A Sad Historical Parallel

This is my 100th post, which is a milestone. I have been blogging on politics for a year now, more or less. So I thought that this post ought to be important.

On May 6th, 2009, Maine was the first state in the Union to Legalize same-sex marriage through legislation instead of judicially. The rest of New England followed suit soon thereafter.

But on November 3rd, 2009, it was repealed legislatially.

In 1780, the Massuchusetts Constitution outlawed slavery. The rest of New England followed suit soon thereafter.

The Southern States kept slavery legal until the 13th Amendment was passed, and many of them worked around it through Jim Crow Laws and then later, the "Separate but Equal" nonsense.

In 2009, many people who campaign against same-sex marriage salve their consciences by saying they are not depriving anyone of a civil right, but they are letting homosexuals have "civil ceremonies" which are "equal" but separate by their very nature.

In 1845, the Northern Religious Entities fought for freedom for the slaves, declaring it a sin to own slaves. The same year, the Southern Religious group denied slaves their freedom, using the Bible to justify their sin.

In 2009, conservative Christians use the Bible to deprive those of the constitutional and amended rights to equality for all citizens. Other groups use their religious background to fight for freedoms.

In 2009, we regard those who defended slavery at best silly, and at worst monstrous.
In the future, future generations will regard those who defended denying marriage rights to gays as silly at best, and at worst monstrous.

GOP: A Pure Minority is Still a Minority

Read this over at Republicans United, formerly The Progressive Republican, and thought it hit the nail on the head. I have had, here and at other blogs, many right-wing Republicans tell me that as a RINO, I need to "get out" (often in more colorful terms) and that the GOP doesn't need anymore RINOs or moderates or Progressives in the party. Got news for all of you: You're wrong.



A Pure Minority Is Still A Minority

by Pat Edaburn


Ever since the election last fall we have seen an ongoing debate in the Republican party over which direction it should take in the future. Hard liners in the party have stated that they need to swing hard to the right to become as ideologically pure as possible. Web sites like Redstate.com and Polipundit.com regularly rail against so called RINO’s for being insufficiently pure.
In recent weeks however another voice has emerged as leading Republicans call for the party to be more of a big tent organization. Calls for the party to tone down social issues like gay marriage and abortion have been met with contempt by the web sites above.
Well I’ve got a message for those hard liners, being ideologically pure may be a nice idea but if you are in the minority it doesn’t do you very much good since you lose almost every vote. I certainly understand the desire to have people in office who you agree with on all of the issues, but the fact is that absent a situation where I become King of the World this isn’t going to happen very often.
If the GOP is going to succeed in the future they need to consider the impact of the hard line attitudes being pushed by the evangelical right.
Let us first consider the advantages of having a party that is ideologically pure, only allowing those who follow the party line 90-100% of the time to be members. On the bright side you are, as a hard liner, going to be happy with the way your party caucus votes most of the time. You can count on a 90-100% satisfaction rate.
But there is a problem when it comes to actually winning elections and getting policies implemented. I think it is fair to say that right now about 40% of voters will tend to support Republican/conservative views, about 40% will tend to support liberal/Democratic ones and about 20% will shift from one side to the other.
We can debate demographic trends but I’m not sure that it will change too much from this in the future. Even in our most one sided party periods there was a pretty solid middle set of voters that held the balance of power. I’m someome who likes to play with numbers so I ran up the following calculations.
So if you restrict your party to only the hard liners that are GOP/Conservative oriented voters, you’re gonna win about 40% of the votes, which means you are not going to control much more than 40% of the seats. This means you might be able to pull off wins about 10%-20% of the time at most.
So taking 90-100% satisfaction and factoring in 10-20% success on legislation and you end up with a ‘victory quotent’ of about 10%-20% of the time, and that isn’t very good.
On the other hand if you work to a broader coalition in your party, reaching out to those 20% of swing voters and maybe even some of those on the other side you will probably lower your satisfaction figures from 90-100% down to 70% or 80%. But you raise your success rate to 80-90% because you are winning elections.
This gives you a victory quotent which could approach 75% which is a whole lot better than the 15% or so that you had before. You might not get success on all of the social issues or the harder line domestic and foreign policy debates but you do win most of the time.
To put it another way, while I understand that subjects like abortion, gay rights, etc might be important to you and you might not like the inability to get your agenda passed. But the fact is you are not going to get that agenda passed no matter what.
Either you’re going to be in the minority and fail or you’re going to be in the majority and have to give ground.
When it comes to these kind of polarizing topics majority or minority status isn’t going to matter, whether you are on the right or on the left. But when it comes to the other 90% of the agenda, being in the majority is quite important.
In addition the future is only going to exacerbate these conditions.
Younger voters are far more libertarian in their attitudes towards social issues. This is unlikely to change as they get older. But when it comes to domestic and foreign policy issues there is much more room for movement, and in there the GOP has an opportunity.
I’m not saying you should give up your core beliefs. There is nothing wrong with the Republicans having a strong pro life element, but there is also nothing wrong with including voters who agree on most other issues, but happen to be pro choice. There is nothing wrong with having a strong evangelical contingent in the party but it should not be able to dominate.
During the 60’s and 70’s the Democratic party forgot the rule of broad inclusion and the result was a serious of major defeats. So far the Republicans have suffered two losses in a row and if they do not change things they are likely to see many more.

Police Officer Reinstated after ticketing mayor's son

An Update:

From Deserete News:

STOCKTON — Calling for Mayor Dan Rydalch's resignation, dozens of residents crammed into the Stockton fire station Thursday night, cheering the town council's unanimous vote to reinstate police Cpl. Josh Rowell.

"We need a mayor that can work with the town board, that the town board can trust, that has open communication. We need a mayor that the public can support," said Councilman Kendall Thomas at the council-called town meeting.

Rydalch is running for a second term as mayor this election season against Councilman Mark Whitney.

Rowell was fired last Tuesday by Rydalch after Rowell pulled over Rydalch's son and issued him a citation for driving without a license. Rowell was later told that he was being suspended instead.

One of five officers in the small town of 600 south of Tooele, Rowell had stopped 29-year-old Jared Rydalch outside a DUI checkpoint. Jared Rydalch was allegedly avoiding the roadblock and drove away from it; Rowell had been assigned to chase such cars.

Rydalch met with the town council before the meeting to address the incident with the four-member board for the first time, but did not come to the town meeting. He refuses to speak to the media at the advice of his attorney.

In a statement read at the meeting, Rydalch said he received numerous notices from residents — his son included — that officers were stopping drivers outside the planned checkpoint. Rydalch himself was pulled overthat evening.

"I was angry that the officers were exceeding the scope of the traffic checkpoint," his statement read. "This incident is not about my son, this is about an officer exceeding the proper scope of traffic checkpoints, subjecting the town to complaints for unconstitutional stops, and refusing

to cooperate with his supervisor."

If there was a Rydalch supporter at Thursday night's meeting, they did not speak up.

Tyler Rydlach, another son of the mayor, did not defend his father at the meeting, but did ask people to stop calling and harassing his parents.

Rowell's firing has garnered national attention and generated a media firestorm.

Residents at the meeting described Mayor Rydalch as a bully, butting heads with staff and running employees out of town.

"He tries to keep everyone in the dark. He doesn't want people to know that he's trying to run it this way," said Nando Meli, chair of the planning commission. "The thing is, the mayor has fired other people for instances and he's tried to run them out of town."

Residents complained that the mayor was conducting his own private investigation into Rowell's suspension; Meli said the mayor should be investigated.

"This is the kind of attitude and the things the mayor is known for," said Mark Woolley, a former town councilman. "He reacts, he doesn't think and he's supposed to represent our town and our community. And it seems to me more often then not he is representing himself and his interests."

Former town and court clerk Ellen Montague told the Deseret News Wednesday that Rydalch took away her duties, put her on paid leave and eventually asked her to resign. She sued Rydalch in 2006 for violating her civil rights.

Stockton Police Chief Heinz Kopp said Rowell, who has been in his current post less than 10 months, has issued 122 citations in that time and never had a formal complaint.

"The way the mayor handled the situation was uncalled for and unprofessional," he said.

The council voted to put Rowell back in his position, pay him back wages and remove the incident from his personnel record.

Rowell, a Tooele native whose wife is pregnant with the couple's first child, said he was grateful to be back in uniform. He refused to comment on the mayor.

The council, wanting to make sure their action is entirely legal, have asked the town's attorney to determine whether a third-party investigation is needed.

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The Council has reinstated the Officer, given him back wages, and is investigating the Mayor.

This is what I saying in the last post. Everyone but the Mayor himself thinks the Mayor overstepped immensely. The officer did what he was supposed to; look for people avoiding traffic stops. The Mayor got all bent out of shape that the ticketed individual happened to be his son, and fired the officer himself. A mayor should NEVER be able to fire a a police officer and bypass the chief, unless he intends on firing the chief. This would be like the President firing a random FBI agent. Doesn't, and shouldn't, happen.

And again, the fact that the mayor was conducting his own investigation said volumes. I agree with the City Council and the people of the town: This Mayor should be fired immediately.

Police Officer Suspended for Ticketing Mayor's Son

From KSL.com:

STOCKTON -- A traffic stop involving a young officer and the son of a small-town mayor has the whole town talking. The mayor of Stockton tried to fire the officer for issuing his son a ticket.
Cpl. Joshua Rowell told KSL News he was just doing his job. He said he acted professionally when he wrote the driver a ticket and was shocked when he was suddenly asked to hand over his badge.
Rowell is a new member of the five-man Stockton police force. So, last Tuesday he didn't think twice about pulling over a driver in a small white car for avoiding a DUI stop.

"He didn't have a driver's license, so I issued him a citation for that," Rowell explained.
He didn't think twice, that is, until he handed the ticket to the court clerk.
"She looked at it and said, ‘Hey, you know you just gave the mayor's son a ticket?' And I said, ‘Oh, crap,'" Rowell said.
He said he had never met the driver, 29-year-old Jared Rydalch, before. He said Rydalch told him he was out looking for his dog, and asked him to tell the other officers to not pull him over again.
"I told him, ‘No. If I see you driving around again, I'm going to pull you over again,'" Rowell said.
Rowell said he knew there was trouble when, about 20 minutes later, he found the chief of police in the mayor's truck in a heated discussion. Then he said the mayor, Dan Rydalch, rolled down the window and demanded he get in his truck. When he refused, Rydalch abruptly fired him on the spot.
"He told me, ‘All right, I want your badge in the morning,'" Rowell said. "I tried to defend myself and say, ‘First of all, look, he was breaking the law. Second of all, I didn't know he was your son.'"
Shortly after the incident, Rowell was told he was suspended without pay, indefinitely.
"The mayor, I think, was wrong," said Stockton City Council member David Durtschi.
According to Durtschi, not only was Mayor Rydalch out of line, the council stands behind Cpl. Rowell. In fact, the town is so upset about the mayor's actions, many of the citizens are trying to change their write-in ballots for the upcoming election.
"I think the mayor did make a mistake," one Stockton resident told KSL News.
Another said, "I was very shocked, very shocked, because I thought it was a little extreme."
As for Rowell, he just wants the job he loves back.
"There's no more respectable position than a police officer, in my mind," Rowell said.
We tried repeatedly to get ahold of the mayor.
Another Stockton city council member, Kendall Thomas, told KSL News the mayor is conducting the investigation into any wrongdoing in the incident and has not consulted any of the council members. A special council meeting is scheduled for Thursday night to discuss the incident.

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This is ridiculous. This mayor needs to be fired immediately. Notice above where it says that "The mayor is conducting the investigation into any wrongdoing in the incident and has not consulted any of the council members..."

WTF?! The mayor is conducting it? Can anyone say "conflict of interest"?

The mayor should be fired for, and charged with, Official Misconduct. Ridiculous. I grew up in a small town, and I thought the politics there were bad. But seriously.

Bailouts DID help...but at what cost?

Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General in Charge of oversight for the bailouts, essentially a government watchdog, is releasing a report today in which he gives a blunt assessment for the TARP bailouts started under Bush and expanded by Obama: The Bailouts saved our economy, but cost us more in the long term.

TIME:

[Barofsky] said the $700 billion bailout for the financial industry played a major role in rescuing the economy over the last year but also engendered anger and distrust among Americans because of secrecy and confusion about the way the program was handled...

"Despite the aspects of TARP that could reasonably be viewed as a substantial success," he wrote, "Treasury's actions in this regard have contributed to damage the credibility of the program and of the government itself, and the anger, cynicism and distrust created must be chalked up as one of the substantial, albeit unnecessary, costs of TARP."

Barofsky said public suspicion was fed by Treasury's decision not to require banks to report how they used their rescue money and its "less-than-accurate" statements describing the financial condition of nine large banks that benefited from large infusions of aid...

Overall, Barofsky said the cost of preventing a financial collapse fell into three categories:

•Taxpayers: The government has spent more than $454 billion through TARP programs. Forty-seven TARP recipients have paid back nearly $73 billion. That means more than $317 billion remains available. The program is set to end Dec. 31, but the administration could seek an extension until next October. Despite the repayments several of the program are not expected to yield returns to the taxpayer, including a $50 billion mortgage modification plan and some of the money injected into auto companies.

•The integrity of the industry: Many firms considered "too big to fail" last year, and thus in need of government assistance, are even bigger now. "Absent meaningful regulatory reform, TARP runs the risk of merely reanimating markets that had collapsed under the weight of reckless behavior," the report sates.

•The credibility of the government: Barofsky wrote that public antipathy for the bailout is fueled by "the lack of transparency in the program." Over the course of the year, Barofsky has called on the Treasury Department to seek more information from banks on how they use their taxpayer assistance.
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Basically, the bailouts worked in the short term. But because of government ineptitude and all the secrecy, distrust has been seeded instead of consumer confidence, which is what was really needed for the market to correct itself. A full disclosure and better oversight in the bailouts would've helped, but both Bush and Obama almost gave the money away without really looking at the causes of the collapse; in essence both Presidents merely put a bandaid on an infected shotgun wound, when what we really needed was to fix the root of the problem and cover the wound. We should've given the bailouts and broken up the "too big to fail" companies to make sure it never happened again.