Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
When arguing with friends why they shouldn’t support 3rd party candidates in the national elections, I never had any solid evidence why it would never work. They made good points about principles and needing to ‘send a message’ but Duverger’s Law is concrete proof that voting 3rd party, in our current election system, is plain dumb and helps give us elected people like Donald Trump.
I found an interesting guest column in my local paper the other day from Dennis Hetzel, who is executive director of the Ohio Newspaper Association and president of the Ohio Coalition for Open Government. In his column, he admits that journalists in Ohio need to do a better job in reporting on the upcoming elections. Hetzel believes it should be based on issues and not the horse race. I’ve been complaining about that for years and I’m glad Hetzel offers some solutions.
One of the mainstays of the Internet are self-check quizzes you can take. The ones I like are the political ones. The most famous is the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” to find out if one is a Libertarian – I’m not by the way. Another quiz that actually can help one understand US politics today is the isidewith.com. You answer questions on various issues and as if by magic the quiz tells you which Presidential candidate your views align with. I wasn’t surprised mine were aligned with Jill Stein from the Green Party.
Read an article on the Washington Post about a new political party called the National Atheist Party. While I applaud the effort to get atheists more involved in the political process, trying to include a broad progressive platform into such a narrow religious belief label is the wrong way to go.
The National Atheist Party is a non-profit, 527 political organization devoted to issue advocacy. As a 527 they can’t endorse candidates. In their mission statement the NAP says:
Caught a couple of good articles on the Internets today. One talked about why the Democrats might lose the 2010 midterm elections and another talked about how to fix the short term deficit problem. The fix doesn’t include cutting social security or electing Republicans – as smart people know.
Democrats won their massive majority because of an economic collapse. They’ve passed so much legislation because they have a massive majority based on an economic collapse. But the economic collapse isn’t over. And having a lot more seats than the other party means 1) voters blame you for the condition of the country, and 2) you have a lot of seats to lose. What the bad economy and the huge majority giveth, the bad economy and the huge majority taketh away. Om.
The incredible obviousness of the Democrats’ political fortunes
*Side Note* One reason it seems people aren’t happy with the President and the Democrats is because they still can’t rub two stones together to get us to see their half-assed watered down legislation (like the Health care reform and the recent financial reform bills for example) is the bees knees.
Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn’t even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.
Sometimes half doesn’t work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama’s half assed “left wing” policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a “socialist” this means that Obama’s policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.
That leads us to the real fix for the deficit since the Republicans and other idiots insist on “fixing” it:
First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do.
The deficit hawks would be satisfied and it doesn’t include Republicans or trashing the economy.