[ALawPoker]

1.) "Well, he CAN win. He has been hovering around 6-9% on prediction markets, which speaks for itself. This is a question you shouldn't even be asking yourself anyways. The point isn't to guess who other people might be voting for and act accordingly; the point is to diligently find the best guy. What's the point of necessarily picking someone who wins anyways? That seems to defeat a lot of the point behind making your voice heard."

2.) "He doesn't want to up and get rid of it; he wants to work towards phasing out that department, in addition to other departments he thinks create wasteful spending, such as the dept. of education, because he thinks the goal of what these departments are intended for will be best met when you remove the barrier of centralized regulation.

Terrorists are a real threat, and because of that RP doesn't want to trust the solution to be in the hands of a bureaucratic federal government. Government is incompetent at everything they do, and defense is no different. We need to move towards solving this problem on the state and local level.

While we personally might have nothing to hide in our emails and phone conversations, we should still be wary of a counter-terrorism approach that involves this tactic. Other people are bothered by it, because people like privacy, and they will only let it go so far before they say no more. So our counter-terrorism forms a sort of dependency on an approach that's inherently flawed. We should be focusing on an approach that has more long-term viability. I don't know exactly what that approach should be, but I do know that when you take the federal bureaucracy out of the way and give states and local governments more control over their own safety, good things will happen."