Saturday, December 23, 2006
Buddhists in Congress? Who knew?
In all the uproar over the election of a Muslim to Congress and his decision to use the Koran in his swearing in ceremony, the media have apparently overlooked the election of two Buddhists to Congress. (They've also conveniently forgotten to ask Jewish officeholders what book they've chosen to use in their swearing in ceremonies - I'm betting its not the King James Bible;-) Long live American multiculturalism!
Monday, December 11, 2006
Colorado Confidential :: Weinstein: Christian Soldier Testimonials An Outrage
"My first priority is my faith in God, then my family, and then my country. I share my faith because it describes who I am," Gen. Catton says in the video. "You have many men and women who are seeking God’s council and wisdom as we advise the Chairman and the Secretary of Defense. Hallelujah."
Friday, December 08, 2006
MiamiHerald.com | 12/05/2006 | Disabled boy seeks blankets from state
More Republican government in action...
"State spends thousands of dollars to deprive a boy with disabilities of thermal blankets that cost $360 a year."
"State spends thousands of dollars to deprive a boy with disabilities of thermal blankets that cost $360 a year."
Constitution Party legislator named chairman of House education
Posted on Dec. 7
This is the Republican agenda that they are too scared to campaign on:
"Republican leaders are giving the House Education Committee chairmanship to the Legislature's only third-party member, a Constitution Party lawmaker who opposes more money for public schools."
If you want to fear for your country, read these folk's platform at http://www.constitutionparty.com/.
"Republican leaders are giving the House Education Committee chairmanship to the Legislature's only third-party member, a Constitution Party lawmaker who opposes more money for public schools."
If you want to fear for your country, read these folk's platform at http://www.constitutionparty.com/.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Slain Nevada Soldier at Last Gets Wiccan Plaque
I may not be a Wiccan, but this is great news for religious freedom in America. It seems clear to me that soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country should be able to choose the symbolism for their graves.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Disembowelled, then torn apart: The price of daring to teach girls
"But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls."
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Washington Wire � Oath of Office
"Some conservatives are livid that Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who became the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, has said he will take the oath of office with his left hand on the Koran."
Monday, November 20, 2006
White House brushes off CIA draft on Iran: report - Yahoo! News
The White House is still ignoring the nation's best intelligence.
"The White House dismissed a classified CIA draft assessment that found no conclusive evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, The New Yorker magazine reported."
"The White House dismissed a classified CIA draft assessment that found no conclusive evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, The New Yorker magazine reported."
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Republican Loser Demands Hindu Democrat Winner Convert to Christianity
The race of your life is more important than this one—and it is my sincere wish that you’ll get to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. He died for the sins of the world, yours and mine—and especially for those who accept His forgiveness. His kingdom will come and His will be done—on earth as it is in heaven. There’s more….I love belonging to the family of God. Jesus is the way, the truth and offers His life to you and each human being. Pay attention…this is very important, Satveer. Have you noticed Jesus for yourself…at some moment in time, yet???
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Tuesday's Elections
With the election this week, you may have found yourself thinking, "what does Howard think about the results?" OK, you probably didn't actually think that, but I still have opinions on the subject that I am compelled to share.
First, this was obviously a good week for Democrats and the country at large. We restored checks and balances to our government and oversight to the executive branch. We checked, for the moment at least, the extremist takeover of our courts. Who knows, we may even get to put science back in our science programs.
Still, the question of the day is what really happened and what doesit all mean?
I generally believe that elections are really decided by very few criteria. Voters simply don't choose candidates based on position papers or policy ideas. Each election has a frame that shapes how voters think about the candidates and how they decide to vote.
This election was no different. You hear pundits on the left talking about the return of progressivism. And pundits on the right talking about how the election of conservative Democrats means affirms conservative principles. And they are all full of it.
This election was, IMNSHO, driven by only two considerations. First, that the country, the economy, and the war are headed in the wrong direction. Since there is one party in charge and they don't seem to be willing to take responsibility, acknowledge failure, change course, or even behave nicely, the voters decided to hold them accountable. Yep, it really is that simple. People aren't happy with how the country is running and no longer believe that the Republicans running it are competent. Every piece of bad news, every new scandal, every Bush "happy speech", every Rumsfeld obfuscation, every attack ad just reinforced that frame.
The second factor is a long term political shift. Over the past 60 years, the South has shifted to the Republican party. This happened slowly at first from Thurmond to Nixon, accelerated under Reagan and was brought to fruition by Gingrich and Rove. And now the Republicans are stuck with the Democrat's traditional burden - a solid South who's values are out of touch with the rest of the country.
Actually, its even worse for the Republicans since they also have traditionally Republican rural America who's values are just as conservative. With both factions now in the same party, these values now completely dominate that party's national agenda. It is no accident that so many of the national Republican figures are from the South. Bush, Lott, DeLay, Frist really are the face of the new Republican party.
As I told my friend Bob several years ago, this is not the same Republican party that he voted for all those years. It is not the party of Tom Kean or Nelson Rockefeller. That party no longer exists. And, with given the size of the South and the alignment of rural America, that Republican party will never be again.
Now we see the inevitable reaction to that change elsewhere in the country. Voters in the northeast and midwest and in the suburbs everywhere are waking up to the fact that this Republican party no longer represents their values and interests. It is no accident that the electoral map for the past two presidential elections is so divided along regional lines and urban/rural lines. A similar division of the congressional map is, IMO, an inevitable result that this election accelerated. As the Republican party becomes more Southern, the rest of the country will become more Democratic. Jim Jeffords was a trailblazer and now other politicians like Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snow may follow suit.
On this score, the night was actually somewhat mixed for the Democrats. The wave, while large, was not large enough to remove truly odious and incompetent Republicans like the Queens of Mean Jean Schmidt of Ohio and Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado. Where particularly odious individuals did fall, they tended to fall based on their own misdeeds. Democrats may well find these seats indefensible in 2008. Think of the seats held by Mark Foley or Tom DeLay for example. The race for both of these seats was close even though voters had to actually vote for Foley or write in DeLay's replacement.
As for political re-alignment, it clearly reached fruition in the New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Results from the midwest were more mixed. Democrats took only 5 of 15 seats in blue Michigan, 10 of 19 in blue Pennsylvania (which included several pickups), 10 or 19 in very blue Illinois and failed to win the Governor's mansion in blue Minnesota.
In the end, the Democrats failed to maximize their gains. Overall, they took 56% of the congressional vote. That should have translated to 240+ seats. Even worse, I saw one set of poll results that indicated that only 60% of the people who hoped that the Democrats would take over congress actually voted for a Democrat.
Some will blame this on the failure to fund the right campaigns. Others to the failure of specific candidates. Personally, I attribute the failure to the power of negative campaigning, the Republican dirty tricks operation. and the effectiveness of Republican gerrymandering in the Midwest.
It is the REPUBLICAN dirty tricks operation by the way. There is no Democratic equivalent anymore. That was the domain of big city machines and southern Democrats that no longer exist. The myth that "both sides do it" is 50 years out of date and exactly the kind of propaganda that dirty Republican operatives count on so that voters let them get away with it. The robocall scam in the northeast, push-polling, faked sample ballot in Maryland were all Republican campaign tactics.
Gerrymandering was particularly harmful in Pennsylvania and Michigan which were controlled by Republican Governors and legislatures the last time districts were drawn. The good news for Democrats is that they captured the Governor's mansions in both states and also took the state house of representatives in Michigan for the first time since the last redistricting. The question will be whether they can hold onto these gains through the next redistricting window.
The downballot success was actually the best news for the Democrats on election night. Control of Governor's mansions and state legislatures is key to fulfilling the political realignment. And Democrats now have a majority of both. If they can hold these majorities through the next redistricting window, the impact of realignment can be fully realized.
Not only is it important to understand what an election was really about, it is equally as important to understand what an election was not about. This election was not a triumph of progressive values nor was it affirmation of conservative values. The views held by Democratic challengers were unimportant compared to the (R) next to the names of the Republican incumbents.
There was some good news on progressive economic issues as minimum wage initiatives passed around the country while initiatives designed to enforce rigid limits on government spending were defeated. Still, I think that an analysis that I once read is spot on - the problem that Democrats (and progressives) have is that the progressive agenda has pretty much already been adopted so now we are simply nibbling at the fringes. We long ago reached a consensus on "safety-net capitalism." Bush's aborted attempt to gut Social Security demonstrated the futility of attacking that consensus. Only health care remains largely unaddressed, an omission that increasingly benefits Democrats as apprehension over health care costs grows among middle class Americans.
This election was also not a victory in the culture war. Anti-gay marriage amendments continued to pass around the country. Even the defeat in Arizona was largely attributed to a poorly written amendment that would seriously impact unmarried heterosexual couples in addition to gay couples. The Democratic party did put up a number of candidates with culturally conservative views to be less "objectionable" to voters in their districts, but it is unclear whether this was actually beneficial. The only cultural issue that had an impact was the backlash in the Hispanic community to the Republican position on immigration. This community, which had been slowly migrating to the Republican party over the last couple of election cycles in large part do to cultural issues, returned to the Democratic party as southern and midwestern Republicans made overt appeals to bigotry on this issue.
There were a couple of other winners and losers in this election. The biggest losers were gay Republicans. When the Foley scandal happened, leaders of the religious right blamed the problem on a cabal of gay Republican staffers. Most of us laughed this off as the psychotic ravings of generally insane people. Oddly, it turns out that there really are a large number of gay Republican staffers. Ken Mehlman has been publically outed. And the religious right in Virginia (Falwell, et al.) are convinced that Allen lost because he didn't embrace the anti-gay marriage amendment that carried almost 70% of the vote in Virginia. They attribute this failure to the large number of openly gay and presumed gay staffers on the Allen campaign. So, now, the religious right is out to purge the party of gay staffers who they blame for losing the Senate. They are even circulating a "values" statement that they expect Republican officeholders to sign saying that they will not employ gays. It will be interesting to see what log cabin Republicans will do if the purge happens and what the religious right will do if it doesn't.
The big winner on Tuesday was John McCain. The two most formidable challengers to his right in the Republican party, Santorum and Allen, were both defeated. That leaves only Newt Gingrich on the right capable of putting together the kind of coalition between cultural and economic conservatives that could stop McCain. And, after this loss, conservatives may be more motivated to win which McCain can do and Gingrich cannot. Besides, for all the press has painted him as a maverick, McCain is actually quite conservative - certainly more so than his other chief rival Rudy Giuliani. He is anti-abortion and pro-Iraq. His departures from Republican doctrine are primarily on less dogmatic issues like campaign finance reform. Republican insiders and financial backers prefer to coalesce behind a candidate early and McCain is the only candidate available to them.
Unfortunately, this election did not give us a serious Democratic contender. A national campaign exposes a candidate's political weaknesses in a way that no other campaign does. During this election season, Hillary Clinton demonstrated on numerous occasions that she has a tin political ear that will not stand up to a national campaign. Besides, a contest between Clinton and McCain will be driven by a single factor, the national media love McCain and hate Clinton. And if you don't think that fact alone dooms a Clinton candidacy, you might want to review the treatment of Al Gore by a similarly antagonistic national media.
That pretty much sums up my thoughts on this election. Besides, this missive has grown beyond any reasonable length and I am sure that I've lost all of my readers by now. If you have made it this far, thanks for listening.
First, this was obviously a good week for Democrats and the country at large. We restored checks and balances to our government and oversight to the executive branch. We checked, for the moment at least, the extremist takeover of our courts. Who knows, we may even get to put science back in our science programs.
Still, the question of the day is what really happened and what doesit all mean?
I generally believe that elections are really decided by very few criteria. Voters simply don't choose candidates based on position papers or policy ideas. Each election has a frame that shapes how voters think about the candidates and how they decide to vote.
This election was no different. You hear pundits on the left talking about the return of progressivism. And pundits on the right talking about how the election of conservative Democrats means affirms conservative principles. And they are all full of it.
This election was, IMNSHO, driven by only two considerations. First, that the country, the economy, and the war are headed in the wrong direction. Since there is one party in charge and they don't seem to be willing to take responsibility, acknowledge failure, change course, or even behave nicely, the voters decided to hold them accountable. Yep, it really is that simple. People aren't happy with how the country is running and no longer believe that the Republicans running it are competent. Every piece of bad news, every new scandal, every Bush "happy speech", every Rumsfeld obfuscation, every attack ad just reinforced that frame.
The second factor is a long term political shift. Over the past 60 years, the South has shifted to the Republican party. This happened slowly at first from Thurmond to Nixon, accelerated under Reagan and was brought to fruition by Gingrich and Rove. And now the Republicans are stuck with the Democrat's traditional burden - a solid South who's values are out of touch with the rest of the country.
Actually, its even worse for the Republicans since they also have traditionally Republican rural America who's values are just as conservative. With both factions now in the same party, these values now completely dominate that party's national agenda. It is no accident that so many of the national Republican figures are from the South. Bush, Lott, DeLay, Frist really are the face of the new Republican party.
As I told my friend Bob several years ago, this is not the same Republican party that he voted for all those years. It is not the party of Tom Kean or Nelson Rockefeller. That party no longer exists. And, with given the size of the South and the alignment of rural America, that Republican party will never be again.
Now we see the inevitable reaction to that change elsewhere in the country. Voters in the northeast and midwest and in the suburbs everywhere are waking up to the fact that this Republican party no longer represents their values and interests. It is no accident that the electoral map for the past two presidential elections is so divided along regional lines and urban/rural lines. A similar division of the congressional map is, IMO, an inevitable result that this election accelerated. As the Republican party becomes more Southern, the rest of the country will become more Democratic. Jim Jeffords was a trailblazer and now other politicians like Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snow may follow suit.
On this score, the night was actually somewhat mixed for the Democrats. The wave, while large, was not large enough to remove truly odious and incompetent Republicans like the Queens of Mean Jean Schmidt of Ohio and Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado. Where particularly odious individuals did fall, they tended to fall based on their own misdeeds. Democrats may well find these seats indefensible in 2008. Think of the seats held by Mark Foley or Tom DeLay for example. The race for both of these seats was close even though voters had to actually vote for Foley or write in DeLay's replacement.
As for political re-alignment, it clearly reached fruition in the New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Results from the midwest were more mixed. Democrats took only 5 of 15 seats in blue Michigan, 10 of 19 in blue Pennsylvania (which included several pickups), 10 or 19 in very blue Illinois and failed to win the Governor's mansion in blue Minnesota.
In the end, the Democrats failed to maximize their gains. Overall, they took 56% of the congressional vote. That should have translated to 240+ seats. Even worse, I saw one set of poll results that indicated that only 60% of the people who hoped that the Democrats would take over congress actually voted for a Democrat.
Some will blame this on the failure to fund the right campaigns. Others to the failure of specific candidates. Personally, I attribute the failure to the power of negative campaigning, the Republican dirty tricks operation. and the effectiveness of Republican gerrymandering in the Midwest.
It is the REPUBLICAN dirty tricks operation by the way. There is no Democratic equivalent anymore. That was the domain of big city machines and southern Democrats that no longer exist. The myth that "both sides do it" is 50 years out of date and exactly the kind of propaganda that dirty Republican operatives count on so that voters let them get away with it. The robocall scam in the northeast, push-polling, faked sample ballot in Maryland were all Republican campaign tactics.
Gerrymandering was particularly harmful in Pennsylvania and Michigan which were controlled by Republican Governors and legislatures the last time districts were drawn. The good news for Democrats is that they captured the Governor's mansions in both states and also took the state house of representatives in Michigan for the first time since the last redistricting. The question will be whether they can hold onto these gains through the next redistricting window.
The downballot success was actually the best news for the Democrats on election night. Control of Governor's mansions and state legislatures is key to fulfilling the political realignment. And Democrats now have a majority of both. If they can hold these majorities through the next redistricting window, the impact of realignment can be fully realized.
Not only is it important to understand what an election was really about, it is equally as important to understand what an election was not about. This election was not a triumph of progressive values nor was it affirmation of conservative values. The views held by Democratic challengers were unimportant compared to the (R) next to the names of the Republican incumbents.
There was some good news on progressive economic issues as minimum wage initiatives passed around the country while initiatives designed to enforce rigid limits on government spending were defeated. Still, I think that an analysis that I once read is spot on - the problem that Democrats (and progressives) have is that the progressive agenda has pretty much already been adopted so now we are simply nibbling at the fringes. We long ago reached a consensus on "safety-net capitalism." Bush's aborted attempt to gut Social Security demonstrated the futility of attacking that consensus. Only health care remains largely unaddressed, an omission that increasingly benefits Democrats as apprehension over health care costs grows among middle class Americans.
This election was also not a victory in the culture war. Anti-gay marriage amendments continued to pass around the country. Even the defeat in Arizona was largely attributed to a poorly written amendment that would seriously impact unmarried heterosexual couples in addition to gay couples. The Democratic party did put up a number of candidates with culturally conservative views to be less "objectionable" to voters in their districts, but it is unclear whether this was actually beneficial. The only cultural issue that had an impact was the backlash in the Hispanic community to the Republican position on immigration. This community, which had been slowly migrating to the Republican party over the last couple of election cycles in large part do to cultural issues, returned to the Democratic party as southern and midwestern Republicans made overt appeals to bigotry on this issue.
There were a couple of other winners and losers in this election. The biggest losers were gay Republicans. When the Foley scandal happened, leaders of the religious right blamed the problem on a cabal of gay Republican staffers. Most of us laughed this off as the psychotic ravings of generally insane people. Oddly, it turns out that there really are a large number of gay Republican staffers. Ken Mehlman has been publically outed. And the religious right in Virginia (Falwell, et al.) are convinced that Allen lost because he didn't embrace the anti-gay marriage amendment that carried almost 70% of the vote in Virginia. They attribute this failure to the large number of openly gay and presumed gay staffers on the Allen campaign. So, now, the religious right is out to purge the party of gay staffers who they blame for losing the Senate. They are even circulating a "values" statement that they expect Republican officeholders to sign saying that they will not employ gays. It will be interesting to see what log cabin Republicans will do if the purge happens and what the religious right will do if it doesn't.
The big winner on Tuesday was John McCain. The two most formidable challengers to his right in the Republican party, Santorum and Allen, were both defeated. That leaves only Newt Gingrich on the right capable of putting together the kind of coalition between cultural and economic conservatives that could stop McCain. And, after this loss, conservatives may be more motivated to win which McCain can do and Gingrich cannot. Besides, for all the press has painted him as a maverick, McCain is actually quite conservative - certainly more so than his other chief rival Rudy Giuliani. He is anti-abortion and pro-Iraq. His departures from Republican doctrine are primarily on less dogmatic issues like campaign finance reform. Republican insiders and financial backers prefer to coalesce behind a candidate early and McCain is the only candidate available to them.
Unfortunately, this election did not give us a serious Democratic contender. A national campaign exposes a candidate's political weaknesses in a way that no other campaign does. During this election season, Hillary Clinton demonstrated on numerous occasions that she has a tin political ear that will not stand up to a national campaign. Besides, a contest between Clinton and McCain will be driven by a single factor, the national media love McCain and hate Clinton. And if you don't think that fact alone dooms a Clinton candidacy, you might want to review the treatment of Al Gore by a similarly antagonistic national media.
That pretty much sums up my thoughts on this election. Besides, this missive has grown beyond any reasonable length and I am sure that I've lost all of my readers by now. If you have made it this far, thanks for listening.
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