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Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat
Akido37 was one of many readers letting us know that US Sen. Arlen Specter has changed parties to become a Democrat. This gives the Democrats 59 seats in the Senate, and 60 if and when Al Franken gets seated from Minnesota. However, Specter said in his announcement that he will not be an automatic 60th vote for breaking Republican filibusters. While the senator's move seems to have surprised many Republicans, it is understandable to moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who said, "You haven't certainly heard warm encouraging words of how they [Republicans] view moderates. Either you are with us or against us." Specter noted that in his home state of Pennsylvania, 200,000 formerly Republican voters switched party allegiance last year.
Well, to be fair, he has always described himself as a moderate republican; elected in the 80's when the 'Big Tent' philosophy was strong in the Republican party. If 200,000 people left the Republican party for the Democratic party, you can bet that it was the moderates that were leaving, shifting the party farther to the right and making it impossible for him to win the primary as a self described moderate.
If he is more likely to win the primary in the democratic party than the republican party, he is almost by definition a democrat. If he isn't a democrat, he will lose badly in his first primary and everything will be exactly as it would be if he had stayed as a republican.
It's a joke. Who cares? Specter was pretty much a lock on most votes for the Democrats anyway. He was just a way for them to get a Republican to vote with them and then scream about how great they are at "bipartisanship." LOOK! A REPUBLICAN SUPPORTS US! Ignore all the others that stand by their principles. He's been pretty much a schmuck who basically votes to please Philly and Pittsburgh. The rest of us he thinks can all go hang.
He's 79. Have you ever noticed politicians all want you and me to retire by 72 at the latest? But they're supposed to keep getting into office until they're dead? And in some cases afterward? We need to have an age limit on politicians and judges. Over 70 and they should ALL be forced out of office. That's a law that really needs to be passed.
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
First I am a conservative though not a Republican. I am all for this.
I want the Democrats to have to own what happens the next few years. After all the years of hearing them harp on Bush deficits I want them to have undeniable majority so they are undeniably responsible for the economy busting budgets they are signing off on. I want ownership to be a non question. While there are good people on both sides of the aisle as a whole I think the entire Congress stinks.
Their actions have become the best reason for term limits. Too many of them think themselves as kings and queens, benevolent in their view because they know better and they are better - in their own minds. They game the system ensuring two party rule and the American people are more enamored with American idol personalities and similar : see Obama.
Now we just need Snowe to flip. She is nothing more than a RINO as well. Make them honest - if you vote one way consistently then be willing to take up the mantle of the party you align with. That way when it comes time to swap parties in power you can get outed. The tragedy is that most won't. They have so many connections and so much power from their office that unseating them takes serious criminal acts and even that is not a guarantee they don't get back in.
Its a great day. Now the Democrats have their "majority" and the hot seat is all theirs. The question becomes, do they do to Obama what they did to Clinton? See the flip side is that when one group has a real majority they don't answer to anyone - including the President. After all they no longer need them. It also leads to internal factions which happened to them in the early nineties. That majority benefits and hurts them.
But the key is, they cannot escape the responsibility for the spending spree or legislation. It will give Obama a convincing excuse too for what he signs off. So he can claim its not what he really wants "but the reality of the situation..."
So, awesome, and lol. Can't wait to see all the excuses for doing stuff that people would eviscerate Republicans for doing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Rather than being a change in personal convictions, Specter claims the opposite: that the Republicans have shifted away from him, i.e. more to the right. I think that sounds pretty accurate, don't you? For example, the chair of the Republican party has recently been apologized to Rush Limbaugh for stating the obvious, that Limbaugh is incendiary. While this is circumstantial, it's still pretty compelling that the Republican party has become more radical from the 1980s where it was a "big tent" kind of party.
This will be interesting though! Just for yucks, I went over to fox news to see what they had to say about it, and their first headline read "Specter abandons millions of GOP voters to join the democratic party." I think that's pretty funny since Specter himself says the GOP voters are abandoning the GOP. That is, he says 200k registered republicans switched parties in the last election in pennsylvania. (They've got something else up now about him being a party pooper.)
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Well, I'm not sure I'd advocate slaughtering everybody, but my pet issue I'm working on memetically spreading is to get a law passed striking all political party information off of state ballots. You would be given the names of candidates, and that's that.
He's hasn't been an automatic vote either way as it was. From a practical standpoint, nothing has changed. The big news here is that Specter thinks the Republicans are more likely to push a hard-right primary challenge (which they almost certainly go on to lose in the general election, given Specter's district) than Democrats are to push a hard-left challenge (which they might win).
Not a typewriter
It's a bit too simplistic to call all the people responsible for the Republicans' fiasco neo-cons.
The Republicans looked very powerful around the time of GW Bush's first election, but what they had is something we old time Democrats knew a lot about: a big tent coalition. We had the cultural elite and labor, and Reagan figured out that that was a fracture line he could split Democratic support along.
The difference is that the Republican coalition had even less coherence than the Democrats, and underwent spontaneous implosion as they tried to put together an agenda that pleased everyone in the tent: Westerners of a libertarian bent, the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party, the evangelicals, the flat out racists. That's why they could never control spending, they were too busy keeping everybody in the tent happy. They fooled themselves into thinking they were cleverly doing this temporarily so they could "starve the beast" until such a time the system began to fall apart. That was stupid. You can't starve the beast. If you try, then when things start to fall apart it just reaches out and eats you alive.
Still, if you want to find a scapegoat, look the the Southern social conservatives. It was their backing of the messianic mission of the neo-cons that allowed them to hijack foreign policy.
Nixon invited the old enemies of the Republicans economic elites into th party, the old Dixiecrats. They became powerful, like the far out religious parties in Israel, because they were the key to power. They're the ones that run the Republican party; not the people who elected Eisenhower. It's too bad, because the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party weren't such a bad bunch, if you kept an eye on them. The country needs people like that, even if you didn't want them to have unchallenged control over policy.
But those old time Republicans don't have any place to go now. The Republican party has been redefined out from under them. It's now the party of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and racism, all things that were anathema to those old time conservatives.
Maybe it's time for a Grand New Party.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For those that are not aware:
The Republican Party hasn't had anything resembling a "big tent" since before Nixon. Arlen Spector, Christie Whitman, and other moderates fit in with the Republicans about as well as a war-mongering, bible-thumping Joe Lieberman fits in with the Democrats.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Arlen Specter is one of the worst, most soul-less, most belief-free individuals in politics. The moment most vividly illustrating what Specter is: prior to the vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he went to the floor of the Senate and said what the bill "seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years" and is "patently unconstitutional on its face." He then proceeded to vote YES on the bill's passage.
I came here for a good argument
Yeah, shutting down the government worked so amazingly well when Newt Gingrich tried it! It only gave Clinton a major boost in his public support and reminded people that yes, they do in fact like the services that government provides. And given that record numbers of people today are reporting that they are satisfied that they are paying a fair level of taxation, the 'John Galt' crowd looks sillier and sillier by the day.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
"Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, pressed an amendment that would strike a provision from the bill that prohibits terror suspects from challenging their detention in the courts. ''What the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years,'' said Mr. Specter, who traced the ability to challenge one's detention to the Magna Carta"
Speaking as a Canadian, you sir know nothing about this system. Private medical treatments are prohibited by law - so, no, they are not available.
There is a shortage of family doctors. Operations - both serious and non-serious - are often delayed until there is almost little point in doing them causing months/years of suffering and further complications. And don't get me started on the emergency rooms at hospitals. The wait times are ridiculous. And once you wait your 5-12 hours in the emergency room, you may get a cast/crutches and be prescribed some Asprin (which you still have to pay for).
To say this system works better is ridiculous.
To say this system works better is ridiculous.
Unless you measure health outcomes, rather than user experience. I agree the user experience sucks, and while private care is not entirely unavailable here it is generally only available to the ultra-rich and politically well-connected.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
Critics of the Canadian system don't actually care about health care outcomes, which is why they always focus on the lousy user experience. The curious question is: if they don't care about health care outcomes, why are they bothering to get all worked up about the system in the first place? They could avoid all the inconveniences of our system and get EXACTLY THE SAME CARE as an uninsured person in the United States without ever leaving home.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Exactly how many neocons are there? I don't think there are enough of them to give any party electoral success. I don't even think there are enough of them to even run a party.
I'll tell you who the neocons were. They were the intellectual dregs of the old liberal movement, the very nation-building nutcases old time conservatives loved to hang around the liberals' necks. Then the Republican party brought all the anti-intellectuals into the fold, and in fact elected one to the presidency. George W. wasn't a neo-con. He wasn't interested enough in the world to have a position. But you have to have positions, and so he turned to the neo-cons because they had an intellectual agenda that sounded just the ticket for a president who wanted to go down in history. He was right, in an ironic way. In any case, he and his other conservative advisors apparently didn't realize these people were the ancient enemies of conservatism, but you can't blame the neo-cons if people choose to listen to them.
You're right that "social conservative" is perhaps far too broad a brush. It's really the anti-intellectuals in that movement that are to blame. C.S. Lewis was a social conservative, but he also said "When a nation thinks its cause is God's cause, it's wars become wars of annihilation." He'd have known better.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What was that? Darfur? Timor? You want us to what in Darfur?
Not if it is unconstitutional for the government to do so, or if it is a thing better provided by a private organization.
Sure it sucks. You know what other things sucks? Rain, snow, and not getting laid. The fact that "something sucks" doesn't mean the government automatically has the responsibility to make it "not suck".
No, no one "has" to do it. Do not confuse objective necessity with your belief that something should be done about a problem. The problem is, when you step over the line from "believing something should be done," to "forcing everybody to do what I think must be done by making it a government program," I have a problem with that.
I'm sure I'll be modded down as troll and flamebait because I'm breaking with prevailing slashdot wisdom, but I don't mind burning karma to make this point. If you think that something more should be done about poverty, then by all means - Campaign your little heart out to raise private (VOLUNTARY) charitable donations to alleviate the problem. Take a vow of near-poverty yourself and donate all your earnings to the poor.
Hell, if you did that rather than try to seize control of the government to use it as a club to force me to donate to the programs you happen to think are "necessary," I'd write you a check to help educate, feed, clothe, shelter, and medicate the poor & homeless with a big smile - I donate my time & money already of my own free will, because I believe it's the right & moral thing to do.
If you want more to be done about all the problems, I'll respond with this simple challenge: You first. Do it on your own, voluntarily, lead by example. I may follow voluntarily, I may decide to go a different direction and donate to another cause that I think is more important. But either way, I will not hate you for presuming to know what is best for me and forcing me to fund programs that I do not support, and you will have proven that you do not hate your fellow human beings enough to think that the only way they will do the right thing is if they are forced to.
Hahaha, oh I always love that fantasy world you live in. Fortunately for America, you are wrong, and we will do just fine. We will be out of this recession in a year and a half, and Obama will look like a genius. He will sweep the next presidential election in a landslide, and we will get Universal health care. This will do so much to restore American competitiveness that we will experience huge economic growth before he leaves office, ushering in even more socialism, as people realize it just plain works.
You, on the other hand, will be bitterly eating crow and whining about how it all sucks and will be falling apart any day now.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is the beginning of the new realignment. If the GOP continues to alienate Snowe and Collins, they'll lose them too. If the Democrats get larger, they could reach a critical mass which results in more fiscally conservative Republicans, who could do without the religious-right's agenda of social issues, leaving their party for the Democrats. The end result would be the splitting of the Democratic party into the fiscal conservatives and the advocates for social services, with the social issues marginalized.
Social issues might come back into the spotlight, at which point the religious groups could reattach themselves to either side, but until the economy starts booming again, banning gay marriage or overturning Roe vs. Wade will not be high priorities.
I have health care coverage because I am self employed and pay for my health care expenses out of pocket like you suggest, and this is what I get. Oh, this, plus a bill for over $6,000 for a broken ankle. So you can go take your unwarranted assumptions and shove them deep up your ass. You have no idea what you are talking about.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No, I think Bush was a Fascist. Luckily public opinion and the Congress swung against him before the Unitarian Executive theory could get any further. But we still need to take a weed whacker to Presidential power and prune the crap out of that tree.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This is going to get me flamed to hell, but I don't care, my karma is good, so here goes. Hate to break the news to you, but inside every Iraqi is NOT an American waiting to get out,okay? You are NEVER going to "win" there,got that? They WANT to live under their crazy Sharia law, and you are NOT going to get them to behave like little Americans. All you are doing is wasting time and lives. Just ask the Russians, they can tell you all about it from their time in Afghanistan.
So go right ahead and keep believing you can "win" this thing. You can't. You can't win this anymore than we could win Vietnam, hell probably have even less of a chance here. We could win WW2 because Germans and Japanese were basically functional before they got Hitler and the militant generals of Japan. Here you are trying to take dozens of tribes, many of whom HATE each other, and are happy to strap bombs to themselves and their kids because it gets them a free pass to Allah, and make them behave like they were just another country in the EU. It will NEVER EVER work. But keep believing that it will, while Haliburton and the other contractors laugh their way to the bank with your money.
Whether you pull out now or in 10 years you WILL pull out, the only questions are how many lives and how much money will be pissed down that rathole before we do. There is simply NO WAY to win this, your money and your planes and your bombs will NEVER EVER make these people quit slaughtering each other. All you are doing is giving them a common target to shoot at, because the only thing they agree on is they ALL hate us.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In fact, it is the government that can't take your money, your freedom or your life without good reason. Private industry feels no compunction against doing so.
This comment is laughable in light of what the government is doing RIGHT NOW to illegally take GM's assets.
People who made legitimate investments in GM are being cheated by the Gov't and the UAW (through raw Gov't corruption) in ways that would be clearly illegal if the company were in actual bankruptcy!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The GOP has shrunk a great deal in the last 4 years. Moderates and Independents left the party. Millions of them. The result is a GOP that is far more conservative than it was as recently as the 2004 election.
You're only looking at one trait. From talking to friends and family, I believe that a huge number of fiscal conservatives have left the party, leaving only social conservatives who are bad at math. I had been a Republican before Bush came along, but now I just try to vote for any Conservatives (if any happen to be running).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yeah, but maybe, just maybe, the fact that the government has to pay for the costs of those self-destructive behaviours was behind public awareness campaigns to decrease those behaviours through other government departments like school lectures, documentaries and public service announcements on public TV, sin taxes on liquor and cigarettes, etc. There is little profit motive in the private-sector health system in the USA to co-ordinate a similarly effective response. The USA also has a shortage of GPs because training costs drive doctors to specialize and maximize their earnings potentials. That means fewer first-line response doctors to do more prevention counselling, and more specialists who want you to have serious enough problems to warrant their attention. There's an incentive in the government single payer system to get you to live a healthy lifestyle and keep costs down. There's less incentive in the private US system to do the same because disease prevention is a low profit activity for health care providers. In addition, all those non-insured people only get dealt with when their condition is so serious that they need (relatively more expensive and taxpayer-funded) emergency care.
That's why your population health indicator averages suck. The USA "private" system is geared provide the most expensive treatments to the rich people who can afford it; the rest get mediocre treatment that bankrupts them because they're not in the financial class the treatments are geared to, or are allowed to deteriorate until their condition is so critical that the taxpayer can be stuck with the bill from an emergency room.
You see a similar effect in Crown-owned power utilities in Canada that subsidize/encourage energy conservation through the use of low power appliances, better home insulation and heat efficiency, use of more efficient lighting, etc. We've had those kinds of programs for decades. In the USA, the private corporations want you to increase your power consumption until they overtax production capability and get brownouts, because that allows them to maximize profits for their current infrastructure investment. The resulting scarcity means that they can crank up rates without changing costs without worrying about decreased consumption, and thereby increase their profits. Of course, NIMBY opposition to any power project really helps in maintaining that scarcity. But for every US NIMBY, there's gotta be at least one guy who insists he needs a single occupancy SUV to drive to their urban job, keeps their swimming pool heated year-round, or who still uses appliances and lighting from the 60s or earlier. Arguably, some of the "NIMBY" concerns regarding quality-of-life and environmental impact of new power generation are valid.
If there's one thing that should be taken away from the current mortgage and credit crisis, it's that market economics are often superior when you can get solid competition between players, but fail miserably when costs, risks, and responsibilities/end goals aren't aligned/tied to profit making. The current US private health care system is a lot more like the latter than the former. The HMOs and hospital transfer as much of the risks and financial responsibilities to patients, employers and the taxpayer as they can get away with (and since it's a small cartel of HMOs they get away with quite a bit). The reason why private health organizations are so against a public system is that it would re-align risks and responsibilities with costs and revenue. Now, certainly some of the risk should be on the patient to provide an incentive to live in a healthier manner and keep health costs down, but the patients need information on how to do that. The US system financially discourages the care providers from providing that information as a service as long as the economy can support continued premium increases by HMOs instead. That's a critical structural problem with the USA's private health care system. Public health care systems suffer from the usual problems of government bureaucracies, but those can be more easily dealt with than fundamental structural flaws.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
And the Democrats see the world with rose colored glasses that hide all their sins.
Or did they not do all of the above and far far worse to Joseph Lieberman. (And Lieberman at least ran as an independent, and that only after losing the primary.) The Democrats were far more cruel to him than the Republicans have been to Specter.
But we all know the Democrats have no clothes... ;-)
They also have the deck stacked against them, since they own so little of the track they must run on. Nearly all the heavy rail in the USA is owned by the various heavy frieght companies. The company that owns a particular stretch of rail gets to influence its scheduling priorities. This isn't abused too much because most companies have to run on each-others' rails often enough to make a round of punative scheduling bad for everyone.
In contrast, Amtrak only owns a relatively small amount of rails in the Northeast with non-Amtrak alternates available to frieght, so none of the frieght companies cares very much about offending Amtrak by forcing their trains to work around everyone-elses' traffic. Is it really a surprise that the only area where Amtrak service is high in quality, on-time, and potentially profitable, is also where they own the majority of track they use?
As someone pointed out in another post yesterday, the USPS handles more items in a day then UPS and FedEx do in a year combined, for cheaper and in general without direct gov't money.
snig