning that they must constrain their election-related spending to half of their overall expenditures. Yet, if corporations and other groups could not be stopped from spending money in elections—even for express advocacy—in the wake of Citizens United, it was considerably more difficult for the IRS to stop a 501(c) group from doing so either. After Citizens United, 501(c)(4)s therefore differed little from 527s either in the type of activities they could legally spend money on or the size of the contributions they could receive. However, the lack of a disclosure requirement for 501(c)(4)s provides a considerable advantage compared to 527s. Seeking 501(c)(4) status in the post–Citizens United world therefore seems like a prudent move for groups wanting to accept unlimited contributions, but who might not be inclined to publicize their donor lists: At present, 501(c)(4)s can pursue electioneering activities using anonymous unlimited funders so long as their activities can plausibly be defended as contributing to the social welfare (broadly defined) and so long as political spending does not constitute their “primary” expenditure (Luo 2010). In practice, the IRS/FEC has taken “primary” to mean more than half of a group’s overall expenditures.

Data from previous years are consistent with the notion of a growing proportion of independent expenditures spent to oppose—rather than support—candidates in federal elections. The CRP maintains summary records of independent expenditures made for every federal candidate, and Figure 3.4 depicts the percentage of independent expenditures made Figure 3.4 Percentage of Independent Expenditures Made to “Oppose” General Election Candidates for U.S. House, 2004–2012 Source: Authors' analysis of data obtained from the Center for Responsive Politics website “in opposition” to candidates for election cycles going back to 2004.23 Data are included for expenditures made during the entirety of an election cycle for candidates who ran through the general election.

Figure 3.5 Mean Independent Expenditures 2008–2012 (in 2012 Dollars), by Candidate Status, in U.S. House Races Where Expenditures Were Made Sources: Financial data from the Center for Responsive Politics; candidate data from Professor Gary C. Jacobson

Third, although the $179 million spent by hybrid PACs is hardly inconsequential, the spending of those organizations paled in comparison to super PACs. The latter spent $800 million in total during the 2012 federal elections. Of that sum, more than $600 million was spent on independent expenditures. Given that making independent expenditures is the sole political purpose for the existence of super PACs, it is hardly surprising that they directed 75 percent of their funds to that purpose. Super PACs’ independent expenditures are far and away the leader in that category, and amount to about half of the total spending of House candidates in 2012. It remains to be seen what the future holds for hybrid PACs, but it seems safe to conclude that super PACs in 2012 were key players with a capacity for mass communication rivaling that of most federal candidates.

Table 2.1 Key Contribution and Expenditure Rules in 2012 Contributions Individuals PACs Super PACs Hybrid* PACs National Parties Corporations Unions 501(c)(4) Can donate directly to candidates Yes Yes No Yes Yes No No No Contribution limit to federal candidates, per election $2,500 $5,000 N/A $5,000 $5,000 N/A N/A N/A Expenditures for “Express Advocacy” Individuals Standard PACs Super PACs Hybrid* PACs National Parties Corporations Unions 501(c)(4) Can purchase ads naming candidates near an election Yes Yes Yes** Yes** Yes Yes** Yes** Yes** Limitation on express advocacy No No No No No No No Yes*** *Hybrid PACs, like traditional PACs, can make contributions to federal candidates using regulated, limited contributions. So long as the hybrid PAC maintains a separate account, it can also make independent expenditures using unlimited contributions for express advocacy, like a super PAC. **Was legal in 2012, but not 2008. ***There is no statutory dollar limitation on political activities of 501(c)(4) groups, but they are constrained to spending 50% of their budget on such activities.

That case was brought by a group called Speechnow.org (SpeechNow), which unlike Citizens United, was not a corporate entity. Rather, it was a nonprofit 527 “political organization” dedicated to advocating for the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. SpeechNow accepted donations only from individuals, and its bylaws prohibited it from contributing funds to candidates for office. Though SpeechNow had not begun political activity when it initiated the federal lawsuit in February 2008 (well before the outcome of Citizens United was known), its stated intention was to accept donations from private donors, aggregate them, and spend those funds solely on independent expenditures. Importantly, however, SpeechNow also wanted to pursue express advocacy promoting the election of certain candidates who it hoped would advocate for the First Amendment when they reached office. SpeechNow was therefore effectively asking the federal judiciary to carve out rules for a new type of political group. Unlike standard PACs, SpeechNow was not interested in contributing to candidates, and unlike 527s, it wanted to purchase express advocacy advertising.

With regard to whether individuals could be legally subjected to contribution limits if SpeechNow or other groups had no intention of contributing to candidates for office, the Court of Appeals looked to Citizens United. There, the Appeals Court justices found a clear answer. “Because of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC,” they wrote, “the analysis is straightforward. [In Citizens United], the Court held that the government has no anti-corruption interest in limiting independent expenditures” (10). Given that the only legitimate rationale the Supreme Court had traditionally recognized for regulating political money was the government’s anticorruption interest, and because its opinion in Citizens United held that independent expenditures (regardless of size) are not inherently corrupting absent coordination between a group and a candidate, the Appeals Court determined that SpeechNow was free to accept contributions of any size. The majority put it rather succinctly: “No matter which standard of review governs contribution limits, the limits on contributions to SpeechNow cannot stand” (16).

Since the decision in SpeechNow, a number of campaign finance cases have made their way through the system, and most have sought to chip away further at the regulatory framework. Perhaps the most notable of such cases decided to date is Carey v. FEC. At issue in Carey was a natural second question in light of the holding in SpeechNow: If super PACs could form for the sole purpose of channeling unlimited money from donors to mass communications, were there circumstances in which traditional PACs could do the same? By 2010, traditional PACs had been making both independent expenditures and donations to federal candidates for more than sixty years. However, under the FECA and the BCRA, donations to PACs were limited, just as they were for candidates, and PACs, in turn, could only give candidates $5,000 per election cycle. These donations were certainly useful for candidates, but for PACs looking to invest, the ability to make unlimited independent expenditures surely posed an attractive option as well. Simply, the SpeechNow decision dramatically changed the calculus for existing PACs. If, some groups reasoned, they maintained a separate account that would fund only communications (and not donations to candidates), then surely they could accept unlimited contributions to that account. The federal courts had held that contributions posed some risk for increasing the appearance of corruption, and so any contributions made to PACs for the purpose of bundling into larger ones destined for campaign coffers would be subject to hard-money limitations. But if donations to groups who promised to make no contributions to candidates could not be limited, then established PACs saw an opportunity to be both a contribution bundler and a super PAC.

The truth of the matter is that the system is not designed to allow for upstart third parties. It can adjust to accommodate a patently bogus third party, and it can tolerate the occasional Republican or Democrat bolting his party to pose as an ‘Independent,’ but a real third party doesn’t stand a chance. That is why you won’t find anything but Republicans and Democrats in the White House and the US Senate. Even the House of Representatives, reputedly the branch of the federal government most responsive to the people, counts just one Independent among its 435 members.34 That’s because we all know that voting for a third-party candidate is just throwing your vote away. Which is, sadly, quite true. True because the American system of ‘democracy’ is a winner-take-all system. And a minor party candidate, lacking funding and media support, has exactly no chance of winning. If, however, America were based on a representational system, as are the European democracies, winning would be a relative concept, and third-party votes would not be thrown away. For in that type of system, congressional or parliamentary seats are awarded proportionally based on the election outcome. In other words, your party need not ‘win’ to gain representation. Every vote for your party gains greater representation, and no votes are thrown away. It is easy to see how this type of democracy could quickly erode the entrenched ‘two-party’ system.

The role of money power in elections can be traced to a very fundamental axiom of Indian politics that when people go to cast their vote, they want to vote for a candidate belonging to a party they feel has a realistic chance of actually forming the government and not necessarily their favourite candidate. As a result, many excellent and meritorious candidates lose out because they are either running as independents or are affiliated to smaller political parties. For parties to have a ‘winning’ perception in the public, they must have great visibility and this visibility is usually purchased by money in the form of advertising, holding large election rallies (which cost a fortune and very often people are brought there by monetary inducement) or in the form of having a large number of paid workers on the ground who are visible.

It would be an absurd exaggeration to speak of a feeling of escape or holiday; but underlying the regret there was a sense of a return to a simpler world, one in which the roof, or what passed for it, was not expected to be universally waterproof, where chimneys and the poor-rate amounted to little, where a settled hierarchy, independent of moral or intellectual merit, did away if not with difference of opinion then at least with its more candid expression, a world in which there were no morning calls and in which servants could not give notice; a world devoid of most comforts, complex enough in all conscience, and not without its dangers, yet one whose complexity was as who should say more direct, less infinitely various; and above all a world that they were used to.

That optimism aside, Louise Day Hicks had entered Congress, setting up a similarly urgent campaign to drive her from the seat in her 1972 reelection bid. But this time around, David Nelson was out of the running. After the 1970 race, Nelson began serving as assistant attorney general under Robert Quinn, and by 1972 was in line for an appointment to a federal judgeship. For his part, Moakley’s second run for the seat came as an independent. This ensured Moakley would appear on the final ballot, competing with Hicks for an electorate that had over one hundred thousand more voters. With Moakley and Nelson out of the Democratic primary, advocates who wanted to organize against Hicks needed a new candidate.

Center of Southern Politics and Society found that, even though sexism was more common in white Republican men, “roughly 11 million white male Independents and Democrats feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them.”55 In the end, 12 percent of Sanders supporters ended up supporting Trump in the general election. When surveyed, almost half of those Sanders supporters turned Trump voters said they disagreed that white people have advantages in the United States, whereas only about 5 percent of Clinton voters disagreed that white people have advantages.56 Defection after a tough primary isn’t unusual. In the 2008 election, 15 percent of Clinton primary voters ended up voting for McCain in the general election, and many remember the racial tensions in that primary almost as vividly as they do the ones from the 2016 election.57 But the combination of the charged rhetoric of the 2016 election, the blatant sexism, ableism, and white supremacy of the Trump campaign, and the large policy differences between Trump and Sanders led many to expect that the number of voters who were willing to cross over to support the Republican candidate would be much lower than it had been in the 2008 election.

The name of the new peace organization is to be the United Nations. It is a misnomer and will mislead the people. The name of the organization should be the League of Free and Independent Nations pledged to Enforce Peace, or the Fifty Sovereign Nations of the World Solemnly Sworn to Prevent Each Other from Committing Aggression. These titles are clumsy, candid, and damning. They are exact, however. The phrase 'United Nations' is inexact, because it implies union, and there is no union suggested or contemplated in the work of Dumbarton Oaks. The nations of the world league will be united only as fifty marbles in a dish are united. Put your toe on the dish and the marbles will scatter, each to its own corner.

What you believe about climate change doesn’t reflect what you know,” said Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School who studies risk perception. “It expresses who you are." To illustrate this point, Kahan cited the results of yet another survey by the Pew Research Center. This survey was designed to test basic scientific knowledge and it posed questions like “What is the main function of red blood cells?” When respondents were asked what gas “most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise,” 58 percent chose the correct answer: “carbon dioxide.” There was little difference in the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who gave the right response; among the former it was 56 percent, among the latter 58 percent. (Among Independents, 63 percent chose correctly.) But polls that ask Americans about their own beliefs about global warming show a significant partisan divide; in another Pew survey, 66 percent of Democrats said they believed that human activity was the “main cause” of global warming, while only 24 percent of Republicans did. This suggests there are many Democrats who don’t know what’s causing climate change but still believe humans are responsible for it and many Republicans who do know, yet still deny that humans play a role. And what this shows, according to Kahan, is that people’s views on climate change are shaped less by their knowledge of the science than by their sense of group identity. To break the political logjam, he argues, Americans need to find ways of talking about climate change that don’t require members of one group or the other to renounce their cultural identity. “If you show people there is some way of responding to the problem that’s consistent with who they are, then they’re more likely to see the problem,” Kahan told me. Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has studied how people talk about climate change. She, too, believes there’s a strong cultural component to Americans’ attitudes, but she sees the problem as reflecting the strategies people use to avoid painful subjects. Norgaard argues that it’s difficult even for people who are privately worried about climate change to discuss the issue in public because on the one hand they feel guilty about the situation and on the other they feel helpless to change it. “We have a need to think of ourselves as good people,” she told me. Meanwhile, the very lack of discussion about the issue feeds itself: people feel that if it really were a serious problem, others would be dealing with it: “It’s difficult for people to feel that climate change is really happening in part because we’re embedded in a world where no one else around us is talking about it.” “It becomes a vicious cycle between the political gridlock and the cultural and individual gridlock,” Norgaard went on. What could possibly break this cycle? Norgaard argues that if the nation’s political leaders would candidly discuss the issue “it could be very powerful. It could free up a lot of the hopelessness people feel and allow them to mobilize.” “I think there are probably multiple levels at which we could break this cycle,” she went on. And though, after more than thirty years of ignored warnings, the challenge has grown all the more daunting, she said, “I don’t believe we get to give up.

It was this gap between the truth of modern-day Russia and Putin’s insistence on its superpower status, I thought, that helped account for the country’s increasingly combative foreign relations. Much of the ire was directed at us: In public remarks, Putin became sharply critical of American policy. When U.S.-backed initiatives came before the U.N. Security Council, he made sure Russia blocked them or watered them down—particularly anything touching on human rights. More consequential were Putin’s escalating efforts to prevent former Soviet bloc countries, now independent, from breaking free of Russia’s orbit. Our diplomats routinely received complaints from Russia’s neighbors about instances of intimidation, economic pressure, misinformation campaigns, covert electioneering, contributions to pro-Russian political candidates, or outright bribery. In

In theory, I’m a Libertarian, but until they find a candidate who didn’t graduate from Hollywood Upstairs Medical College, I declare myself politically agnostic/independent and will hold my nose while I vote a split ticket for whomever I hate the least.

When we cast aside our intellectual curiosity, refuse to adapt our opinions on policy when presented with new information, and lose our ability to view each candidate and every issue independently, we have cast our lot with a political party. We have sworn allegiance to something or someone who is not God and was never designed to be worshipped.

We decided to boil our list down to just a few key criteria around which we could easily evaluate candidates. We settled on six: •​An intense desire to win: We didn’t want a new CEO who was adept at explaining why something didn’t happen, but rather someone who could figure out how to win even if unanticipated problems cropped up. •​Intelligence: We wanted someone smart and analytical who could avoid problems before they arose. •​The ability to think independently: Fad surfers need not apply. •​Courage: My successor had to be capable of making bold decisions, while also checking afterward to verify that these decisions were correct. •​Curiosity: We needed a CEO who could stay fresh over time by exposing him or herself to novel ideas—someone who was self-aware and dedicated to learning. •​An ability to motivate and build a strong culture: Our next CEO had to be able to mobilize the company behind the strategy, hiring great people and motivating them.

Culture is a key part of the hiring process at Airbnb too. Each candidate also goes through a values interview, conducted by an Airbnb employee who isn’t that candidate’s hiring manager. This ensures that values are considered independently of how much the organization needs that candidate’s particular job skills.

Socialism as a program has traditionally meant economic democracy—social ownership of the means of production for democratic planning and allocation of economic surpluses—as a necessary condition for full political democracy and freedom. But in the absence of a sizable socialist Left that runs its own candidates against both capitalist parties, socialism has been reduced in popular parlance to simply government programs.

identify your employee adjectives, (2) recruit through proper advertising, (3) identify winning personalities, and (4) select your winners. Step One: Identify Your Employee Adjectives When you think of your favorite employees in the past, what comes to mind? A procedural element such as an organized workstation, neat paperwork, or promptness? No. What makes an employee memorable is her attitude and smile, the way she takes the time to make sure a customer is happy, the extra mile she goes to ensure orders are fulfilled and problems are solved. Her intrinsic qualities—her energy, sense of humor, eagerness, and contributions to the team—are the qualities you remember. Rather than relying on job descriptions that simply quantify various positions’ duties and correlating them with matching experience as a tool for identifying and hiring great employees, I use a more holistic approach. The first step in the process is selecting eight adjectives that best define the personality ideal for each job or role in your business. This is a critical step: it gives you new visions and goals for your own management objectives, new ways to measure employee success, and new ways to assess the performance of your own business. Create a “Job Candidate Profile” for every job position in your business. Each Job Candidate Profile should contain eight single- and multiple-word phrases of defining adjectives that clearly describe the perfect employee for each job position. Consider employee-to-customer personality traits, colleague-to-colleague traits, and employee-to-manager traits when making up the list. For example, an accounting manager might be described with adjectives such as “accurate,” “patient,” “detailed,” and “consistent.” A cocktail server for a nightclub or casual restaurant would likely be described with adjectives like “energetic,” “fun,” “music-loving,” “sports-loving,” “good-humored,” “sociable conversationalist,” “adventurous,” and so on. Obviously, the adjectives for front-of-house staff and back-of-house staff (normally unseen by guests) will be quite different. Below is one generic example of a Job Candidate Profile. Your lists should be tailored for your particular bar concept, audience, location, and style of business (high-end, casual, neighborhood, tourist, and so on). BARTENDER Energetic Extroverted/Conversational Very Likable (first impression) Hospitable, demonstrates a Great Service Attitude Sports Loving Cooperative, Team Player Quality Orientated Attentive, Good Listening Skills SAMPLE ADJECTIVES Amazing Ambitious Appealing Ardent Astounding Avid Awesome Buoyant Committed Courageous Creative Dazzling Dedicated Delightful Distinctive Diverse Dynamic Eager Energetic Engaging Entertaining Enthusiastic Entrepreneurial Exceptional Exciting Fervent Flexible Friendly Genuine High-Energy Imaginative Impressive Independent Ingenious Keen Lively Magnificent Motivating Outstanding Passionate Positive Proactive Remarkable Resourceful Responsive Spirited Supportive Upbeat Vibrant Warm Zealous Step Two: Recruit through Proper Advertising The next step is to develop print or online advertising copy that will attract the personalities you’ve just defined.

His scheme called for the Antimasonic conventions to endorse National Republican tickets made acceptable by including Antimasons. But so persuasively had Weed and his agents presented their charges against Masons that a strong and strange fanaticism gripped large numbers of the party. When the time came to endorse National Republican candidates, the fanatics among the Antimasons revolted. They accepted Adams but demanded and got an independent state ticket. Weed’s scheme collapsed.