Newt Gingrich should probably read this...

Radical Presidents

Top Websites

It has been a busy week, but a productive one. I thought I would spend this week reviewing some of my favorite political websites. They range from humorous to informative, but they are all sites that I have used to great effect at some point.

Today's site is www.fivethirtyeight.com. This site was really useful to me during the 2008 election because of their excellent poll coverage. For example, they are the only U.S. based site that seems to have useful information on the upcoming UK elections. They also do a great job of providing actual data analysis to back up the political opinions that they express. While there is a liberal lean to this site, it is one that is out in the open and pretty moderate. One of the more interesting sidebars right now focuses on how likely a state's Senate seat is to switch parties in the fall (I'll give you a hint, not looking good for Dems). All in all, this site has a really refreshing mix of fact and opinion and is usually pretty entertaining.

Senate Cooperation

John McCain warned that Democrats should be prepared for little to no cooperation from Republicans for the rest of the year. Hey John, how will that be different from the behavior of Republicans in the first part of the year??

Political Compass

So I found this fun website a long time ago, but rediscovered it today. It's called Political Compass, and through a short test, it purports to be able to measure where you fall politically on a grid representing both economic and social views. It is a fascinating website, and I highly recommend checking it out, even if just to take the test. Here is an excerpt from the site followed by my compass.

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitrary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy)

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.

In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily "right wing", with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.

Your political compass

Economic Left/Right: -4.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00

Confusing court decisions on religion...

So, yesterday I found a couple of interesting articles related to court decisions on religious issues. One of the main reasons they were interesting is that both were cases related to limiting religious expression in school, and I disagreed with the Supreme Court and the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court for entirely different reasons. In the first case, the 9th Circuit Court argued that in Western States, children can continue to say the Pledge of Allegiance. They argued that atheist parents had no grounds in their case that the Pledge violates the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment. You know, the whole "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" thing? Who would have thought that adding "under God" to the Pledge would give anyone the impression that schools were trying to establish the existence of a deity? Here is the article:Pledge of Allegiance

While the Supreme Court has been irritating me lately with a variety of asinine decisions, (most notably the idea that giving massive amounts of money to political campaigns is free speech) I was not expecting to disagree with the court on the issue of restricting religious expression. In this case, the court rejected an appeal by students to overturn their school's ban on playing 'Ave Maria' at graduation. What is most amazing is that it would be an orchestral version with no lyrics. Soooo, unless certain notes now have religious significance, I don't understand the problem. As a singer, this issue is particularly murky for me. I sang plenty of religious music in high school and college and personally enjoyed it as a piece of artistic output rather than a religious expression. Kind of like enjoying the Bible for its story-telling and allegorical significance without believing in all the magic trick parts. While the composers obviously meant their music to be religious in nature, I feel that I can separate the art from the religion in this case. I realize this may seem hypocritical given the first paragraph of this post, but I never said I was 100% consistent. :-) Here is that article: Ave Maria

A fantastic op-ed piece

I have been thinking a lot over the last day or so about the health care debate and the bill that Obama signed this morning. On the one hand, I am not so fiscally liberal that I think government can provide everything to everyone. On the other hand, however, our health care system is broken, and the private sector seems unwilling or unable to fix the problem. Health care costs are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, a truly troubling statistic.

I was about to write a long post summarizing many of my thoughts about the Republican Party's opposition to the bill, but Bob Herbert of the New York Times pretty much wrote what I was going to say(albeit more eloquently than me). Here is his Op-Ed. Onward to immigration reform. And you thought health care was partisan!

Health Care

The health care bill passed tonight by a somewhat healthy margin of 219-212. I say healthy because as recently as this morning, there were serious doubts about whether it would pass at all. Given the Democrats' large majority in the House, though, some would say the bill should have passed by a much larger margin. There is one major reason why the margin is not surprising though: reelection.

If one looks at the House districts where Democrats voted no on the bill, a fairly obvious pattern emerges. Almost all are in politically moderate or even slightly conservative districts. Most likely, many of these Democratic House members were elected on the coattails of large Obama turnouts. Their political reality, however, is that much of their district's moderately conservative electorate is opposed to the health care legislation, and most likely a majority feels this way. They faced a difficult choice tonight: vote with their party and listen to the President, or vote the way their constituents wanted them to. While a call from Obama may have given them pause, most Congressmen in these districts realized that while his reelection bid in 2012 may be influenced by the outcome of tonight's vote, this fall feels a lot closer.

So the answer to the question of why Democrats voted against the bill is simple: survival. It remains to be seen whether voting 'no' will be enough to save these moderate Dems, or if 1994 will repeat itself.