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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.
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.
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:
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.
Lord preserve us from such conservative wishing.
There was a time when conservatives saw this country as something more than a wall for spraying political graffiti onto, or fuel for their rally's bonfire They used to care for traditions, principles, and institutions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"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"
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.
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.