War, Casualties, Saddam, Bush, Etc.

[Phi for All]

i certainly hope im not paying for the president's plane rides with my taxes:\

If it's presidential business (including vacations) you're paying, if it's for re-election, his campaign pays the equivalent of a first class ticket for each campaigner aboard, you pay the rest (first class from Dulles-IAD to Austin-AUS is $2656.19US non-stop round trip from United Airlines departing 10/19/04 and returning a week later).

[Kingpin1989]

I've come to the general conclusion (not objective conclusion' date=' just in terms of forming my opinion) that the best we can do is try to improve general House spending oversight, party ethical practices, and, of course, making informed ballot choices (but in all positions, not just Prez).

QUOTE']

 

 

I'm curious as to how you would do this?

[Pangloss]

It's a good question. Obviously part of the answer is to get people more involved in House races, and try to focus national attention on at least the importance of them, to the exclusion of cheesy and irrelevent information about the presidential races. I do not need a daily update of Bush and Kerry's stump speeches, which I have heard a thousand times before, every night at 6:30pm. What I need is more information about whomever is running against my incumbant House member, and/or any Senators who happen to be running.

 

I would spend more money on awareness efforts at the local level, nationally funded. I would have state-sponsored debates and town hall meetings with senate and house candidates. I would require the parties to pay for more of this stuff as well.

 

I would have a state-sponsored discussion/debate board in every single state in the union, organized and promoted at the local level, with moderated and unmoderated areas.

 

I would have state-sponsored, party-paid (non-partisan) workers whose job is to establish and maintain local "information centers" or "bulletin board" -- non-partisan web sites devoted to CURRENT campaign news and information at the local level. So for example if a candidate dropped out of a race, the information center would have a bulletin on that. All races would be listed and kept current.

 

Not all of these may turn out to be great ideas, but there's a LOT that could be done, and done in such a way that people would actually take an interested in them.

[Kingpin1989]

I like your first point, I am sick of "Kerry delivers speech to small Colarado town" or "Bush admin. travels to Conneticut for rally."

We don't need to know what they do every second, more important is the general information, like where they stand on certain issues. We also need to weed out biased or anti-candidate phrases for true things, and we need that info faster. Good ideas in my opinion....

 

_________________________________

I'm not crazy, you're crazy!