Election

[elizilla]

So it looks like people prefer the status quo to the alternatives that were offered. Makes sense to me. The status quo could be better, but the alternatives were mostly pretty dismal.

Ypsilanti consolidated schools with Willow Run, and the school millages passed. Hopefully this will work out well for the combined districts.

Matty Moroun lost his attempt to block the new bridge - yay! We have definitely had enough of his monopoly tricks. The existing bridge is a traffic bottleneck on the US side because of his shenanigans, and the Canadians are sick of having the NAFTA highway running down their surface streets. If Canada wants to foot the bill for a whole new bridge, and bypass Matty Moroun's little fiefdom, I say we give them our full cooperation.

The California style tax gridlock amendment failed, yay! If we're going to imitate California, why start with the dysfunctional stuff?

And we nuked the emergency manager law. I can see why people wanted it, but replacing elected officials with people appointed from outside is not a very democratic way of handling those frustrations. I wonder what will happen now, to the municipalities currently under emergency management?

The other proposal results all just went in the direction of keeping the status quo. Nothing was destroyed and no new messes were made. I'm comfortable with that.

Comments

[khaylock]

Have you legalised recreational pot and/or same sex marriage in your state?

[elizilla]

Unfortunately the religious wackos made a big push and got a constitutional amendment put through here to make gay marriage illegal, several years ago. I still have the No on 2 yard signs in my garage. Now, before we can legalize it we have to undo that garbage first, sigh.

We have medical marijuana here, and a number of municipalities have passed laws telling the cops that pot enforcement is low priority, but we don't have outright legalization.

[khaylock]

Ah... religious whackos... I think one good thing from this election in the US is that they seem to be in full retreat at present...

[elizilla]

They're not retreating - their delusion is the sort where failure is considered proof of righteousness. And really, who cares what they do with their own lives? That's their business. But it sure would be nice to give them a little less power over the rest of us.

[khaylock]

Speaking from over here (the UK is a secular country, despite our nominal state religion, where less than 5% of people attend a church/mosque/temple/etc on a Sunday), it sort of appears that the swivel-eyed crazies had descended upon big swathes of the Republican Party and taken it over, because there were more of them who wanted to take over the Republican Party than any other group who were motivated to get involved. My fervent hope, on behalf of people who lived in the US, was that the batshit crazy tendency didn't actually represent anybody except themselves, and that when the reality of 'The American Taliban' met a wider electorate head on, it would get a kick in the nuts. At which point the Koch brothers would conclude that putting billions of dollars behind trying to get clinically insane and willfully ignorant people who want to micromanage other people's life choices elected is a total waste of money, and stop doing it. In many cases, it seems to have worked, with a number of very winnable senate seats lost due to the 'I know he's a Republican, I want to vote Republican, but this candidate is clearly insane/evil/both so I can't' factor. The hope is that the only people now saying 'The problem is, we clearly weren't batshit crazy enough!' are the swivel-eyed loons themselves, and that the people paying for all this craziness aren't prepared to bankroll any more of it.

The risk for youse guys was that anti-encumbent sentiment would have swept the batshit crazies into a position of real power and you'd all have been very badly screwed for a very, very long time. And I don't care how much somebody believes that the Ryan plan was a better economic prescription for America in the short term, they should know with the Religious fundies in control of e.g. education, and schools forced to teach 'intelligent design', a generation down the line you'd be well on the way to a future as a national historical theme park...

[elizilla]

The religious pandering and the Southern Strategy makes a good cover for the guys who have the means and the desire to put themselves at the top of a banana republic, so they keep paying for it. There are a lot of Republicans whose primary motivation is not Jesus and/or racism, hell Romney is probably in that group and just got himself beholden to them. But the ones who can see that it takes more than a D after your name to make you a socialist, can hold their nose and vote for a Democrat who hands them everything their party was proposing, back before their party went insane. They kvetch like sports fans whose team lost, but they go on.

[khaylock]

I like Rachel Maddow a lot, based on what little I've seen of her from over here, and I like this bit of analysis a lot...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/49736294#49736294

[khaylock]

I also saw an analysis which claimed that because the GOP Primary process has now ensured that sane people remotely likely to be elected by a reality based electorate would always be weeded out by the batshit crazy demographic who have made themselves the people who decide GOP primaries, this had pretty much ensured that sane people would decide that running for office was pointless, & that the batshit crazies should be left to yell into their own echo chamber & spiral off into marginal irrelevance, taking their party with them.

Two party systems, eh?

Something very similar happened in the UK, where we had an effective two party system in the 1970's (there were two main parties, Conservative & Labour, plus a vestigial 3rd 'Liberal' party with a tiny handful of seats. The Liberals had for centuries been one half of an earlier 2 party system before the 1st world war but had been destroyed by post WW1 recriminations). By the end of the 1970's, the governing Labour party had effectively been infiltrated by the hard left, ideologically driven, marxist 'Militant Tendency', who were every bit as non-reality based as your christian evangelical conservatives are, though admittedly in a very different way. & when I say 'Marxist', I mean proper & proudly Marxist, mass nationalisation, profit is evil, etc, not 'something Republicans ridiculously call Obama'. When the Labour party lost the 1979 general election to Margaret Thatcher's conservatives, much blood letting followed. Wave after wave of it, as labour rendered itself progreesively less & less electable through each election cycle, & conservative majorities grew & grew election after election, even as they did economically unpalatable things. The militant tendency also held regular purges of the insufficiently ideologically committed & drove anybody interested in reality out of the party, hijacked candidate selection to deselect the ideologically impure, etc. This came to a head when the last of the moderate, sane ex Labour government ministers still in parliament quit the party & set up a new 'Social Democratic Party', which immediately began challenging Labour in opinion polls & winning by-elections against all comers. At this point, the Labour party could easily have imploded completely, & the SDP would have smoothly taken its place, leaving the crazies to rant to themselves in the lonely darkness. Instead, those people who had rejected a chance to leave on the SDP liferaft formed an alliance with the moderate trade unions who bankrolled the Labour party & expected it to be a party of government that would further their [members] agenda, rather than an expensive irrelevance, decided to hold a last stand battle for the soul of their party. It was bloody & unpleasant, it took years & things got worse before they got better, but eventually Militant was defeated & then purged/expelled from the party for 'running a party within a party'. They went off to form something called 'Socialist Labour', which vanished without trace after never getting anybody elected to anything, & the restored Labour Party, rebranded as 'New Labour', put Tony Blair in as leader & then won 3 straight elections from 1996. The SDP had their thunder stolen by a resurgent Labour party, & ended up merging with that old rump Liberal Party to form the 'Liberal Democrats', who are now part of a coalition government with the Conservatives for the first time in 90 years. Anyway, the lesson from our experience is that if the GOP surrender their party to the crazies, eventually the people who aren't crazy but want to advance a more right leaning agenda than the members of the only sane party will be forced to set up their own party. But that that will only work once the lunatics have completely taken over the asylum & left non-loonies on the right of US politics completely out in the cold. When somebody does that, & when it looks like it is working, that's the final wake up call for anybody who wants to save the GOP, because if they don't take their party back right then, there won't be a party to take back...

I'm not sure why I wrote all that. Thinking aloud, perhaps. I find all this stuff much more fascinating when I'm a disinterested observer from afar...

[(Anonymous)]

The problem per se isn't necessarily Republican v. Democrat or Liberal v. Conservative (as if we used those terms accurately any more, tis to laugh) so much as everything is so damned polarized any more... There are many people in the US who see both sides of this imaginary fence, but anyone striving for balanced policy is immediatly suspect. I want my gay friends to marry, but I also want my 2nd Amendment right to carry a concealed firearm for defense. Why are these completely unrelated goals contradictory?

The one thing I can point to in the 2012 Presidential Election as a Good Thing Indeed is the ass-raping that KKKarl Rove is undergoing right now. That fills my twisted, raisin-like heart with a bounty of mirth and glee.