Are there any politicians you like?

President Obama and Governor Jerry Brown

I’d definitely do sexy time with Sarah Palin, sure, i’d insist on her having a “whore’s bath” prior & yeah, i’d shower myself after, like Jodie Foster in The Accused, but man, it’d be worth it…so long as she pays :D

I actuallly liked and still like Bill Clinton. Maybe not as much as Monica did but definately more than Hillary does. Some of his decisions I may not agree with but most of them were spot on. He’s cool.

My two local Representatives: Frank Pallone and Rush Holt.

To be (semi) serious for a second, I like Obama. He has a vulnerable quality that I can’t quite put my finger on, much like a black Gollum.

Bill and Hillary Clinton

Pierre Elliott Trudeau “Just watch me”, “fudle duddle” and Al Gore.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren

I don’t know much about him, but Bernie Sanders seems to make remarkably logical comments, a lot.
And I greatly admired Wendy Davis’ courage.
Elizabeth Warren also seems like an amazing woman.
Now that he’s out of office, I very much admire Jimmy Carter
I’ve beenn disappointed in some of his actions (and frustrated by his limitations), but I still cheer President Obama. Unlike many of those that he interacts with, I truly believe he’s a decent human being.

Ron Paul

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ron%20paul%20channel&sm=1

I am of the school that anyone who likes any main party propaganda specialist is a blithering idiot. Seriously, we need to fire them all.

Bernie Sanders consistently and for many years.
and Jerry Brown. He’s amazing.

@DWW25921 Ron Paul seems great for a while, and then he opens his mouth and says things are are seriously nucking futs. Like, scary nucking futs.

I like . . . .

No. There’s no one.

I wonder why anyone votes for them at all.

You mean, TOTALLY like? As in 100%? And dead ones don’t count? I like Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, but they are all dead.

I like Bill, Hilary, and Obama.

My list starts like @syz‘s list:
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Wendy Davis
Jimmy Carter – stirring some interesting waves recently regarding the causus belli for the Iraq war
Nancy Pelosi – for standing up to the “Intelligence” communities for lying.
Dennis Kucinich – (During the 2000 primary voters of all types picked his policies when his name and party were stripped off the survey about 76% of the time vs everybody else)
Alan Grayson – unforgettable description of Republican health care policy “Don’t get sick, die quickly”
Kirsten Gillibrand – showing some serious progressive potential

Dead ones count too. As long as you liked them for something they did, and not just because they’re dead politicians. :p

Absolutely add Elizabeth Warren to my list. I love that woman. I’d vote for her as president in a heartbeat.

Bernie Sanders
Jerry Brown

I’m the volunteer Treasurer for a state Senator who’s now running for the U.S. Congress. He’s one of the finest, most honest, and most sincere people I’ve ever known.

FDR

The Clintons

I used to like Chris Christie. Now I’m waiting to hear the outcome of the investigations.

Billy Carter is a good humanitarian but as a president, he was weak.

Jimmy Carter not Billy! Thanks to the jelly who pm’d me and pointed that out. Billy Carter was the beer drinking brother.

Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Olympia Snowe, and Vermin Supreme.

Jimmy Carter has been an exemplary world citizen since leaving office.

I liked Ronald Reagan because I thought he was an amazing leader, appearing consistently confident and strong. He also appeared to be a good judge of people around him, and great at delegating. In many ways he was ‘larger than life’ and generally gave the rest of the world a strong, resolute image of America.

I wish I’d lived in a time to have experienced FDR first hand, and formed an opinion not filtered by time. I have a feeling I would have liked him even better that Ronald Reagan, but for much the same reasons.

Jay Nixon, the Governor of Missouri, was the Attorney General when I lived in MO and he was awesome. Had his finger on the pulse of the average people, like actually prosecuting companies over the ‘Do Not Call List’. I still have a high opinion.

There are a few dead ones that I don’t dislike so much. Does that count?

I really like Senator Bernie Sanders and my own state’s senior senator, Elizabeth Warren.

There are quite a few I like and also respect. Obama, Biden, both Clintons, Jerry Brown. And I like Nancy Pelosi, a nice SF representative.

I really like Jackie Speier, Representative from the SF Peninsula. Knew her in high school and was in scouts with her brother. Whip ass smart, and a caring person.

Former Rep Joe Walsh, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers just catapulted herself to the front of the line with her stellar rebuttal to Obamas SOTU address. All these humble people truly care and are passionate to see that we the people regain control of our Government to benefit us and not some corporate thug.

No, not really. And I’m of the view that one should have a healthy distrust of anyone asking for power.

@Cruiser

That’s a good joke.

@ibstubro Agree, Jay’s a cool dude. When ATT tried to charge me for overseas and porn calls he investigated and got me out of that when I produced proof I was at work during the time the calls were made.

I have a story about Bernie Sanders that’s very old – goes back to when he was a congressman.

One of my kids was studying abroad and he needed a medicine that was not legal in that country for some reason. I tried everything including the American embassy but I couldn’t find a doctor who would give him a prescription and I could not legally send the medicine to him. So I went to see Bernie – told him my dilemma and he wrote an official letter on US House of Representatives letterhead and used a big seal on it and sent it to the country’s embassy and a copy to our embassy there. My son was immediately directed to a British physician who took care of his needs from there on. It wasn’t my problem any more. Because the country had Universal Health Care and the Physician was British serving mostly students and British people who had jobs abroad, I was never charged a penny. Just paid for the price of the medication – which was a fraction of what it cost in the US. Pennies.

Bernie likes to help the little guy. Stay in touch with the needs of his constituents and the whole country.

My grandmother had a photo of FDR on her kitchen wall right through the 60’s. She a World War I widow, then widowed again in 1929 just after my mother was born. Then the depression. Then both her older sons dropped out of high school to serve in World War II. She thought he was the greatest president we had in the history of the US.

No

@KNOWITALL Jay Nixon actually made me believe he became a politician because he wanted to be a public servant. And (best in class) by showing rather than telling me so.

Moving from Missouri to Illinois was the worst mistake of my life. I don’t regret the move, I just acknowledge I should have concentrated on living in Mo.

I respect Ron Paul a great deal, and I feel he’s real and sincere. I don’t agree with all of his views though. I have a great deal of respect for Gary Johnson too, a person who I don’t think was even involved with politics before running for govenor of New Mexico, and someone who actually worked for a living like a regular Joe. I don’t agree with him on everything either but I love his stance on social and military issues. I’m sure there are a few other politicians that I can’t think of currently whom I admire too.

I tend to agree about Ron Paul, @Paradox25. Real and sincere.
My gut reaction to his son, Rand, is exactly the opposite. Crying shame.

Meh, Ron Paul panders as much as any other politician does.

@ibstubro Rand is no libertarian, neither with the big or small ’L’.

@Paradox25 Bleh. Spit. Rand(om pandering). It’s a damned shame Rand didn’t take after Ron. We might have had an American Revolution to last, the next election.

Americans are sick to death with the Republican against Republican, Democrat against Democrat debate.

We need something fresh, not party created.

I guess Rand killed the Libertarians.

@Paradox25 @ibstubro Ron Paul is no libertarian either. He is an old school conservative who merely wants to take power away from the federal government and give it to the state governments. He’s perfectly okay with the government regulating what you do in the bedroom, so long as it’s a state government (thus why he was furious when the Supreme Court overturned Texas’ anti-sodomy laws). He’s perfectly okay with the government making medical decisions for you, too, so long as it’s the state government denying you a medical procedure and not the federal government making sure you can afford it (as seen in his rabid opposition to legalized abortion). These views have taken him so far as to support the Sanctity of Life Act—which he expressly tied to his faith, rather than any sort of constitutional mandate—and the We the People Act—which attempted to prevent the Supreme Court from protecting civil rights so long as it wasn’t the federal government doing the violating. Then there’s the hypocrisy over his views on border defense. In Liberty Defined, he argues that there are no such things as group rights and that national borders are therefore illegitimate. Yet he also supports increasing US border security. There’s a reason Ron and Rand don’t criticize each other in public despite their historical willingness to break ranks with anybody: they’re not really all that different.

I think appearing to have the strength of his own convictions is part of the appeal, @SavoirFaire.

I too think that the federal government has subsumed too many of the regulations that were formerly set by the states. I think there is value in letting people who actually choose to live in an area set communal standards.

I’m not crazy about the guy, and, in all honesty, part of his appeal is that he is a perpetual underdog.

I think part of his appeal is that he’s batshit. I’ve noticed most of his followers are batshit as well.

@ibstubro Heroes and villains alike can have the courage of their convictions, so it’s important to know if one’s convictions are worth standing up for. As Nietzsche said: “A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!”

In any case, my only point was that Ron Paul is not a libertarian. A libertarian cannot be okay with tyranny just so long as the tyrant isn’t the federal government. A libertarian cannot support the systematic removal of civil rights protections. So maybe you’re okay with letting people set their laws by their communal standards, but I can’t help but think about how many communities throughout history have thought it was acceptable to kill people on the basis of race, religion, or hair color.

I don’t know of anyone else with national prominence that’s even giving lip service to containing or reducing the federal government’s influence in our daily lives. I can’t help but think we’re headed the way of New York City, where the government tries to regulate the size of pop cups.

In any case “I’m not crazy about the guy, and, in all honesty, part of his appeal is that he is a perpetual underdog.”

What does it matter if the federal government is constrained when the states are given just as much power that is supposedly bad when in the hands of the federal?

@ibstubro Plenty of politicians with national prominence are at least giving lip service to the notion of small government. It’s literally the basis of the Republican Party’s stated platform. If you are genuinely concerned about oppressive government, try voting for some genuine libertarians (ideally, left-libertarians). After all, the New York City soda cup regulation you mentioned is not a federal law, and so it is not opposed by Ron Paul. The ban can go national without the federal government ever taking any action on it. All it takes is for every city or every state to think “yeah, we’d like that power for ourselves, too.” This is why merely being opposed to federal power grabs makes no sense.

P.S. Some people are underdogs for a reason and we should hope they stay that way.

Okay, yeah, you win, @SavoirFaire.

@ibstubro The problem with your post about conflicts within each party is that the divide is a philosophical one, and I disagree with you vividly and I think this is what’s needed. Today’s Republican Party is not even close to standing for the ideals on which it was founded, civil liberties, freedom and justice.

I think this is a great thing that there’s conflict within the Republican Party since it has been hijacked by religious nuts, corporatists and fascists. I’ll say the same things for the Democrats too, though I feel that unlike the Republicans, the shift of the Democrats is much better than in the past.

I would like to see more viable alternative political parties and candidates involved in American politics though.

@Paradox25, you’re betwixt and between.

As long as the two national parties can be hijacked, rather than picking a story and sticking too it, there will be no “viable alternative political parties and candidates involved in American politics.”

If our political parties would stand up and be counted, there would be more political parties. The function of the US national government is currently to see that there is only one government, and it’s based in Washington DC. Based on power and influence rather than common good.

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
—Alexander Pope

I’m not trying to win, @ibstubro; I’m trying to discuss. And changing your mind—if that is indeed what happened—is not a loss.

As for the hijacking of parties, I think it’s important to remember that parties are not ideologies, but rather alliances. The Republican Party started out as a liberal party. The Democrats used to dominate in the Old South. Americans focus far too much on the “team sports” aspect of politics rather than actual policy debates, which is one of the reasons we’re stuck in a two-party swamp. For my own part, I favor a switch to some sort of ranked voting system. This would allow us to vote for whomever we prefer without fear that our vote will be “wasted” because, should our top-ranked candidate lose, our vote will be then go to our second-ranked candidate (and so forth until a winner is declared). This, I think, would be one of the best ways of bringing policy back into greater focus while undermining the two-party system.

@ibstubro That’s the problem though, being that we have two sets of drastically different political philosophies where the politicians can’t seem to agree with what the ‘common good’ is. We have humanitarians squaring off against objectivists here.

Show me a room where you ask people who are their favorite politicians and I’ll show you a food fight in the making. Unless of course the people in the room all have the same political leanings. No food fight here.