…is only indicative of local situations, really – with two caveats.

1. If you run a crappy candidate and a nasty, dumb campaign, don’t be surprised when you lose.
2. If you spend a lot of money and should have won or just barely won, that says more about your campaign and your candidate than anything else.

In Virginia and New Jersey, the Democrats ran really poor candidates and got beat.  In NYC, Bloomberg spent $100M of his own money and won by a much lesser margin than expected; exit polls said that his gyrations to but term limits didn’t go over well with voters.

In New York’s 23rd congressional district (which will go the way of the dodo come next reapportionment and census)  the Conservative Party candidate and his snarky stunts and we’re-entitled-to-stomp-the-unpure approach, hand in hand with Glen Beck, didn’t go over well with the locals.  For the first time since the 1870s, the Republicans lost that seat to the Democrats.

The big lesson for the Democrats is not that Obama’s lost support; his support in VA and NJ was far higher on election day than the sad-sack Democratic candidates.  It’s that they run to the right with cruddy candidates at the peril of losing the active support and interest of their base and of voters who are tired of the same old stuff.    A large majority of voters in both states clearly said in exit polls that their vote had nothing to do with national politics, period, and far more that the other guy was a bigger stinker.

(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend)

Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist.  Really.

Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I’ve never heard of Czar Brezhnev.

…also, there’s no ‘czars’ in the US federal government, except in the pens and imaginations of press writers who deemed some person a ‘czar’, just like there was no ‘Star Wars’ DOD program by that name – headline writers thought that the namess were cool.

I will admit that a ‘abstinence czar’ is indeed a funky title, and I don’t know what the punishments would be for breaking his rules.   (Though the one that Dubya appointed resigned over his hookers…dude, just say no, OK?)

Lesson #3: Inflating the numbers of a rally by a factor of 25-30 (making 50-60 thousand marchers become 2 million) and lying about the source of the information is right up there with declaring to the ladies that your tallywhacker is 53 inches long, and that Obama wants to kill your grandma.  Wait…

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

I have my own suspicions, but the Californians who have opinions who regularly read my journal can read this posting in the Mahablog (which I regularly read) and see if they agree about the breakdown of the political process in the Golden State.

Here also is a quick breakdown of who is paid in IOUs and who is paid in cash.

1. If you want an idea of why the idea of mixing church and state is a bad one, look at Iran.   You can’t challenge the state without challenging God’s word, you heathen.  Die in hellfire!
2. And which church gets to call the shots?  The largest church in the USA is the Catholic Church, and I can just bet that there’s a lot of people in the USA who aren’t Catholic (or consider those damn Papists right up there with Saaaaatan) not caring for that.  As a Unity person, I have no truck with theocrats of any stripe, thank you very much.
   ( Read the rest of this entry » )

…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries).  Interesting news coming out of it, of course.  Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.

Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked?  Not really.  It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously.  It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.

I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-richer-and-more-brutal in both countries.    It occurs to me that stupid rich bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone else have caused a mighty amount of pain in the world and created revolutionary conditions again and again, and never realized that pushing people repeatedly to the edge will end up in disaster, eventually.

The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*.  As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large.  Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.

You’d think some folks would learn…

I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.

Speaking of  the seriously rich are still pretty much the seriously rich unless they put their money in the seriously stupid, the Chinese Prime Minister is getting nervous about the safety of US Treasury securities with all of the talk about spending lots of newly printed dollars.  Dude.  There’s no real place to go with this (then what do you invest in, dog biscuits?), and if you forgot, there’s that Devil’s Bargain that you made with Bushco and their friend, Palsy.

Let’s review it, shall we?

• Americans send their factories to China,
• Chinese laborers make money and prop up the economy with cheap stuff,
• the Politburo gets a cut of the sales, and
• the Americans buy the stuff, and
• you buy American debt so that
• Americans can buy more Chinese stuff.

You stop this merry-go-round, and:

• the American economy will go further down, and
• yours with it when we can’t buy any of your stuff anymore - and then
• you have riots in the streets
  
• followed by further repression and the further failure of the rule of law and
• people calling for the end of the Communist Party.

Such a deal!
All those layoffs in Guangdong Province didn’t help you much, bub, not to mention your bureaucrats letting corrupt businesses poison your own people’s milk and food and those places you trade with, just for a quick, cheap profit.  There’s a lot of simmering anger over corruption, and only prosperity was holding it back.

Anyone here got a good explanation as to why the heck the Liberal Democrats (who are niether) ended up in charge in Japan for the last 54 years?  My understanding is a combination of gerrymandering and fear of the opposition party as a buncha Commies.

There’s also the whole business over the drunk Finance minister, and man, if he was as hammered as I saw him last night, he had no business being at a press conference.

Took this political-spectrum test that’s been floating around on Live Journal; it marked me down and a moderate-liberal sort.  Or as they put it: left moderate social authoritarian.  Only VERY minorly authoritarian, but I certainly don’t think that way.  I mean, I’d probably be a Liberal Democrat in the UK, but that’s a way different sort of alignment there.   I see myself as more of a hard-civics get-involved-for-the-right-reasons good-government sort who is leaning to the liberal side more as a reaction against raging pseudo-conservatives / Republicans.

political-spectrum-quiz-result-jim (PDF, 2pp, 52k)

• A sitting member of the house was a Democratic Congressman for five years *before* they changed their registration from Republican with the local Board of Elections.  Who is this person?
• Name the last President that absolutely refused to use a telephone while in office.
• Name the President that served in the Senate before and after his term in office.
• The newly elected president left the Senate to take up his new office, and two members of nationally powerful political families fought it out for the nomination of the President’s party for that seat.  The person the President supported for the office won the nomination and the special election.   Name all three of the people involved: the President, the Senator and the other guy.   For extra points, name the guy who lost the election (who was also from a nationally powerful political family).
• What year was the last time the Democratic convention went to more than one ballot?
• Name the prominent Democratic politician who lost part of his finger to a meat slicer at Arby’s Roast Beef. (libertango got this one)
  
• How many years between the first and second set of Presidential debates?
• When in doubt, vote for the left handed candidate.  When was the last Presidential campaign where this would not have been helpful, and the last one that the leftie didn’t win?

I had planned long ago to take off yesterday and work as an election judge (Democratic) in my home precinct, and Susan did as well - I think she really enjoyed herself at the polls.  My problem, of course, was that I was crippled up by the operation, and we weren’t sure what I could do aside of sit someplace and check signatures or something.

So I didn’t go to the setup on Monday night, and I didn’t do the breakdown on Tuesday night.  I was brought in on my scooterish thing, and set up as a signature checker.  And after a while, they moved me over to the ‘Ask Ed’ area where Mr. Law School and Poly Sci could make judgments and advice on situations where there were irregularities.

And there were several.  I also had an obnoxious-at-turns poll watcher who was obviously a-quiver to note efforts of the locals to force people into provisional ballots, and I was annoyed with her.  The more who-is-that-woman-anyway sorts on the judge panel were highly unhappy with her, and I said through gritted teeth that I’d rather have someone try and keep us on our toes than not.

The problems with the voters were almost all situations where the voter had moved to a new location, and never changed their registration, were motivated to vote yesterday but….

In one case, the gap between move and vote was twelve years!   More often, it was six months to three years.  They had gone to the driver’s license bureau for Illinois, and changed their licenses to show the new address, and been asked by the clerk about voter registration, and it just slipped their minds to say - why, yes, I need to be re-registered in the new location as well!  *sheesh*

Of course, I’m Mr. Public Citizen.  I registered to vote and for the draft on my 18th birthday.  I have moved all over the place, and I always take care to re-register wherever.  Not everyone has civics and political hooh-hah up my brain as much as I do, but dayum, people.

The one I felt terribly for was a guy who registered as a voter about two months before the election - plenty of time for the election-and even had a original receipt for the registration with him.  And he was *not* in the books as a voter. Nowhere.  Obviously a glitch in the system.  So I discussed this with the other judges…normally, he’d get a provisional ballot and have to check up to make sure it got counted later, but I was willing to give him a full ballot then and there.  I got outvoted.  The technical judge gave him a provisional ballot, and the guy submitted it, but he was seething.  I don’t blame him.  I would have been outraged.  But the real culprits on this was obviously the board of elections people who didn’t get his thing into the system.  (I mean, I was highly impressed that he hung on to the blinking receipt.  People don’t do that…)

Things were actually busiest for the first hour - 25 people were in line when we opened. The operation really went very snoothly, and we ran out of “I voted’ stickers around 500 voters.  We had one guy who wanted to be chatty with one of the judges who was next to the ballot box, and was going on about the Constitutional Convention and ’socialists’, and I pushed the technical judge on getting him to freakin’ move on already.

Few went for the touchscreen method - mostly younger people.  It was slow and clunky…you did a lot faster with a paper ballot.

I kept track of the numbers: 150 by 7:15, 208 by 8 am. There was a brief lull after the commuters left, and then 375 by 10:30, 462 by 11:30, 600 by 2:30 and nearly 900 at the end of the day.

The polling place had a record…of around 1885 voters in the two precincts, about 18% voted early (or by a scattering of absentees) and around 47% voted on election day.  It wasn’t as jammed as everyone expected - there was a solid stream almost all the time, but it was obvious that people were motivated to vote.  Only one older man needed assistance to vote - he was feeble and only spoke Spanish.

There were numerous glitches in the books on people’s names - Connie, my mother-in-law who lives with us, had her name misspelled ‘CCONSTANCE’ with an extra ‘C’.  If you’d have tried to look her up with the computers, you would have had problems…I had a long list of errors.

One precinct tied for Obama and McCain, the precinct with more older voters that I live in - and the other one with more younger families went for Obama by a good margin.  The county I live in as a whole went for Obama as well - 55 /45.

I also got interviewed by some school kids (about Mere’s age) as part of a project buring a lull. “Wow, you’ve been working on elections for over 30 years?”  Yeah, kids, and I hunted down wooly mammoths with your grandpa, too. 

They sent me home at 7, since I couldn’t do much in the tear-down; Connie picked me up, fed me and we waited to see the results with Susan.    More on that later.

The principle of competition which the Socialists flog has already been discarded; they are whipping a dead horse. No trust promoter believes in free competition. Moreover, most of the Rooseveltian policies - the arid land reclamation schemes, the National forests, the leasing of coal and mineral rights, the renting of grazing lands, the construction of the Panama Canal by direct employment, the development of water powers under public ownership and control - are in strict harmony with Socialist principles….The faith of our forefathers in the sacred principle of competition as the self-acting force which yielded ideal justice and rendered to every man according to his deserts, has departed as surely as the belief in witchcraft. So why be alarmed because Socialism is inculcating with some success a political philosophy that means the conscious adoption of the method we are already, empirically, trying? There is no advantage in preaching one principle and practicing another, as do some good Republicans and Democrats.

- Letter to the editor of the NY Times, October 28, 1908, speaking about Teddy Roosevelt.   Like I said, this sort of crapola has been going on for a long time.

Being a student of American History and Political Science, I’ve noticed something since - oh, 1930.  When some Republicans, the more wingnut sorts, are behind the eight-ball and trying to stir things up, they call the Democrats commies, socialists or commie sympathizers.  And traitors to the realm.

Go back and check out the commentary about FDR, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, and so on, and you’ll see this sort of nonsense over and over again.  It’s not just the province of Joe McCarthy.

Progressive political movements in this country are NOT socialist.  I mean, I know real socialists, Wobblies and such, and they are the fringe of politics in this country and always have been.

I know that there’s people who go on at length about Obama in particular, being socialist, and that’s utter nonsense.  He’s a center-left sort, very cautious, uninterested in ideology.  The closest to a real rip-snorting socialist in the last round of Democratic candidates was Congressman Kucinich.    Notice how much support he got.  (Or there’s Ralph Nader, who is a whole lot closer to being a socialist than Obama.)

Since the beginning of the New Deal, we have lived in a somewhat ’socialized’ country.  I’ve studied Marxism since college, and I’m a fervent anti-Communist.  But the numerous reforms created since then that were fought against by the Republican party are legion, and they have made our lives a whole lot better.

• Banking reform, including the Glass-Steagall act and the FDIC and SEC.  The New Deal essentially *saved* capitalism and banking.
• Taking the country off the Gold standard.
• Farm Price Supports, Rural Electrification and the TVA
• the CCC and many road and school building projects
• various dam projects on the Colorado and Columbia rivers, increasing hydroelectricity and making Las Vegas possible.
• Social Security
• GI Bill
• Voting Rights reform and modern Civil Rights
• Medicare and Medicaid
• Federal aid to Education, including loans and grants for college attendees.

But to be honest, the two things that stick in my craw is that the biggest Socialistic measure for many years was just accomplished as part of the bailout plan; partially nationalizing many banks.  By Bush and his cabinet.  And the reason that Palin can afford to be so hot on tax-reduction is the collective ownership by the state of Alaska of tax revenues and profits from the North Slope oil - eliminating most taxes and involving massive paybacks annually to every Alaskan.

That sure sounds socialist to me….

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Another blogger had the perfect comments on last night’s Presidential debate; excerpts after the cut. I thought McCain (with a lot of audible steaming around, twitching and grimacing, looking like he was going to burst) came across as incoherent and rambling and incredibly cranky.  I also know his voting record enough to throw rocks at the screen when he said that he supported X (middle-of-the-road) position, which he doesn’t, or when he made cracks about women.    Again, Obama was there to show quiet, competent, knowledgeable personality.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Susan and I took advantage of the federal holiday (but not one for the elections people) to go for the first day of early voting.  We have to, because we’re election judges.  The ballot was light - only a scattering of races, and in our heavily red area, a lot of the more local stuff was one-party-only.  Voted for the local park district getting a bond for a new rec center, and for the Illinois Constitutional Convention to be held.  And if you haven’t figured out the Presidential, Senate and Congressional votes, you haven’t read my political notes.

I was irritated at having to use the Diebold machines; don’t like or trust them.  And the person taking our ID stuff was asking Mere cutesy questions, including stuff about who she was for.  Susan didn’t mind it, but I didn’t care for it at all from a poll worker - the preference stuff.  Not her business to ask such questions of anyone.

I’m also giving up debating this stuff online, pretty much, at least for a while.  Debating political issues can get to be a situation where, as in religion, people can get invested in a particular point of view, and trying to explain, say, the advantages of Buddhism or polygamy to the Pope, a big waste of everyone’s time.  Even if you think that the Pope’s explanation of some point of Catholic doctrine is dodgy and doesn’t hold water, the Pope’s eyes will glaze over as you point everything out, no matter how closely reasoned you think your logic is.  It’s a matter of faith in the logic of his system, and that’s that.

it’s a matter of realizing that that point has been reached, I guess.  Or pre-guessing that further discussions on this line will be more likely to alienate a friend than to get anywhere.   I prefer to have a diversity of friends - I certainly don’t want them all to think exactly like me.  (It would get pretty boring.)  And frankly, most everyone around here has probably made up their minds on the issues of the day, and I’d rather discuss something with the Pope or Pope-ess that is a whole lot more fun for us to talk about.

That doesn’t mean I give up my ideals or my search for truth, justice and a better world.   Not a chance.

Oh, yeah - good luck to my Canadian readers going off to the polls tomorrow!

From the WaPo: (read it all)

Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. “I broke my promise to always tell the truth,” McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

The precise moment of McCain’s abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on “The View,” the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig — an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

“We know that those two ads are untrue,” Behar said. “They are lies.”

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like “Home Cooking” or “We Will Not Be Undersold.” Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation “I approve this message” was just boilerplate. But he didn’t.

“Actually, they are not lies,” he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

At a forum last week at Columbia University, McCain said, “But right now we have to restore trust and confidence in government.” This was always the promise of John McCain, the single best reason to vote for him. America has been cheated on too many times — the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies…

McCain was going to fix all that. He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can — as he did in South Carolina — renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work. Karl Marx got one thing right — what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

…I write as much as I do on political subjects, the answer is simple - because I care.

My view, for as long as I can remember, and has been ever since, is to see the long run, the big picture.  My focus and education was directed at the synthesis of the world around me - history, political science, the law - and the scientific and economic areas that supported that sort of a image of How Things Work.    Mechanics are largely beyond me. Detailed views of physics I have a weak grasp on, but probably better than some.  I know how to make computers do tricks, but I couldn’t code in assembler if my life depended on it.

I guess it’s both a How Things Work and Why Things Works sort of view, as well.  And in the process, you see where the seams are.  You have the concept that this works better than that, that this is a smarter way to do things, that good government and good management saves everyone a lot of time and trouble.  And you wonder why people don’t do that.

As I’ve said many times, my real focus is and has been on good government.  But I realize that people are ridden by the ur-feelings within.  Grog stomp, Grog kill, Grog mighty.  Grog get laid.  Grog stuff face.  Grog burp, roll over, go to sleep.

In my case, I guess that I have decided to go over to the Democrats because I finally have gotten the message after this last week that the Republican Party is quite willing to feed the country endless streams of BS in the search for power.  At that point, it was something that, to me, cried out for redress - that if people within are simply not willing to let the truth have merit beside the concept of power for ‘their guys’, then they don’t deserve political power.

This is not an easy decision for me.  I was greatly troubled by the 1988 election, and that and the fall of the Soviet Union made me see that between the theocrats and a new motto of ’screw you jack, I’ve got mine’, the Republican party was less an agent of positive change and more an instrument to hold power and control the masses through trickery.  The Clinton-Lewinsky debacle stopped me in my tracks, because I didn’t care for such trickery out of any party.  But at this point, under these circumstances. my feeling is that the only long term hope that remains is to support the Democrats as a party, and take a part in things in that direction.  The path the Republicans want to take is, in my strong opinion, disastrous to all of our futures, including Meredith’s, and I fear for her and us all and for our democracy if that’s the one that is chosen.

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From Balloon Juice, a regular-read blog on my political list:

I am not a Democrat because I am some sort of crazy liberal who believes in all sorts of left-wing causes. I am a Democrat because in a two-party system, when one party is abso-damn-lutely corrupt, immoral, incompetent, and, well, evil, you have to do what you can to support the other party. Long story short- there are a lot of folks like me out there who are enthusiastically supporting lots of left-wing candidates as a way to return some balance and order to the system, but who are not going to take kindly to the Democratic party embracing the worst aspects of the right-wing.

Very good article that explains the real limits of Chinese power down the road.  Here’s a mix of his points and some of my thoughts on the matter:

• Cheap labor and fair access to markets is about their main strengths.  Quality is not as important if the manufacturers can slide by.
• Labor is starting to price itself out of the basement, and the real dirt-cheap producers are looking elsewhere - like Vietnam.  In some cases, the manufacturers are finding out that the endless parade of people in government wanting a cut of the action are getting to be endless.  And expensive.
• Chinese aren’t innovating, they’re just cheaping things out. 99% of what they’re doing is innovated somewhere else, in regards to true innovation.
• They’re depending on massive, continuous, unending growth. This is impossible. Eventually, the growth is going to hit a limit.
• The Chinese - both people and manufacturers - are consuming huge quantities of raw materials, stripping their own country bare and polluting the heck out of it. Long before they’re done producing, the quality of life and the lack of arable, unpolluted land is going to smother them.  Or upset the masses enough to say enough-is-enough.
• Health care is China is absurdly bad, and this and the pollution is going to catch up with them.
• The demographics are going to hell in a handbasket. Because of the one-child policy and the way it’s been implemented, there’s going to be a lot of unmarried guys unemployed and looking for work and women that aren’t available, and there’s going to be a ton of elderly with no visible means of support (in the hundreds of millions, reaching a third of a billion in the not-too-distant future). There’s no pensions as a rule or Social Security in China - you depend on your kids. What kids?
• Too much corruption means that there’s too much of a leakage on all costs - you put X amount into a business or a government project, and too much of it gets trickled off and too little gets done in an effective manner. This will only work out so long as the spigot is full and juicy. If it ever dies down, watch out.  The inner contract between The Party and the people is that the gravy keeps rolling in, and the party controls things. 
• Too much government control and corruption in government is a situation ready for a long-term collapse and a drying up of further innovations in favor of cash cows to keep the bribes flowing.
• The government is subsidizing a lot of things, such as gasoline and diesel, but this becomes a constant drain that can never be cut off without open revolts in the streets.