The 11 County Chairmen of the Republican Party in the district hand picked her without a primary. Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee, Newt Gingrinch went on to endorse her. Isn't that pretty much the definition of the party elders backing her?
Only after her views surfaced, did some of the more conservative members of the party, none of which ever held leadership positions within the party, came out and endorsed her... people like Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson and Tim Pawlenty. Hell, two of those three don't even hold office anymore.
So, remind me again, how the party elders backed Hoffman? They spent over $900k on Scozzafava's campaign. She was so committed to the Republican Party that, after she dropped out, she endorsed the Democrat.
ZERO Republicans voted for the stimulus package. One GOP Senator voted to let ObamaCare out of committee and it has zero support otherwise, including Snowe withdrawing her support from Reid's modification of the bill. Yet, Scozzafava was for the stimulus, she was for ObamaCare, she's for card check (her husband is a big shot union lawyer), etc.
Throw aside issues like abortion. The GOP, especially in NY, has elected pro-abortion candidates, that wasn't the problem. The problem is, what, exactly, does the Republican Party stand for? Does it have any core issues that define it as a party, or is it simply a letter after someone's name with a complete lack of coherency? Newt with his endorsement, in particular, took the line of "I don't care if she agrees with us, she's got a R after her name..."
That's the biggest problem the GOP has right now, they just want to do whatever it takes to get into and maintain power, even if what they're doing completely betrays their supposed ideals. And they wonder why they were unceremoniously thrown out of office in 2006. Create a platform, articulate it and stick to it. The surest way to piss everyone off is to try to be everything to everyone. Ideas matter more than party affiliation, but to those in power and those seeking it, all that matters is the power.
But the Republicans controlled both branches of government, with sizable majorities, for six years, and it didn't happen. Instead, we got a ridiculous government-funded prescription drugs entitlement in Medicare Part D---the exact opposite of any attempt at cost reduction.
I despise Medicare D as much as any other conservative type... But the GOP didn't have a "sizeable majority" in Congress for 6 of Bush's 8 years.
2001 (107th Congress): Senate starts out 50R/50D with Cheney having the tie breaker. Jim Jeffords leaves the R and caucuses with D, making it 49R/50D until Paul Wellstone dies in late 2002. The Rs didn't even have control for most of this session (everyone seems to forget that).
The House is split roughly 221R/211D for the entire session. A small majority, but certainly not a sizeable one.
2003 (108th Congress): Senate is split 51R/49D. Barely a majority, definitely not enough to even try to break a guaranteed Democrat filibuster if they try to reform tort law.
The House is a ballpark of 227R/207D. A decent majority, but no guarantee that they can ram things through. It also requires the Senate to not stall in filibuster if they do.
2005 (109th Congress): Senate 55R/45D. A good majority, but they still can't invoke cloture, so Democrats will stall tort reform.
The House is about 230R/201D. A sizeable majority, but still meaningless because of the Senate.
2007 (110th Congress: Senate 49R/51D. Democrat control
House: 201R/233D. Democrat control and pretty much a flip of the last House.
Compare that to Obama's Congress: Senate: 40R/60D (filibuster proof) House: 178R/255D. The Republicans NEVER enjoyed numbers anywhere near that... yet the meme is still that they dominated Congress for 6 years of Bush's administrations. They only had marginal control for 4, especially when you take into account the threat of filibuster in the Senate.
I gave up my insurance a few years ago. I figured at my age (now 32) and in my health, it wasn't worth $6000 a year. I had only gone to the doctor twice in the last 5 years, so that's $30k I spent "just in case" to go to the doctor to get an antibiotic twice. I had a $15 co-pay, so the two visits cost me $30 plus another $5 for each generic antibiotic with my prescription plan, or a total of $30,040.
In the 5 years since I dropped my insurance, I've gone to the doctor once. It cost me $50 for the visit and my generic antibiotic cost another $8. So for the same period, I've spent $58. It's certainly cheaper for me to pay for my own routine health (as an added bonus, the doctor charges less because he doesn't have to jump through the insurance company's regulations and he's more free to give me the care we decide is best). Frankly, a HMO would be a complete bust for me at my age.
Yeah, so then the question is "what about catastrophic care?" I'd love to get a policy to cover an accident, heart attack, etc, but my state won't let me buy one. You see, the dirty secret is that the government already controls the entire insurance market, including the HMOs (they decide what the HMOs have to provide and how much they can charge). HMOs didn't even exist until Ted Kennedy wrote them into law in 1973 to fix the "problems" with health costs back then. By making it difficult for people to insure themselves, the government is trying to force you to depend on the state to alleviate the problems of those overly regulated "evil insurance companies." In fact, if you look at the history of health insurance going all the way back to the 1930s when employers first started offering it, you'll find that it was the government causing problems all along. The solution to government causing problems isn't more government, as Obama and friends would have us believe, it's less government. Get the government regulations out of the way and let me buy the policy that I want, not the one or two that the government wants to force me into. THAT is how we can fix the healthcare industry. The "problem" is that it empowers the individual rather than the politicians and their cronies.
As someone that has spoken at several tea parties, none of us referred to ourselves as "teabaggers." In fact, most people that I know attending had never even heard the term, much less knew that it was a sexual reference. Conservative leaning people tend to not be all that hip with sexual innuendo, especially middle aged or older ones, which a good majority of the protesters in this case are. Did many people carry tea bags on them? Sure, but that doesn't mean they were calling themselves "teabaggers." The term originated on the left, specifically at MSNBC and later spread over to other networks like CNN. Fox did use the word "teabaggers" in a report on how other networks were disparaging the protesters. Outside of that context, the term was never used there.
So, as they say on wikipedia, <citation?> on either count. You'll excuse me for not simply taking your word.
I will agree with you on the 24 hour news networks being more focused on entertainment and salaciousness than real news though. For example, when they stopped covering the protests in Iran for three days because Michael Jackson died.
$11 trillion right now is real debt with projections of that doubling in a decade. We have a deficit 3-4x worse than Bush's worst deficit this year and are projecting deficits as bad as Bush's worst one for the rest of Obama's possible terms.
On top of that, add in another $75-90 trillion is in owed obligations for Medicare and Social Security. Unless you're willing to cut either, that's real debt too. Just because it isn't due today doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It starts coming due in 7 years (2016 for Medicare, 2017 for Social Security). So, the reality is, right now, every PERSON owes about $280k in outstanding debt and obligations on behalf of the governent... or more than $1 million for a family of 4.
Medicare is hemmoraging money left and right, yet we're told how efficient it is. The same people that provide you hospitals like Walter Reed are now going to guarantee your health care. The same people that tap your phone lines now want to control your medical history and what treatments you can receive. As an added bonus, it's only going to cost us trillions more.
You can try to minimize the debt all you want. Government exists to protect our rights, not to be used as a lever to take something away from someone else for the benefit of another. You may have no problem bankrupting your great grandkids for your own selfish needs, but maybe your grandkids should have a say over what they're saddled with.
Way back in January 1776, Thomas Paine wrote:
The authority of Great Britain over this continent, is a form of government, which sooner or later must have an end: And a serious mind can draw no true pleasure by looking forward, under the painful and positive conviction, that what he calls "the present constitution" is merely temporary. As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.
Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offence, yet I am inclined to believe, that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation, may be included within the following descriptions: Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three.
PS - while you complain about people scare-mongering about health care rationing (which WILL happen), you're busy scare-mongering about how the current system is guaranteed to bankrupt everyone to get a bandaid. It doesn't... yes, it does bankrupt some people, but we're talking about a fraction of 1% of the people that have their lives ruined by the system. Under ObamaCare, it isn't your wealth that limits your health, it's a faceless bureaucrat that you will never meet that will decide whether or not you're worth enough to society to save. I'm not sure why you think that's any better.
Then use a different distro that has the flexibility you want. I use Gentoo myself and while most of my system is stable, I have about 70 packages set to use the latest versions of (gcc, the kernel, nvidia drivers, pidgin, etc). It's easy with Gentoo since all of that is compiled against the libraries which exist on your system. On binary distros, there can be incompatibilities between library versions (especially as you start adding more and more unstable packages to the mix), so it's hard to keep just a few packages up to date.
In fact, it was that very problem which originally caused me to drop RedHat Linux back in the late 90s and go to compiling everything from scratch (I then migrated to Gentoo to automate things). And despite the memes, it doesn't take nearly as long to compile everything on modern hardware as some would have you believe. A full rebuild of my system takes about 24 hours (AMD64 X2 4400+, 1002 packages installed), but I do that maybe once a year. It usually amounts to 10-20 minutes a day.
In the US, hate crimes are generally an extra charge tacked onto a crime that has been committed, so as to dole out extra punishment. However, they're appended in a very arbitrary manner and not equally enforced, which only strengthens the undertones of hate in some communities. White men are frequently charged even if hate wasn't a motivator, while very often minorities who attack those white men usually aren't charged with them.
See the cases of James Byrd, Jr and Ken Tillery which I referenced. Both were dragged to death in the same town four years apart, but the perpetrators were charged differently.
What the laws amount to, is trying to determine the motivation behind why someone committed their crime... and frankly, that motivation is a thought, so hate crime legislation borders on outlawing certain thoughts. And since motivations aren't frequently ascribed equally, there is a question of whether or not it is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal treatment under the law.
Racists use the capriciousness in the application of the law as one of the reasons to hate, so the question becomes, does the selective applicatin foster more hate than the legislation is intended to punish? Further, if the law can't be applied uniformly, isn't it in violation of the Constitution?
That's complete nonsense. They don't live in those neighborhoods and send their children to those schools because they want racial segregation - they do it because those neighborhoods and those schools are upper-class environments where their children can prosper without having to worry excessively about crime or violence, and because those schools tend to offer a better quality of education. Parents who can afford to send their kids to a private school don't start the selection process by saying "hrm, let's see which school has the fewest negros" - they send their children to the best school they can find. Unfortunately, due to the economic discrepancy between the races, those schools tend to have fewer black students, but you're confusing correlation with causation.
Who said they were rich? White flight has been pretty constant here in the Rochester area. There were the race riots in the 60s and white people moved to the first ring of suburbs in the 70s and 80s. Blacks started moving to the suburbs in the 90s and now the white are moving out of the suburbs and into the exurbs and rural towns surrounding that. You don't have to be rich to move away from an element you don't like, nor do you have to be wealthy to afford private school (in fact, private school charges 25-35% of what a public school costs per pupil here).
How do I know? My parents were part of the 70s white flight from Rochester when they were 19 and 17, unwed with a freshly born me, and dirt poor. Granted, we were far enough out that I didn't go to private school (but choosing a public school did play a major factor into where they chose to live). I know wealthier people who've taken it a step further with their gated communities or mansions on dozens of acres of former farmland, etc...
As for the whole "proud to vote for a black man" thing... that IS racist. If you're more proud to vote for a particular candidate due to his race, you're a bigot, regardless of whether he's black, white, green, or purple.
I completely agree... but there are a lot of people who are privately racist but will publicly declare that they voted for a black guy or "but my best friend is black" or whatever to "prove" that they aren't. Those people are a big part of the problem in ending the animosity since their racism is covert.
If the purpose of hate crime laws is to dissuade people from hating, they are a complete failure. Some people have always hated other people from the dawn of time and criminalizing thoughts won't solve that, especially since most racism is expressed verbally in private.
Whether someone gets beat up because of the color of their skin or for the wallet in their pocket, the effect is the same and both should be punished the same way. Giving an extra sentence because of the motivations of the person doesn't make them hate any less, it only gives a new reason for other potential haters to hate.
Most people who have been physically and emotionally abused will tell you that the physical wounds heal, it's the emotional and psychological stuff that is hard to overcome. So yeah, I'd say that quiet racism preached behind doors is just as much of a problem as physical racism.
The solution is to overtly air the racism rather than ban it, so that it can be dispelled... because the stuff behind doors will eventually build and be released all at once like a pressure cooker.
Hate crime laws don't suppress racism... they might suppress public expression of racism, but people will still hate privately, likely using the hate crime laws themselves as a valid excuse to promote hate to others. "Look at James Byrd, they gave two of the three white guys that dragged him to death the death penalty and the other life, while the three black guys that did the same thing to Ken Tillery got 15, 20 and 70 years..." It's hard to enforce the law equally when the purpose of the law is to setup specific protected classes and that will result in more division.
IMO, it's much better to get people to express themselves publicly since it gives them an avenue to vent while simultaneously allowing you to deflate their arguments before they can spread the hate.
I live in NY... and you'll hear lots of people saying they were proud to vote for a black man for President, but those same people moved when blacks started encroaching on their white neighborhoods, send their kids to mostly white private schools, etc. While they publicly talk a good game, they still don't want to be around "those kind of people" privately. That undertone of racism is allowed to go unchallenged though, largely because as long as the racism isn't overtly public, it "isn't" really racism. I'd argue refusing to let your kids go to school with someone of a different color isn't much different from beating someone else up for being a different color. The same hate exists, just expressed differently... Sure, one is a violent crime which deserves a penalty in its own right, but the other goes completely unpunished and undiscussed.
Ultimately, if we want racism (and sexism, homophobia, etc) to end, we need to stop drawing lines to divide people into different camps and giving special treatment to "the right groups." Anything short of equal treatment breeds a hate itself.
Too bad it only covers about a third of the federal budget... $1182 billion out of $3998 billion. They'd rather you not look where the other 70% of the budget goes and instead focus mostly on military spending. That's not to mention the additional trillions in various bailouts and stimulus spending over the last 18 months.
And what does "promote the general welfare" mean? Well, if we look to the Federalist Papers, we'll see:
Federalist 23 (Hamilton):
Defective as the present Confederation has been proved to be, this principle appears to have been fully recognized by the framers of it; though they have not made proper or adequate provision for its exercise. Congress have an unlimited discretion to make requisitions of men and money; to govern the army and navy; to direct their operations. As their requisitions are made constitutionally binding upon the States, who are in fact under the most solemn obligations to furnish the supplies required of them, the intention evidently was that the United States should command whatever resources were by them judged requisite to the ``common defense and general welfare.'' It was presumed that a sense of their true interests, and a regard to the dictates of good faith, would be found sufficient pledges for the punctual performance of the duty of the members to the federal head.
Federalist 41 (Madison):
A system of government, meant for duration, ought to contemplate these revolutions, and be able to accommodate itself to them. Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power ``to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,'' amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction. Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. A power to destroy the freedom of the press, the trial by jury, or even to regulate the course of descents, or the forms of conveyances, must be very singularly expressed by the terms ``to raise money for the general welfare. ''But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter. The objection here is the more extraordinary, as it appears that the language used by the convention is a copy from the articles of Confederation. The objects of the Union among the States, as described in article third, are ``their common defense, security of their liberties, and mutual and general welfare. '' The terms of article eighth are still more identical: ``All charges of war and all other expenses that shall be i
Roe v Wade stated that abortion is a fundamental right under the Constitution and that any laws restricting it must be subject to strict scrutiny. Further, they went on to state that a fetus must be viable outside the womb to avoid the disruption of its right to life under the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Court created and defined the trimester system to denote viability). They also argued that abortion fell under the right to privacy, so nobody other than the woman could interfere with her medical decision.
In one fell swoop, the Courts wrote law defining when life begins and when life is viable. Whether or not you support abortion, those seem like definitions which clearly should belong to the legislature. It also took away the States' rights to determine the laws of their own state, blanketing the entire country with federal law.
Anyway, to get back on point... Abortion wasn't decided because of the efforts of a group of dedicated people wanting to change the law. It happened because a court ruled the current system into existence, which stands in stark contrast to the other three goal which WERE won by people advocating their points to the people and legislatures.
Temperance. (Americans still have a bunch of crazy laws thanks to these folks.)
Suffrage. (A constitutional amendment too! )
Civil rights.
These were fought for by the people and written into law by legislation... as was the repeal of temperance. In fact, all 3 involved Constitutional Amendments (13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, and 26)
Abortion rights (This battle is still on. The ones that fought for them, and the ones dedicated to taking them away)
This one wasn't decided by the people, but by a court of unelected, lifetime tenured justices, which is why it continues to be fought... it's also why it is the number one litmus test that both parties want to know about a new SCOTUS justice before they're approved by the Senate. Because law was created by judicial fiat rather than legislation, it existence is tenuous at best and only continues to exist because the SCOTUS hasn't reversed itself.
It'll remain like this pretty much forever (unless it gets reversed by a future court, which will move the question back to where it belongs: the legislatures/Congress)... both sides like using it as a wedge issue, which is why there are two "pro" movements involving it.
I don't expect anyone, straight, gay or somewhere in between, to be openly fondling each other in the restaurant.
I do find that to be pretty annoying and offensive. Were it my business I would ask them to desist and to leave if they are unable to do so. If the business-owner refuses to do so then I'm probably going to take my business elsewhere.
Right... and its a reasonable place to draw the line. But for every complete prude that wouldn't even hold hands in public, there's also someone who has to be militantly in your face about everything (and yes, once upon a time when I managed a McDonalds when I was a teenager, I had to throw people out for having sex in the dining room). Those people harm their own cause by acting like that. To some, having a line of public decency is an outrage.
In fact, knowing a lot of religious social conservatives (albeit mostly of a northern variety), they tend to have a live and let live attitude. They won't approve of homosexuality, but they don't go out of their way to condemn it either. Unfortunately, I also know a lot of homosexuals that won't tolerate most Christians. There's a lot of room for tolerance on both sides and I find the ones who want tolerance the most are usually the least tolerant of others.
I get what you are saying but there has to be some middle ground between Rush Limbaugh's desire to run 100% ideologically pure candidates and the McCain's/Specter's of the World. There does come a point when someone splits with the party on so many issues that they aren't worth supporting any longer but as you previously said you'll never manage to find someone who agrees with you on everything.
Right... and while I've certainly been disappointed in an official here and there, I can still completely support them for at least doing 90% of what I'd want them to (or even 75% if they stuck to the things that were most important to me). Eventually, though, they get to the point where you have to ask yourself if they're even worth having in the party anymore. I don't think Rush wants to get rid of everyone that has never voted straight party line (or we'd probably be able to count them on one hand), but over a long period, some people like Specter and McCain have shown they don't care about the principles of the party, so the party needs to reconsider about whether or not they're worth supporting.
The liberal republican wing is telling us we need to be more like the Democrats and run a "moderate" candidate in 2012 if we want a chance to win. Well, that's exactly what McCain was and he got fewer votes than GWB did in 2004, after the moderates had already turned their back on him. What the GOP needs is a Reagan type figure. Yes, Reagan was very much a social conservative, but he largely campaigned on economic reform and bringing a pride back to the American people after the Carter "malaise." The northern Republicans united behind him because he wasn't bible thumping, the southern conservatives united behind him because they knew "he would do the right thing" anyway, and moderates all over said "hey, I like what this guy says and I want to believe in America again too." And it worked. That is the formula for 2012, IMO and it would give us a real alternative to the Democrats instead of a "me too, but not as fast!" alternative.
I'm not sure who that person is going to be... but that is the formula they should use. I'm pretty sure a guy like that would get your support and I'm almost positive he'd get mine as well.
I was never a fan of Pataki for a number of reasons. He seemed to treat a lot of the state agencies as patronage jobs for his political cronies. When Spitzer came in with a electoral mandate for reform I had misplaced hopes that he would change this but his idea of change seemed to be firing all of Pataki's cronies to make room for his own while burning his political capital on stupid shit (drivers licenses for illegals, troope
I've become more socially conservative than I ever thought I would but I'm still Libertarian in that I really don't care what you do behind closed doors as long as it doesn't impact my peaceful enjoyment of life. The only social issue that I see that can't be solved through a Libertarian approach is abortion. That's a tough one and it's only made worse by the extremists on both sides, ranging from "zygote == human being and murdering abortion doctors is acceptable" to "third trimester abortions should be legal". The only thing I've been able to conclude about abortion is that the extremists on both sides of the issue scare the hell out of me.
I really don't care about what people do in their own bedrooms either. It's more the "trying to force society to pat you on the back and say good job" for what people want to do in the bedroom. I don't discuss my sex life outside of a few close friends and frankly, I'd expect other people to respect my right to not have to listen to what they do either. People have a right to free speech, but not a captive audience and when I take my young nieces out to dinner, I don't expect anyone, straight, gay or somewhere in between, to be openly fondling each other in the restaurant. But their bedroom? More power to them.
As for the abortion thing... by definition, a zygote is alive (or else we need to redefine a whole lot of biology) and has human DNA, ergo, it is a human and they have the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the rest of us. I could drop dead of a heart attack right now and that zygote could miscarry, but that doesn't mean either of us should be killed for someone else's convenience. I obviously don't condone the shooting of abortion doctors either. I'd like to see it become a whole lot easier to adopt unwanted children in the US to help solve the problem, since the standards are beyond ridiculous at this point and there are a lot of people that want and would care for a child, but the system refuses them for not being the absolute, perfect, fairy tale ideal. 30 million babies have been killed since Roe v Wade. Among them could have been the next Einstein, Mozart or just plain old me. In fact, my mom was 16 when she became pregnant for me and a couple people tried to coerce her into aborting. I'd rather be around even if she had decided to give me up for adoption.
That's another thing I don't understand about the GOP. The sheer number of GOP officials and rank-and-file who cheered Specter's defection and/or have condemned Snowe and Collins amazes me. Would you rather have somebody who votes with you most of the time or would you rather run a "true" Republican who loses and wind up with somebody who votes against you all of the time?
Let me bring up my favorite of these folks... McCain. In an effort to appease his friends on the other side of the aisle, he teamed up with Feingold and gave us the Incumbant Protection Act, which not only violates free speech of the most important type, by preventing people from criticizing incumbants before an election, but also handicapped the party's fundraising abilities, leading to the disparity we saw last year and gave us the whole ridiculous 527 thing.
In addition to that, he wanted to give illegals not only amnesty, but Social Security benefits as well. He worked with Lieberman to try to create a carbon tax and trade scheme. He literally told the conservatives in the party that we could go fuck ourselves even though Republicans generally can't win without embracing the right side of the base.
And that's where my problem comes in... not that someone wants to stray on an issue or two, but when they continually undermine the party. At which point, I have to ask why they're even in the party to begin with. Much as Bush hurt the Republican brand, so do people like McCain. Even Snowe, Collins and Specter, when they gave in on the porkulus package, gave the Democrats the ability to call it a bi-partisan bill, imply
If the GOP would get back to those roots I'd register as a Republican in a heartbeat. It's the social wedge issues that I have a problem with. Take gay marriage as an example. It seems to me that a Conservative solution to the gay marriage debate would be to get Government out of the "marriage" business altogether. Let the Churches "marry" people according to their own doctrine and let the Government provide for civil unions for all couples (gay and straight) that would provide the benefits (medical proxy, joint tax filing, etc) of what the Government currently calls marriage. Problem solved.
I'm a fairly socially conservative atheist, but I'm by no means a one issue voter... I know too many Republicans that will stay home rather than vote for a Republican that supports gay marriage (some of my friends are upset about Jim Alesi right now). But at the same time, I know Republicans that will vote Democrat over abortion even if they disagree with Democrats on everything else. My view is that no candidate is ever going to agree with me 100% unless I run myself, so I can accept a flaw or two. As long as they're mostly in agreement with me, well, that's better than voting for someone that is almost completely out of agreement with me (which is also how I end up voting third party, I'll vote for the person I most agree with/who will do the best job rather than the letter after their name). Too many others will cut off their nose to spite their face over a single issue (and that includes a lot of Northeastern type Republicans). FWIW, my position on gay marriage is similar to yours with slightly different reasoning (marriage is a contract with society to raise children, unions are for people that want the benefits of marriage without the traditional purpose behind it)
The best explanation I've heard is that was a cynical calculation to get the 50,000 votes they needed to keep their party line. It was apparent to anyone with a clue that Faso was going down in flames, so why endorse him and risk falling below the threshold to retain your ballot line?
My friend couldn't even get them to define a platform... how can you have a party if it doesn't stand for anything?
Spitzer burns me up. I knew he was going to be a downstate liberal but I still had hopes that he would use some of the political capital from his landslide to make some changes in Albany. Instead he burned it all up on drivers licenses for illegals. WTF? Even if you think that's a good idea why would you pick a fight over such an issue when there are far more important things to burn political capital on?
These guys come out of the deepest liberal enclaves of NYC... and surround themselves exclusively with people like themselves. After a while, they forget there are other opinions out there since their echo chamber constantly repeats the things they want to hear. They get a little overconfident in their own power and ego, while simultaneously minimizing the opposition (since there is no viable opposition in NY) and that results in things like thinking he can ram the drivers license thing through and get away with taking a $4k/hr hooker over state lines with impunity. The accidental governor has planes to renew the fight over the drivers license thing later this year. In his case, it's just because he's desperate and knows his job is going to Andrew Cuomo next year (who, IMO, is another crook like the rest of them. Where are the billions that disappeared at HHS under his watch?)
Of course she did, she knows where Democratic primaries are decided in this state. Unless I've misread her I'm going to have a very hard time voting for her in the general election. She will get my vote in the primary if the downstater's try to knock her off though. What I can't figure out is why she felt the need to completely embrace the Brady platform. I understand throwing them a bone but she's gone way beyond that. It'll be interesting to see how the
I think your map makes sense. The only bit I'd question is the inclusion of Sullivan County with NYC. Sullivan is fairly equally split between NYC commuters and locals. Liberty and Monticello are big commuter towns but the rest of the county is pretty rural. Tough call on where to put it.
Gotta draw a line somewhere to at least start a discussion with, and that's pretty much what I did.
Since we are fantasizing, where would you put the capital? I think that Syracuse is probably the logical choice. Centrally located and most people are familiar with it. Easy to get to from almost anywhere in the state. It's more of a hike from Buffalo but not nearly as far away as Albany is.
Syracuse does seem to be the logical choice, kinda smack dab in the middle of what's left. It's a natural hub with 90 and 81 more or less running through it joining it both east-west and north-south through the state. It certainly isn't a worse than Albany is now.
I don't know if I'd give him that much credit for it. I place more of the blame with the national GOP. Some of the positions they have adopted have made it very hard to be a Republican in the Northeast. Upstate New York isn't NYC by any means but it's not South Carolina either. I think people just started pulling the lever (random thought: I'm gonna miss our lever machines!) for the Democrats because of disgust with the GOP in Washington.
Certainly the national GOP affected things here... being of a more conservative bent, I was completely unsatisfied with McCain (who I see more appropriately as a Democrat than a Republican) and I voted third party nationally (and for that matter, didn't vote in most local elections since, as I said, the GOP primary is where the real decision happens here). I knew both McCain and Obama would take us down the wrong road (and I had plenty of problems with where Bush went too, but I saw both as extensions of the wrong things Bush did), and I'd rather the other team take the hit for how the crap is going to hit the fan. Maybe in the meantime, the GOP can get back to ideas that unite all of us on the right, like actually producing a smaller government, instead of focusing on wedge issues that separate us. If not, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs that came before them.
I've never understood exactly what it is the Independence Party stands for. Their endorsements for Governor in particular seem cynically aimed at ensuring they net the 50,000 votes needed to retain their ballot line. How else to explain why they endorsed Spitzer? People register as Independent seemingly with no idea of what the party stands for or the fact that they are actually enrolling in a party. "What party are you in?", "None, I'm an Independent!"
My friend was on the committee that chose the candidates they would endorse... and yeah, he was pretty upset with the Spitzer thing. Most of the hierarchy of the Independence Party were simply Golisano lapdogs and when he left the picture, they didn't actually have a platform to support, so they had no guidance on who to pick. And yeah, a good number of registered Indepdence people thought they were registering independent (aka blank).
Him and I are both active in the Rochester Tea Party scene (and we spoke at both Tea Parties here) and we really are looking for someone to support come 2010 and 2012. To say we're disgruntled is an understatement... but he's really awed with the whole uprising and how it might lead to some real changes. Before, he'd get all these people talking about state secession and the same 4-5 people would show up to the meetings every time. Now we're getting interest from hundreds of people every time we go out in public. People want to know what they can do to change things locally, at the state level and at the federal level. There's a whole new undercurrent of excitement and it's all from the grassroots level, despite what certain newscasters with an agen
As an added bonus, Golisano announced he changed his residency to Florida today. Apparently, after buying the legislature he wanted, he's not satisfied with them and is going to stick the rest of the state with the consequences of his actions.
In addition to NYC, the following counties would go with it Albany, Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Nassau, Orange, Putnam, Rensselaer, Rockland, Schenectady, Suffolk, Sullivan, Ulster, Westchester. Basically, the folks that live outside of but identify closely with NYC and the current power structure.
Politically, they would break down to New York City State:
4,594,286 Democrats 1,778,131 Republicans 1,796,785 Blank
That leaves the new state as:
1,237,159 Democrats 1,276,389 Republicans 726,909 Blank
Which means, we're about as statistically balanced in party affiliation as you can get and we can work together without one side dominating the other. The NYC/Hudson Valley corridor can continue to function as they are. In addition to that, it splits us pretty well along cultural and financial lines too, so it is a more accurate representation of both would-be states.
Ithaca would very much be part of the new state in that scenario, as would your current residence of Binghamton.
My fear is that if the Republicans don't take back the State Senate in 2010 that it will be the final nail in the coffin. The Democrats will be able to draw the district lines as they see fit and we can forget about any prospect of Upstate Representation for the foreseeable future. I don't even agree with a lot of what the GOP stands for but I'm forced to vote for them on the state level because the NYS Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sheldon Silver.
I'm a registered Republican for town/county political reasons (whoever wins the Republian primaries wins the general election), but I'm much more of a conservative/libertarian type. All three of the major parties in this state (Tom Golisano's Independence Party for those outside, and no, it has nothing to do with Independence, that's just catchy marketing) are pretty craptacular and harm the state in their own ways. I don't think that will change until and unless there is an upstate secession.
Let's not forget that it was Golisano that funded a number of Democrats for State Senate this last election in an effort to flip the Senate to cause "change." All he did was knife the state in the jugular in the process, by ensuring one party rule. A friend of mine sits on several high level committees in the Independence Party and he's thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing. His personal hope is that with total control of everything, the Democrats will speed up NY's definite collapse, forcing us to reboot that much sooner.
I just don't know about that... to quote Paterson himself (trying to deny that we're a welfare state), we're becoming a social services based economy, with something like 40% of the population living off the public dole and Paterson wants to increase the Medicaid roles to 25% of the state (up from its current 20%) by making eligibility twice the federal poverty level. As the demographics change to the point where there are more people with their hands out than there are people working (and arguably, we're already there with another 15% or so of the population on the state payroll), the working guy is outnumbered and is the sheep voting among two wolves on dinner. Unfortunately, barring that secession, I don't see things getting better for the state. In fact, I see a complete and utter collapse (and probably within the next decade).
As for where I'm from, Livingston County, just south of Rochester. I've got a lot of family here and in Buffalo, many of which used to work at places like Kodak, Xerox and Delphi. I've watched first hand as the policies of NYC via Albany have turned once vibrant communities into economic wastelands dominated by crime and slums (Rochester has had to resort to the state police coming in to patrol the city, in addition to the city and county police forces, because violent crime has been so out of hand the last few years).
And it will never get better as long as we have no say or control in our governance.
I've long supported secession and a 51st state for Upstate/Western NY (I'd give NYC the entire Hudson corridor as well, since most of the people there identify with the politcs of NYC anyway). As for losing some of our tax base (and yes, NYC sends us more money than we send them), we can make up the difference in having laws that fit the needs of the people here rather than the wants of the NYCers that were forced upon us. A massive part of the local government expenditures throughout the rest of the state are from unfunded mandates dictated by NYC.
Most people from outside the state think NY = NYC, when it is a barely a postage stamp sized area on our envelope. NYC has as much in common with the rest of the state as San Francisco would with Wyoming and the disparities are just too great to overcome given that one city wants to dominate the rest of us. NY is considered a deep blue state, but if you cut off NYC, you'll find the rest of the state is nearly perfectly divided politically. With the exception of a handful of State Senate leaders, NY hasn't had a statewide representative from outside NYC/Hudson area since at least as far back as the 1930s. Effectively, we have no representation and people have been choosing to move with their feet for decades because of it (Rochester is less than half the size it was in 1950 and not too long ago, Buffalo had more millionaires per capita than any city in the US).
NYC continues to squeeze more... and I sit here watching more businesses leave and more people follow them out the door since the state is so hostile to able bodied, working people. I love where I live, but our government is so bad, I've been fighting the temptation to leave since I graduated high school and my parents were fighting it long before that.
Has nothing to do with convincing 50.1% of the population and everything to do with NY's budgeting system of "Three men in a room." The Governor (Democrat from NYC), Assembly Leader (Democrat from NYC) and State Senate Leader (Democrat from NYC) lock themselves in a room and emerge with the budget that will be passed by the state. Despite the Governor proposing a number of cuts in face of a $24 billion projected shortfall prior to entering the room, Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver demanded a budget 9.2% higher than last year's and got his way. It doesn't matter what the rest of the state wants, traditionally, regardless of whether there is a Republican Governor and Senate Leader or a Democrat one, Silver drives the budget. He's Assembly leader for life, rules his caucus with an iron fist, represents a district that will never elect anyone else and will not let his body vote on a budget that he doesn't approve of. Time and time again, Silver has shown he will put his own interests ahead of the rest of the state, often forcing budgets to become severely overdue unless the entire state caves and gives him the powers and programs he wants. Disagree with Silver on any issue, whether you're a D or R, and you will have your pet projects stripped from his budget.
NY's population remains powerless. We've got no citizen initiated referrendum or recall powers and due to the Assembly's power base in NYC, the opinion of the roughly 50% of the population in the rest of the state doesn't even matter. We're dictated to, not listened to. It's nothing short of a tyranny and is one of the driving causes in the hatred of NYC by the rest of the state.
So a question is, why are the parties interested in keeping the "register for your party and only vote in that primary" rule.
The people that belong to a party should be able to select the person that represents their views, otherwise, you'll get people tagged with a party's name that shares little in common with that party and the actual party base won't want to support them.
See: John McCain. Most Republicans flat out hate him. The base of the party was divided between a number of other candidates and their split votes allowed the independents in states with open primaries to select the Republican candidate for President. The result was people like me (conservatives, not to be confused with neo-cons which aren't conservative at all) voted third party rather than vote for the lesser of two evils. The result was McCain got fewer votes than Bush did in 2004 after he was already hated by the moderates and some of the right.
Primaries are used to select the candidate to represent the party... if you aren't in a party, well, you shouldn't have the right to tell them who to pick. General elections are for you to pick the guy you actually want in office. So, independents, pick a party if you want a choice in the direction of that party and stop trying to have it both ways (well, I don't want to be affiliated with a party myself, but I want a party to be affiliated with my candidate...)
There are a lot of people left in the Republican party who are a whole lot closer to those old time conservatives than you think, and if they don't get noticed, it's only partly their own fault and largely the media's fault.
Which is precisely what the Tea Parties are about... and why the left feels the need to belittle them. They're afraid that the real GOP (not the imposters that have taken over for the last decade) will rise up again.
I, myself, have spoken at two of them... and, sure, while there are some fringe elements present looking to leech off the crowd, they're all about a resurgence in the old conservative ideals, especially fiscal conservatism, that the party elites have ignored. It's the long forgotten about base standing up demanding to be heard.
I'm a member of what you would deem the extreme right* (conservative, bordering on libertarian). I believe government should be restricted solely to the role proscribed in the Constitution. Trust me, the Republicans aren't moving my way, they're moving to the lesser party of Big Government, rather than their traditional role as the party of smaller government. I'm the type of guy the Republicans are pushing out in favor of the neo-con types, which are basically internationalist Democrats (read up on the history of the neo-con movement, it was born in the 1950s Democrat Party).
As for Spector, he was a Democrat until 1966 (at 36 years old), when he switched to the Republican Party to win an election for District Attorney. So, he has a history of switching his party for his own political convenience, which is really all this was about anyway. He's got more power and a Democrat since that will put him in the majority, and if he ran again as a Republican in PA, he was likely to get the boot since the GOP has been on the decline in PA (the other PA senator is a Democrat that beat a very conservative incumbant Rick Santorum and PA has voted Dem in the last couple gubenatorial elections).
Anyway, don't read too much into this being about the politics of the GOP... it's really about Spector wanting to ensure his seat. It certainly isn't because the GOP is moving too far to the right because they're moving away from me, not closer to me and the principles that got Reagan big wins and the GOP into the Congressional majority in 1994. The reason why the GOP is losing support is because they're becoming indistinguishable from the Democrats and if you want to elect a Democrat, why not actually elect someone with that label?
* I'd work to outright eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Department of Education, etc. I'm the extreme on the right side of the aisle. Anyone working to expand those programs, ala Medicare D, is not on the extreme fringe of the right, they're in the authoritarian middle shared with the nanny state left.
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The 11 County Chairmen of the Republican Party in the district hand picked her without a primary. Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee, Newt Gingrinch went on to endorse her. Isn't that pretty much the definition of the party elders backing her?
Only after her views surfaced, did some of the more conservative members of the party, none of which ever held leadership positions within the party, came out and endorsed her... people like Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson and Tim Pawlenty. Hell, two of those three don't even hold office anymore.
So, remind me again, how the party elders backed Hoffman? They spent over $900k on Scozzafava's campaign. She was so committed to the Republican Party that, after she dropped out, she endorsed the Democrat.
ZERO Republicans voted for the stimulus package. One GOP Senator voted to let ObamaCare out of committee and it has zero support otherwise, including Snowe withdrawing her support from Reid's modification of the bill. Yet, Scozzafava was for the stimulus, she was for ObamaCare, she's for card check (her husband is a big shot union lawyer), etc.
Throw aside issues like abortion. The GOP, especially in NY, has elected pro-abortion candidates, that wasn't the problem. The problem is, what, exactly, does the Republican Party stand for? Does it have any core issues that define it as a party, or is it simply a letter after someone's name with a complete lack of coherency? Newt with his endorsement, in particular, took the line of "I don't care if she agrees with us, she's got a R after her name..."
That's the biggest problem the GOP has right now, they just want to do whatever it takes to get into and maintain power, even if what they're doing completely betrays their supposed ideals. And they wonder why they were unceremoniously thrown out of office in 2006. Create a platform, articulate it and stick to it. The surest way to piss everyone off is to try to be everything to everyone. Ideas matter more than party affiliation, but to those in power and those seeking it, all that matters is the power.
But the Republicans controlled both branches of government, with sizable majorities, for six years, and it didn't happen. Instead, we got a ridiculous government-funded prescription drugs entitlement in Medicare Part D---the exact opposite of any attempt at cost reduction.
I despise Medicare D as much as any other conservative type... But the GOP didn't have a "sizeable majority" in Congress for 6 of Bush's 8 years.
2001 (107th Congress): Senate starts out 50R/50D with Cheney having the tie breaker. Jim Jeffords leaves the R and caucuses with D, making it 49R/50D until Paul Wellstone dies in late 2002. The Rs didn't even have control for most of this session (everyone seems to forget that).
The House is split roughly 221R/211D for the entire session. A small majority, but certainly not a sizeable one.
2003 (108th Congress): Senate is split 51R/49D. Barely a majority, definitely not enough to even try to break a guaranteed Democrat filibuster if they try to reform tort law.
The House is a ballpark of 227R/207D. A decent majority, but no guarantee that they can ram things through. It also requires the Senate to not stall in filibuster if they do.
2005 (109th Congress): Senate 55R/45D. A good majority, but they still can't invoke cloture, so Democrats will stall tort reform.
The House is about 230R/201D. A sizeable majority, but still meaningless because of the Senate.
2007 (110th Congress: Senate 49R/51D. Democrat control
House: 201R/233D. Democrat control and pretty much a flip of the last House.
Compare that to Obama's Congress: Senate: 40R/60D (filibuster proof) House: 178R/255D. The Republicans NEVER enjoyed numbers anywhere near that... yet the meme is still that they dominated Congress for 6 years of Bush's administrations. They only had marginal control for 4, especially when you take into account the threat of filibuster in the Senate.
I gave up my insurance a few years ago. I figured at my age (now 32) and in my health, it wasn't worth $6000 a year. I had only gone to the doctor twice in the last 5 years, so that's $30k I spent "just in case" to go to the doctor to get an antibiotic twice. I had a $15 co-pay, so the two visits cost me $30 plus another $5 for each generic antibiotic with my prescription plan, or a total of $30,040.
In the 5 years since I dropped my insurance, I've gone to the doctor once. It cost me $50 for the visit and my generic antibiotic cost another $8. So for the same period, I've spent $58. It's certainly cheaper for me to pay for my own routine health (as an added bonus, the doctor charges less because he doesn't have to jump through the insurance company's regulations and he's more free to give me the care we decide is best). Frankly, a HMO would be a complete bust for me at my age.
Yeah, so then the question is "what about catastrophic care?" I'd love to get a policy to cover an accident, heart attack, etc, but my state won't let me buy one. You see, the dirty secret is that the government already controls the entire insurance market, including the HMOs (they decide what the HMOs have to provide and how much they can charge). HMOs didn't even exist until Ted Kennedy wrote them into law in 1973 to fix the "problems" with health costs back then. By making it difficult for people to insure themselves, the government is trying to force you to depend on the state to alleviate the problems of those overly regulated "evil insurance companies." In fact, if you look at the history of health insurance going all the way back to the 1930s when employers first started offering it, you'll find that it was the government causing problems all along. The solution to government causing problems isn't more government, as Obama and friends would have us believe, it's less government. Get the government regulations out of the way and let me buy the policy that I want, not the one or two that the government wants to force me into. THAT is how we can fix the healthcare industry. The "problem" is that it empowers the individual rather than the politicians and their cronies.
As someone that has spoken at several tea parties, none of us referred to ourselves as "teabaggers." In fact, most people that I know attending had never even heard the term, much less knew that it was a sexual reference. Conservative leaning people tend to not be all that hip with sexual innuendo, especially middle aged or older ones, which a good majority of the protesters in this case are. Did many people carry tea bags on them? Sure, but that doesn't mean they were calling themselves "teabaggers." The term originated on the left, specifically at MSNBC and later spread over to other networks like CNN. Fox did use the word "teabaggers" in a report on how other networks were disparaging the protesters. Outside of that context, the term was never used there.
So, as they say on wikipedia, <citation?> on either count. You'll excuse me for not simply taking your word.
I will agree with you on the 24 hour news networks being more focused on entertainment and salaciousness than real news though. For example, when they stopped covering the protests in Iran for three days because Michael Jackson died.
On top of that, add in another $75-90 trillion is in owed obligations for Medicare and Social Security. Unless you're willing to cut either, that's real debt too. Just because it isn't due today doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It starts coming due in 7 years (2016 for Medicare, 2017 for Social Security). So, the reality is, right now, every PERSON owes about $280k in outstanding debt and obligations on behalf of the governent... or more than $1 million for a family of 4.
Medicare is hemmoraging money left and right, yet we're told how efficient it is. The same people that provide you hospitals like Walter Reed are now going to guarantee your health care. The same people that tap your phone lines now want to control your medical history and what treatments you can receive. As an added bonus, it's only going to cost us trillions more.
You can try to minimize the debt all you want. Government exists to protect our rights, not to be used as a lever to take something away from someone else for the benefit of another. You may have no problem bankrupting your great grandkids for your own selfish needs, but maybe your grandkids should have a say over what they're saddled with.
Way back in January 1776, Thomas Paine wrote:
PS - while you complain about people scare-mongering about health care rationing (which WILL happen), you're busy scare-mongering about how the current system is guaranteed to bankrupt everyone to get a bandaid. It doesn't... yes, it does bankrupt some people, but we're talking about a fraction of 1% of the people that have their lives ruined by the system. Under ObamaCare, it isn't your wealth that limits your health, it's a faceless bureaucrat that you will never meet that will decide whether or not you're worth enough to society to save. I'm not sure why you think that's any better.
Then use a different distro that has the flexibility you want. I use Gentoo myself and while most of my system is stable, I have about 70 packages set to use the latest versions of (gcc, the kernel, nvidia drivers, pidgin, etc). It's easy with Gentoo since all of that is compiled against the libraries which exist on your system. On binary distros, there can be incompatibilities between library versions (especially as you start adding more and more unstable packages to the mix), so it's hard to keep just a few packages up to date.
In fact, it was that very problem which originally caused me to drop RedHat Linux back in the late 90s and go to compiling everything from scratch (I then migrated to Gentoo to automate things). And despite the memes, it doesn't take nearly as long to compile everything on modern hardware as some would have you believe. A full rebuild of my system takes about 24 hours (AMD64 X2 4400+, 1002 packages installed), but I do that maybe once a year. It usually amounts to 10-20 minutes a day.
In the US, hate crimes are generally an extra charge tacked onto a crime that has been committed, so as to dole out extra punishment. However, they're appended in a very arbitrary manner and not equally enforced, which only strengthens the undertones of hate in some communities. White men are frequently charged even if hate wasn't a motivator, while very often minorities who attack those white men usually aren't charged with them.
See the cases of James Byrd, Jr and Ken Tillery which I referenced. Both were dragged to death in the same town four years apart, but the perpetrators were charged differently.
What the laws amount to, is trying to determine the motivation behind why someone committed their crime... and frankly, that motivation is a thought, so hate crime legislation borders on outlawing certain thoughts. And since motivations aren't frequently ascribed equally, there is a question of whether or not it is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal treatment under the law.
Racists use the capriciousness in the application of the law as one of the reasons to hate, so the question becomes, does the selective applicatin foster more hate than the legislation is intended to punish? Further, if the law can't be applied uniformly, isn't it in violation of the Constitution?
That's complete nonsense. They don't live in those neighborhoods and send their children to those schools because they want racial segregation - they do it because those neighborhoods and those schools are upper-class environments where their children can prosper without having to worry excessively about crime or violence, and because those schools tend to offer a better quality of education. Parents who can afford to send their kids to a private school don't start the selection process by saying "hrm, let's see which school has the fewest negros" - they send their children to the best school they can find. Unfortunately, due to the economic discrepancy between the races, those schools tend to have fewer black students, but you're confusing correlation with causation.
Who said they were rich? White flight has been pretty constant here in the Rochester area. There were the race riots in the 60s and white people moved to the first ring of suburbs in the 70s and 80s. Blacks started moving to the suburbs in the 90s and now the white are moving out of the suburbs and into the exurbs and rural towns surrounding that. You don't have to be rich to move away from an element you don't like, nor do you have to be wealthy to afford private school (in fact, private school charges 25-35% of what a public school costs per pupil here).
How do I know? My parents were part of the 70s white flight from Rochester when they were 19 and 17, unwed with a freshly born me, and dirt poor. Granted, we were far enough out that I didn't go to private school (but choosing a public school did play a major factor into where they chose to live). I know wealthier people who've taken it a step further with their gated communities or mansions on dozens of acres of former farmland, etc...
As for the whole "proud to vote for a black man" thing ... that IS racist. If you're more proud to vote for a particular candidate due to his race, you're a bigot, regardless of whether he's black, white, green, or purple.
I completely agree... but there are a lot of people who are privately racist but will publicly declare that they voted for a black guy or "but my best friend is black" or whatever to "prove" that they aren't. Those people are a big part of the problem in ending the animosity since their racism is covert.
If the purpose of hate crime laws is to dissuade people from hating, they are a complete failure. Some people have always hated other people from the dawn of time and criminalizing thoughts won't solve that, especially since most racism is expressed verbally in private.
Whether someone gets beat up because of the color of their skin or for the wallet in their pocket, the effect is the same and both should be punished the same way. Giving an extra sentence because of the motivations of the person doesn't make them hate any less, it only gives a new reason for other potential haters to hate.
Most people who have been physically and emotionally abused will tell you that the physical wounds heal, it's the emotional and psychological stuff that is hard to overcome. So yeah, I'd say that quiet racism preached behind doors is just as much of a problem as physical racism.
The solution is to overtly air the racism rather than ban it, so that it can be dispelled... because the stuff behind doors will eventually build and be released all at once like a pressure cooker.
Hate crime laws don't suppress racism... they might suppress public expression of racism, but people will still hate privately, likely using the hate crime laws themselves as a valid excuse to promote hate to others. "Look at James Byrd, they gave two of the three white guys that dragged him to death the death penalty and the other life, while the three black guys that did the same thing to Ken Tillery got 15, 20 and 70 years..." It's hard to enforce the law equally when the purpose of the law is to setup specific protected classes and that will result in more division.
IMO, it's much better to get people to express themselves publicly since it gives them an avenue to vent while simultaneously allowing you to deflate their arguments before they can spread the hate.
I live in NY... and you'll hear lots of people saying they were proud to vote for a black man for President, but those same people moved when blacks started encroaching on their white neighborhoods, send their kids to mostly white private schools, etc. While they publicly talk a good game, they still don't want to be around "those kind of people" privately. That undertone of racism is allowed to go unchallenged though, largely because as long as the racism isn't overtly public, it "isn't" really racism. I'd argue refusing to let your kids go to school with someone of a different color isn't much different from beating someone else up for being a different color. The same hate exists, just expressed differently... Sure, one is a violent crime which deserves a penalty in its own right, but the other goes completely unpunished and undiscussed.
Ultimately, if we want racism (and sexism, homophobia, etc) to end, we need to stop drawing lines to divide people into different camps and giving special treatment to "the right groups." Anything short of equal treatment breeds a hate itself.
Too bad it only covers about a third of the federal budget... $1182 billion out of $3998 billion. They'd rather you not look where the other 70% of the budget goes and instead focus mostly on military spending. That's not to mention the additional trillions in various bailouts and stimulus spending over the last 18 months.
Roe v Wade stated that abortion is a fundamental right under the Constitution and that any laws restricting it must be subject to strict scrutiny. Further, they went on to state that a fetus must be viable outside the womb to avoid the disruption of its right to life under the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Court created and defined the trimester system to denote viability). They also argued that abortion fell under the right to privacy, so nobody other than the woman could interfere with her medical decision.
In one fell swoop, the Courts wrote law defining when life begins and when life is viable. Whether or not you support abortion, those seem like definitions which clearly should belong to the legislature. It also took away the States' rights to determine the laws of their own state, blanketing the entire country with federal law.
Anyway, to get back on point... Abortion wasn't decided because of the efforts of a group of dedicated people wanting to change the law. It happened because a court ruled the current system into existence, which stands in stark contrast to the other three goal which WERE won by people advocating their points to the people and legislatures.
Temperance. (Americans still have a bunch of crazy laws thanks to these folks.)
Suffrage. (A constitutional amendment too! )
Civil rights.
These were fought for by the people and written into law by legislation... as was the repeal of temperance. In fact, all 3 involved Constitutional Amendments (13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, and 26)
Abortion rights (This battle is still on. The ones that fought for them, and the ones dedicated to taking them away)
This one wasn't decided by the people, but by a court of unelected, lifetime tenured justices, which is why it continues to be fought... it's also why it is the number one litmus test that both parties want to know about a new SCOTUS justice before they're approved by the Senate. Because law was created by judicial fiat rather than legislation, it existence is tenuous at best and only continues to exist because the SCOTUS hasn't reversed itself.
It'll remain like this pretty much forever (unless it gets reversed by a future court, which will move the question back to where it belongs: the legislatures/Congress)... both sides like using it as a wedge issue, which is why there are two "pro" movements involving it.
I don't expect anyone, straight, gay or somewhere in between, to be openly fondling each other in the restaurant.
I do find that to be pretty annoying and offensive. Were it my business I would ask them to desist and to leave if they are unable to do so. If the business-owner refuses to do so then I'm probably going to take my business elsewhere.
Right... and its a reasonable place to draw the line. But for every complete prude that wouldn't even hold hands in public, there's also someone who has to be militantly in your face about everything (and yes, once upon a time when I managed a McDonalds when I was a teenager, I had to throw people out for having sex in the dining room). Those people harm their own cause by acting like that. To some, having a line of public decency is an outrage. In fact, knowing a lot of religious social conservatives (albeit mostly of a northern variety), they tend to have a live and let live attitude. They won't approve of homosexuality, but they don't go out of their way to condemn it either. Unfortunately, I also know a lot of homosexuals that won't tolerate most Christians. There's a lot of room for tolerance on both sides and I find the ones who want tolerance the most are usually the least tolerant of others.
I get what you are saying but there has to be some middle ground between Rush Limbaugh's desire to run 100% ideologically pure candidates and the McCain's/Specter's of the World. There does come a point when someone splits with the party on so many issues that they aren't worth supporting any longer but as you previously said you'll never manage to find someone who agrees with you on everything.
Right... and while I've certainly been disappointed in an official here and there, I can still completely support them for at least doing 90% of what I'd want them to (or even 75% if they stuck to the things that were most important to me). Eventually, though, they get to the point where you have to ask yourself if they're even worth having in the party anymore. I don't think Rush wants to get rid of everyone that has never voted straight party line (or we'd probably be able to count them on one hand), but over a long period, some people like Specter and McCain have shown they don't care about the principles of the party, so the party needs to reconsider about whether or not they're worth supporting.
The liberal republican wing is telling us we need to be more like the Democrats and run a "moderate" candidate in 2012 if we want a chance to win. Well, that's exactly what McCain was and he got fewer votes than GWB did in 2004, after the moderates had already turned their back on him. What the GOP needs is a Reagan type figure. Yes, Reagan was very much a social conservative, but he largely campaigned on economic reform and bringing a pride back to the American people after the Carter "malaise." The northern Republicans united behind him because he wasn't bible thumping, the southern conservatives united behind him because they knew "he would do the right thing" anyway, and moderates all over said "hey, I like what this guy says and I want to believe in America again too." And it worked. That is the formula for 2012, IMO and it would give us a real alternative to the Democrats instead of a "me too, but not as fast!" alternative.
I'm not sure who that person is going to be... but that is the formula they should use. I'm pretty sure a guy like that would get your support and I'm almost positive he'd get mine as well.
I was never a fan of Pataki for a number of reasons. He seemed to treat a lot of the state agencies as patronage jobs for his political cronies. When Spitzer came in with a electoral mandate for reform I had misplaced hopes that he would change this but his idea of change seemed to be firing all of Pataki's cronies to make room for his own while burning his political capital on stupid shit (drivers licenses for illegals, troope
I've become more socially conservative than I ever thought I would but I'm still Libertarian in that I really don't care what you do behind closed doors as long as it doesn't impact my peaceful enjoyment of life. The only social issue that I see that can't be solved through a Libertarian approach is abortion. That's a tough one and it's only made worse by the extremists on both sides, ranging from "zygote == human being and murdering abortion doctors is acceptable" to "third trimester abortions should be legal". The only thing I've been able to conclude about abortion is that the extremists on both sides of the issue scare the hell out of me.
I really don't care about what people do in their own bedrooms either. It's more the "trying to force society to pat you on the back and say good job" for what people want to do in the bedroom. I don't discuss my sex life outside of a few close friends and frankly, I'd expect other people to respect my right to not have to listen to what they do either. People have a right to free speech, but not a captive audience and when I take my young nieces out to dinner, I don't expect anyone, straight, gay or somewhere in between, to be openly fondling each other in the restaurant. But their bedroom? More power to them.
As for the abortion thing... by definition, a zygote is alive (or else we need to redefine a whole lot of biology) and has human DNA, ergo, it is a human and they have the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the rest of us. I could drop dead of a heart attack right now and that zygote could miscarry, but that doesn't mean either of us should be killed for someone else's convenience. I obviously don't condone the shooting of abortion doctors either. I'd like to see it become a whole lot easier to adopt unwanted children in the US to help solve the problem, since the standards are beyond ridiculous at this point and there are a lot of people that want and would care for a child, but the system refuses them for not being the absolute, perfect, fairy tale ideal. 30 million babies have been killed since Roe v Wade. Among them could have been the next Einstein, Mozart or just plain old me. In fact, my mom was 16 when she became pregnant for me and a couple people tried to coerce her into aborting. I'd rather be around even if she had decided to give me up for adoption.
That's another thing I don't understand about the GOP. The sheer number of GOP officials and rank-and-file who cheered Specter's defection and/or have condemned Snowe and Collins amazes me. Would you rather have somebody who votes with you most of the time or would you rather run a "true" Republican who loses and wind up with somebody who votes against you all of the time?
Let me bring up my favorite of these folks... McCain. In an effort to appease his friends on the other side of the aisle, he teamed up with Feingold and gave us the Incumbant Protection Act, which not only violates free speech of the most important type, by preventing people from criticizing incumbants before an election, but also handicapped the party's fundraising abilities, leading to the disparity we saw last year and gave us the whole ridiculous 527 thing.
In addition to that, he wanted to give illegals not only amnesty, but Social Security benefits as well. He worked with Lieberman to try to create a carbon tax and trade scheme. He literally told the conservatives in the party that we could go fuck ourselves even though Republicans generally can't win without embracing the right side of the base.
And that's where my problem comes in... not that someone wants to stray on an issue or two, but when they continually undermine the party. At which point, I have to ask why they're even in the party to begin with. Much as Bush hurt the Republican brand, so do people like McCain. Even Snowe, Collins and Specter, when they gave in on the porkulus package, gave the Democrats the ability to call it a bi-partisan bill, imply
If the GOP would get back to those roots I'd register as a Republican in a heartbeat. It's the social wedge issues that I have a problem with. Take gay marriage as an example. It seems to me that a Conservative solution to the gay marriage debate would be to get Government out of the "marriage" business altogether. Let the Churches "marry" people according to their own doctrine and let the Government provide for civil unions for all couples (gay and straight) that would provide the benefits (medical proxy, joint tax filing, etc) of what the Government currently calls marriage. Problem solved.
I'm a fairly socially conservative atheist, but I'm by no means a one issue voter... I know too many Republicans that will stay home rather than vote for a Republican that supports gay marriage (some of my friends are upset about Jim Alesi right now). But at the same time, I know Republicans that will vote Democrat over abortion even if they disagree with Democrats on everything else. My view is that no candidate is ever going to agree with me 100% unless I run myself, so I can accept a flaw or two. As long as they're mostly in agreement with me, well, that's better than voting for someone that is almost completely out of agreement with me (which is also how I end up voting third party, I'll vote for the person I most agree with/who will do the best job rather than the letter after their name). Too many others will cut off their nose to spite their face over a single issue (and that includes a lot of Northeastern type Republicans). FWIW, my position on gay marriage is similar to yours with slightly different reasoning (marriage is a contract with society to raise children, unions are for people that want the benefits of marriage without the traditional purpose behind it)
The best explanation I've heard is that was a cynical calculation to get the 50,000 votes they needed to keep their party line. It was apparent to anyone with a clue that Faso was going down in flames, so why endorse him and risk falling below the threshold to retain your ballot line?
My friend couldn't even get them to define a platform... how can you have a party if it doesn't stand for anything?
Spitzer burns me up. I knew he was going to be a downstate liberal but I still had hopes that he would use some of the political capital from his landslide to make some changes in Albany. Instead he burned it all up on drivers licenses for illegals. WTF? Even if you think that's a good idea why would you pick a fight over such an issue when there are far more important things to burn political capital on?
These guys come out of the deepest liberal enclaves of NYC... and surround themselves exclusively with people like themselves. After a while, they forget there are other opinions out there since their echo chamber constantly repeats the things they want to hear. They get a little overconfident in their own power and ego, while simultaneously minimizing the opposition (since there is no viable opposition in NY) and that results in things like thinking he can ram the drivers license thing through and get away with taking a $4k/hr hooker over state lines with impunity. The accidental governor has planes to renew the fight over the drivers license thing later this year. In his case, it's just because he's desperate and knows his job is going to Andrew Cuomo next year (who, IMO, is another crook like the rest of them. Where are the billions that disappeared at HHS under his watch?)
Of course she did, she knows where Democratic primaries are decided in this state. Unless I've misread her I'm going to have a very hard time voting for her in the general election. She will get my vote in the primary if the downstater's try to knock her off though. What I can't figure out is why she felt the need to completely embrace the Brady platform. I understand throwing them a bone but she's gone way beyond that. It'll be interesting to see how the
I think your map makes sense. The only bit I'd question is the inclusion of Sullivan County with NYC. Sullivan is fairly equally split between NYC commuters and locals. Liberty and Monticello are big commuter towns but the rest of the county is pretty rural. Tough call on where to put it.
Gotta draw a line somewhere to at least start a discussion with, and that's pretty much what I did.
Since we are fantasizing, where would you put the capital? I think that Syracuse is probably the logical choice. Centrally located and most people are familiar with it. Easy to get to from almost anywhere in the state. It's more of a hike from Buffalo but not nearly as far away as Albany is.
Syracuse does seem to be the logical choice, kinda smack dab in the middle of what's left. It's a natural hub with 90 and 81 more or less running through it joining it both east-west and north-south through the state. It certainly isn't a worse than Albany is now.
I don't know if I'd give him that much credit for it. I place more of the blame with the national GOP. Some of the positions they have adopted have made it very hard to be a Republican in the Northeast. Upstate New York isn't NYC by any means but it's not South Carolina either. I think people just started pulling the lever (random thought: I'm gonna miss our lever machines!) for the Democrats because of disgust with the GOP in Washington.
Certainly the national GOP affected things here... being of a more conservative bent, I was completely unsatisfied with McCain (who I see more appropriately as a Democrat than a Republican) and I voted third party nationally (and for that matter, didn't vote in most local elections since, as I said, the GOP primary is where the real decision happens here). I knew both McCain and Obama would take us down the wrong road (and I had plenty of problems with where Bush went too, but I saw both as extensions of the wrong things Bush did), and I'd rather the other team take the hit for how the crap is going to hit the fan. Maybe in the meantime, the GOP can get back to ideas that unite all of us on the right, like actually producing a smaller government, instead of focusing on wedge issues that separate us. If not, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs that came before them.
I've never understood exactly what it is the Independence Party stands for. Their endorsements for Governor in particular seem cynically aimed at ensuring they net the 50,000 votes needed to retain their ballot line. How else to explain why they endorsed Spitzer? People register as Independent seemingly with no idea of what the party stands for or the fact that they are actually enrolling in a party. "What party are you in?", "None, I'm an Independent!"
My friend was on the committee that chose the candidates they would endorse... and yeah, he was pretty upset with the Spitzer thing. Most of the hierarchy of the Independence Party were simply Golisano lapdogs and when he left the picture, they didn't actually have a platform to support, so they had no guidance on who to pick. And yeah, a good number of registered Indepdence people thought they were registering independent (aka blank).
Him and I are both active in the Rochester Tea Party scene (and we spoke at both Tea Parties here) and we really are looking for someone to support come 2010 and 2012. To say we're disgruntled is an understatement... but he's really awed with the whole uprising and how it might lead to some real changes. Before, he'd get all these people talking about state secession and the same 4-5 people would show up to the meetings every time. Now we're getting interest from hundreds of people every time we go out in public. People want to know what they can do to change things locally, at the state level and at the federal level. There's a whole new undercurrent of excitement and it's all from the grassroots level, despite what certain newscasters with an agen
As an added bonus, Golisano announced he changed his residency to Florida today. Apparently, after buying the legislature he wanted, he's not satisfied with them and is going to stick the rest of the state with the consequences of his actions.
In addition to NYC, the following counties would go with it Albany, Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Nassau, Orange, Putnam, Rensselaer, Rockland, Schenectady, Suffolk, Sullivan, Ulster, Westchester. Basically, the folks that live outside of but identify closely with NYC and the current power structure.
Politically, they would break down to New York City State:
4,594,286 Democrats 1,778,131 Republicans 1,796,785 Blank
That leaves the new state as:
1,237,159 Democrats 1,276,389 Republicans 726,909 Blank
Which means, we're about as statistically balanced in party affiliation as you can get and we can work together without one side dominating the other. The NYC/Hudson Valley corridor can continue to function as they are. In addition to that, it splits us pretty well along cultural and financial lines too, so it is a more accurate representation of both would-be states.
Ithaca would very much be part of the new state in that scenario, as would your current residence of Binghamton.
My fear is that if the Republicans don't take back the State Senate in 2010 that it will be the final nail in the coffin. The Democrats will be able to draw the district lines as they see fit and we can forget about any prospect of Upstate Representation for the foreseeable future. I don't even agree with a lot of what the GOP stands for but I'm forced to vote for them on the state level because the NYS Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sheldon Silver.
I'm a registered Republican for town/county political reasons (whoever wins the Republian primaries wins the general election), but I'm much more of a conservative/libertarian type. All three of the major parties in this state (Tom Golisano's Independence Party for those outside, and no, it has nothing to do with Independence, that's just catchy marketing) are pretty craptacular and harm the state in their own ways. I don't think that will change until and unless there is an upstate secession.
Let's not forget that it was Golisano that funded a number of Democrats for State Senate this last election in an effort to flip the Senate to cause "change." All he did was knife the state in the jugular in the process, by ensuring one party rule. A friend of mine sits on several high level committees in the Independence Party and he's thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing. His personal hope is that with total control of everything, the Democrats will speed up NY's definite collapse, forcing us to reboot that much sooner.
I just don't know about that... to quote Paterson himself (trying to deny that we're a welfare state), we're becoming a social services based economy, with something like 40% of the population living off the public dole and Paterson wants to increase the Medicaid roles to 25% of the state (up from its current 20%) by making eligibility twice the federal poverty level. As the demographics change to the point where there are more people with their hands out than there are people working (and arguably, we're already there with another 15% or so of the population on the state payroll), the working guy is outnumbered and is the sheep voting among two wolves on dinner. Unfortunately, barring that secession, I don't see things getting better for the state. In fact, I see a complete and utter collapse (and probably within the next decade).
As for where I'm from, Livingston County, just south of Rochester. I've got a lot of family here and in Buffalo, many of which used to work at places like Kodak, Xerox and Delphi. I've watched first hand as the policies of NYC via Albany have turned once vibrant communities into economic wastelands dominated by crime and slums (Rochester has had to resort to the state police coming in to patrol the city, in addition to the city and county police forces, because violent crime has been so out of hand the last few years).
And it will never get better as long as we have no say or control in our governance.
I've long supported secession and a 51st state for Upstate/Western NY (I'd give NYC the entire Hudson corridor as well, since most of the people there identify with the politcs of NYC anyway). As for losing some of our tax base (and yes, NYC sends us more money than we send them), we can make up the difference in having laws that fit the needs of the people here rather than the wants of the NYCers that were forced upon us. A massive part of the local government expenditures throughout the rest of the state are from unfunded mandates dictated by NYC.
Most people from outside the state think NY = NYC, when it is a barely a postage stamp sized area on our envelope. NYC has as much in common with the rest of the state as San Francisco would with Wyoming and the disparities are just too great to overcome given that one city wants to dominate the rest of us. NY is considered a deep blue state, but if you cut off NYC, you'll find the rest of the state is nearly perfectly divided politically. With the exception of a handful of State Senate leaders, NY hasn't had a statewide representative from outside NYC/Hudson area since at least as far back as the 1930s. Effectively, we have no representation and people have been choosing to move with their feet for decades because of it (Rochester is less than half the size it was in 1950 and not too long ago, Buffalo had more millionaires per capita than any city in the US).
NYC continues to squeeze more... and I sit here watching more businesses leave and more people follow them out the door since the state is so hostile to able bodied, working people. I love where I live, but our government is so bad, I've been fighting the temptation to leave since I graduated high school and my parents were fighting it long before that.
Has nothing to do with convincing 50.1% of the population and everything to do with NY's budgeting system of "Three men in a room." The Governor (Democrat from NYC), Assembly Leader (Democrat from NYC) and State Senate Leader (Democrat from NYC) lock themselves in a room and emerge with the budget that will be passed by the state. Despite the Governor proposing a number of cuts in face of a $24 billion projected shortfall prior to entering the room, Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver demanded a budget 9.2% higher than last year's and got his way. It doesn't matter what the rest of the state wants, traditionally, regardless of whether there is a Republican Governor and Senate Leader or a Democrat one, Silver drives the budget. He's Assembly leader for life, rules his caucus with an iron fist, represents a district that will never elect anyone else and will not let his body vote on a budget that he doesn't approve of. Time and time again, Silver has shown he will put his own interests ahead of the rest of the state, often forcing budgets to become severely overdue unless the entire state caves and gives him the powers and programs he wants. Disagree with Silver on any issue, whether you're a D or R, and you will have your pet projects stripped from his budget.
NY's population remains powerless. We've got no citizen initiated referrendum or recall powers and due to the Assembly's power base in NYC, the opinion of the roughly 50% of the population in the rest of the state doesn't even matter. We're dictated to, not listened to. It's nothing short of a tyranny and is one of the driving causes in the hatred of NYC by the rest of the state.
So a question is, why are the parties interested in keeping the "register for your party and only vote in that primary" rule.
The people that belong to a party should be able to select the person that represents their views, otherwise, you'll get people tagged with a party's name that shares little in common with that party and the actual party base won't want to support them.
See: John McCain. Most Republicans flat out hate him. The base of the party was divided between a number of other candidates and their split votes allowed the independents in states with open primaries to select the Republican candidate for President. The result was people like me (conservatives, not to be confused with neo-cons which aren't conservative at all) voted third party rather than vote for the lesser of two evils. The result was McCain got fewer votes than Bush did in 2004 after he was already hated by the moderates and some of the right.
Primaries are used to select the candidate to represent the party... if you aren't in a party, well, you shouldn't have the right to tell them who to pick. General elections are for you to pick the guy you actually want in office. So, independents, pick a party if you want a choice in the direction of that party and stop trying to have it both ways (well, I don't want to be affiliated with a party myself, but I want a party to be affiliated with my candidate...)
There are a lot of people left in the Republican party who are a whole lot closer to those old time conservatives than you think, and if they don't get noticed, it's only partly their own fault and largely the media's fault.
Which is precisely what the Tea Parties are about... and why the left feels the need to belittle them. They're afraid that the real GOP (not the imposters that have taken over for the last decade) will rise up again.
I, myself, have spoken at two of them... and, sure, while there are some fringe elements present looking to leech off the crowd, they're all about a resurgence in the old conservative ideals, especially fiscal conservatism, that the party elites have ignored. It's the long forgotten about base standing up demanding to be heard.
I'm a member of what you would deem the extreme right* (conservative, bordering on libertarian). I believe government should be restricted solely to the role proscribed in the Constitution. Trust me, the Republicans aren't moving my way, they're moving to the lesser party of Big Government, rather than their traditional role as the party of smaller government. I'm the type of guy the Republicans are pushing out in favor of the neo-con types, which are basically internationalist Democrats (read up on the history of the neo-con movement, it was born in the 1950s Democrat Party).
As for Spector, he was a Democrat until 1966 (at 36 years old), when he switched to the Republican Party to win an election for District Attorney. So, he has a history of switching his party for his own political convenience, which is really all this was about anyway. He's got more power and a Democrat since that will put him in the majority, and if he ran again as a Republican in PA, he was likely to get the boot since the GOP has been on the decline in PA (the other PA senator is a Democrat that beat a very conservative incumbant Rick Santorum and PA has voted Dem in the last couple gubenatorial elections).
Anyway, don't read too much into this being about the politics of the GOP... it's really about Spector wanting to ensure his seat. It certainly isn't because the GOP is moving too far to the right because they're moving away from me, not closer to me and the principles that got Reagan big wins and the GOP into the Congressional majority in 1994. The reason why the GOP is losing support is because they're becoming indistinguishable from the Democrats and if you want to elect a Democrat, why not actually elect someone with that label?
* I'd work to outright eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Department of Education, etc. I'm the extreme on the right side of the aisle. Anyone working to expand those programs, ala Medicare D, is not on the extreme fringe of the right, they're in the authoritarian middle shared with the nanny state left.