To Open Source Obama's Get-Out-the-Vote Code Or Not? 356
An anonymous reader writes "There's a battle brewing amongst Obama's election team. The political folks want to keep the get out the vote code closed source so republicans never get access to it, but the programmers want it open sourced so it can be improved upon. 'In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles. But the argument is about more than whether putting the tech back in the hands of the public is the right thing to do. "The biggest issue we saw with all of the commercial election software we used was that it’s only updated every four years," says Ryan. It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house. If the code OFA built was put on ice at the DNC until 2016, it would become effectively worthless. "None of that will be useful in four years, technology moves too fast," said Ryan. "But if our work was open and people were forking it and improving it all the time, then it keeps up with changes as we go."'"
put up or shutup time (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok folks put up or shut up time
Open source and 'bad people' can use your code. Or keep it closed...
Re: (Score:2)
false dilemma (Score:3)
You talk like the code is all locked away, and that the keepers have the power to keep it that way.
Trying to keep widely spread information away from "bad" people is a fool's quest. How many programmers worked on this project? Dozens? How easy would it be to duplicate the ideas, if not the exact code? Pretty easy. The data may be more difficult, thanks to the sheer quantity, but that's also the most perishable part.
Do you realize how easy it is to design nuclear weapons? I suppose you'd like to th
Re: (Score:3)
There is more to nuclear weapons than just the unavailability of the materials.
OK, if you have unlimited weight and size and enough material for a complete critical mass, well, maybe you don't have a problem. As mentioned, you throw it together and stand back. It is a little more complicated than that in that you need to assemble the critical mass
so fast that it doesn't melt before going off but in general that isn't a huge problem.
However, if you have a weight and/or size budget or are trying to make a s
Re:false dilemma (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a rumor. He did, in fact, withhold his birth certificate. He knew all along that to quell rumors he should release the long form. He chose not to for several years. He's special.
Well no, he tried to *not* be special by not circumventing Hawaiian law to obtain a record that a normal citizen would not have access to. He released the only document that Hawaii would provide to him as proof of birth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories [wikipedia.org]
every judicial forum that has addressed the matter, and Hawaiian government officials—among whom a consensus has been reached that the document released by the Obama campaign is indeed his official birth certificate.
Obama was not entitled to receive a copy of the "long form":
oshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii Attorney General's office, stated in 2011 that the original "long form" birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a "record of live birth" kept in the archives of the Hawaii Department of Health is "... a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody", including President Obama. Wisch added that state law does not authorize photocopying such records
Legally, there was no way to obtain his long form.
Finally, in 2011, realizing that he *was* special, and that the long form might save everyone a lot of hassle, Obama requested a waiver from normal records release policy:
On April 22, 2011, Obama asked Loretta Fuddy, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, for certified copies of his original Certificate of Live Birth ("long-form birth certificate").[46] Accompanying the letter was a written request from Judith Corley, Obama's personal counsel, requesting a waiver of the department's policy on computer-generated certificates. Corley stated that granting the waiver would relieve the department of the burden of repeated inquiries into the President's birth records.[47]
On April 25, 2011, Fuddy approved the request and witnessed the copying process as the health department's registrar issued the certified copies. The same day, Corley personally visited the department headquarters in Honolulu to pay the required fee on Obama's behalf, and received the two requested certified copies of the original birth certificate, an accompanying letter from Fuddy attesting to the authenticity of same, and a receipt for the processing fee. Fuddy said that she had granted the exception to its normal policy of issuing only computer-generated copies by virtue of Obama's status, in an effort to avoid ongoing requests for the birth certificate.[48][49]
Enough with the fake outrage.
What else could he release? How about some school transcripts? Bush had his stolen & released. Why wouldn't someone do the same with Obama's? Oh, right. He's special.
Well I can't answer why there is no one willing to risk criminal prosecution by stealing and releasing his school transcripts - why don't you do it? I'm not sure what it would prove if official state birth records and even birth announcements in 2 different Hawaiian newspaper are not enough to satisfy birthers. School records just prove attendance, I've never seen any agency accept a school transcript as proof of citizenship
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/obamabirth.php [whatreallyhappened.com]
Re:false dilemma (Score:4, Informative)
Well no, he tried to *not* be special by not circumventing Hawaiian law to obtain a record that a normal citizen would not have access to.
You are rewriting history. I hear there are job openings in part 2 of the Obama administration for people like you.
From your source, Hawaii does not give it out to "persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record." He has interests. He could have made the call.
Your reading comprehension is a little lax.
Read what I quoted again:
oshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii Attorney General's office, stated in 2011 that the original "long form" birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a "record of live birth" kept in the archives of the Hawaii Department of Health is "... a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody", including President Obama. Wisch added that state law does not authorize photocopying such records
The short-form was already released by Obama in 2008 and was rejected by the birthers, despite it being the only valid birth record that normal Hawaiians are allowed to receive..
Here's a longer quote from the Hawaiia Attorney General's office (with highlighting added to help your comprehension)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42519951/ns/politics-more_politics/#.UP9yiGJQAUQ [msn.com]
But Wisch, the spokesman for the attorney general's office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of "vital records," including an original "record of live birth" — even to the individual whose birth it records.
"It's a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody," he said. Nor do state laws have any provision that authorizes such records to be photocopied, Wisch said. If Obama wanted to personally visit the state health department, he would be permitted to inspect his birth record, Wisch said.
But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated "certification of live birth" form that everybody else gets — which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.
He was born in Hawaii. I get it and always have. The issue is dicking around with not releasing the birth certificate. I don't hold on to Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories.
But he *did* release the only birth certificate that Hawaii was willing to provide to him (until the public records office was harassed so much that they waived their normal policy to release a copy of the original birth record).
On your original offer of "what else could he do" he could release some school records. The original point about the Obama election group not releasing source code would fall in line with the lack of transparency in this administration. It's not surprising.
But you haven't said what releasing school records would do -- if an official state record of birth is rejected as adequate proof, what good is is releasing school records?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Open source and 'bad people' can use your code.
Puh-leese, that ship has already sailed. They worked hard to re-elect a guy who, according to the NYU/Stanford report [livingunderdrones.org] has killed nearly a thousand civilians with drones, including 176 children, not to mention the number of injured.
If these programmers' work was actually influential in the election's outcome (I doubt it, but for the sake of argument...) then they share in the responsibility for every additional man, woman, and child who will be murdered in the
Re: (Score:2)
If these programmers' work was actually influential in the election's outcome (I doubt it, but for the sake of argument...) then they share in the responsibility for every additional man, woman, and child who will be murdered in the next four years. They could have chosen to work for one of the peace candidates, but declined to.
Everyone with their head on straight knew back in 2008 that the winner of 2012 was going to be either Barack Obama or whoever the Republicans backed, barring some unprecedented public outcry. If they worked for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or some other candidate, the odds of a Romney win would have increased,while doing nothing to increase the odds of their actual preferred candidate winning.
There's something to be said for making a living wage while working to avoid the greater of two evils.
Re:put up or shutup time (Score:5, Insightful)
They are the same evil. Your mentality IS the problem with this country. You are what keep this bullshit going. Just stop... get out of politics. Don't vote... please. If only the people that actually cared about this country, and the people having hellfire missles landing in their livingrooms got to vote, then maybe we'd get somewhere. We're involved militarily in more countries now, than when Bush was in office. How is that the lesser of 2 evils?
Often we hear about candidates that they are "Radical" or out of the "mainstream" If the normal mainstream is bombing nearly every country in the African continent, most countries in the middle east, ans southern Asia, then we definitely need a radical in office. The people do not need our "help" the help is usually worse than what they had before. Also, our country is on the fiscal decline. That's ok, we don't have to be the richest country on earth by several orders of magnitude. We can live comfortably... but we do not have all this extra money to be pretending to be the worlds police force. We have a crap ton of nukes, no ones going to invade us. So lets just scale back a "tad" Shit, if we spent the military budget on building bases on the moon we could just move there and let the world go to shit on it's own (just kidding, but really... the military budgets way too big.)
Re:put up or shutup time (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't vote... please. If only the people that actually cared about this country, and the people having hellfire missles landing in their livingrooms got to vote, then maybe we'd get somewhere
Has it occurred to you that in the 200+ years of only having US citizens vote (mostly), we HAVENT had a major revolution, we havent had a substantial invasion (excepting the War of 1812), we havent had any dictators, and we generally have been pretty stable compared to almost everywhere else (along with perhaps the UK).
But no, our system is flawed and clearly the solution is to throw out what has been working remarkably well given how messed up people generally are. Lets go with anarchy, thats always a great fallback, right?
If you ask me, I would go with "lets address the problems we have" rather than "lets throw it all away and hope things dont get substantially worse".
Re:put up or shutup time (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't consider the Civil war a major revolution? It is the war in which more Americans were killed than any other. There was even a President of the Confederate States of America. Seems pretty major to me. We haven't had a successful, violent revolution.
Aside from that I agree we can assume the base of this democracy is solid. But it does need much work.
Re: (Score:2)
Puh-leese, that ship has already sailed. They worked hard to re-elect a guy who, according to the NYU/Stanford report [livingunderdrones.org] has killed nearly a thousand civilians with drones, including 176 children, not to mention the number of injured.
Don't forget the kittens and puppies.
Re: (Score:2)
Shit, 178? 270 children have been murdered in Chicago just since 2007. That's with the strictest gun bans in the country and no drones overhead. Sounds like you're safer as a human shield for terrorists in Pakistan.
Re:put up or shutup time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
but would his opponents in 2008 and 2012 have killed less?
I worked for Ron Paul in both of those campaigns. He was the only candidate who the pollsters (who got the election exactly right in 2012) showed could beat Obama. But the corporatist Republicans were squarely against him winning over Obama, and the rest is history. Here in NH (Romney's second home) he came in 2nd place in both the Republican and Democratic primaries.
And, yes, he would have ordered a withdrawal from the Middle East on his first da
Re: (Score:3)
Your interpretation is too narrow.
If this were a fantastically gifted campaign manager we were talking about, like Carville or Rove, nobody would blink at the idea "we must prevent the other side from using his talent."
This is software used to manage talent. It is politics as usual to prevent your opponents from matching your advantages. It is not illegal or even immoral to try to win by being better than your opponent.
Re: (Score:3)
Congratulations on doing an excellent job restating the title of this story. Have a cookie.
Open Source developers know exactly what they want to do- open source it. They're acting completely in line with their beliefs/philosophy. Partisan politicians know exactly what they want to do too- they want to keep it closed in order to keep it out of the hands of the "bad people".
This isn't some internal morale debate. This is two camps of people working together, but then arguing about what to do next.
Improving you say (Score:3, Insightful)
In light of all the gerrymandering going on ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In light of all the gerrymandering going on ... (Score:4, Informative)
Except they had a huge electoral advantage from their software. The GOP does not have very sophisticated get out the vote tools. So why on earth would the DEMs give the GOP one of their proprietary competitive advantages?!
"Hey we heard you wanted to gerrymander the districts even further. Here's a tool to help you elect officials to enable you to do that!"
Re:In light of all the gerrymandering going on ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean the same way that Maryland gerrymandered districts to eject a Republican congressman? District 3 in Maryland isn't even consecutive, it is 3 areas of the state that are 10-20 miles apart. Only fair that some Republicans in other states get to do the same.
Re:In light of all the gerrymandering going on ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The only 'fair' thing is to remove politics from the district drawing process altogether. Not easy or simple, but Money and Political District Drawing are 2 things that quite literally are a direct threat to our governmental system.
Not only is it not easy or simple, it is not possible. No matter how you set the process up, someone will manipulate it for political advantage. The one change that could be made (but if it is, it should be made at the state level, not the federal) is to make it so that districts are required to be contiguous and as geographically compact as possible. The problem with getting that enacted is that would preclude creating districts intended to maximize the number of districts which have a majority of particul
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Thus gerrymandering will continue to happen, by both parties, unless voters punish them for doing so, and support those who don't gerrymander. But that requires an electorate that pays attention.
Re:In light of all the gerrymandering going on ... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we hang both Democrats AND Republicans who gerrymander? That's only fair.
Re: (Score:3)
And this is why we don't deserve nice things. When everything is justified by "but the other party is doing the same thing!", nothing will ever improve. Instead, it will just be eternal bickering. Which has its own appeal (stalemate can be good in certain circumstances...), but is mostly just leading to a lot of shouting and idiotic decisions when the stalemate is lifted.
Re:In light of all the gerrymandering going on ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The GOP does not have very sophisticated get out the vote tools.
Evangelical Christianity?
Re: (Score:3)
I think of the hack itself as being sophisticated, not the individual teabilly drone being sophisticated.
"Vote for X or you'll end up in Hell with the commie socialists" is a pretty good hack on taking advantage of human fears of the afterlife to control them to vote for someone. Not bad.
Its kind of like "hacking" ants into walking in a circle by playing games with their pheremone chemicals using sheets of paper. The hack design is elegant, the small minded animals being taken advantage of are not the com
Re: (Score:2)
Principals...nice to have, but can be jettisoned when inconvenient.
Re: (Score:3)
... open sourcing the software may be critical; not only does it expose to anyone who needs to know that its done well and ethically, but it can also serve as a platform (at all levels) for the majority of voters to fight back against the exponentiation of aforementioned gerrymandering.
What does this software have to do with gerrymandering? Sure, it gives them an idea of what type of voters are where, but so does the actually county by county public vote tallies after each election.
Re: (Score:2)
simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have the DNC set aside $400k or so to keep a 3 member team of coders updating it for the next 4 years. Don't forget, there are midterms in 2 years.
Re: (Score:2)
But who would they copy from?
Who paid for the development (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Shouldn't it belong to every donor, then?
Wasn't a lot of it already open source? (Score:3)
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would they put it on ice for four years? There are plenty of state elections, local elections, and Congressional elections between now and the next presidential election, and I find it hard to believe that the software is so specialized that it's only good for presidential elections - for one thing, if it were that specialized, open sourcing it likely wouldn't help, since no one's going to bother working on code that's of no use for anything else.
And also, "none of that will be useful in four years" sounds like BS to me. The hyped usage was in targeting who to have workers phone or visit. Polls, addresses, phones, etc. aren't going to change significantly in four years, and unless they did some seriously messed-up stuff, their code should still compile and run with only minor tweaks at worst four years from now.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Your points are still valid. One of the reasons Obama won was because he was able to organize on the local level better than Romney. This implies that the software would be useful for local elections.
conflicting goals (Score:3)
It gets as simply as this:
The developers who created the baby want it grow to be a nice piece of useful code that can benefit everybody.
Politicians want to have an edge on their rivals.
Re: (Score:2)
The solution is simple... (Score:3)
Let the DNC hire the programmers and keep them on staff. Keep the code closed-source (so the Rs don't get it) and also expand it to work with local races in the House and Senate.
They don't want us to know what they know about us (Score:3)
If the code is open, we might then have a notion of the scope, depth, and detail with which all of us are being tracked by the party. And that would probably be shocking to all of us who thought we had some level of privacy left. So I don't expect it to be open for just that reason.
Re: (Score:3)
If the code is open, we might then have a notion of the scope, depth, and detail with which all of us are being tracked by the party. And that would probably be shocking to all of us who thought we had some level of privacy left. So I don't expect it to be open for just that reason.
It's not the Democratic Party that is doing the tracking - its the commercial data sources that they buy their data from. And you don't need to look at Obama's source code to see the depth that we are all tracked.
There's always hope (Score:2)
Ethical concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles.
Unless the developers were tricked into thinking they were developing an open source software platform, I don't see where ethics come in. Why would a business release the software that is widely believed to have given it a competitive advantage?
. "It’s going to send a very bad signal to engineers who might consider working on the next election cycle in 2016," says Rathee. "It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how we work."
There are lots of programmers that understand confidentiality and realize that their code is never going to be open sourced. Is there a growing body of developers that want everything to be open sourced and free to the world?
The things we built off of open source should go back to the public," says Manik Rathee, who worked as a user experience engineer with OFA. The team relied on open source frameworks like Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django.
Isn't this exactly the type of thing Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django were built for? To allow developers to quickly develop and deploy applications? This is the kind of FUD that makes corporations afraid to use open source - they think that if they take advantage of an Open Source framework then they are obligated to open source their code even if it's used only for an in-house application.
I don't see the source code for Google's search engine or Facebook's core code available for download even though both companies take advantage of FOSS software in their infrastructure -- that's not to say that they haven't released some of their support code, but the "secret sauce" that runs the business is still private.
RNC has money (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Even if they did manage to come up with a brilliant GotV system, they are a dying party. Those under 30 went 2/3 for Obama this election. Conservatives have lost the moral war on gay marriage and they're not doing themselves any favor on other subjects, like rape and abortion. As for the econo
No Risk (Score:2)
The republicans run Windows. the GOTV code from the Obama campaign would be unusable to them.
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, yeah - they would be completely baffled, unable to find a way to run anything other than Windows...
They would have no idea how to set up a *nix-based web server.
Darn! Foiled again by their choice of desktop platform!
Just find the right place to use it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I know for a fact the Republican Party of Florida has similar a software/database setup that is constantly tweaked, maintained and used. There are too many elections between Presidential ones to let it go to waste. The DNC just needs to sell it to the state party offices to keep it useful.
Well... (Score:2)
For one thing, were the programmers paid for the work they did and was it clearly understood that their work may not be released as open source before they started (IOW, who holds copyright on the code?)
For another, that code could come back into play in 2014 for the midterm elections. Or it could be used sooner depending on how quickly 2016 starts to heat up.
Re: (Score:2)
2016 has already heated up - several MSM outlets were working on their 2016 shortlists after the 2012 elections.
Do you think the Republicans will contribute back? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
More people voting is better for all democracies (Score:5, Insightful)
Forking politicians... (Score:2)
Fork the political software!
It is not the code, it is the data. (Score:4, Funny)
What made OFA better was that people were willing to let Obama For America get access to their friend's list, .mailrc, gmail contact list etc etc. I, for one, would be very terribly upset if OFA shares the contact graph created by me allowing OFA access to my private list of friends shared willy-nilly and every Tom-Dick-or-Harry politician starts calling my contact list pretending to have my approval or endorsement. I gave Obama access to my contact list. I don't want it shared with DNC without my explicit approval.
I trust Congressional democrats less than I trust Obama. In fact I trust Congressional Republicans less only by a slim margin compared to congressional Democrats. Looks like Harry Reid is preparing to cry uncle and surrender everything in the filibuster reform.
Opening the source for America! (Score:2, Interesting)
Not opening the source is extremely short-sighted. On one hand, the opposition (read republicans in this case) may be able to leverage the progress of Obama's campaign developers. However, third parties would also be able to leverage this software. This would aid the third (or forth, fifth) parties to gain visibility and thus choice for the American people. Opening the code would be a net positive for those that matter; the American people.
Competitive advantage shouldn't be open sourced (Score:3, Funny)
Post-election it was widely reported that the tech powering the Obama camp was a big factor in its success, whereas the Romney camp was handicapped by poorly tested & implemented systems.
Why would they want to give that away that sort of advantage?
My suggestion would be to make it easy to volunteer on the project, & hack on the code, but not go so far as to open source it. This enables participation from folks who are motivated, but doesn't give the competition a leg up.
Uh, no. Hell no. Are you kidding me? (Score:3)
If you've ever been involved in software development, you know how rare this is.
The Republican software never worked properly. Why would you give away that advantage?
Once they catch up, whatever, but I woudn't do it now.
Re: (Score:3)
I noticed that as well. I looked repeatedly for a mention of who Ryan was. Without further development, the context could lead you to believe it's Paul Ryan...
Re: (Score:2)
The political folks want to keep the get out the vote code closed source
Re: (Score:2)
Oh good. I was concerned I was the only person bothered by this.
I figure it's just Ryan, like Cher or Teller.
Re: (Score:3)
Third paragraph, first sentence.
"The software itself, much of it will be mothballed," believes Daniel Ryan, who worked as a director of front-end engineering at OFA.
Re:so republicans never get access to it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they don't care about good policy, they care about their team winning.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yup... it still a hard choice, though.
No, there's no hard choice. Neither major party has the best ideas or most tenable solutions to any of our problems. Any support for either is supporting the continuation of our anti-democratic system. Whether Republicans win or Democrats win in 2014 or 2016 is irrelevant. The only question that matters is when we fix our electoral system.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Who are we to tell them what to do with their software?
The fucking owners, [wikipedia.org] that's who.
Re: (Score:3)
You care about your team winning because you think your team has the best policy. Either the tax burden on the wealthy is a drag to economic growth; or it needs to go up so we can pay for the troops who protect the economy that makes those people wealthy. Either the health system is choking economic growth because people pay too much for care (ie: they delay care until it gets really expensive, and then they can't successfully negotiate a good price because they're fucking dying), or it's choking economic g
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Ron Paul is a loon. Like a broken clock he's right twice a day, as in Liberty'O'Clock. But other than that, he's quite literally batshit crazy.
... But the people who keep voting in the same oligarchs, time and time again, expecting said aristocracy to actually do things differently at some point, are not somehow 'batshit crazy?' Or are you silently acknowledging that the D and R voters are just-as-if-not-moreso crazy than those who vote for Paul?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results" -- Albert Einstein
Re:so republicans never get access to it ... (Score:4, Insightful)
if by batshit crazy you mean advocating the withdrawl of U.S. troops overseas and not wanting to start pointless wars, or supporting 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendment rights and opposing the expansion of TSA, Patriot Act, stop the indefinite detention of American citizens, or wanting to reduce federal spending and balance the budget, or legalize marijuana and stop the war on drugs, or support gay marriage and other civil rights for gays, then yeah I guess he's batshit crazy.
Re: (Score:3)
Part of caring about policy is caring about what can get through Congress.
If we were a Westminster-system Democracy I'd have a lot more respect for potential third-party candidates as policy-makers. But we aren't. We've got a bicameral Legislature, and an independent Executive. To actually get your ideas implemented you need a majority of both houses (and probably 60% of the Senate), and no US Third Party has a plan like that. Most don't even have warm bodies in a majority of Congressional districts and Se
Re: (Score:3)
Which is just a long winded way of saying there are no candidates for people who care about good policy. If you care about good policy, you can't vote for either Democrats or Republicans, because they won't implement good policy. You can't vote third party, because they can't implement good policy.
The only conclusion is that our system is well and truly broken and must be scrapped. If you care about good policy, fixing the electoral system is the only thing that matters. And that won't happen for as lon
Re:so republicans never get access to it ... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure why they are worried about that. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in at least 30 years. If the next democratic nominee runs on the notion of continuing what he has done so far the GOP won't be able to field a candidate who is more conservative.
"Most conservative?"
You have avery limited definition of Conservative. He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC. And we still haven't gotten to the #1 Conservative project: re-making the Supreme Court in their image.
Pretty much the only area he could be considered right of Bush is his use of drones, and that's only because Bush didn't have this many drones to play with.
Re: (Score:2)
He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC.
And, that pretty much sums up why the US won't solve its problems unless they elect someone from a 3rd party, as none of those issues can be "solved" without major changes.
For example, one party would like more military spending, while the other wants more spending on health care. Yet, neither want to raise taxes enough to finance their desired spending, nor could they do so even if they wanted to, so instead we see devastating cuts to things like NASA, when a couple of days worth of war budget could pay f
Re: (Score:2)
I understand saying Obama is conservative for Europe. But you are comparing him to other US presidents from the past 30 years.
He is the most (publicly) pro-abortion president we have ever had. He is for socializing healthcare (just wasn't able to get that far.) He is trying to severely limit the 2nd amendment. He firmly believes the government is best suited to solve with most social and economic issues. He speaks vocally against corporations. He is pro-gay marriage. He is against limiting to Social
Re:so republicans never get access to it ... (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you do that, you will be hard pressed to find a single bill that he has signed that would not have been signed by Reagan. Hell, Obama has even raised taxes fewer times - for a lower total percentage - than Reagan did in his first term.
Every president as a candidate says they will do various things, and each president accomplishes a varied amount of those things (one could argue Obama is distinct in how few of those he has accomplished). However if you are talking about what Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush Jr did, then you need to compare it to what Obama has done. And if you do that, you'll find that he is easily the most conservative of the set. We can even go back further and add Nixon to that set and Obama is arguably more conservative than him as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because he hasn't been as successful as he would like, does not make him conservative. Clinton, Reagan, Bush, and Obama were better at negotiating than Obama. Obama had a tough time even passing things when he controlled both branches. Republicans winning in the mid terms was probably the best thing that could have happened for Obama since Republicans opposition diverted attention from his own party's dissension.
Re: (Score:3)
No from what he's done, he's not a conservative. He's a right-wing authoritarian: http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2012 [politicalcompass.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Obama helped pass the requirement for people to buy health insurance, which while more conservative than single payer, is not conservative
How is driving customers to businesses - which are free to set their own prices to maximize profit - not conservative? It sure as hell isn't liberal or even centrist. Go all the way back to Hoover and you won't find a republican president who would not have signed that measure in particular.
Obama allowed homosexuals in the military, not a social conservative position
Bush would have had to do that in order to continue his wars. We were running out of able bodied and willing troops; it was either end DADT or start a draft.
Obama has been in favor of financial assistance for underwater mortgages
Another pro-business position as their were too many und
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who owns the code?
Well, let's see... It was written by public employees, for the public election of a public official, paid for by public monies...
Who honestly has to ask that question? "Honestly" being the key word in that sentence.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It was written by PRIVATE employees, paid for by PRIVATE monies. Obama's campaign did not take PUBLIC money for his re-election.
The code is either owned by the Obama campaign, or the DNC, or perhaps a specific individual. It all depends on who payed and who commissioned the work. Regardless, no government civilian workers had their government paychecks granted to them because they worked on coding the Obama campaign's get out to work widget.
Re:Ownership? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They tried... there was a /. article about what a train wreck it was.
Re: (Score:2)
Worse, someone will do something stupid and make you look like an asshole to boot.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is a joke
I'm not getting the joke
Make up your mind?
Re: (Score:2)
Considering we only ever get to pick from two hand selected candidates
That's not true - in the majority of states, there were no less than 4 candidates on the ballot.
That you, and people that think like you, don't consider third-party candidates as viable is part of the fucking problem, you know.
Re: (Score:2)
I bet if you could make a movie out of the code they'd find a way to leak the information.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, 'cause they only got 48% of the vote... hardly anybody voted for them.
Re: (Score:2)
I say open-source it. Much like the NRA, the more they communicate with the American public, the less they're liked. Some of the biggest helpers in Obama's success were the off-color comments of Romney (47%), and those two wacko abortion Republicans. Another lost election or two and they might figure out they don't represent the majority of Americans anymore.
So you're saying republican voters are so weak minded that a few off color comments and a couple crazy abortion opponents is enough to make them vote for the other party (or perhaps worse, to not vote at all)?