Worth sharing

[Dave Grubb]

This came from my best best friend this week.

Just an honest sharing of feelings and thoughts:

A few years ago there was a "workshop" given at Moravian college in Allentown by the Democrats. It was a "workshop" for people who were interested in running for an office in Pennsylvania. I was curious, so I went. It was very easy to see the puppeteering of the party. Some of the requirements were based on how much money one could raise before there was even talk about support. There was a list of requirements actually, I just remember the money, because that was mentioned before they even mentioned that the person would need to be vetted by the organization before there would be support. BUT, if you could pass those requirements, hey, they would get behind you and help.

I saw that it is just like the "Primary, where we get to choose a candidate from a preapproved group of candidates. The parties are calculating in their support of only those who are willing to do what the party tells them to do and who they can control. The added problem is the parties are so involved in the game they don't even realize how obvious their tactics are to others looking in. I am so disheartened by our political system, it is horribly broken. Sadly I think it has been broken since Eisenhower. To be corrupt for that long, the corruption becomes the norm.

[Truckman]

That underlines the crying need for independent candidates...How, when and if they surface is a mystery since their existence will be downtrodden by those already in positions of power......Ben

[Kevin]

You can tell your friend it has been broken since inception, Dave. Before the primaries, the smoke-filled room chose who we would vote on. Before that, bosses like Tweed did the choosing. Before that, candidates stood at the polling booths and, if they had money, paid for votes. If they did not, they intimidated the vote counters (cheaper that way). Before that, it was common to get people drunk at polling places by showing up with a wagon full of whiskey kegs and promising free drinks for anyone who would vote for you. Getting people to vote for you was one strategy. Another was to not allow people to vote you didn't think would vote for you. Gerrymandering, poll taxes, literacy tests, denying the vote to whole segments of our population. Or you could get the media to run all sorts of muckraking stories about your opponent. You could buy newspapers and use them to throw elections to your favored candidate.

There was never any golden age of political elections in this country. From the very first election, our system has been rigged.

[UTAH]

...free drinks for anyone who would vote for you.

Modeling our election process on "free drinks" is starting to look just as good as any other choice. When our system is broken, the fix may lay outside the box.

Hunter