Skip to main content

2016 GOP Dream Team -- a little of bit of this, a little bit of that

The current GOP primary field is exciting and diverse, with respect to life experience, cultural/regional background and ideology:

  • Rand Paul (opthalmologist, Presbyterian, Libertarian)
  • Ted Cruz (lawyer, Southern Baptist, Tea Party, Cuban-Canadian)
  • Ben Carson (neurosurgeon, Seventh Day Adventist, Constitutional Conservative, Detroit, MI)
  • Allen West (US Army Lt. Col. retd., Tea Party, Georgia)
  • Mitt Romney (Private equity/venture capital, Mormon, Moderate, Michigan)
  • Jeb Bush (Real estate, Roman Catholic, Moderate, Texan)
  • Chris Christie (Lawyer, Roman Catholic, Moderate, New Jersey)
  • Scott Walker (Politico, Nondenominational Evangelical, Moderate)
  • Nikki Haley (Accounting, Methodism, Indian-American from South Carolina)
  • Bobby Jindal (Roman Catholic, Indian-American from Louisiana)
  • Mike Huckabee (pastor, Southern Baptist, Arkansas)
  • Mike Pence (Attorney, Evangelical, Indiana)
  • Rick Perry (Air Force capt., Nondenominational Evangelical, Texas)
  • Susana Martinez (Attorney, Roman Catholic, Mexican-American from Texas)
  • Brian Sandoval (Attorney, Roman Catholic, California)
  • Rick Santorum (Attorney, Roman Catholic)
  • Marco Rubio (Lawyer, Roman Catholic, Cuban-American)
  • Paul Ryan (Roman Catholic, Randian/Objectivist/Libertarian)
  • Condi Rice (Political Scientist/Diplomat, Presbyterian, Foreign-Policy Hawk)


They range from libertarians to centrists to social conservatives to policy wonks to foreign-policy hawks. A long, drawn-out primary season would split the electorate and would be a self-defeating war of attrition. Instead, I suggest that the entire field should join forces and compete as a team. The President, VP and the Cabinet comprise an Executive Team of about 22, or more. It would be awesome if these people can get in a room and decide a couple of front-runners for President, along with picking appropriate persons for Cabinet roles. Then, the primary voters can be asked to vote after a couple of public discussions and/or debates. No TV ads, attack ads, etc. Following this, the Presidential candidate (say, Rand Paul) can then assemble the team consisting of all the others, and focus on winning the elections and righting the nation according to a simple agenda : (a) balance the budget; (b) protect Constitutional freedoms, (c) reduce the size, scope and reach of the federal government, (d) reduce taxes and simplify the tax code, and, last but definitely not least, (e) audit the Fed, normalize interest rates, and guide the dollar to normalcy by ending QE-based inflation (which is a tax on the poor).


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the brave new economy

A free(er) market is emerging and has been emerging ever since the advent of the Internet and the Web. Newer technologies have accelerated this. Old inefficiencies in knowledge and access to the market are quickly disappearing. Participation is increasingly peer-to-peer (P2P). Participants can produce, create, curate, give, lend, sell, share, auction, consume, take, borrow, buy, reuse, rent and/or barter goods, services, cash, credit, currency, equity, debt and/or knowledge. The resultant economy is highly collaborative and is sometimes referred to as the ‘ sharing economy ’. Efficiencies are being introduced and value is being created in the smallest of markets. Non-profit activities are thriving as well, in addition to for-profit ones. The marketplace is becoming, at once, global and local. An important subset of the new economy is collaborative and crowdsourced , and may be described as commons-based peer production . Asymmetries in information are diminished by algorithms (Google
Post a Comment
Read more

Migrating from MS SQL Server to MongoDB

The following contains notes from various attempts at migrating 2.5GB of MS SQL Server data to MongoDB, on an 8 GB, quad-core, 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise machine. [TERMINATED]  http://mssql2mongo.codeplex.com/ : Simple to use. Exponential slowdown observed in migration. For a total of the 50 million records spanning two tables, the following migration times were observed: 1 second for the first 100,000 records,  30 minutes for 1,000,000, 20 hours for 16 million (after which I terminated the process). [DID NOT WORK] http://rubydoc.info/gems/mongify/ : A ruby-based approach. Use Ruby 1.9.3 (tiny_tds dependency causes problems with Ruby 2.0). Install DevKit before installing the mongify gem. Also, use ' sqlserver ' as the adapter in the .config file. Then, before running ' mongify check <config-file> ', install the gems  activerecord-sqlserver-adapter  and tiny_tds . At this stage, it fails. ' mongify translation <config-file> ' fails as well.
1 comment
Read more

the World Cup draw -- an alternative proposal

The FIFA World Cup seeding and draw system has consistently produced groups of death and groups comprised mainly of teams that fail to invoke passion or imagination from fans around the world, except perhaps for such teams' own fans. The latest edition is no exception -- and may even be the worst ever on this measure. An outline of the draw system can be seen here . We have one group which contains Switzerland, Ecuador and Honduras and another consisting of Russia, Algeria and South Korea!! And, on top of this, we have at least three, if not four or more, groups of death. Depending on one's perspective, esp. given the recent rise of African powerhouses, all of the rest of the groups may even be considered Groups of Death!! This is a disservice to football fans around the world, not to mention the skilled and enterprising teams that worked hard to get here. To address this, I propose a simplified draw system : Randomize Pot 1 and assign to Groups Assign remaining Pots t
4 comments
Read more