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I've Been Given a Reason to Vote Republican

March 4, 2010, 3:15 pm

I wrote a while back that I had a real hard time getting excited about either McCain or Hayworth in this year' s AZ senate race.  But despite my disaffection from both candidates, I may have to suck it up and vote for one or the other.  Via Valley Fever:

Michael Moore Says He's Not Coming Back to Arizona Until State "Elects a Democrat as Senator"

Moore is nothing if not able to suppress his beliefs when money is on the line, so I have a guess we will continue to see him at Sundance despite the lack of a Utah Democrat in the Senate.

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Category: Arizona
  • http://thelibertypapers.org/ Brad Warbiany

    Does Sundance work on an invitation model? I'd love to see the hosts fail to invite Moore, then when questioned bring up this quote and say "oh, we didn't think you'd accept the invite anyway."

    Of course, I'm sure the Sundance hosts are as left-wing as Moore, so it wouldn't happen...

  • MJ

    I don't get it. Does Moore think this will be perceived as a threat?

  • Methinks

    I don't like McCain and never have. There's nothing that exciting about the Republicans - except that they aren't Democrats bent on destroying health care and bankrupting the country all in one piece of legislation that they are determined to shove down everyone's throats like the nobility in feudal societies. So, for the first time since Reagan, I'm excited about Republicans because I've already lived in and escaped from a country living under the jackboot of the Democrat vision. The best I can hope for is enough Democrats and Republicans to create gridlock. The hope of gridlock really makes me excited about Republicans.

  • TGP

    That might leave a french fry for someone else in the state.

  • http://http//www.tinyvital.com/blog John Moore

    The Republicans, even in their Bush high-spending times, were more friendly to the free market and liberty than the Democrats have been for decades.

    If you plan to vote (a civic duty IMHO), not voting for Republicans is just dumb.

  • IgotBupkis

    > I have a guess we will continue to see him at Sundance despite the lack of a Utah Democrat in the Senate.

    Yeah, well, the whole AZ thing is just displacement of his ire at Utah, anyway.

    Say, if we elect an overwhelmingly GOP Congress in the next 4 years, do ya think we can get him to actually leave the country ?

    ...Even if he refuses to go...?

  • IgotBupkis

    > I’m sure the Sundance hosts are as left-wing as Moore, so it wouldn’t happen…

    LOL, Robert Redford? Yeah, I think so...

    > If you plan to vote (a civic duty IMHO), not voting for Republicans is just dumb.

    Well, I do recommend a strong preference for True Republicans, which probably translates to candidates with Tea Party support.

    RINOs are almost worse than Dems, because they give the Dems cover and an appearance of bipartisan attitudes when what they have is no conservative support of any kind.

  • jay

    I've taken to voting 3rd party (basically libertarian leaning)

    If you don't vote, it's viewed as apathy, if you hold your nose and vote for one of the 'major' parties, they've succeeded because they got your vote despite their policies. (I cannot stomach the Dems authoritarian social moralizing or the GOPs authoritarian religious moralizing.)

    a vote for a third party, even though it doesn't win, is a vote that truly says "none of the above", and both parties realize it's a vote that they failed to capture.

  • ADiff

    I think most of the proposals I've seen from the Democrats on health care are pretty bad. That said, I'm getting to the point where I'm about sick and tired of hearing about all that. It's pretty clear we need to address the issue of Health Care, somehow. While they certainly should continue to obstruct changes believed very negative, isn't about time critics of current proposals offer something positive? Bitching and moaning may be highly constructive in stopping bad ideas, but after a while they get very old and ultimately nothing isn't an acceptable substitute even for flawed efforts at reform. Critics should think about that pretty soon, I think. In answer to ceaseless objections to every potential commander suggested for the Army of the Potomac Abraham Lincoln asked "and then who would you recommend". The reply "anyone, anyone else" was met with the rejoinder "anyone won't do, I have to have a man, I have to have a General". The point is that however useful "no" may be, it isn't an answer.

    Unless, of course, you believe the current state of the health care system is just fine and we don't need to do anything at all...in which case you should make that clear. I'm afraid that'll just take you out of the discussion, however, as it's also pretty clear the overwhelming majority does believe the current system is badly broken and does need reform, however little agreement there may seem at the moment with respect to any such now offered.

    Think about it.

  • Eddie

    ADiff: For nearly 100 years now, the Democrats have been saying that the health care industry is broken, and government needs to step in and fix it. During that 100 years the way people pay for and insure against health care needs has changed dramatically. In many cases, government mandates for health care requirements, along with incentives for offering certain types of coverage and for employers to offer insurance plans, have drastically changed the face of the health care industry.

    Now, we're told that we need drastic changes to fix cost problems that have arisen due to the managed health care programs that have arisen due to nudges by the same folks who want the drastic changes? Funny thing is, this wasn't a crisis in the 90s when the Clintons bent the system out of shape, and it isn't really a crisis now.

    There wouldn't even be anything to complain about at all, except that managed plans have increased unecessary spending on health care by a factor of 2 or more, according to recent studies.

  • Eddie

    By the way, does Michael Moore ever come to Arizona anyway? Why?

  • ADiff

    I understand he's making a movie about Joe Arpaio called "Bowling in Fountain Hills"....

    I agree with Warren, Moore's declaration's at least one reason to vote GOP, anyway. What a piece of work that guys is!

    Although I will admit he is an effective propagandist, at any rate.

  • ADiff

    Eddie,

    I don't know (or really even care to try to understand) what the Democrats (or the Republicans either) have been saying about it in the distant past. What's broken clearly isn't "the health care industry" (at least as I see it, anyway). What's "broken" is the way our Federal government is involved in that industry! Now I'm not at all one of those thinking there should be no such involvement. I respect the views of those so thinking, but firmly believe that at least some aspects of health care are clearly areas for social investment. Any discussion of that's beyond this venue, but suffice it to say that I (and I believe the overwhelming majority) believe "get rid of it all" isn't practical. So the government intervenes in that market, in ways that appear not only highly flawed, but causing severe negative distortions in that market. It's that we need to fix, not the industry itself. What needs to be fixed is Federal health care programs, from Medicare and Medicaid all the way to the Public Health Service and the CDC. Fix those and I personally believe the industry will do fine all on its own. I say this from the perspective of our society overall, as I personally have plenty of high quality care and have no individual beef of any kind with things just as they are.

    No axe to grind here, just wanted to make that clear. The problem isn't in the private sector, it's with the socialized aspects of the system as a whole.

  • Methinks

    ADiff,

    The Republicans proposed portability of health insurance. That's not only a positive proposal but a huge step in the right direction - more competition among insurance companies, fewer pre-existing condition issues and more choice for the consumer. The Dems flatly refused to even entertain the notion.

    Bad ideas have to be obstructed and obstructing them is at least as important as coming up with positive ideas. How can we even talk about positive proposals when the Dems are ready to apply a bulldozer to anything that might still work in health care?

  • roger the shrubber

    i'd pretty much given up on politics when i realized voting for a republican was like voting for...oh...forrest gump, say. then i realized i kind of *had* to vote for poor stupid forrest because his democrat opponent was ted bundy. oh, sure, forrest's a gullible idiot and ted is always conning him with sincere promises that he immediately reneges on, but still - given a choice between an *idiot* in power, or a *sociopath* in power, who's less likely to hurt or kill you? any russian or chinese can answer that one for you pretty quick.

    well, now we have ourselves a nero in the oval office, and his chief of staff is a dzerzhinsky. if you doubt that, just look at the folks who ardently support/love him - class acts like michael moore and the simpletons of washington and hollywood. the 'healthcare' con is just this decade's smokescreen: before that it was welfare, before that medicare, before that social security, before that income tax....all with the same M.O.: they started out small, so small as to be negligible. they all came with solemn promises they would never be expanded, and would always pay their own way as they went. of course, ted bundy promised his victims he'd be a perfect gentleman, too, so there ya go.

    whatever else forrest's faults may be, "control of the people" is fairly far down the list, i think. democrats and sociopaths, however, see things differently: a (paraphrased) description of the sociopath's goals can be found in any DSM manual: "the goal of the sociopath is to obtain complete control and domination over [his intended victims] and his means are to create fear, isolation, and ***total dependency***. (my emphasis) sound familiar?

    my contempt for the bushes, and mccains, and grahams, and all the other RINO's of this world know no bounds. but they merely disgust me. they don't *scare me. a sociopath in power DOES. poop on michael moore! gump/palin/any non-democrat in '10 and'12!!

  • MJ

    ADiff,

    The problem is that the Democrats want to impose sweeping changes in the way that health care is structured. I believe, from listening to Obama and congressional Dems, that the bulk of their proposed changes are focused on extending insurance coverage to the presently uninsured. That's a noble goal, but as presented has serious problems.

    For one, Warren has shown how the number of uninsured that we should be focusing on is much smaller than the numbers bandied about in public debates. This leads me to believe that a hidden goal is to greatly increase the number of people receiving government-run insurance (via Medicare/Medicaid or some new bureaucracy needed to administer a 'public option').

    The other big issue that I see is that the other putative goal of these proposals is cost containment. There are very few measures in the current proposals that would have any chance of reducing costs. Many would push in the opposite direction, by increasing the demand for health care.

    The Republicans will have to, at some point, come up with a counter-plan if they are to be seen as serious about this issue and not merely 'obstructionist'. Reintroducing the idea of portability would be a good start. If Democrats rejected this approach it would lay bare their bias toward sheltering unionized labor, which currently benefits greatly from employer-based coverage (via 'cadillac' insurance plans), and their opposition to serious cost-containment measures.

    The real problem with health care costs, as they relate to the government, is that much like private insurance providers government insurance providers are third-party intermediaries in the process of paying for treatment. It's hard to expect anyone to make better decisions about cost/effectiveness tradeoffs in care when they have no direct stake in doing so. This is why past efforts at cost containment have largely failed.

  • dr kill

    Methinks- to paraphrase Ann Coulter- 'there are a lot of bad Republicans, but there are no good Democrats'.

    So true.

  • Rick C

    @jay: "a vote for a third party, even though it doesn’t win, is a vote that truly says “none of the above”, and both parties realize it’s a vote that they failed to capture."

    No. Let me give you an example. You have George Bush, a wishy-washy Republican, Bill Clinton, a very liberal Democrat (HillaryCare, anyone?) and Ross Perot, a kook. After Bill Clinton is elected because Ross took nearly 19% of the vote (including yours), he blows you a kiss for getting him elected.

    Or you can have a current example. Debra Medina failed to gather enough votes in the recent Texas Republican Gubernatorial primary (18%) and the incumbent won outright with 51%. The next day on the radio, I heard morons saying that Rick Perry isn't conservative enough for them, so they're going to vote for Bill White, the Democrat. Wait, what?

  • IgotBupkis

    > is a vote that truly says “none of the above”

    Come the revolution, that should be one thing we install in the next democratic system -- "none of the above", which is essentially an anti-vote for all the candidates. If "none of the above" wins the ballot, then the election is redone and the candidates that were on the slate cannot run for that office ever, ever again. They should also be encouraged to never run for or hold any elected or appointed government office, too, but that might be a bit trickier to require.

  • IgotBupkis

    > isn’t about time critics of current proposals offer something positive?

    LOL, what planet have YOU been on?

    Oh, planet "MSM", apparently...

    The GOP has been offering a set of tried and true proposals -- ones which are known to work -- for several years now.

    > i’d pretty much given up on politics when i realized...

    Roger, I somewhat agree with you, but one of the key tricks I've found is also "vote the bastards out". The longer anyone stays in office, the more beholden they become to special interests, the less connected they become to the people they purportedly represent, and the harder it is to get the fellatiating SOBs out of office.

    So, one rule I use is, if I don't know of anything notably good the incumbent has done -- particularly if the opposition isn't particularly odious (a lot less possible of recent, with the Dems putting up total basket cases more often than not, meaning you have to vote for change in the primaries), Vote Against the Incumbent.

    This helps reduce the accumulation of power and favors which winds up with Ted Bund///// sorry, "Kennedy" in power for, oh, several thousand years longer than he should be.

  • Mesa Econoguy

    110 degree heat kills people with Moore’s bodyfat percentage instantly – that’s the real reason.

    I dare that fat ignorant bastard to come here, and take a brief stroll around 3 pm in July.

  • epobirs

    Adiff,

    If you look at the history of health insurance, the problems start during the FDR/WWII era when there were ham-fisted attempts to control employees who might leave a vital war contractor for better money elsewhere. This is where health care as an employment perk first got entrenched, then tax laws were passed in the 50s that unfairly gave large employers an advantage over smaller companies vi tax breaks. It has snowballed ever since. The very concept of health insurance for every contact with medical personnel is broken at its root. As has been said, it's like expecting your car insurance to keep your gas tank filled and your homeowner's policy to keep groceries in the fridge.

    The insurance industry has, in the health care sector, become a monster that is far more deeply involved in our lives than any such entity should be. The government programs like Medicare were just a natural reaction once the citizenry became trained to believe they needed some entity between them and the doctor handling the financial side. If we want the government to help fund charitable health care organizations, that is one thing. A bad thing but at least less market distorting.

    What we need is a way to to kill the health insurance monster without creating an NHS-like entity that replaces it.

  • me

    @IgotBupkis

    Congrats - you've made a suggestion (a vote against that prevents candidates from running again) that if implemented would actually get our maladjusted political system working again.

    Respect.

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  • caseyboy

    President Obama and the democrats won't accept small incremental steps that might improve the health care system. They want the government in control of health care, period. They see this massive legislation as an incremental step toward the real objective, a single payer (government) program. There is video (pre-election) of Obama stating that his objective is a single payer system. But he acknowledged that it can't be done in one step. Obama can't afford to have the system improved through smaller market oriented changes because that would undermine the grand plan, government mandated and controlled health care. Look past his words to his motives. When he said he wanted to "Transform America" he wasn't talking about fixing the way Washington works. He was talking about changing the way Americans work and live. He has a vision of what is best for you. DON'T GET IN THE WAY.

  • IgotBupkis

    "Cheap Loans" comment == semi-blatant spam.

  • IgotBupkis

    Me:

    Two other ideas I like --

    One from Robert Heinlein: Two houses, one of which passes laws with only with a 2/3rds majority, and another house which repeals laws with only a 1/3rd minority. The idea being that if a third of the people dislike it, it probably has no business being law anyway.

    Another, just to deal reasonably with the "incumbent" issue. The first time you get elected, it's by the now-standard 50% majority. The first re-election, in order to get elected you have to win your primary with a 55% vote, or else you're out and not eligible for that office again (if you fail the 55%, but no one else has 50%, then a runoff is scheduled with you eliminated). The second time through, you need a 60% majority to get re-elected. Each time, it increases by 5% up to a max of 75% (if you can get 3/4ths of the people to vote for you, you must be doing something right). This allows people who ARE getting real widespread approval to get re-elected, while preventing the casual "Vote For The Name You Know" re-elections which have become so prevalent somehow.

  • roger the shrubber

    "repeal" a law! what a quaint notion. that's probably why it had to be put into a fictional story. really, whattaya suppose the percentage of laws enacted are ever repealed (and not just amplified, strengthened, redefined or superseded by a new one)? one-one hundredth of one percent? i can think of maybe 3 : 1)prohibition, of course (but not until organized crime had been given a dozen years to set down strong roots and thousands of americans had their lives ruined over a beer or two) 2)awhile back, with much self-congratulatory hoopla, didn't they finally repeal a telephone tax enacted in the 1890's to help pay for the spanish-american war? 3)the (bitter, grudging, done-only-at-gunpoint repeal of 55mph.

    so that's *3* laws repealed out of, say, 5,000,000 passed.....carry the "2"....and we get a percentage of......

    i think i see the problem.

  • ADiff

    Well whatever may come to pass (and I assure you I don't expect things to get better any time real soon) at the very least it's probably a good idea to vote against all Democrats this time around anyway (at least at the Federal level), as they control the Executive and the Legislative branches, and show evidence of thinking they can do just any old thing they want. They need a good stout 'wakeup' call on the nose with an electoral 2x4, at the very least. If not their eating off our plates is going to get completely out of hand!

  • me

    @IGotBupkis:

    Even more respect. Three ideas about systemic political reform, each of which would greatly improve the process and thereby -eventually- the overall outcome. My remaining question, of course, is: how do we get you to be in charge of making these reforms?

    Thank you for making my day :)

  • IgotBupkis

    Roger, you fail to grasp, while the "pass laws" chamber's actions would be dominated by the majority party, the "repeal laws" chamber would be action-dominated by the minority party.

    Suppose we had that system right now. What do you think the GOP would be doing about ObamaCare? Because they likely have the votes to repeal it in that system.

    You might even wind up with stalemates, where every time one group gets together and manages to pass a law, the other gets together the votes to repeal it. So you'd wind up with the kind of deadlock and low-quantity-passage scenario for the Fed which the founders actually envisioned.

    The current system is no guideline at all -- repealing a law is easily tied up in committee, and still takes majority support. The whole point of this version of bicamerality is that it makes it EASY to remove laws from the books. The kind of individual that attracts is the minimal government type. Hell, that chamber might be dominated by libertarians and small-government conservatives, more of whom would actually run for office than currently. More critically, the lower the number of people required to agree with something, the easier it is to obtain agreement.

    Further: If I have a group of 10 people, and delegate a subgroup of them to decide where to get lunch from -- is it easier to get 3 people make the decision or 6? Because that's the difference involved. "A committee is the only known form of life with six or more legs and no brain". The bigger a committee gets, the more of a slow-witted dinosaur it becomes. Most such bodies wind up making a decision ONLY through the efforts of a dominant leader who pushes and prods the other members into going along with what said leader has decided...

    Workable? Not sure. I can see/feel there are subtle possible problems with it that you aren't commenting on, if you're seeing them at all.
    But it's one of those ideas that is certainly worth discussing in detail to see what the potential problems might be, and if there are ways around them.