Jeff Stahler for February 11, 2016

Unfortunately so true. Without Congressional cooperation, change in anything governmental ain’t happening.

This is the kind of cartoon the late Bill Mauldin referred to as an,"Evergreen’. It’s relevant now, it was relevant 25 years ago, and in another 25 years it’ll still be relevant.

More like GOP diversionary tactics.

In fairness to all politicians of every stripe, they can only promise to “fight” for something. When a single Senator can completely stop the legislative process in its tracks, then really who can make any promise? We don’t live in a dictatorship (despite Rs best efforts) ………….yet.

If the political parties attracted accomplished people instead of ‘good ol’ boys and gals there could be commitments instead of promises. It would be nice to have someone who has been outside of the political or 1% bubbles representing the people.

Basically everything Trump has said has as much substance as a soap bubble.

If you really want change, you have to research into who owns them.

Vacuous campaign promises are actually not a bad thing. There are a number of promises being made especially on the R-side, I don’t want to see fulfilled.

In the 1800’s’ voter turnout was about 80% now about 60%, With wins of 51% and the Hastert rule (majority of the majority) a de facto minority is running the house … could be as low as 15.6% (0.60 × 0.51 × 0.51 = 0.156) . I’m pretty sure that is NOT what the founders had in mind!

Promises made during any presidential candidate’s campaign should be called proposals. Campaign promises are enticing but talk is cheap. Not many candidates run on “I’ll raise your taxes” but most politicians discover taxes are the only way to pay for all of their promises and end up raising taxes. Promises of job creation are always popular – but without government intervention there are no guarantees that this will happen. With government intervention there are few guarantees jobs will be created – but there needs to be some kind of proposal to achieve results and what the fiscal policy is. Just saying create jobs has done little in the past. The usual suspect, of course, is the voter. We have a very bad collective short term memory. Even with good intentions promises are difficult to quantify and can be very ideological and our current system doesn’t promote a discussion of the complete story of each promise. What candidates promise and what they deliver are usually very different and we have very little accountability for the process.

“The biggest problem is people who actually believe the “promises” and then vote for the “promise” makers.”.That is why Rand Paul lost. He didn’t make big promises, only a commitment to pursue fiscal responsibility and it seems to be a message that few want to hear.

Why does no one ever propose replacing welfare with jobs & job training? Fix those bridges before they fall down. Also how is it not obvious that eternal war is unsustainably expensive? Maybe we should keep schools & social security & cut down on the wars.