A lot of folk were worried that the far-Right National Front in France would gain a large foothold of power, based on an upswing in support from a stagnant economy and (especially) Islamicist terrorism over the last year. And the first round of election that fear seemed to be coming to pass. Then …:
'France's far-right National Front performed unexpectedly poorly in Sunday's regional elections, securing control of exactly zero regions. In the first round just one week ago, it finished in first place in six out of 12 regions and was expected to prevail in second-round voting in at least two, and perhaps as many as four, regions. The unexpected defeat came in the context of soaring turnout. Just 48 percent of eligible voters cast ballots last week, but, faced with predictions of National Front victory, that surged to 59 percent today.'
Turning out for elections matters. That's a lesson that the Democrats keep struggling with, especially in off-year elections, when turnout drops in general — and which the GOP then sweeps in and gains more seats in Congress. You think your going out and voting doesn't make a difference? The French just proved you wrong.
And by piling up I mean that Ted Cruz is usually at enough of a reality disadvantage talking about stuff, but when he starts going off about climate change, he ventures way into cloud-cuckoo land.
And yet, there he is, in a leadership position in the Senate, pressuring NASA to stop looking so much at, y'know, Earth and what's going on there. And he thinks he could be our next president, too, which would be a barrel of laughs and/or tears.
Ted Cruz Goes Full Orwell
In case you haven’t heard, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is not a fan of reality. The reality of science, that is. He has a history of saying global warming–denying talking points and used some of his political power just this past week to pressure NASA into downplaying its role in…
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Udall (D-CO) has been one of the loudest advocates for years on releasing information about intelligence agency abuses, both in this context and regarding surveillance activities, lambasting both the Bush and Obama administrations for their actions. He continued that today, discussing how the Senate report released yesterday is supported by an internal CIA review (still classified), and providing additional details.
Unfortunately, Udall won't be around next session to continue this good work, even in the minority. He was defeated for reelection by (sigh) Cory Gardner, who suggested during the election that discussion of releasing the Senate report was just an attempt to "politicize" it.
And I'll bet you Mr Land (and those who think he's the cat's meow) would be apoplectic if Harry Reid helps fast-track any open judicial nominations during the remaining lame duck session. Which sounds like an excellent reason to do it.
"True the Vote," a "voter integrity:" group, provided an app for folk to report on election day voter fraud they observed. What they got back were … well, more cases of restrictive voter ID laws keeping people from voting than anything else.
The only positive side to Gordon "Dr. Chaps" Klingenschmitt winning his campaign to the state House of Reps is that he's from down in Colorado Springs, and, honestly, it seems there isn't anything a candidate could say down there that would be too far to the right to get elected.
GOP leadership urged the President today to not "poison the well," to avoid inflammatory statements that would stand in the way of creating a cooperative, mutual, bi-partisan path forward to a better America and the governance thereof.
Of course, quoth John Boehner, now that he and his buddy Mitch are large and in charge, one of their top priorities is "renewing our commitment to repeal ObamaCare, which is hurting the job market along with Americans’ health care."
Oh, and to nobody's surprise, "These bills include measures authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will mean lower energy costs for families …" [overseas, where the refined products from the Keystone XL pipeline will be shipped, which is the whole purpose of building a pipeline from Canada to the Texas Gulf].
And as for their priorities overall, we have this laundry list of "pressing challenges":
• The insanely complex tax code that is driving American jobs overseas;
I.e., "Reduce taxes on businesses enough that those who don't find dirt cheap labor in the third world attractive will earn higher profits while in the US, a certain percentage of which will then be forwarded to the GOP."
• Health costs that continue to rise under a hopelessly flawed law that Americans have never supported;
Those would be the health costs that are already growing at a far slower rate than they were before the ACA, right? The law whose individual provisions the American public has always supported, but whose overall label has been convincingly turned into a curse word by the GOP.
• A savage global terrorist threat that seeks to wage war on every American;
Because foreign policy is always more successful when run by committee.
• An education system that denies choice to parents and denies a good education to too many children;
I.e., "More vouchers to help the people who are already sending their kids to private school."
• Excessive regulations and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up costs for families and preventing the economy from growing;
I.e., "Businesses shouldn't have to treat the environment well, keep their workers safe, or produce products that don't hurt the public, so we'll both remove the regulations that require those thigns and limit the ability of people to sue when businesses don't.
• An antiquated government bureaucracy ill-equipped to serve a citizenry facing 21st-century challenges, from disease control to caring for veterans;
Because disease control and veterans affairs abruptly changed when the calendar turned over to 2001. (Wait, who was president then?)
• A national debt that has Americans stealing from their children and grandchildren, robbing them of benefits that they will never see and leaving them with burdens that will be nearly impossible to repay.
I.e., "We'll reduce the national debt by cutting taxes! Because reducing income always reduces cost overruns!!"
But don't poison the well, Obama!
Yeah, it's going to be an entertaining two years.
Speaker.gov | Boehner/McConnell Op-Ed: “Now We Can Get Congress Going”
Looking ahead to the next Congress, we will honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy. Among other things, that means a renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought to a vote by the Democratic Senate majority. It also means renewing our commitment to repeal ObamaCare, which is hurting the job market along with…
According to NBC exit polling yesterday, 37% of the voters casting ballots were age 60 or older; 12% were age 30 or younger.
Guess which groups skew more Republican or Democratic?
There are a variety of reasons why the election yesterday went as it did ("Forget it, Jake — it's Mid-Terms"), but this difference was certainly part of the equation.
A reasonable set of questions would be why each of those groups felt motivated (or demotivated) to vote (leaving aside states that have made it more difficult for college students, part of that Millennial group, to vote). Granted, that Under-30 vote was no worse than the Mid-Term numbers in '06 or '10, but the 60+ cohort has been making up more of the overall voting population. One wonders why.
While Mark Udall's name came up in the news the last several years because of his being a US Senator for my state, where I often also ran across him was dealing with the NSA, CIA, and other "too many secrets" organizations, in his role on the Senate Intelligence Community. Where there were noises being made to reveal the extent of surveillance programs, determine the justifications the government had made for various monitoring practices, or releasing classified-to-save-face information, Udall was almost always at the forefront.
His loss, as well as the shift of the Senate Intelligence Committee to the likely chairmanship of someone who thinks secret intelligence activities are nothing to worry about, move along, will have unfortunate implications for probably decades to come.
While the national election results were (IMO) appalling, and most of the Colorado state elections only a bit less so (it seems Hickenlooper will edge out Beauprez for Governor, but we now have Corey Gardner in the Senate, Mike Coffman is (once again) my US Rep, and Gordon Klingenschmitt fercriminysakes is on his way to the state House), at least the state ballot propositions seem to have mostly fallen my way:
Amendment 67 (Personhood): Defeated. Again. Two-to-one margin. Expect it to rise up, zombie-like, as soon as they can gather up enough signatures. Again.
Amendment 68 (Race track slots): Defeated (which I'm pleased by) by an even higher margin than Personhood. Which goes to show that you can win an issue even with truly awful (in content and format) commercials.
Proposition 104 (Open school board propostions): Won. I saw hardly any advertising on this, which meant it passed because "openness" and "labor unions" drive votes certain ways. Which is great, and I hope all those folk voting for it are also in favor of their own salary negotiations with their bosses also being held in public.
Proposition 105 (GMO labeling): Lost, so no meaningless fear-mongering on food labels. Now, if we want to do something important, let's press for more meaningful testing of GMOs.
And one other positive benefit of the election: the number of unsolicited phone calls to the house should go way down. It's a small silver lining, but I'll take it.
🙂 Please plan to vote early, in the morning or early afternoon, so you don't run out of time on Tuesday. 🙂 Call your boss and say you will arrive 1 hour late or take a longer lunch break, etc. Don't worry if a few Senate or House seats may be lost to Republicans, we just want the least seats to be lost, and to do that we need to vote in big numbers. 🙂 Call all relatives and have everyone vote. All friends. 🙂 Thank you. We create our destiny.
I don't watch or obsess about the polls. I always assume My Side is on the verge of losing. If the polls say bad things, I don't want to hear it because that's if I don't acknowledge it, it wont be true. If the polls say good things, I don't want to hear it because Fate Will Punish Me if I get happy about the polls.
Yeah, it's about me.
So I don't assume the GOP is going to "win." I don't assume the Dems are going to "win." Even though both sides are sending me DESPERATE EMAILS describing how the Other Side is about to win and Ruin America, so PLEASE SEND US MONEY!
All I can say is VOTE. I would rather see people I disagree with vote than sit at home. I definitely would rather see people I agree with vote than sit at home. Low voter turn-out means the most motivated people carry the day … and the most motivated people are usually the folk on the fringes, the zanies, the fanatics, the people who mutter about precious bodily fluids and the Black Helicopters that the [Other Side's] Administration is going to send after dissenters.
So … if you haven't already … then tomorrow, please VOTE.
Former presidential candidate, former gubernatorial candidate, former US Congressman (sighMyDistrictsigh) and nativist of the highest water, Tom Tancredo, joins the chorus of right-wing commentators arguing that if the GOP wins the Senate, Job One should be impeaching Barack Obama. Because FREEDOM! (And no invasion from south of the border.)
It would be nice to think that the Impeach Obama rumblings are just as politically motivated and unlikely to happen as the Sue Obama threats were. But, honestly, I don't put anything past a GOP majority in both houses.
1. Context is really important when presented with information. And Twitter, because of its message size limits, has only the context of "I've read a lot of stuff by this person, so I have an idea of how they think" to work with. That's pretty easily stripped away when retweeted, esp. ever since Twitter changed how retweets work. Tweeter beware, and take another look at that droll comment you're about to send off.
2. Yeah, it is kind of a creepy practice, apparently (based on the comments) practiced by both parties to get out the vote they think should be gotten out, whether it wants to be or not.
Okay, three things:
3. I think I probably would still have taken this, out of context, as sarcasm. That some others were quick to leap on this to their own ideological ends is certainly, if regretfully, to be expected.
JoCo tweets a political letter he received he thought was creepy/funny and Twitter goes nuts.
Jonathan Coulton
At first I got a couple replies from my immediate followers and the people I know, most of whom seemed to understand and share my take on it: that the letter was a little weird, ham fisted, and kind of dumb. It had the tone of a mobster threat (“Nice house. It’d be a shame if anything happened …
Here's the bottom line: churches get tax exemption on money donated to them and on their assets. To then use those donations and assets for explicit political purposes gives such donations a favored status over ordinary political donations (which are not tax deductible) and church a favored status over other non-profits, tax-exempt organizations (which follow the same sorts of rules).
That's wrong, and wrapping a cloak of religion around it doesn't make it right. If we want the pulpits as candidate advocacy groups, then let's remove all tax exemptions from churches.
But congratulations to the Religious Right for cowing the IRS into not pursuing these violations of the law for fear of causing a huge political stink. Yay for freedom!
This is annoying. Part of the price churches pay for their tax exempt status is not endorsing candidates. If you want to endorse candidates from the pulpit then pay taxes like the rest of us. The longer the IRS ignores this issue the more of them that are going to flaunt the rules.
Rogue pastors endorse candidates, but IRS looks away
A record number of rogue Christian pastors are endorsing candidates from the pulpit this election cycle, using Sunday sermons to defiantly flout tax rules. Their message to the IRS: Sue me. But the tax agency is doing anything but. Although the IRS was sued itself for not enforcing the law and admitted about 100 churches may be breaking the rules,…
Just 42 donors are responsible for a third of all Super PAC contributions this year. All are older and white, and 35 of them are men.
Does money determine elections? No, not in every case. But it sure doesn't hurt (as proof of which look at how much is spent and how much time and effort candidates put into pursuing it).
Are all these "old white guys" pushing precisely the same ideology in their donations? Probably not, but I'll bet you it's a less diverse ideological spectrum than you'd get from a cross-section if the America public.
Super PACs, by the way, are spending more this year than the political parties.
Votes, of course, are the bottom line in the democracy, and money can't buy votes (yet). But money does help determine which people can even afford to get into the pool to compete, and it can help determine which of those candidates then get heard (and, thus, voted on). And, of course, as they say, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about electronic voting machines, and a lot of security and transparency issues to suggest consider getting rid of them.
But, honestly, the worst, most stoopid reason to do so is because it costs money to maintain them … and states don't want to spend the money and Congress (coughHouseGOPcough) won't allocate any because the states should have to do it.
I mean, really? We keep calling ourselves the richest country on Earth and We're Number One and all that jazz — and when the voting machines wear out we're simply not going to replace them because someone might have to spend some money?
I don't buy the argument that the US has already become a banana republic, but when we get there, this will be a great piece of evidence.
… I'm more than willing to say that the actions of the Kentucky state Democratic Party here were absolutely wrong. (As were those of the local police who provided an unredacted arrest record.)
Hey! Did you hear the one about the political mailer that includes opponent's SSN and driver’s license number? Sorry to say, there’s no punch line here! It happened! Oops!
Political mailer includes opponent’s SSN and driver’s license number
Did you hear the one about the Kentucky GOP candidate who asked his attorney general to investigate the state Democratic Party for allegedly sending out the Republican’s Social Security number and more personal information to thousands of constituents? Sorry to say, there’s no punch line here, because according to recent reports, it actually happened. By Adam Levin.
