In Brief: No, Democrats Have NOT Gone Too Far Left (NSFW)

I'm not going to link directly to Peter Wehrer's article because I don't want to give him 7 more hits of traffic from my readers, but I will link to the articles written to refute his contention that the modern Democratic Party has gone too far Left.

One chart involving the US House (which is reflective of the partisan shifting in the Senate):

The Republicans have dramatically shifted more conservative than the Democrats shifting more liberal.

So in short: the Democrats have not gone too far Left.  The Republicans have gone too far Asshole.

Kiss Me I'm Irish (And Pro-People)

This is huge, what Ireland just done.

Ireland - with 62 percent of the voters in favor, and winning in 42 of 43 districts - became the first country to deem by popular vote that gays have a right to marry:

"Today Ireland has made history - the first country in the world to vote for equal marriage," Prime Minister Enda Kenny told reporters.

"With today's vote we have disclosed who we are: a generous, compassionate, bold and joyful people. Yes to inclusion, yes to generosity, yes to love, yes to equal marriage," he said.

The voter turnout was 60 percent - much higher than in other recent referendums.

This is huge because it's proving that most people do not want to go out of their way to discriminate or hate upon a significant minority within their own nation.  This is the first time a nation opened up to equal rights to getting married - a major cultural, economic, and legal right - by the will of the people rather than a legislative or judicial decree.

This is what being Pro-People looks like.

This is huge because Ireland is famously - almost notoriously - Catholic in their religious faith.  The power and sway of the Catholic Church and the papacy (used to be) greater here than in most other nations (including Italy where the Church originated and still houses its seat of power).  Ireland infamously has one of the harshest anti-abortion restrictions in all of Europe, and it only decriminalized homosexuality itself merely 23 years ago.

In theory and in practice the Catholic Church opposes homosexuality, one of several "conservative" Christian faiths to argue the sin of it.  However, regarding this vote, the Church itself remained oddly silent except for a handful of Bishops coming out late in opposition to it.  The power of the Church had dropped in the wake of sex abuse scandals... and there are signs the current Pope has shifted the dynamics of the Church towards social justice...

So maybe Francis has lightened up.

This is huge because the Irish vote was not only a sizable majority of available voters, and because the vote itself was a solid majority, the polling numbers suggested this wasn't a generational issue.  Whereas the younger voters will trend liberal-leaning (read: open-minded), older voters tend not to.  Except they didn't: polling showed "the support cut across age and gender, geography and income..."

This is huge because it shows to the rest of the world we don't have to hate or discriminate on the basis of our "fears", that we don't have the excuse of religion or faith to discriminate.

This is huge because the more other nations show us that allowing gay marriage does not mean the end of the world, the easier it will get in this "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" to open up to gay marriage across all states.  Here, it's happening mostly by judicial decision and court order, and yet we're still getting politicians and conservative religious leaders standing up screaming "family values" and "religious liberty" as excuses to hate.

There are no other arguments against gay marriage.  The argument against being gay relies entirely on passages of the Hebrew (Leviticus is prominently mentioned) and Christian Testaments (Romans and other Pauline letters).  There are no scientific arguments against gay, where biology and psychology over the decades has revealed reasons why being gay happens (homosexuality is not a choice), and that being gay isn't really special it's just...a thing.

This is huge because more people are refusing to use religion as an excuse to hate.  Because more people are seeing the hypocrisy of religious leaders railing against gays using Leviticus while allowing EVERYTHING else banned in Leviticus and the Bible to happen.

This is huge, having more people being Pro-People.

A Modest Proposal For the Republican 2016 Clown Car Debate Format

There is a formal, media-led debate - by Fox (Not) News - scheduled for August 6 this year, and there was apparently some problems getting the lineup figured out.

It seems we are up to 16 (!) viable (?) candidates in the Republican lineup: that's a lot of clowns to pull out of one car to get onto one stage.

So Fox (Not) News decided on a rule: It will limit the prime debate to the top ten candidates polling the highest averaged from five national polls.  The Washington Post provides a current polling sample:

By this rule, Fox will give prime coverage to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Rick Perry.

More seriously qualified candidates like Governors John Kasich and Bobby Jindal or Senators Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham will be set at the children's table and ignored until the dinner is over.  They have to sit there while Donald "Bankruptcy Court" Trump gets a seat at the big boy's table.

This seems a bit, you know, unfair to treat fellow Republicans like unwanted redheaded stepchildren...

...Now, if you're John Kasich's people, you have any number of arguments you can make. After all, you're only 0.2 percent below Perry in the average, and that's in a bunch of polls with margins of error north of 3 percent. In fact, you've done the same as Perry in every poll except the Quinnipiac one, where Perry got 3 percent to your 2 percent. That's the entire difference...

But should we include Donald Trump? His numbers come from appearances in just two polls, both from Fox News. Does doing well in two polls and not existing in three others count? By the time August rolls around, the field may be settled enough that this won't be as big a deal -- but it could be! With a field this big, pollsters spend a lot more money having their callers ask people to pick from a list of 20-odd names. But if you start leaving people out, that decides when and if they appear in a debate. And that's a big deal...

This is a vicious cycle: the candidates can only succeed if the media is willing to air their positions and show them what they bring to the issues.  But the media can't afford to showcase everyone equally, and the media (and the Party) have already established their favorites from within their insulated closed bubble.  A lot of the candidates polling high are only doing so because they've been mentioned in polls for so long and so often.  As a result a "serious" candidate can get ignored over an "unserious" candidate who just happens to be a friendly insider with the cable channel he/she shills for.

There has to be a fair and just method of establishing who gets to be on the big stage for the opening main debate.

I have a solution.  Bracket busting.

There are - officially and unofficially - sixteen Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential run:

1. Jeb Bush
2. Scott Walker
3. Marco Rubio
4. Mike Huckabee
5. Ted Cruz
6. Rick Santorum
7. Bobby Jindal
8. John Kasich
9. Ben Carson
10. Rand Paul
11. Chris Christie
12. Rick Perry
13. Lindsey Graham
14. George Pataki
15. Carly Fiorina
16. Donald Trump

There may well be more candidates, and there are regional candidates - guys who filed within one state but not nationally - but let us be honest these are the major players on the field and it fits this proposal.

We will have Three Rounds of debates in one day.

First Round - Seeded Debate Candidate vs. Candidate

Starts in the morning one hour after a shared public breakfast by all candidates.  Hosting 40 minute debates with two candidates against each other, meaning eight debates.  Each question must take one minute to ask: each debater has three minutes to answer.  It should take 35 minutes (with 5 minutes allowed for overtime).  All debates will use the same questions, so each debate round has to be aired at the same time.  If we are doing this at a hotel with a large convention hall, separate meeting rooms of sufficient size are doable.  The network(s) showing the debates will have to determine ahead of time which seeded debates they'll take and share among them.

There will be five questions, verified by the Party leadership but not the candidates themselves.  An outside debate monitoring service - ToastMasters can sponsor! - will determine the questions do NOT favor one candidate over any others.  ToastMasters will also serve as referees to ensure there is no cheating, no physical contact outside of debate rules, and no improper use of blaming Obama or either Clinton as scapegoats (we are not about to let the debate slide early into fear-mongering).

There will be no bathroom breaks.

The debate lineups shall be based on a seeding method.  Number One debates Number Sixteen, Number Two debates Number Fifteen, etc.  The Five seed vs. Twelve seed should be awesome for an upset if this is anything like college basketball.

Determining the seed ranking shall be a formula derived from these key elements:

• Previous/Current electoral experience
• Level of electoral experience: Vice-President over Governor, Governor over Senator, Senator over Congressperson, Congressperson over non-elected Executive or Judicial, all that over State legislator/official, and lastly someone with no governmental experience at all.  In case of tie, current elective/nominated position ranks over former (meaning sitting Governor Scott Walker would rank over former Governor Jeb Bush, suck it Jeb)
• Average polling rank determined by the top national polls

Using that as a formula, the First Round play-in seeding should look like this:

1. Walker
2. Jeb Bush
3. Rubio (due to polling)
4. Huckabee (ranks here due to polling over other current governors)  
5. Christie
6. Kasich 
7. Graham (gets bonus points for the prolonged elective career)
8. Jindal
9. Perry
10. Pataki
11. Paul
12. Cruz
13. Santorum
14. Carson
15. Trump
16. Fiorina

...Holy shit.  I might actually want to watch these matchups.

First Round Republican 2016 Debate
1. Walker	2. Bush	3. Rubio	4. Huckabee	5. Christie	6. Kasich	7. Graham	8. Jindal
16. Fiorina	15. Trump	14. Carson	13. Santorum	12. Cruz	11. Paul	10. Pataki	9. Perry

The winners of each debate will be determined by a scoring system and graded both by: a team of three randomly selected judges provided by Fox (Not) News, the National Debate and Speech Association (I would want Toast Masters to be impartial organizers), the National Review, and CSPAN; as well the viewing audience in-person using those remote dial-turner thingees.  The audience cannot include any persons working for any of the campaigns or the Republican Party itself: no cheating to either inflate a debater's score or sabotage the next rounds.

The eight winners will move on to:

Second Round - Open Stage Debate

This happens in the afternoon one hour after private lunches at any of the sponsored restaurants in the area.

This will be an open stage with eight podiums.  Placement at the podiums - radiating outward from the center - will be determined by drawing lots supervised by ToastMasters and one randomly selected worker from the convention center/hotel.  The worker's identity will be hidden by luchador mask.

The debate will have one candidate asking to the rest of the floor one question that should be no more than one minute to ask.  The question can be on any topic (including, yes, bashing Obama or both Clintons), as long as the debate monitors are comfortable the question does not violate common decency/community standards.  Each candidate must answer the question going along the right (their perspective) and cannot be interrupted.  Any other candidate interrupting during the answer will be removed from the floor and not allowed to return.  The questioner can reply to any request to clarify the question.  The first one to ask will be the candidate standing to the farthest right podium (their perspective), and will round to the candidate on the right to ask next (from the left back over to right).

Each answer should not take longer than three minutes to give.  Anyone going over the three-minute limit will received negative grading as determined by the clock: the longer he/she goes over, the more points deducted.  A light system at the judge's table (ToastMasters shall provide and maintain) will warn the candidates if they are close to the limit and when they go over.  This round should not take more than 3.5 hours (I think).

Water will be provided at the podiums.

There will be no bathroom breaks.

The scoring shall be done by five judges: one from Fox (Not) News, one from National Review, one from CSPAN, one from the NDSA, and one from the audiences at the previous round.  The judges shall be pulled from each group by drawing of lots overseen by ToastMasters and the staffer in the luchador mask.  The audience member will be pulled by door-prize ticket number, also overseen by ToastMasters and the luchador.

The judges shall score using standard grading methods for debates.

The top four grades shall move on to the next round.

Third Round - Thunderdome

Four candidates enter, one candidate leaves.

Various weapons shall be provided within the steel cage at various spots hanging above.  Their lethality shall be limited to ensure no bystanders can be killed.  Each candidate will be harnessed to bungee cords to allow them freedom of movement up and down as well as on the ground.  No weapons from outside the Thunderdome will be allowed inside.  All other debate rules should apply.

The Thunderdome will be scheduled before dinner, to reduce the risk of upset stomachs interfering with the round.  Also to keep the candidates hungry and focused.

There will be no bathroom breaks.

The four candidates fight to the death.  Time is open until finished.  Last one standing receives immediate medical attention to ensure that candidate survives his/her wounds.  The dynamics of a four-way fight would be interesting to watch.

This has the advantage of ensuring our next Republican candidate is not some chickenhawk cheerleading for kills on the sidelines: the next GOP bomb-em-all I'm-for-the-death-penalty-yeeha hawk will certainly have blood on his/her own hands.  This also helps weed out candidates from the next round of debates.

As long as all sixteen possible candidates sign off on this, I think this is a doable option.

(with many thanks to Jonathan Swift)

Predicting Character: The Emptiness of Jindal

It's gotten to where you can tell a Republican is going to announce he will attempt a Presidential campaign run by how shameless and hypocritical he gets in pandering to the religious Far Right.

Example: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal issued an Executive Order for his state allowing (read: encouraging) anti-gay discrimination:

Jindal’s executive order is notable for two reasons. First, the Louisiana governor is clearly considering a run at the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Over the last few years, Republican strategists, pundits, and young ’uns have been telling us that this time around, the GOP would take a tolerant turn on gay rights. But like Jeb Bush, Jindal is doubling down on LGBTQ issues, zigging hard to the right even as the rest of the country zags further to the left. As the New York Times’ Ross Douthat admitted a while ago, the conservative endgame on marriage equality at this point is to guarantee anti-gay holdouts the legal right to demean same-sex couples and their families. Jindal, like Bush, appears to be more interested in pandering to this shrinking minority than appealing to the supermajority of Americans who support equality. (note: I wouldn't call it a supermajority but it's a clear and growing one)

The pandering part is easy to spot.  The hypocrisy part requires context:

Second, Jindal has been a vituperative critic of President Barack Obama’s executive orders, especially his order deferring deportation for many undocumented immigrants. In a press release, Jindal castigated Obama for “bypassing Congress” and “ignoring the American people,” slamming the order as “an arrogant, cynical political move.” Jindal seemed to be keenly concerned that Obama imposed his policy preference by executive fiat rather than allowing the people, through their elected representatives, to have their say. Now, though, the people’s representatives have firmly rejected Jindal’s bill—and rather than persuading the legislature to reconsider the measure, Jindal has simply imposed it by executive decree.

Only a painfully gullible naïf could be surprised to see a Republican eagerly aping Obama’s methods of governance while simultaneously denouncing the president’s maneuvers. Even as Mitt Romney condemned Obama’s executive orders in 2012, he planned a sweeping slew of his own. And Jeb Bush, who scores points on the campaign trail by lambasting Obama’s executive overreach, would enthusiastically issue his own favored executive orders in the early days of his presidency...

Sigh.

One can question if this was an impulsive move or a calculated one, but the end result is an obvious move by Jindal to keep his anti-gay bona fides fresh in the minds of primary voters for 2016.

It didn't have to be this way.  When Jindal won his governorship in Louisiana back in 2009, he was one of the bright smart shining stars of a GOP that had ruined its reputation over bad leadership and growing disdain for genuine deep thinkers.  He showed up on the stage warning the Republicans to "stop being the stupid party."  But then he turned right around and became a perfect example of what a person looks like after having a brain fart.

What happened?  The best argument to make is that Jindal's ambition got the better of him.  He saw the Republican Establishment at the national level insisting on a pure "tax-cut, school-cut, kill healthcare reform" agenda and sold his soul over it.  If we look at the Washington Post article on him from 2013:

...On Monday he dropped his tax reform plan that would have replaced income taxes with higher sales taxes, acknowledging a widespread backlash from the public, religious groups, business and state lawmakers in his own party. "It certainly wasn't the reaction I was hoping for," Jindal said...

There's Jindal offering himself up to the anti-tax Club for Greed crowd that pushes against a progressive income tax system in favor of a regressive sales tax system.

...Deep budget cuts, particularly to health care and education spending, have been unpopular. Polling suggests that a small majority also opposes the vouchers at the heart of his educational reform plan, which a judge has deemed unconstitutional...

The education spending in 2013 was just the tip of the iceberg: in 2015 Jindal is pushing for a major slash of spending for state universities to the point where Louisiana State - home of the LSU Tigers and a key SEC powerhouse - may well lose 82 percent of its funding and could well close its doors (has a major public university of its size ever close before?!).  There would certainly be a revolt by students and (surviving) faculty over the horrific decline of the school's accredited value.  And there's the fealty Jindal has again to the tax-cutter elites: he dare not consider bigger revenue hikes to help the educational system recover or right itself.

The voucher part of that paragraph refers to the ongoing Far Right obsession over "choice" in schools by giving parents the money to send their kids to schools they prefer (including private religious schools that won't answer to state regulations).  They're not really very popular with the parents to begin with, and the courts keep noting how unconstitutional they are.  But the wingnuts insist because it plays to two of their desires: the desire to scam more money out of the public funds, and the desire to have kids sent to private religious schools that would teach God, Creationism, and Fear instead of History, Science and Math.

It's telling how Jindal bends to the whim and will of his corporate and church overlords.  He does not seem to respond to the cries of the public, sticking to a script of "this is what's best for you, take it and shut up" and moving on to the next event that would keep his national profile afloat.  And he's getting to the point where his inflexible positioning over empty ideology has alienated his own party in the state.

If I have to chart out Jindal's positives and negatives and guess (ha) at his Character trait, it'd look like this:

Bobby Jindal - Governor, Louisiana
Positives: Has been able to win election as governor twice, so he knows how to campaign.  His background - Rhodes Scholar - clearly shows someone who had a functioning sober brain, which ought to put him one up on half the contested field.  His presence as a non-white on the debate platform eases the GOP's need to present themselves as "diverse" and not a bunch of old greedy sexist white guys.
Negatives: One of the blandest visible figures trying to run since 2009.  Can be flatter than drywall.  Early attempts to make himself the GOP's answer to Obama - a well-educated ethnic - were disasters. Flips-flops not over policies - he's been consistently conservative - but over marketing and public stances.  Jindal may be an intellectual but he betrays intelligence as a virtue every time he panders to the ignorance of the Far Right.  His actual record running Louisiana is terrible: he succeeded in pissing off a well-respected conservative pundit from the state, and that takes doing.
Chances: Doesn't look that good to begin with.  His popularity numbers are one of the lowest among sitting governors.  His pandering to religious issues does not separate him from the likes of Huckabee or Cruz, who both have a head start and better ground beneath them.
Character Chart: I keep coming back to how the Republican party itself leans so far over to Active-Negative behaviors - rigid Uncompromising attitudes above all - that every Republican candidate is pretty much going to fulfill that character.  On Jindal's specific woes, he's much like Huckabee in terms of a rigid social-religious ideology, but he also carries with him a hard-line economic mindset that would break the federal budget in the worst ways.  His record as Governor - alienating, uncompromising, stuck on broken issues - is proof of that.

It's also painful to note that just as our nation's population is drifting away from church and Christianity - the polls are showing downturns in attendance and affiliation - the Republicans are acting more desperate to pander to the hard-core religious types whose inflexible dogmas and insisting of shoving Religion into everyone's private lives are driving people away in the first place.

We see the likes of Jindal here pandering over discriminating gays at all costs,  We had Jeb Bush as Governor pandering to the pro-fetus crowd over Terri Schiavo (which wasn't a pro-life fight as it was a quality-of-life, which a majority of sane people recognized).  And Huckabee, the worst of these false Judges of us.  We've got a Far Right Purity Purge wrapped around God And Guns (and Tax Cuts) pursuing a platform unpopular with most voters but still unpunished for doing so because our rigged electoral system keeps them safe...

Yeah, I know, I'm ranting.  I'd best leave off with this little tidbit for Jindal to chew on if he ever sees this:

Matthew 23:23: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.

Put that on your gay wedding cake and eat it.

The Conservative Cavalcade of Candidates Creates Clown Car Certainty

...took me about 23 seconds to get all the words figured out.

I'm not the only one accused of hit and run oops that's just like Crosstown Traffic, but I digress keeping track of the candidates lining up just to get down for 2016.  David Graham over at the Atlantic site is keeping a running update, and he's been getting busier by the day.

Late May and early June are shaping up to be peak periods for presidential announcements. On Monday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal formed an exploratory committee with plans to make a final decision in June and Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, said he would start his campaign on June 1. Former New York Governor George Pataki announced last week he would announce his decision on May 28, followed by former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley two days later.

While the Democratic additions will bulk up that party's options along with Hillary and Bernie Sanders, the Republican field is getting more crowded by comparison.  Jindal and Graham are not the only ones: Ohio Governor John Kasich is mentioned looking into things, Santorum is trying to make things official "polling" his twelve followers on a blog if he should run or not, Scott Walker hasn't made it official, nor has Jeb Bush oddly enough, while Chris Christie is probably going to wait for the BridgeGate stuff to quiet down a little before jumping in.

It seems there may be oddities in the election laws that allow certain persons to announce early while others have to wait.  Given the nature of the Republicans being the opposition party, we're bound to see a lot of wannabes line up by the end of June just for the attention-grabbing alone.  The ones who even delude themselves into thinking they've got a shot will keep it serious enough well into January to say Far Right nuttery things - dear God, Rubio just imploded over Iraq two seconds ago - to keep us moderately sane American horrified.

In the meanwhile, if you keep an eye on David Graham's blog page at the Atlantic, you'll be appraised of the crazy lineup with his own pithy takes before I can usually get a blog write-up done here.

Now, I gotta go to bed.  G'night all and for the LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

This Involves Rick "No Ethics" Scott Again, So This Entry Is DEFINITELY Not Safe For Work

Yup, this will involved curse words.  Hide the llamas.

Over on Balloon Juice, they call it Peak Wingnut.  The belief - long since disproved - that at some point the mass delusional conspiratorial rumor-mongering of the Far Right would be so over-the-top that everyone and their grandparents would completely dismiss it and the Far Right would be discredited forever and barred from polite society.  You may notice we've yet to reach Peak Wingnut and probably never will (if Hillary wins in 2016, it will only change from racial nuttery to gender nuttery).

Considering what we've got as governor of the state of Florida, I prefer to call it Peak Asshole.  And we've yet to reach that as well.

Even after Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott went to the federal government to beg for Medicaid money - just not Obamacare Medicaid Expansion, because God forbid we get anything with Obama's cooties on it - and getting his sorry hide dismissed for refusing the obvious, we're still getting the stupid out of him as well as the lack of accountability.

Scott has just sent out a letter to the state agencies regarding the budget impasse within the Florida Legislature, and informed those agencies to start planning for the possibility of a full-bore state shutdown.  Per the Tampa Bay Times:

...Scott put agency heads on notice, giving them until 5 p.m. next Monday to identify services that must continue when the fiscal year ends at midnight June 30 and, in the absence of a budget, agencies could not spend money and state employees would not be paid.

In letters to agencies, Scott laid the blame for a potential shutdown on the Senate...

Okay, I gotta interrupt here.  THE SENATE WANTS TO PASS A BUDGET.  Blaming the shutdown on them when it's THE HOUSE THAT SPLIT TOWN THREE DAYS EARLY LIKE LAZY BASTARDS is the height of hypocrisy and blame-gaming.

Back to the report:

"It is possible that Florida Senate President Andy Gardiner and the Florida Senate will not agree to any budget without the specific expansion of Medicaid (at a cost to state taxpayers of $5 billion over 10 years)," Scott wrote. "Therefore, we are requesting your agency prepare a list of critical state services our citizens cannot lose in the event Florida is forced into a government shutdown on July 1st."

Scott is making it clear that any budget with federal Medicaid expansion money is unacceptable to him.  His allies in the state House will most likely deny any compromise attempt.

By sounding the alarm of a shutdown, Scott may be trying to rally Floridians to support the view he shares with the House that a debate on health care must take a back seat to a more urgent matter of passing a budget.

Bullshit.  Health care is part of the budget itself.  It HAS to be part of the budget.  Take away any provision of health care funding and we will see hospitals and nursing homes close their doors.

But Scott could also be seen as calling out his fellow Republicans for behaving irresponsibly. Talk of a shutdown could heighten a public sense of dysfunction in a state government controlled by Republicans at all levels.

Dear Rick "Asshole" Scott:  It takes two to have an argument.  Blaming the Senate for YOUR intractable irresponsibility is denial of the worst kind.

Scott's hardball tactics Thursday cost him support from one of his few staunch Senate supporters, Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater.

"I have great respect and admiration for the governor," Latvala said. "But I think it's unfortunate that they're taking this approach in trying to solve the situation between the House and Senate. Raising the specter of a government shutdown is not necessary at this point, and it's meant to put political pressure on the Senate… It's hard for him to be a broker for a solution when he takes one side like this."

I doubt Scott has any friends left in the Senate, the way he's been using them as a scapegoat for his political ambitions and short-sighted betrayals.

Part of me still thinks this whole thing is kabuki, that Scott is just playing the part of an Obamacare Refusnik down to the last minute so that he can play the martyr when a deal gets made including the much-needed Medicaid money.  On the other hand, the Republican Party has become so radicalized over constant campaigning to the far right that Scott may well fear any deal would hurt his 2018 Senate hopes.  There's still that factor from the federal shutdown I noted before, how the Far Right are convinced that the "doom-and-gloom" over a budget impasse / default is all a librul myth, and that if they stick to their guns they'll get the "small government" they've always hoped for.

I am extremely pissed off.  I would love to see Rick "Not My Fault, Screw Everyone Else" Scott get burned over this.  I would love to see the whole state FINALLY fucking wake up to the horrors of one-party Far-Right-Wingnut rule.  I would love to win one of the state lotto tickets before the whole thing gets shut down.  Unfortunately, I know my luck's not that good.  I know we're screwed as a state.  Barring outright arrest warrants issued for Scott by any of the various judges calling on his sorry ass to answer to the law, we're stuck with this crook for another three years.

Insert more curse words here if you like.

Predicting Character: The Hubris of Huckabee

Just to mention, the inevitable jumping-in of Mike Huckabee into the GOP primaries happened.  Inevitable in that he'd been making the rounds at the key states, making noises about starting up funding efforts, making wildly inaccurate accusations about the godless heathens dancing to Beyonce.

He's been mentioned on this blog several times before.  And on several occasions I've made the observation that among the social conservative wingnuts running for the highest office - the likes of Santorum, Cruz, Palin, others - Huckabee is the one that can be the most credible threat to win the nomination.

He made a serious run in 2008 that got him in third behind McCain and Romney, and Huckabee did a serious job weakening Romney's standing among the Far Right religious voters.

That he didn't run against Mitt in 2012 was a slight surprise: against the faux purity of plastic ideology that Romney offered, Huckabee was a genuine Bible-thumping wingnut that the GOP wingnut crowd could back.  The thing is, Huckabee may buy into religious dogma but he's not completely blinded by political ideology: he could see the political landscape in 2012 still favored Obama, and likely didn't want to ruin his reputation on a doomed effort.  Still, he was the one who polled well enough against Obama to have been a real chance for the Republicans to take the White House then.

Why I need to re-address my views on Huckabee now, since I've already got my appraisals from 2008 and 2012 to verify how he'll do for 2016, is that this time I'm also looking at previewing / predicting the Character traits that Huckabee likely brings with him.  Using Professor Barber's system of uncovering the candidate's world-view, I hope to establish just how much of an Active-Negative Huckabee could be sitting in the Oval Office.

Pulling back up the brief preview I wrote earlier this year from his appearance at the Iowa Suck-Up Extravaganza:

Mike Huckabee - Governor, Arkansas
Positives: Populist political figure from a strongly conservative political region (Southeast).  Can govern.  Knows how to campaign in a Congenial style.  Remained a well-known figure on the national stage - by being on Fox Not-News as a pundit - after his failed primary campaigning in 2008.  He polled well as a possible candidate in 2012 (and showed enough awareness to tell it wasn't going to be a good election cycle for Republicans and stayed out of it).  Has legitimate religious conservative cred (ordained Baptist minister).  Can not only pander to the Tea Party base, he can do so without looking like it.
Negatives: Not exactly trusted by the anti-tax crowds still dominant in the backrooms of the GOP leadership (which is ridiculous as GOP dogma is too firmly obsessed with tax-cutting for anyone to violate that rule).  Has been away from elected office long enough for people to forget any good stuff he'd done as governor.  His time as a fear-monger on Fox Not-News will turn away moderate voters.  His early campaigning comments - going after "family values" issues and insulting Beyonce (?!) - are not exactly endearing him to any younger voters.  And that's not even going into legitimate scandals - granting clemencies to violent offenders who promptly killed (again), a son who killed a stray dog under obscure circumstances - that can become millstones in a national campaign.  Worst of all, Huckabee's advocacy of his religious beliefs - his failure to even respect the No Religious Test requirement IN THE CONSTITUTION ITSELF - threatens the sanctity of Separation of Church and State.
Chances: While he won't get the deep-pocket backers the way Jeb Bush (or even Mitt if Romney decides to make one more try) will, Huckabee has a high chance to use his charm and campaign skills to make a serious go at the nomination.
Character Chart: I stated earlier how the Republican Party is dominated by Active-Negatives and has an Active-Negative platform, yet needs a Passive-Positive candidate to appeal to regular voters.  Huckabee can present himself as a Passive-Positive better than any other candidate... but he's so Active-Negative with his strict religious convictions that he'll likely lean that way.

There are different ways a President can be an Active-Negative, but the one trait that type shares is the "I Must" mindset of a hidebound ideology.  As in, "I must do this thing because it is the only way to do it and I am the only one who knows how."  This is the Uncompromising trait that Barber wrote about in his studies on Presidential Character.  Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Wilson, Hoover, Andrew Jackson... each of them with different world-view backgrounds yet focused on the same unbending agendas.  Where LBJ's Uncompromising habit came from his need to succeed as the best, where Nixon's came from his need to prove himself in crisis, where Hoover's came from the unbending logic of an engineer, they all ended up in the same place: inflexibility regarding policy solutions that ended in disasters.

Of the previous Active-Negatives, Huckabee shares most with Woodrow Wilson, the Idealist among Presidents.  Wilson's idealism was a self-assured righteousness, not of faith but of politics.  It was that idealism that drove much of his progressive agenda but also led to pushing too hard for a peace platform in the wake of World War I that ended up isolating the United States in the worst possible way (not to mention various civil liberties violations like the Palmer Raids).

Huckabee's idealism is tied directly to his Christian faith.  Unlike most of the other Republican candidates, Huckabee is not a hardened fiscal conservative (although he'll sign any tax cut bill a GOP Congress will send to his desk) that the Establishment types would prefer.  He seems to genuinely come from the wing of the GOP that takes churching and proselytizing serious.  From the Washington Monthly article by Steven Waldman:

...I met Huckabee in the 2000s when I was running a multifaith religion website called Beliefnet. Huckabee was making the rounds promoting his efforts to encourage healthy eating. He was charming, reasonable, smart, and funny—conservative, to be sure, but empathetic and appealing. During his underfinanced campaign in 2008, he proved himself to be a far better candidate than John McCain. In a party that’s forever searching for the next Ronald Reagan, he’s the closest to the Gipper in temperament than anyone else out there...
...He could have energized religious conservatives while seeming hopeful to the rest of the population...

I know that Waldman's comparing Huckabee to Reagan should be a sign that Huckabee could well be a Passive-Positive - indeed, the one character type that could appeal to a broad range of voters at a time when all we have running are Active-Negatives - but then Waldman notes how Huckabee went and sold his soul:

Then he got a Fox News TV show. He evolved into an uninteresting, standard-issue religious-right pundit. He repeatedly said that Obama grew up in Kenya. He defended Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin. He champions David Barton, who argues that the Founding Fathers did not believe in separation of church and state. He even mocks Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating efforts, even though being the Biggest Loser (in terms of pounds, not votes) was his claim to fame once upon a time...

It's not so much that Huckabee went and re-branded himself as a Huckster.  It's that Huckabee saw an opportunity to make money and still stand on his reputation as a Moral-Majority Republican.  It's kind of a horrifying thought: that he not only got to sell snake-oil as a fear-mongerer, he somehow got to keep his self-image of a true believer whenever he looked himself in a mirror: the worst of both worlds.

Thing is, Huckabee didn't sell much of himself to Fox Not-News.  He had always been that fervent a "religious-right pundit".  Defending Barton - fake historian - over the issue of Separation of Church And State wasn't a new thing: Huckabee spoke against the precedents of Separation of Church and State years ago.  To the flashback machine of my blog:

...Please note sir, that your definition of what God is and what God wants, as a Baptist, is going to be different from even your fellow Christians, be they Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Calvinist, Reform, etc.

Please note Mr. Huckabee that your desire to rewrite the Constitution to reflect *your* point-of-view on God's Will, and it's only *your* will by the by, is going to scare the crap out of every other person who doesn't preach and pray to God the same way you do.  (add-on: and that includes fellow Christians)

Sir, you may be preaching thinking that you want to convert this nation from its seemingly godless ways, but rest assured we Americans are more driven by our faith and our acceptance of God moreso than any other Western nation. There is no need to make the Secular Law of the Land to mirror the Law of Faith. If you do, if you persist, you're going to find more people bickering and arguing over the Law of Faith the same as they bicker and argue over the Secular Law...

Huckabee hasn't changed since 2008.  The only thing's that changed is that Huckabee is more rigid in his denouncements of the "liberal" godlessness threatening Christians.  His claim that gay marriage will "criminalize Christianity" is just one big proof of how his fear-mongering has moved from being a smiley happy preacher to a dark doom-and-gloom judge of us all.

If we go into a more detailed biography - there are several in print, but one from the New Yorker in 2010 may help best - we can see the Uncompromising religious idealism of the man:

When Mike Huckabee was born, in 1955, the mores and values of Christianity seemed indistinguishable from the mores and values of the country. Growing up, Huckabee assumed that everyone was Christian, and in Hope, Arkansas—which is also Bill Clinton’s home town, though the two politicians did not become acquainted until adulthood—he was not far off. His family was not deeply religious, but his mother, Mae, took Huckabee and his sister to Sunday school every week, where the preacher would “literally scare the hell” out of him. “I grew up in a culture where everybody went to church but nobody took it that seriously,” Huckabee told me one afternoon a few months ago, drinking tea on the sunporch of his house in North Little Rock...

...When Huckabee was fifteen, he encountered an alternative. A young couple in his neighborhood offered Bible study at their home on Wednesday nights, and these meetings changed the way he saw his place in the universe. “For them, Christianity was not a cultural expression—it was a personal relationship with God,” he said. “It wasn’t about behavior.” He was attracted to the intimacy and depth of this vision, and to the couple’s emphasis on love rather than fear. "Evangelical essentially means people who have a belief in the authority and veracity of the Bible,” Huckabee said, “but who also believe that the Bible is about good news..."

...In some ways, Huckabee seems like a promising candidate for 2012: a squeaky-clean family man and bona-fide Christian who loves to talk. His communication is folksy but fluid; he never seems flummoxed, like George W. Bush, or befuddled, like John McCain, or unprepared, like Sarah Palin. “If we’re running a race against their most articulate guy,” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s former campaign manager, told me, referring to President Obama, “we should put our most articulate guy. Huckabee’s that guy...”

This was in 2010.  Other than the change in messaging from hope and love to "war on faith" fear-mongering, there remains the constant of Huckabee's religious convictions.  It may not be a "fundamentalist" form of faith, but it's still an "evangelical" absolutism that few other Republicans can even fake.

It's that religious absolutism that made Huckabee free a lot of state prisoners who found out quick that professing conversion to faith as a quick ticket to paroles.  It's that same religious absolutism that will make him reject the growing public consensus that gay marriage is not a threat to heteros.  It's that religious absolutism that has convinced him that there should be Religious Tests and religious-based laws governing the nation, despite the Constitution and the proof of history that such laws were dangerous.  

Huckabee may have as a personality the Congeniality skills that makes him likable, and approachable among the lower-class citizenry that the other Republican candidates can't abide.  But he's an Idealist who won't bend on matters of personal faith that will dictate his public actions that will affect the rest of us.  That puts him in the Active-Negative category as much as the con artists making up the tax-cut pro-business Establishment candidates facing him in the primaries.

He's simply not a sane alternative to the likes of Cruz or Walker or Jeb or Rubio or any of the others.  In some ways he's worse: he's driven by a belief in God that isn't humble or accepting, it's demanding and inflexible.  It borders on hubris, a form of excessive pride that puts a man above others, making himself a god.  Huckabee may think of himself as God's messenger, but he's not: he's his own.  Hence the hubris, hence the pride.

And the Bible is pretty strict about what pride brings about.  Proverbs 16:18.

UK Elections 2015: What the Hell Happened?

Had to admit, I was hoping for a divided result to where another coalition would have been necessary, along the lines of Labour having enough seats to tempt potential allies in the Liberal Dems or the rising Scottish National (SNP) to turn over Tory Prime Minister Cameron's Austerity regime.  Most of the pre-polling pointed to a muddled result.

Instead, the results ended with the Conservatives winning enough seats to secure their own majority under Cameron.  Labour lost seats, the Liberal Dems were near annihilated, and the other third parties barely scratching out single seats making them more than meaningless.  The only other winner on Thursday were the Scottish National Party, which pretty much dominated all of Scotland as a voting bloc: a major paradoxical turn of events regarding Scottish independence movement (which had been shut down not too long ago).

So, what the hell happened?

Simplest explanation is usually the best one.  The simplest explanation is that the United Kingdom's economy is struggling but stable.  In spite of an austerity regime of spending cuts and uneven tax hikes/cuts, the UK's economy was stable compared to the rest of Europe's.  Parties in power tend to stay in power when conditions - economy, wars, social trends, lack of political scandals - are stable and manageable.  If the economy was truly tanking, or there were troops caught in quagmires in overseas occupations, or the Conservatives were caught in massive bribery/sex/bizarre Masonic ritual scandals, we would have seen voter unrest and a desire for change at the top.

Cameron was able to sell economic stability as the Conservatives' platform.

Stability - especially economic stability - is the big reason a lot of parties/elected officials can stay in office even during trying times or questionable leadership.  Here in the U.S., that kind of stability is why Obama won in 2012 despite the Republicans' efforts to claim otherwise, and Bush the Lesser winning in 2004 (as the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan hadn't soured yet and the economy was still - barely - ticking), and Clinton winning in 1996 during the Internet Boom, and Reagan winning in a (misleading) blowout in 1984...

Nearly every electoral turnover here in the U.S. happens because of a major, troubling economic malaise.  At the Presidential level, major recessions (and a Great Depression) ended a lot of one-term guys like Bush the Elder, Carter, and Hoover (going back into the 19th Century we can point to Van Buren).  Obama won in 2008, and the Democrats won Congress in 2006, due to the economic downturns starting to collapse during Bush II's second term as well as growing disillusion over Iraq/Afghanistan.  Republicans took over Congress in 1994 due to a slow recovery as well as the overall ennui of Democratic control for 25-plus years.  Republicans had brief control of the Senate in 1980, but lost that as the 1981-83 recession turned voters against Reagan's tax-cut agenda.

Most other congressional turnovers are tied to economic woes (other times it's shifting demographics affecting gerrymanders, which affected the 1994 and 2010 results).  The only exceptions to this would be honest-to-God scandals like Watergate (which hurt Republicans who had nothing to do with it) or bad wars like Iraq II.  Even major scandals like Iran-Contra and the S&L debacle, or petty ones like the Lewinsky Affair, might not impact results as long as people are content with their lot.

When Clinton campaigned in 1992, the inter-office message "It's The Economy, Stupid" was pretty much the right message.

(To explain the Republicans regaining Congress in 2010 and retaining it in 2014, I'd have to point to the perception of economic disaster painted by the GOP, especially over the "threat" of Obamacare and tax increases.  During periods of lesser voter turnout like the midterms, that perception can be enough)

How this applies to the UK would be the same thing: while unemployment remains an issue, and cuts to social aid are a serious problem, most Britons seem content overall (or at least unburdened) with the direction their kingdom's economy is rolling, and so they're not about to rock the boat.

A more thorough examination into the election would point to what was happening with Scotland.  This gets a little harder to explain.

Even though Scottish voters rejected full independence, those same voters remain upset at how their nation is mired in deeper economic woes than the rest of the UK.  As a result, voters switched from the Labour Party - which used to dominate that region - to the Scottish National as a form of protest.  Even though at the united level, the incoming SNP ministers won't have any real power (they're third behind Labour, which means they're not even the official Opposition party) to make changes.

On the one hand, this cut into Labour's overall strength of numbers as a major party.  On the other hand, this gave Conservatives a means of fear-mongering - this was arguably one of the nastier campaigns in modern history, which is saying something considering how vicious British tabloids get - to their base voters and undecideds: by warning of a threat by the SNP - certain to win enough Scottish seats to be a threat - to divide Great Britain if they were to form a coalition with Labour, the Tories ensured voter turnout to their side.  As another part of the paradox, that fear-mongering worked to SNP's advantage as Scottish voters bought into that and supported the SNP well above the staid Labour.

Another factor was the utter collapse of the Dems (no relation).  What had been a small-yet-thriving third party alternative between Far Right Conservatives and Far Left Labour fell apart in the wake of this election.  The explanation for that goes all the way back to the deal with the devil that party leader Clegg made with Cameron in 2010: rather than team with Labour to form a minority government, Clegg teamed with the Conservatives to form a coalition government.

That deal was supposed to moderate the Tory agenda and preserve key issues for the Lib Dems.  Instead it gave the Conservatives a license to pursue their own policies, forced the Dems to vote on matters they normally wouldn't have, and drove away supporters after failing to prove any influence on government policies at all.

At the time - 2010 - Labour was a weakened party riven by scandal and barely functioning: Blair's scandals (sucking up to Bush/Cheney had to hurt) and Gordon's poor leadership made them a party on the downturn.  Clegg probably viewed them as a sinking ship (literal and metaphor) and likely felt he could get a better deal out of Cameron. He didn't.  He got the worst of both worlds: the coalition neutered the Liberal Democrats on policy matters, and the party got all the blame for Conservative actions that violated the liberal leanings of both the Dems and Labour.

Lib Dems went from 57 seats to just eight.  Voter disillusionment is the only explanation.  How many switched to Conservative and how many went for Labour needs deeper examination (given how Labour lost seats not just in Scotland is a factor here as well).  But if any tangible change went for the Conservatives this election cycle, this was it: the vacuum caused by the Dems' self-implosion was not filled by other third parties, and those votes had to go somewhere...

Past all that, I got nothing else to say about this except "Good luck, Brits.  You get what you pay for."

The UK should now expect increased privatization efforts in education and health care - despite evidence that in both cases nothing good is happening.  More tax cuts to corporations and wealthy are likely, even against evidence that income inequality is a growing problem in the UK (as much as it is here in the US).  And now that one party is in charge, expect the radicalization of that one party to turn into obsessive dogma at the expense of pragmatic reform.

My apostasy against the American Conservative wingnuttery may blind me against the more constrained-seeming British Conservatism, but Right Wing is too far a wing for me no matter the country.

I dread the coming austerity collapse Great Britain is about to get.

Elections Matter: The Past, The Present, The Future

Elections are in the news here and there and everywhere.

To the past, a previous election from weeks ago is still making the news because it just only had gotten resolved about 50 minutes ago in real-time (I was about to write something else and blamm-o, deal got done).  I speak of the Israel election:

With just an hour to spare before a deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late Wednesday that he has succeeded in forming a coalition government.
According to Israel Radio, Netanyahu came to an agreement with the final party required for a coalition, the right-wing Jewish Home party, at 10:30 p.m. local time...
...Netanyahu had six weeks to form a government after the March 17 elections in which his Likud party won 30 seats. They beat his main rival, Zionist Union's Isaac Herzog, who won 24 seats. Netanyahu now has one week to present his coalition and Cabinet to the Knesset.
Netanyahu's government is likely to be a right-wing government with 61 seats out of a 120 seats in the Israeli parliament, the bare minimum to form a coalition.
One of his primary coalition partners, Avigdor Liberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced in recent days that he was leaving the coalition and resigning his post as foreign minister, which would cut Netanyahu's coalition from a strong 67 seats to a weak 61 seats...

Coalitions matter in Israel and other nations because the proportional voting system combined with their parliamentary form of government means multiple parties spread across a finite voting populace: creating several large parties with pluralities but not majorities, and giving the smaller parties chances to form coalitions and extort prizes and favors.

This means the strength of the prime minister in a coalition majority depends entirely on how many parties he can pull together to form enough votes to avoid a government collapse.  As of now, Netanyahu is about one vote away from a defection on any key legislation into a tie vote, and two defections away from a failed vote.  I'm not entirely sure if a single failed vote would be construed as a no-confidence that could collapse the entire coalition and force a new election, but I think I've seen that happen before... a lot... with Italy's government.

Netanyahu may well be on the hardest tight-rope walk ever of his long - and questionably corrupt - prime ministerial career.  He's formed a hard-right coalition, but each party is led by a factionalist some of whom aren't entirely fond of Netanyahu on a personal level.  He has to placate some factions more than before to keep them happy... but doing so risks the possibility of outraging the rest of the nation and alienating one of the more centrist coalition members into quitting the group.

That election may be in the past, but the results of it - close and as far from a solid majority as any government would want - will haunt Netanyahu's current coaltion for the next year, if it even lasts that long.

It helps an election if the results are clear-cut and obvious.  Like the one that just happened in the Canadian province of Alberta.

The news about it since last night has sent shockwaves across Canada and even into the U.S.  Not because of the results - polling ahead of time showed the New Democratic Party was going to win over the once-controlling Tories/Progressive Conservatives - but because of the crushing decisiveness of the results and how it signaled leadership change to a region that hadn't switched hands in over 40 years:

The NDP, a party that had never won more than 16 seats, captured more than 50 to secure a majority in the 87-seat legislature.
The Wildrose party took second place and will form the official Opposition, while Prentice and his battered PCs were relegated to third.
It was a crushing defeat for the Tories, who had steered the ship of state since 1971—longer than any party anywhere in the country...
...(Outgoing leader Jim Prentice) took over a party in September that had been stung by scandals under former premier Alison Redford. Legislature members and the premier were using government planes for party business and Redford ordered that a penthouse apartment be built for herself on top of a renovated government building.
The party had also failed to build promised schools and was criticized for lavish salaries and severance payouts to political staff and government executives...

While the real causes of the switch between the conservative PC party and the more liberal-labour NDC are many, it basically breaks down to one thing: the Progressive Conservatives had been in office too long (over 40 years!), took their hold on power for granted, did little to keep the populace happy, got corrupted, and got bent.  That corrupt attitude and failure to respond to the electorate shows in the shocking fortunes of the Wildrose party - a more hard-core conservative group - that won second place.  People were so fed up with the Conservatives that they fled to the more wingnut party out of spite.

Still, this is a huge seismic shift in electoral favor.  Alberta had long been one of the more conservative provinces (not state, they ain't like up Oop North) in all of Canada.  When the Red State/Blue State divide in the United States back in 2004 created homogeneous blocks of Conservative/Liberal zones, the mapmakers of the so-called Jesusland would add Alberta as part of that Red State empire (with the Blue States and the rest of Canada labels the United States of Canada).

You have to admit, having one party in control of anything - a state or province, the nation as a whole - for more than two decades is pushing the limits of effective and responsive leadership.  Parties that stay in power calcify, get lazy, get to thinking nothing can topple them, get to thinking they know what they're doing even if they keep repeating the same mistakes.  Fresh ideas become fewer, needed reforms less likely as they butt against the status quo.  Not to say that turnover for the sake of turnover is good - that way leads to losing too many people who do know what they're doing, and disrupts any long-term fixing of problems - but if the same clowns have been in power for more than four decades, I guarantee you things have gotten sloppy and stupid.

This is still a big deal.  This is akin to a state like South Carolina - long a home of conservative ideology regardless of which party (Democrats before 1964, Republicans after 1972) ran it - suddenly voting out every Confederate flag-waver and replacing them with pro-choice civil rights advocates who all attend Unitarian services (in short, beyond impossible).  The seating went for 16 for the New Democrats all the way up to 50 out of 87 seats: about 20 percent up to 60 percent, about as solid a majority as the Republicans here in Congress controlling the House.

Alberta's election has long-term implications.  The reigning national Conservatives long counted on Alberta as their base of support: if they've lost that many voters this year, it's not likely those voters will turn around and vote for them in the national elections this autumn.  And this election has ramifications for other future elections, not just for who controls Ottawa.

It's not entirely clear if what happened in Alberta will affect the major partner of the British Commonwealth, but the United Kingdom elections that are happening tomorrow (or today depending on your time zone, a big hello to any of the UK readers I get if any) may see some voters inspired by the conservative kick-out by their Canadian cousins.

The UK Parliament is up for vote for the House of Commons, and right now the whole thing is a literal dead heat with an unlikely majority.

The three major parties - conservative Tories, socialist Labour, liberal Democrats (no relation) - are in somewhat bad shape.  The Conservatives under Cameron have had a messy, destructive five years of coalition rule: their austerity measures of social spending cuts and tax hikes on middle-income people hurt their economy.  The Liberals under Clegg made the mistake of selling their collective souls to the conservatives to become part of a coalition, and got caught defending bad conservative policies that hurt their own standing and weakened them for this cycle.  Labour is being touted as the least evil of the three now - which is telling you something - but are led by a bland figure in Miliband whose lack of charisma hurt the national campaign, while the party itself still has not recovered its reputation after the disastrous end of the Blair/Gordon years.

The likelihood of another coalition government gets scarier when you factor in the other once-smaller "third" parties that are more wingnut than the major parties.  In particular, the rise of what's known as UKIP, which was polling at a popularity percentage of 13 percent.  Try to picture it this way, America: UKIP is anti-EU (which for British politics isn't too crazy actually), anti-regulation (libertarian/Randian), anti-Arab (neocon hater wannabes), anti-immigrant (uh-oh), racist (hoo-boy)... Lemme put it another way, America: picture the Klu Klux Klan with 13 percent of the voting base and you've got an idea what the UKIP represents.

Here's the thing: if the Conservatives win just enough over Labour but not enough for its own majority, and the UKIP is sitting there with just enough seats to form a coalition... yeah, be afraid America, our best international ally just went Teabagger on us.  The irony of it may be lost in the trans-Atlantic transition...

There's also the possibility that if Labour wins just a few seats over Conservatives but not enough to control, they'd have to see about forming a coalition with the Dems (no relation), if Clegg's party is able to hold enough seats of their own.  It's more likely Labour could form a coalition with the Scottish National Party, which is poised to clean up most of Scotland's seating in Parliament... but which Cameron claims is an "illegitimate" move, leading to an international crisis on a scale equal to Election 2000.

Part of me is wondering if the British voters paid attention to Alberta: having seen an ineffective conservative government get ousted by the voters had to have given them the same idea among the non-affiliated voters.  It's a question if it happened too soon or if it happened at exactly the right time for it to have an effect in Great Britain itself...

I mentioned before how Alberta's election can affect the national Canadian elections set for October.  The potential downturn in support for the national Conservatives does not yet translate into gains for the other major factions, but the New Democrats have to be energized by their win here to motivate turnout everywhere else - where more liberal/left-of-center voters reside.  It may yet shock the national Conservatives into moderating their message rather than react more radical (although that's unlikely: the hard-core members are too set in their ways by now).

And even though Alberta's election was only in Canada, it has an effect across the border here in the United States.  The New Dems campaigned on a strong pro-environment anti-oil platform.  The incoming leader, Rachel Notley, promised to end the aggressive push for the controversial Keystone pipeline (calling it now an American problem, not Canada's).  That she won a decisive majority in what had been a province overly reliant on the energy corporations means that the climate change argument is a winning one even in pro-oil markets.  I would think the Koch Brothers and other energy conglomerates pushing the Climate Denial are reconsidering their options.  ...Nah, the Teabagger faction here in the U.S. is too far gone...

But there are other lessons to learn here for American politics gearing up for the major 2016 Presidential elections (with key Senate races as well).  First off, the conservative message of the last forty years - deregulate, cut taxes, cut social spending, worship the rich - is not as potent as it was under the Age of Reagan.  Voters who lived for decades in a free-market, far right region like Alberta have gotten sick of it and finally tuned out.

We're about due to see the same thing here in the U.S.: the same amount of decades of massive tax cuts and diminishing social services are starting to adversely affect places like Kansas and other Red States.  Decades of unchanging political leadership like here in Florida are starting to show signs not only of corruption but also complacency and ineptitude, and worse tuning out on the needs of the local voters crying for leadership on health care and climate change.

There's an irony here because the conservative Republicans are charging headlong into the Presidential race on the belief that they are due for taking back the White House.  People are wondering why so many Far Right GOP'ers are putting their names up for consideration this primary season need to consider the myth of the Pendulum Swing: the idea (ignoring actual history) that the White House tends to swing back and forth from one party to another.  That after a two-term Presidency, the party in opposition is poised to take over the Presidency for their own two terms.

As I noted, that ignores actual history.  External factors - weak national parties leading to constant one-termers that dominated much of the mid-19th Century, Presidents dying in office leaving weak replacement Veeps in charge, ongoing national moods such as the post-Civil War "Bloody Shirt" dominance by Republicans (1861 to 1912, barring exceptions) and post-Depression dominance by Democrats between 1932 to 1968 (with Ike the exception) - have more to do with which party controls the Presidency.

What really matters is performance in the White House: if one party does well, the voting electorate will continue to back that party until things fall apart for it, much in the way 40-plus years control of Alberta fell apart for the Conservatives.  The reasons Bush the Lesser won after the Bill Clinton two-terms had more to do with Al Gore avoiding his campaign to link to the still-popular Clinton, as well as a broken voting system in Florida that threw the results into chaos.  The reason Obama won in 2008 after two terms of Bush the Lesser had a lot to do with the disasters of the Bush II administration - collapsed economy, bad wars, failed policies.  Nixon won in 1968 because LBJ's disastrous administration led to the end of the New Deal era that carried over through the FDR, Truman, and Kennedy administrations (and also through the Eisenhower Republican tenure, which is telling).

In all other cases, a popular Presidency leads to the successor candidates gaining their own terms.  Jefferson begat Madison who begat Monroe (who benefited from an era where the opposition party died away) who begat Adams... who flopped as President.  Jackson led to Van Buren... who flopped, and at this point the one-terms moved into play as the regional factions divided the nation (and the dominant Democratic party) up towards the Civil War.  The alienation of the Democrats post-war pretty much gave Republicans control of the White House from Grant to Hayes to Garfield to Arthur... and that was with Grant's administration being one of the most corrupt in political history and with Hayes honestly losing but eking out a corrupt deal due to the Republicans wielding enough political clout to pull it off.  Cleveland becomes the Democratic hiccup between Arthur (Harrison kinda shouldn't count) and McKinley, who begat Teddy on his own successful two-terms who begat Taft (broken up by Wilson due to the GOP schism between Teddy and Taft) leading to Harding and Coolidge and Hoover... at which point the Great Depression shatters Republican control for the next 40 years...

The lesson here is: successful and popular Presidency continues the control of the White House to that President's party.  It's one of the reasons why Republicans still scream about Obama being a failure when he's not, and it's one of the reasons they need to be afraid of the fact Obama is still more popular than they are.

Hell, Hillary is still more popular than the Republicans.  This is not at all like Alberta, or Israel, or the UK, where the leadership's popularity took collective hits and weakened their parties.  Israel is one bad vote away from collapse: who knows how the UK elections will go.

We need to see how the British elections hold up tomorrow... I mean today... I mean, ah damn you Greenwich Mean Time!

Cinco De Mayo: More Than One Remembrance

Today is Cinco De Mayo, kiddos!

But something else of note: today is a Tuesday, and if City of Heroes was still up and running this day would be a Tanker Tuesday.

Some background (taken from a fanpage I created ages ago on a now-defunct website):

Tankers are one of five original Archetypes for the City of Heroes MMO character designs. There's meant to be a role played by each AT, and a way of balancing these ATs out. Blasters are long-range damage dealers with little or no armor. Scrappers are close-quarters damage dealers with some armor to compensate for being in melee range. Defenders are healers and protectors with some attacks but not as powerful as Blasters. Controllers are literally crowd controllers, with some damage abilities but really their forte is Holding mobs at bay for others to wipe out. Tankers are armored front-line attackers that are shielded from head to toe, but with limited attacks.

There's not supposed to be one AT that is better than the others, but the Tankers kinda bend if not break that unwritten rule. Tankers can survive fights almost entirely on their own, if properly designed. Only Scrappers can match that, and even Scrappers don't get the higher Hit Point counts Tankers get that allow them to survive longer in battle. Certain Tankers (Fire, cough) have offensive capabilities that can rival a Blaster or Scrapper. A good Tanker can overcome the disadvantages of not having as many attack options as a Blaster or Scrapper. And an expert at playing Tankers can perform a game trick known as 'Herding', the ability to draw or 'aggro' a series of mobs together across an entire map if need be in order to kill enough of the mobs all at once. And to be perfectly honest, when confronting a high-level villain class known as Arch-Villain (AV), you NEED a Tanker there to get the job done because that Tanker is the only one with enough Hit Points and with the needed aggro control to survive the fight.

As a character build, Tankers became popular enough that entire teams were built around the Archetype.  On Champion server, the Tankers even formed an event on the first Tuesday of the month.

One month, Tanker Tuesday fell on Cinco De Mayo.  One of the main organizers, online name of The Ring, decided to throw a Cinco-themed Tanker event:

On the day of Del Dia Tanque itself, there was another large crowd of Tankers waiting at the designated spot in Kings Row. We grouped, we gathered, we danced, we waited for Ring to show up and start this gig. Ring did show, bringing along a special guest, Gen. Zaragoza himself! Sure, he was Level 1 and all, but the General had arrived to start the celebrations off with the proper style. We praised the General and then got the lineups going...

 We ran the Hess Task Force, with the ever-awesome MegaMech!

Ah, one of the best Tanker Tuesdays we ever had.

I miss City of Heroes.  I am not the only one.  The other hero-themed MMOs - DCU Online, Champions Online - just don't play well.  I guess I got spoiled on CoH.  Kinda waiting on a variety of potential replacement hero build MMOs - City of Titans is one, Valiance another - but it's shocking how there's few superhero MMOs in an age of a massive comic-book media wave of television shows and movie blockbusters.

Oh, and as for Cinco de Mayo, don't forget this: