amyers's Comments (25)

“Clemson's C.J. Spiller has to be the most exciting player in college football right now. He has been doing some insane things on the football field to get his team into the ACC Championship Game. I can't vote for the Heisman, but he'd be at the top of my ballot if I could.”

“The LPGA has been stuck for the past few years with a commissioner (Carolyn Bivens) who did not put much consideration into marketing women's golf to American audiences. Michael Whan, who takes over in that position in January, comes from a marketing background; with young American players like Wie, Creamer, Pressel, Natalie Gulbis, and Brittany Lincicome becoming fixtures on LPGA leaderboards, he should fare better in his role than his predecessor.”

“One of the many problems Republicans have right now is that they are selling their platform as ideology and not as something that works. They support small government for the sake of small government, they support tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts. They have become so indoctrinated with these ideas over the last three decades that they believe their product sells itself. This is why the GOP is so obsessed with the state of their "brand," and not with improving the message with which they attempt to win over voters.

It also doesn't help that 28 years of repeating the mantra "government is the problem" has led to a culture of weak policy behind their stale old ideas. Even if you think that addressing health care reform or education or poverty is something best left to private citizens and not government programs, those efforts need to be backed by strong policies that encourage the private sector to meet the desired objectives. Simply sitting back and declaring that the markets will solve the problem by themselves isn't going to work, because the markets will always put maximizing profits before maximizing service when left to their own devices.”

“My favorite Tim Calhoun line:

"Jack Abramoff? But I hardly know Abram."”

“Exactly who was calling for an abolition of the electoral college?”

“Let's have a look at the current landscape, shall we?

Obama's victory was not a landslide in the Reagan-Mondale sense, but it was most certainly decisive. He won about the same total in the electoral college as other presidents did with a similar margin of victory (see also: Clinton's two wins). And despite what talk radio mouthpieces want you to believe, his approval ratings are still in the high 60s.

Meanwhile, for all of the congressional Republicans' attempts to obstruct the stimulus package by living in their own world of endless tax cuts, all they have to show for their solidarity is a popularity similar to that of canine epilepsy. Meanwhile, most GOP governors are breaking ranks with their Washington brethren (except for Jindal, whose political ambitions necessitate a display of ideological purity), seeing that their grandstanding doesn't help the budget crises their own states are facing. To top it all off, the new RNC chairman keeps going on about introducing conservatism to "hip-hop settings," as if the party's problem is that young voters don't think Republicans are cool enough instead of the fact that their platform does not address issues that youths and blacks care about. The conservative movement may be alive, but it's not at all well.”

“One of the all-time "What If" moments in American political history: What if Ross Perot had organized his supporters from his first presidential run to establish the Reform Party in 1993, and drafted a slate of congressional and gubernatorial candidates to run in the 1994 mid-term elections? What if he didn't waste all of his momentum from the 1992 campaign on his anti-NAFTA crusade, and only form a party as a front to his 1996 presidential bid? Would we have a viable third party in this country now if he and his supporters had done that?”

“If you have such a dim view of human nature, then why should we have a system that provides no safeguard against people who seek to swindle, abuse, and violate the freedoms of the rest of us? If I am not to trust that a government with a mandate from the masses will act with our best interests in mind, why should I think that a person who is most eager to receive the money from my pocket is any better?

This is all a meaningless debate, because at the end of the day, I'm not going to make you budge on your belief that all government is evil, and you're not going to convert me to the wonders of anarcho-capitalism.”

“Yeah, and about that dim view of human nature...quite frankly, it's too hard to spend one's entire life on guard against a world that can never be trusted. I'll keep my faith in humanity, thank you very much.”

“There are two general schools of libertarianism: rational fundamentalists and anti-authoritarian right-wingers. The libertarian who believes so fully in the infallibility of human reason that he deems the rule of law unnecessary is one of the former; the libertarian who builds a makeshift fort in the woods where he can fend off anyone who tries to take away his money or his stockpile of sawed-off shotguns is one of the latter.”

“I hope that the Republican opposition proves to be more constructive than obstructive these next four years. With the arrival of a new government, let's see an end to drawing lines in the sand and shouting at the top of one's lungs, to hammering out good legislation by working out differences of opinion at the negotiating table.”

“The Tories aren't really in that great of shape. They're better represented in the House of Commons than they were, but they don't garner anywhere near as much support as they need to to win more than a minority government in the next UK general election. A Conservative plurality in the House of Commons only leaves the door open for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to form a center-left coalition the moment the government takes a misstep, setting the stage for a parliamentary crisis like the one unfolding in Canada as we speak.”

“Were we supposed to believe WorldNetDaily to be a credible, impartial news source in the first place?”

“--Cont'd--

The most common branch of socialism is social democracy, which is ultimately a continuation of the Progressive Movement that went to great lengths to reform America into the country it is today during the early 1900s. Its forefathers were as influenced by Karl Marx as they were by Jesus Christ; even today social democratic parties worldwide work closely with Christian organizations. The socialism that is being compared to is not the bolshevism of our former ideological adversaries, but the principles firmly entrenched in the governments of our strongest allies. A constructive debate over social democracy and whether it has a place in the American system of government, is long overdue. If only we could have it without conservative opponents insisting on an illogical "slippery-slope-to-communism" argument in dissent, and address the real drawbacks to such a proposal.”

“The most mind-boggling political argument of the 2008 presidential election was the constant "socialist" name-calling towards Obama shouted by Republicans and their supporters while their president and his cabinet was simultaneously purchasing equity in the American banking system: a clear ploy by conservative strategists to stir up anger within their low-information voter base who don't understand what socialism is, but know it's bad because their favorite pastor/talk radio host/Fox News personality told them so.

It's a problem that the GOP has so successfully programmed its base to immediately associate a term that represents a broad spectrum of political philosophies exclusively to a particularly extreme form therein that has lost all relevance in the global perspective. It would be shortsighted, though, to think that this mentality began during the Cold War; its true beginnings came well before then. When this country, overwhelmed by its new place as a global power after a 20-year period bookended by the Spanish-American and Great Wars, tried (and failed) to escape its new responsibilities, it also abandoned the progressive ideal. The two lasting effects of this self-imposed isolation that are extremely relevant to this issue are the schism of Christian theology between the liberal/modernist and conservative/fundamentalist factions (with the latter holding the upper hand for the last thirty years), and the ongoing hostility toward socialism in any form.”

“Insert text of Friedrich Hayek's "Why I Am Not a Conservative" here, straight from the mouth of a man whose writings form the basis of modern political conservatism.”

“I don't understand the backlash, either. I'm pretty centrist when it comes to economic issues, and I fail to see what good making Wall Street suffer is going to do to solve the country's financial woes, or that Clintonian advisers somehow lack the ability to be pragmatic in the face of a crisis of this magnitude. President-elect Obama has gathered a group of very intelligent people with various perspectives on economic policy with whom (one must hope) he can consult and reach consensus. We're all learning as we go along at this point in the game, so the best thing any of us can do is to stay alert and stay vocal on the situation in the coming weeks and months, and make sure that our leaders and legislators can hear our voice.”

“Yes, but we can demand the opportunity to be allowed to counterpoint all the bulls*** they spew. It's called the Fairness Doctrine, and we had it until Reagan abolished it.”

“Follow that advice, and the Republican candidate in 2012 will be lucky to make it out better than Walter Mondale.”

“The high-water mark of Rovian politics and the "50-percent-plus-one" strategy is a 286-251 electoral victory with a 2-point advantage of the popular vote. Bush and the GOP claimed that this gave them a mandate, political capital, and set the course for a permanent Republican majority. Obama's victory makes all of that look feeble in comparison, and it comes only four years after those declarations.

The Republican Party has no base in the Northeast. It has no base on the West Coast. Its base is diminishing in the Midwest and Mountain West. The perfect execution of the Rovian Republican strategy, as proven in 2000 and 2004, results only in a narrow victory that hangs on a few hundred or thousand votes in a large battleground state. When everything doesn't go right, you lose in a landslide. The reality is that Kerry's 252 electoral votes in '04 represents the worst a Democratic candidate can do in a national election in the current political climate, and that McCain's 173 electoral votes this year does not even scratch the surface on how badly things can go for Republicans. Expand your message, expand your base: that's the bottom line for the GOP.”

“Don't just abandon Rove personally, abandon his entire philosophy. The whole "50-percent-plus-1" strategy only works when you play all your cards right. That 286-251 Bush electoral victory in 2004, the one that gave you a mandate and political capital to spend? That's the high-water mark of Rovian politics, and Obama obliterated it four years after you declared that a permanent Republican majority was at hand. Find your Howard Dean.”

“I live in Georgia, and I am going to make sure to remind all of my friends who voted for Obama and Martin to go back to the polls on December 2. Our job is not done yet.”

“Very well stated, Senator. Like Joe Biden, you were in your day a statesman of Obama's mold who came to prominence at the wrong time. If you were so generous as to offer your service as the President-Elect builds his new administration, this country would be better for it.”

“Electoral College: Obama = 367, McCain = 171
Popular Vote: Obama = 52.8%, McCain = 45.6%
Senate: Dem = 57, GOP = 41, Ind = 2
House: Dem = 262, GOP = 173
MN Senate Race: Coleman = 41.2%, Franken = 40.7%, Barkley = 18.1%”

“For all you direct democracy advocates out there, here's the deal: even with the Electoral College, American voters still have more of a say in deciding its leaders than any other liberal democracy in the world. Why? Because the vast majority of our developed allied nations base their governments on the Westminster system (a.k.a.: the British Parliament). Under the Westminster system, the head of government is simply the leader of the party that holds a majority of the seats in the legislature; other than the MP of their district, voters have no say in who the Prime Minister will be.

The Electoral College has its faults, but it does what the framers of the Constitution intended it to do: provide a good compromise between a national popular vote (which would give too much power to major population centers) and an equal vote between individual states (which would give too much power to smaller or less-populated regions of the country). In my opinion, the ideal solution is for every state to adopt the Maine-Nebraska Method of distributing electoral votes, in which a state allocates the electoral votes representing its individual congressional districts to the candidate who wins each of those districts, while awarding the electoral votes representing its two Senate seats to the statewide winner of the popular vote. This method would eliminate the dilemma of swing states: every individual vote is potentially worth three electoral votes. There is no fairer way.”