Well, Perot's candidacy did prove that people will vote for a third-party candidate they feel is viable. Also it proved that a third-party candidate with enough financial backing can get attention. At one point Perot was polling higher than either Clinton or Bush. If he hadn't fucked up his own campaign, Perot might have done much better than the 18/19% he got.

You ask for lasting effects however, for that I point to the increases in signature requirements for ballot access by states across the US, and the current exclusion of third-party candidates from Presidential debates. Seems that Rs and Ds don't like competition.

You mean you _choose_ to pee in a bathroom? I would have assumed you didn't even bother going inside and/or pissed in your car. Also, people cry when happy. I guess you'd avoid that type of happiness as well.

Thank you for proving my point - we exert control over our biological impulses all the time, either ignoring them or choosing different ways/times to express them. We can't control all of them all of the time, and some can control themselves better than others, but just because biology is talking, doesn't mean you have to listen.

That's nonsense, you confront your biology every day. Ever had to urinate but held it? Ever fallen in love with someone who didn't reciprocate? Ever wanted to hit your boss, but didn't? Ever cried, but didn't want to?

Avoiding situations that forced you to confront your biology would boring as hell, and you couldn't do it anyway.

Just because biology is talking, doesn't mean you have to listen.

Every individual and organization, be it from a family unit to a city to a corporation, is geared towards survival, growth, and profit. I'm not sure why you're using that behavior as a club against corporations when it's a natural behavior for us all. That these organizations gain power and profit, and then use all means to grow and maintain that position indefinitely, is nature. That individuals within these organizations work to survive, gain power, and profit, too, is natural. But, Supreme Court rulings notwithstanding, corporations are not living and breathing entities, they have individuals taking care of each task. So the above poster is correct, we need to hold those individuals accountable.

If you want to make an argument against corporations, make it about size and streamlining. Just like nature, a free-market can't exist when an part of that system(species) gets so large that it interferes negatively with the whole system. There is nothing inherently wrong with capping the size of a corporation - in fact it's better that we do it early. On the corporation level, sure, a narrative exists that says they'll "lose" money. However in the larger system, that money is still at play within the market. In fact, by forcing corporations to spin off and splinter, that money will change hands more often and stay in the market longer. Smaller organizations will be better able to compete on the merits of the product or service, rather than trying to sneak gold from dragons protecting their hoard.

Streamlining is also problematic to a free-market "naturalistic" system. In nature, an organization (say, an ant colony) need individuals for task completion. While I understand why the poor overworked queen may appreciate having a robot to bring her food and do the housecleaning, unfortunately that throws the whole system off and displaces a bunch of hungry, and now angry, ants. While a few of them might find work building robots, the rest are despondent and prone to misadventure and/or tragedy. (And at least a couple are plotting against the queen)

Sure the queen need not produce so many workers, and so she may not be in danger from her once-loyal minions, but corporations do not have the ability control the population, only reduce the amount of the population needed. Guess what? There's a lot of hungry and angry ants roaming about.

Corporations today are getting bigger while using less people (who cost less now, oversupply), and because of their size and natural tendencies they make it harder for new businesses to flourish - even with a labor market that is artificially depressed by automation.

I don't know if it'll fix the problem for sure, but capping size and taxing automation at a rate equal to what an individual doing that job would pay to the State seems like a good start to limiting corporate power, increasing jobs, and getting us closer to a true free-market system.

"And to the points made in the dissent in this case, at least they were well thought out and reasonable."

They wern't reasonable in my opinion. One justice compared violent videogames with child porn, and the other missed the point of the arguments entirely.

I hope that was satire. We don't need the land urgently to raise crops - in fact with the CRP program we are paying farmers to keep millions of acres in grassland. We also buy excess grains and subsidize various markets because we produce so much.

Also, birth rates are being rolled back - both white and black birth rates have declined significantly with only recent immigrant populations having high birthrates - and those will likely go down over time as well. US doesn't have a problem with rising population.

It's going to be a tough election cycle. The politicians are looking to find ways to make the public like them. While 10 (or even 5) years ago they wouldn't have even dreamed about supporting something like this, groups like LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) are making their voice heard about the ongoing problems with the "War on Drugs."

It may not ever pass through committee, however if you take just 5 minutes to send a message to your Senators and Representatives telling them to support this bill, it will at least make them think about it just a bit.

However you can increase the odds by contacting your Senators and Representatives and telling them unequivocally that if they don't support this legislation, then you don't support them.

"That claim is false: the overwhelming majority of US government spending is proportional to the number of people - and in particular, a significant chunk of it is proportional to the number of old US citizens."

"Much of the rest pays for equal-chance education (teachers), unemployment insurance (which cost goes up during crises and goes down during booms), poor families/children, roads and other infrastructure - none of those have fixed maintenance costs but go up linearly with the number of people."

All spending is proportional, but some groups are more proportional than others?

The rest of your argument is nonsense too. If spending were linear, add 33% to to 1980s spending (1/3 more people) and track it to inflation. You'll get a lot smaller number than today's spending levels. Hint: $3.4 Tril - 2.6 Trillion less than last year's spending. All you've done is just prove that the government is overspending by nearly double.

We wouldn't need more taxes if we hadn't increased defense spending to huge amounts. You'll get no argument from me about cuts there. Medicare and Social Security are, while noble ideas, also unsustainable. Both are ponzi schemes with most people putting in less than they get out - in which case the first out get the benefits while those that stay in require a larger and larger burden. We are fast approaching the point when the number of recipients are larger than the number of payors, the only way to counter that is to make payors pay more (tax them, tax the rich ones more (even though they don't need medicare/SS and arn't the problem)) or to increase birth rates and/or immigration to have a larger economic base in which to pay for the next generation - basically creating economic slaves out of our children to pay for our own retirement. Bush actually had a good plan to help fix the problem - 4 cents on the dollar invested into individual accounts- but we know how that went.

We (as in the government) have also added numerous agriculture subsidies, dumped money into various new departments and bureacracies, given raises and benefit increases to federal workers - and then the federal unions have forced contractors to pay their workers federal wage rate, (you should see what the construction workers on federal projects get paid!) and paid for hundreds/thousands of pork-barrel projects (war on drugs, bridges to nowhere). If, instead of allowing special interests to mine out the money of the people in every way imaginable, we had simply focused on infrastructure, education, and modest social support, and modest defense spending, we'd be just fine.

"No, We're paying less as a percentage of GDP"

False. We're actually paying higher when all tax sources are figured in.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/27/41498733.pdf

Doubled GDP, Doubled Economy, Quadrupled tax income. Sextupled spending.

"Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."

You mean we're paying less per person. While our economy doubled in the same time frame, actual US tax income has actually quadrupled $500Mil -> $2.5 Trillion from 1980 - 2007 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-total-taxes.JPG

FYI that's well past inflation.

It's a tired and out of context argument that somehow we needed to keep these top tax rates (as much as 70%!) and that we've shortchanged ourselves, corporations are not paying enough, etc. Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all. In fact, if we had maintained government spending at 1980's levels (>$1 Trillion) and tracked to inflation we'd be just fine today - in fact we'd have a slight surplus. Instead, despite a doubling of the economy and the quadrupling of tax income, the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)

The problem has not been taxes, instead it has been both parties spending far beyond revenues, and taking loans out to pay for it (or just pushing the bills into the future, which is why some reports have us at 70 Trillion in unfunded mandates)

Should these satellites go away? Probably not. But I'd like to see something else (or everything) cut first rather than to just add more tax burden.

Free Speech Zones were reportedly invented during the 1988 Democratic National Convention. While it's easy to blame Bush for everything, the precedent was set before he came along.