Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Democratic Candidate For State Treasurer Says He'll Donate Salary If Elected
Mike Boland, the Democratic candidate for Indiana Treasurer, says he will donate his $76,600 a year salary to charity or scholarships if he's elected. Boland, a retired Illinois legislator and educator, tells the Terre Haute Tribune-Star that his family is in good health and he has no mortgage to pay on his home. Boland says he's not rich; just "a good middle class." He said a secondary reason for giving up his salary is to remove the cynicism held by many voters that all politicians are crooks. Boland said Harry Truman believed that politics was a noble occupation and so does he.
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6 comments:
Sorry for taking this slightly off-topic.
Sheila Kennedy is on her blog spewing bile about how voters cannot be trusted to elect judges, so there must be a select committee established to choose judges for us. Notice that the hard Left screams about voter disenfranchisement whenever the Republicans ask for an ID at the polling place but have no problem disenfranchising every voter from having a say in the most powerful office in the government.
Kennedy knows that the real power rests with the judges, and she doesn't want the rabble having any input in how they are governed. Judicial activism gets difficult if a people's candidate sits on the bench.
Select committes and other undemocratic methods of appointing governmental officials ensure that there will never be anyone to hold the office who will deliver true change, and such processes flat lock out any person not from the two main parties and not well connected within hte two parties to the power structures that constituted the committees.
If you want a perpetual oligarchy, appoint not just judges, but every other office. In the wake of Marbury, the Supreme Court has been a running disaster, exercising power never considered by the Framers, and this coup, this drafting oversight, has been executed and exploited to full benefit by certain interests.
Only an unelected judiciary could be as brazenly contrary to the founding ideals of this country and be perpetually fed at the public trough. if the Supreme Court were elected, the Left would have been nowhere near as successful in changing this country through the courts.
They want to use the same shadowy processes in every court in the land, so they can't have you and I having a say in their system.
If you want true change and true opportunity for the people's voice to be heard, allow judges to be elected, and enact contingent voting.
I'd post this on Kennedy's blog, but, like her disapproval of people being heard at the ballot box, she bans anyone who doesn't reside in her amen corner. The hard Left, like all extreme ideologies, can only retain nominal viability in absence of all dissent and inquiry.
Apologies. I meant to advocate Alternative Voting, not Contingent Voting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
What makes a judicial office so special, so sui generis, that its occupant cannot be chosen by the people?
Further, this business of "Shall Judge Whosits be retained?" needs to go. Every judicial office should be put up for election at frequent intervals. Nobody is entitled to a publicly funded sincecure.
These are our offices, not your private merrionette stage.
The problem is that 99.9% of the electorate have no idea what judges do, and no capacity to know if they're competent. Mostly, lawyers, especially trial lawyers, at least have some contact with which to gauge competency. Open elections will lead to people running on platforms of pre-judging cases, and introduce more money into the system. As best, you'll end up with all judges having last names beginning with "A".
That's already true of a lot of offices, including Treasurer, that ought to be appointed. Heck, the majority of people voting for Secretary of State assume the office deals with foreign policy.
Anon 12:24, the problem is the merit system is often politics behind closed doors.
Paul:
Not only is the selection behind closed doors, it's utterly inhospitable to radicals, third-party candidates, boat-rockers, constitutionalists, social justice advocates, dissenters and anyone who is outside the aims of the power elite.
The people should have the ability to elect a Green Party, treehugger, socially conscious Birkenstock-wearer as their judge.
The law as seen through the eyes of the power elite does not afford the citizens much due process, if any.
The problem is the acknowledgement that democracy is a failure for anything really important, but they'll let us play vote in the inconsequential offices.
If we can choose a President, we can sure choose a local judge, or let's call the entire democracy exercise a failure; be done with all of it, and move directly to an overt oligarchy.
What an idiot!
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