Tag: Voters

Electoral College Must Go!

Seriously?

Most of us “pinkos” on the Left have been saying that for decades and no one was listening and now it is all the rage…..I have written many posts condemning the EC and calling for its abolishing…….

https://lobotero.com/2008/07/14/what-do-you-really-know-about-the-electoral-college/

https://lobotero.com/2016/11/28/what-do-you-know-about-the-electoral-college/

The reason that I re-visit my attempts to sway my readers is something that was published last week……

Earlier this week, former Attorney General Eric Holder called for the abolition of the electoral college because it is “undemocratic” and “forces candidates to ignore majority of the voters and campaign in a small number of states.” In a New York Times op-ed, columnist Jamelle Bouie echoes all of the above and hopes that Holder’s argument becomes a main topic among Democrats running for president. “The Electoral College routinely threatens or produces perverse outcomes, where the will of the voters is thwarted by an ill-considered 18th-century electoral device,” writes Bouie. “It has no place in a democracy that strives for a standard of ‘one person, one vote.'” It’s also the reason Donald Trump is president instead of Hillary Clinton, he writes, and the reason Trump might win again in 2020.

Bouie runs through the historical origins of the electoral college, along with the failed attempts to replace it over the years with a system based on popular vote. Opponents of the electoral college have nowhere near the support necessary to get an amendment ratified abolishing it, he notes. “The inertia behind the Electoral College is strong, which is why it needs vocal opponents making their case as loudly and often as possible.” However, he writes that the movement has, in fact, been gaining ground, with the governor of Colorado promising to join the National Popular Vote interstate compact, and Maine’s legislature considering the same move. Click to read the full column, in which Bouie argues that the current system is a “glaring flaw” in our democracy. (Read more electoral college stories.)

My question is…what took you people so long?

Maybe now someone will f*cking listen because some high paid pundit has written an op-ed stating what most of us on the Left have known for many decades……

As they say…..”better late than never”…….

And guess what? We may not have had a Trump as president if you a/holes had listened in the beginning.

Just Saying!

Advertisements

Those Empty Slogans

Since I started this blog I have been writing about just how much I hate a politician’s empty slogans and promises.

The GOP candidates have, in the past, been the worse at silly slogans….Make America Great Again is one such bizarre and silly slogan (America has always been a great country just not so much as a society).

But since the Dems won the House I have noticed that they are starting to sling a slogan or two…..(this quote is from the WaPo that will do what it can to sabotage any progressive agenda this op-ed is a prime example)…..

Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post thinks Democrats are starting to look like the Republicans of 2016, and she doesn’t mean that as a compliment. They’re “emphasizing empty slogans instead of evidence-based policy, rejecting experts in favor of cranks, handwaving away questions about implementation, and promising that an expensive policy will magically ‘pay for itself’ through economic growth,” writes Rampell. And one of those she calls out is a fellow millennial, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, specifically over the Green New Deal championed by the new congresswoman. That policy promises to save the environment by achieving carbon-emission targets that far exceed anything on the table so far, but the plan skips over the details on how to get there, along with any sacrifices that Americans would have to make.

AOC dismisses this kind of criticism by saying the plan will pay for itself by creating jobs, but that’s not nearly good enough, writes Rampell. She finds the same kind of “lazy sloganeering” present in “Medicare-for-all,” and thinks it’s a mistake because it comes at the expense of “vibrant, nuanced debate” on health care, tax policy, and climate policy. As for the 2016 comparison, it’s true that President Trump won the White House with some “empty slogans” of his own, writes Rampell. But “right now, Democrats still retain a monopoly on expertise and evidence-based policy,” she writes. “They should not relinquish it easily.” Click for the full column, in which Rampell takes issue with the Modern Monetary Theory that’s been gaining in popularity

I agree with the main point….that with silly slogans the Dems are slowly becoming the GOP……(could it be that they also think the American people is easily swayed by moronic slogans as does the GOP?)

The with this op-ed is that to have a rigorous debate you need a willing opponent and the Dems do have have such an opponent…all they have is the GOP and their silly slogan and lies.

I suggest the WaPo needs to call out one then call out all.

Feel The Bern!

Run Bernie Run!

All us people that supported Bernie in 2016 have been waiting for him to step up in the 2020 contest.

The wait is over!

Last time, he was the underdog, notes NPR. This time, he’ll be one of the favorites. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday told Vermont Public Radio that he is entering the 2020 race for president. The 77-year-old joins a crowded field, with big names including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar already in the mix. “We began the political revolution in the 2016 campaign, and now it’s time to move that revolution forward,” said the independent senator. He will campaign on familiar issues, including universal health care and a $15 minimum wage.

As the Washington Post notes, a big challenge facing Sanders is that many of his 2020 rivals already embrace policy positions he’s pushing. In his announcement, Sanders didn’t mince words when talking about the man he hopes to replace as president. “I think the current occupant of the White House is an embarrassment to our country,” Sanders said. “I think he is a pathological liar. … I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.” (Sanders wants to raise taxes on the richest Americans.)

Now the MSM can make sure we all know he is a Democratic Socialist……sad that this nation has to use labels and not policies……the GOP is gearing up and some of the Dem candidates will join in…..candidates like Harris……

For now I like Bernie but I am leaning more to Tulsi at this stage of the process…..but I will be watching..

Is it possible that there is a path for Bernie to win?

Bernie Sanders is a famous, successful loser.

When he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in April 2015, Sanders trailed Hillary Clinton in the polls by nearly 57 percentage points. By spring of 2016, some polls showed him within single digits. Sanders was no longer an obscure senatorial frump from Vermont — he was a bona fide political phenomenon whose primary success embodied the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.

But 2020 is not 2016. Sanders kicked-off his 2020 run early on Tuesday, and as he navigates his second presidential primary, he’ll need to prove he can build on his past success, not coast on his 2016 coalition.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-2020-democratic-nomination-kickoff/

A few takes on the Bernie candidacy…..

  • Wide appeal? A common knock against Sanders is that his democratic socialist views would make it hard for him to win in a general election. But Sanders’ campaign says his appeal among minorities, the white working class, and independent voters could help him win in unexpected places, including typically red states such as West Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, reports Politico. The story talks to Sanders’ pollster.
  • Trump team: The president’s campaign is already out with a line of attack using the s-word. Sanders “has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism,” says the campaign, per the AP. Among other things, it cites Sanders’ support of a Medicare-for-all system.

  • The challenge: An analysis at Vox agrees that many of the issues championed by Sanders in 2016 have now been accepted by his Democratic rivals. In a way, that’s good for Sanders. “On the other hand, Sanders has to make the case that he’s still the progressive that voters should choose. He’s remained consistent; he’s fighting for the same things today that he was in 2016. The question is: Can he win at his own game?”
    Sign of trouble? David Weigel of the Washington Post writes that Hillary Clinton came off her 2008 loss in the primary by building on her support to become the 2016 frontrunner. Sanders has not done the same, he says. “In early polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he won 50 percent and 60 percent of the vote, support for the senator from Vermont has ranged from the low teens to 30 percent.”
    The basics: Axios has a primer on Sanders’ life and policies. One question surrounds his age of 77. More than half of Democratic county party leaders in Iowa said in a recent poll that they wanted a young candidate.

The fact that gives me a smile is that Bernie’s candidacy will have corporate Dems, like Kamala, will be running scared and their voice, MSM, will start the slander and the misinformation…..

With a launch of the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign on the near horizon, efforts to block his trajectory to the Democratic presidential nomination are intensifying. The lines of attack are already aggressive—and often contradictory.

One media meme says that Bernie has made so much headway in moving the Democratic Party leftward that he’s no longer anything special. We’re supposed to believe that candidates who’ve adjusted their sails to the latest political wind are just as good as the candidate who generated the wind in the first place.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/12/bernie-2020-campaign-has-corporate-democrats-running-scared/

FEEL THE BERN!

Is More Democracy Better?

We have just practiced one of our “inalienable rights”….we voted in the midterms and according to the pundits democracy has won out over the silliness in the country today.

But has it?

I still have not seen a backlash that all were predicting…..okay the Dems won the House…..who did not see that coming?  Repubs keep the Senate….and this is a surprise?  At what point will all that make a difference to my life?  But it does give the high paid pundits something to talk about…..

Just what did the midterms prove?

People voted…..Trump still has a 40% approval……Dems still are as rudderless as always….do I really need to continue?

But now let’s look at the democracy we love (about here someone will no doubt point out that the US is a republic…..thanx for that now go back to sleep)……

Candidates and Political Parties…….the candidates no longer need to hold to party ideology……

n the late evening of August 29, 1968, a balding fifty-seven-year-old wearing a black suit and a black tie took the stage at the International Amphitheatre, in Chicago, to accept his party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Framed by a gray backdrop, Hubert Humphrey promised America a bright new day: “It is the special genius of the Democratic Party that it welcomes change, not as an enemy but as an ally; not as a force to be suppressed but as an instrument of progress to be encouraged.”

When he was first elected to the U.S. Senate, some two decades earlier, Humphrey was hailed as a liberal hero for his outspoken support of civil rights. When he served as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vice-President, he continued to champion progressive causes like equal-opportunity hiring and privately expressed misgivings about the military escalation in Vietnam. But, during the primaries, he did not publicly distance himself from Johnson even as the President became less and less popular, and activists gradually came to see Humphrey as the hapless face of a failing establishment. “Once a fiery liberal spirit,” the satirist Tom Lehrer lamented in song, “Ah, but now when he speaks he must clear it. / Second fiddle’s a hard part, I know, / When they don’t even give you a bow.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/is-more-democracy-always-better-democracy

An outside group, Indivisible, has taken upon themselves to help the Dems grow a spine…..a lofty task……..

After more than year of playing defense against President Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on healthcare, workers, immigrants, refugees, the LGBTQ community, and the common good, the progressive group Indivisible on Tuesday published a new action guide aimed at helping organizers and constituents go beyond resistance and pressure the new House Democratic majority to fight for a positive, ambitious agenda.

“This guide is for what comes next,” Indivisible notes, contrasting the new roadmap with its viral 2016 Trump resistance guide.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/14/help-democrats-stiffening-their-spines-new-indivisible-guide-details-how-trump

The GOP may be a hopeless cause…..they have sided with sex deviates and have lambasted a military man in defense of a cowardly president……their redemption will be harder for these spineless slugs…

Democracy is a fascinating topic and I will re-visit it in the near future….

Turn The Page ….but Stay Tuned!

Closing Thought–27Nov18

How many of my readers were on the internet in 1999?

Well I was and I participated in an experiment into democracy……

Democracy on the internet…….

in 1999 I felt that the internet was the future of democracy and voting…….now a look back into those days……

In 1999, the organization responsible for the backbone of the public internet, ICANN, tried to build a democracy.

In theory it was utopian: Internet users from around the world would register as at-large members of ICANN, elect delegates to represent their continent, and these delegates would sit on the ICANN board of directors. The structure of internet would be governed by its users.

ICANN was in a position to do this because it’s in the business of determining how people are found on the World Wide Web. It governs the directory that every computer uses for directions to the right web page on the right server. If you register a web page, it gets registered by an ICANN-approved registrar. This proposal wasn’t just about who could register a .edu domain versus a .org, but instead who would be allowed to have a place on the web at all.

https://qz.com/1422925/the-public-internet-was-almost-a-democracy/

I still think that the internet could be used for good but that would require a free internet and there are too many working to make sure that is NEVER the case.

Any thoughts?

Peacemakers, Warmongers And Fence Setters

You are about to go to the polls and vote for your favorite candidate or in my case the one with the least smell about them…..but who represents your political thinking…a peacemaker?  Or a Warmonger?  Maybe a coward that sits on the Fence and watches the political winds?

Who represents you?

In lifetime voting records tabulated by Peace Action, the average House Democrat has a 72% peace voting record, while the average House Republican scores only 10%. In the Senate, the difference is 69% to 14%

As a foreign policy crisis explodes over the apparent Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, the failure of the U.S. Congress to assert its constitutional war powers over three years of illegal U.S. military action in the war on Yemen and booming U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners is finally coming home to roost.

The UN already reported two years ago that a child was dying every 10 minutes in Yemen, wracked by the war and its consequences, including malnutrition, diphtheria, cholera and other preventable diseases.  Data already showed that more than a third of Saudi-led airstrikes were hitting schools, hospitals, markets, mosques and other civilian sites. But none of the dire warnings by UN agencies and NGOs could trigger the constitutionally required debate and decisive action by the U.S. Congress.  Even now the Trump administration is trying desperately to salvage its blood-soaked arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/23/peacemakers-warmongers-and-fence-sitters-who-represents-you

I look for the person that I feel will keep the US ot of useless wars….and like I said these days I just hold my nose and vote or I look for an alternative candidate that has NO chance of winning but at least I have voted my principles in most cases…..too many cannot say that.

Today is your day to send whatever message you have close to your heart….please go vote…..your country needs you.

Midterms Biggest Loser!

Today is the big day…the day that we all have been hearing about for over a year…..the 2018 Midterms (or is it mid-terms)….but no matter which way you vote….whether as a human or otherwise….there is one thing that is for sure….no matter who wins what the biggest loser will be democracy.

When Angelina Cruz, the head of the teachers’ union in Racine, Wisconsin, goes canvassing, she doesn’t just knock on doors. If she sees someone in the street she approaches them and starts a conversation.

“D’you know you can vote today,” she asked a young black man who walked by last Saturday.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m a felon.” (A felon is someone who has committed a “serious crime”.)

“On papers or off papers,” she asked. (In Wisconsin your voting rights are only restored after prison, parole and probation have all been served, and you are “off papers”.)

“On papers,” he said.

“Well, ask your friends to vote,” said Cruz.

“Most of them are on papers too,” he yelled back.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/11/02/why-democracy-will-be-biggest-loser-us-midterms

This may not matter to too many people….if not please do one thing no matter what…VOTE!

Dems may win the House but that matters not because…within the Party there is a “Civil War” brewing…..

Now here is something really interesting, via Politico: there’s a growing cultural divide within Democratic ranks:

As the party’s attention turns to the presidential nominating season, one of its biggest challenges will be navigating this culture war in its own ranks. The energy at the moment is with the liberal wing, centered around cities and college towns and on the coasts, its members mostly white and college-educated and far to the left on social and cultural issues compared with the rest of the party. But its voting majority is still more blue-collar and diverse, many of whom favor an incremental approach on social issues and who are more interested in preserving the clout of longtime powers like Crowley and Capuano than in notching symbolic victories for the “resistance.”

In many of the cases outlined above, the policy differences between the candidates are microscopically small. Nearly all Democrats favor tackling income inequality, raising taxes on the wealthy and the minimum wage, and reforming the criminal justice system. There is some dispute over how fast to move and how far to go, but the broad outlines are the same. The differences, in one analysis, are stylistic, and so it is easy to imagine that they will be worked out over the next year as the party settles on another presidential nominee.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/democrats-hidden-civil-war/

The Midterms may make these divisions more pronounced…..but the real battle will begin January 2019….how will the country turn?