At Jeff Pulver's 2018 Spring Monage conference, I got to see Michael Allman give a talk entitled Blockchain and Voting. While the blockchain aspect of it is probably why he was on the agenda, to me that's a secondary factor. What I found most interesting is the idea of what Allman calls "direct democracy." In this model, he commits to voting as his constituency desires, issue by issue. Allman is running on the Republican ticket and describes himself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative "almost libertarian on some issues," he says. Allman will use a system he's created called Voterfied.com to poll constituents and get their views on issues. He then commits to voting with those results, regardless of his personal preference or his party's platform.

Direct democracy is where people vote on the issues, and however they vote, that is how I will vote in Congress. Instead of me telling the voters how I am going to vote, they are going to tell me how to vote. It is giving political power back to the people, which is where it belongs.

For the first time, voters can have a say on an issue-by-issue basis. Anyone registered in my district can cast their votes on important questions of the day through a website or mobile app I have created. I will be guided by the results of these votes, not by special interests, lobbyists, or anyone else.

I love the idea. Anything that tries to move past the existing two-party, identity politics stranglehold is a good thing. Now, I can't actually vote for candidate Allman because I don't live in San Diego County, the 52nd district, where he is running, but I support what he is doing. Of course, I don't expect either party to be particularly open to this approach. They want candidates that vote along party lines. But if the people start to demand it, maybe they will have no choice. That's what Allman and his team hopes.

And his campaign accepts Bitcoin too 😃

I'm sure somebody has made this comparison before, but it is becoming increasingly clear to me the many parallels between politics in the U.S. and Pro Wrestling (what we used to call "Big Time Wrestling" when I was a kid).

Being the contrarian that I am, whenever it becomes popular to ridicule something, I find myself asking "wait a minute. Is there more to this?" Many of the figures of the Tea Party movement are pretty easy targets, making it easy to dismiss the whole movement as a bunch of extremists, ignorant backwoodsmen or agents of some evil puppet-master.

There are things I should like about the movement. First, it started as a populist movement, which is what I think we need to shake up the current rigged two-party monopoly. But it hasn't played out that way. Tea Party proponents say they "don't care about party labels" and that they "don't care what party you're in; they just want to know if you reflect their values." However, in practice, there is no place for Democrats in the Tea Party - and what's more, all Tea Party candidates have run on the Republican ticket, not a third party ticket.

Ok, so the real Tea Party is older, white, somewhat more male, and 30% more likely to identify as "born-again" Christians than the general population. They have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party and an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. But what do they want?

A common slogan is "Take back America." When I see representatives of the movement speak, whether official PR spokesmen or ordinary attendees at rallies etc. it feels like this is code for a number of what appear to be fear-driven goals. In a lot of ways, "Take back America" seems to mean taking America back to a mythical, idealized time in the past, when white people had it good, jobs were plentiful, taxes were low, and everybody feared/loved Jesus in appropriate quantities.


Tea Party enthusiasts are quick to throw around the word socialism in reference to Obama’s tax policies. They claim he wants to raise the tax burden on the rich and lower it on the poor to "distribute wealth" but the facts, again, don't bear it out. The rich continue to get richer. Even if Obama had gotten his way, it would have represented a pretty paltry tax increase for the richest people and, even then, it would only get things closer to where they were because, while the tax rates for nearly all households have been dropping since the 60s, the rates of the richest have dropped the most, by far. If the Tea Party sees a pro-business, pro-capitalism moderate such as Barack Obama as a socialist with all his tax cuts, imagine what they would think of a president who ran a federal government with significantly higher tax rates than today and who raised taxes while in office, specifically, Ronald Reagan.



The basic message of the Tea Party movement is quite appealing: Government is too expensive, too intrusive and too big. But the devil is in the details. In the end, I don't think there's anything new here. The Tea Party should be praised for managing to organize some of the anger and frustration that's out there into something people are looking at - and perhaps it can be a model for other populist movements in some way. But for the Tea Party itself, there is no "there" there, at least not yet - it's not that unlike the old "moral majority" but with a much narrower agenda. And like that movement, it will continue to be a fringe element. It is a movement that cannot deny that it is heavily loaded with extremists - truth hurts, sorry. Mocking them really is easy, and justified in most cases. Again, tough luck. You are what you are.

It's quite clear that conservatives in general, and Republicans specifically, have decided that anything that Barack Obama proposes must be a radical, left-wing, socialist agenda.

They call him the most radical left-wing liberal president ever and they label every policy proposal as such, or socialist, or worse. While the left considers him the liberal messiah.

This rhetoric allows the hate and anger on both sides to persist, as though it's based on something real, while in reality both sides are taking us to the cleaners.

Obama is not a liberal and his policies are not progressive - he is to the right of Nixon. He's a corporate shill, just like Bush. Republicans love to hate Obama and liberals love to hate Bush. But the fact is, when it comes to policy making, they are much more similar than they are different. They do it wearing far different hats, but they both do it, just the same.

Whether its Wall Street Bailouts or Iraq War profiteering, they both operate on "take from the poor and give to the rich" policies - their direct actions take money straight from the working middle class and hand it over to wealthy executives - they're so bold about it now, they don't even make a pretense of hiding it anymore.

Obama can take a conservative proposal and, when he says it, the same exact thing, it is suddenly labeled as radical and left-wing. Calling Obama a liberal is an insult to liberals. And doing so, just to keep the fire of bipartisan hatred burning is foolish - it's the distraction both sides want, while they steal our money, just like as shown in the 1890's cartoon below.



Notice where the politician’s right hands are located. They prop up the "left-winger" to fight the "right-winger" on some "invented" basis that both sides get all emotional about, and meanwhile the politicians on BOTH SIDES snatch money out of our wallet!

Wake up People!

Stop falling prey to Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, and the rest of them and look a little deeper. The person you love to hate, the regular old "liberal" or "conservative" down the street is on your side (yes, even the Tea Partiers). Our common enemy is the scum politicians on both sides who are pretending to be on our side with their rhetoric, using all the words and phrases we want to hear, all the while stealing our rights and our money from right under our noses. As long as we're fighting each other, on the terms they've laid out for us, we're doing them a favor.