Seriously, this isn’t rocket science and if you are afraid of “undressing” your finances in front of the public, you have no business running for public office. You lose your moral claim to some of your rights the moment you stand for public office. Individual liberty is not always compatible with the needs of public service, especially in a republic. Republics cannot survive when office holders are allowed to put their own rights ahead of the duties that civic virtue demands of them.

I think the principle remains, even if disclosure is “voluntary”: demanding “full” disclosures from politicians will greatly favor those with the connection to make their so-called “full” disclosures in actuality be anything but.

How do you figure that it remains? Any middle class family could theoretically found a LLC, transfer their assets to it and “hide them” from a disclosure that is limited to merely providing a listing of assets. There is no secret power that the “connected” have to hide assets. The only difference, if any, is their ability to hire someone truly gifted at forming shell companies and trusts to move assets around until they’re thoroughly hidden in plain sight.

Mr. Brooks probably believes that making the public aware of the mistakes of a benevolent government may have worse effects than allowing the government to clean up after its mistakes confidentiality. He is, in fact, correct in this belief. Where he errs, however, is in his apparent assumption that governments will always remain benevolent. Limiting the effectiveness of a malevolent government may be a good thing.

On the other hand, informing the public of government wrongs may not always drive the government to right action. If some government personnel commit grave wrongs, but despite very broad public awareness the actual reaction against them is very slight, other government personnel may take that as a green light to commit similar wrongs themselves. In some sense, it may have been better if the transgressions of the first agents had not become so public.

I think the principle remains, even if disclosure is “voluntary”: demanding “full” disclosures from politicians will greatly favor those with the connection to make their so-called “full” disclosures in actuality be anything but.

I’m not saying that this isn’t precisely why surveillance is to be opposed, nor am I saying that the release of one’s tax records is anywhere near as intrusive as this, but it begs the question of whether or not one would have a different opinion on sunshine were that the case.

I think you misunderstand the critical distinction here between disclosure and surveillance. Financial disclosure is voluntary. You want the job? You have to, under penalty of perjury, voluntarily enumerate your assets to the prospective employer. Almost invariably, the reason is that the damage you could do by being bribed or blackmailed is more important than your privacy on your financial standing. It’s not just federal and state employers that do this, but also many financial institutions require financial disclosure to make sure that their people aren’t doing things which are unethical or illegal.

It does the cause of privacy absolutely no good to conflate disclosure and surveillance.

What if, as will probably be likely in the next 10 years, you had the ability to combine mass surveillance with facial recognition technology to determine precisely where every single candidate has been out in public their whole lives.

You have a record of how he snuck into a bar when he was 18, and how he hired a stripper when he was 21. You have a record of the non PC jokes he made, and the things he told his wife. You have a record of the women he saw and the man he met last night.

Would this information then mean that the only possible candidates with a shot at getting elected will be those with the connections that allow this information to disappear? Those for whom records are unavailable and whose cameras mysteriously stopped working when they were in the picture?

I’m not saying that this isn’t precisely why surveillance is to be opposed, nor am I saying that the release of one’s tax records is anywhere near as intrusive as this, but it begs the question of whether or not one would have a different opinion on sunshine were that the case.

Fungus is really repugnant. As I pull the wall back further, I’m even more disgusted with what I see.

I could either rip the whole thing down and go through all the pain and expense of cleaning it out, or I could put up a really strong wall that would make it harder for me to see it grow until it actually invades my lungs and kills me. Hmmm..

What a fucking moron.

‘That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” ‘

The man who (for all of his good ideas on foreign policy) has as much chance of becoming President as Richard Dawkins has of becoming the next Pope?

It’s nasty. It stinks. It ruins your reputation to be forever known as an “pig excrement diver”.

Except, of course, amoung all the other pig excrement divers.

And that’s who is in control of this country.

citation please. Last I checked, Ron Paul raised quite a bit of money without checks from big business, and that’s just one example.