Wednesday, November 08, 2006

some election thoughts

Overall yes, I'd say I'm happy with the way the election went yesterday. I did vote, as an absentee (which is very common in California). Although I'm a Canadian born and raised, I'm also a US citizen as well with both my parents being American. This is how I've been able to live and work in the states without any problems. Being a Canadian though, especially an urbanite, I'm pretty far left of what many American would consider reasonable. In fact I quite happily would call myself a progressive socialist. I enjoy living here in the States, and I like being able to participate in the political process. Despite the occasional frustrations. Thankfully for me San Francisco is a fairly liberal city overall, and I'm happy about that.

While I personally skew closest to Green party, I went for the Democrats this time, and I'm glad to see that they did well overall winning the House back. As of this writing the Senate is still being decided, with the results for Virginia and Montana still too close to call. I'm sure that'll all sort itself out soon though... I hope.

What interested me perhaps more though was the state and local measures. If you're not from California you probably wont know or care about this, but it's interesting to me. SFGate has a nice concise results page that I've been checking. It's the state ballot measures that are the most frustrating to me. Prop 1A-1E all passed - that's $40 Billion in new bonds for public works funding. $40 billion is a lot, and I'm not sure it's being doled out properly, but I voted for most of those (not the highway one though). I thank God that prop 85 failed. Very scary stuff that. but the two measures that I find the most frustrating are the failures of prop 86 and 87. That's the cigarette tax, and the oil tax respectively. I hate the fact that the big business can just throw money at these kind of propositions and make them go away. It's made me crazy these past weeks to see commercials, especially for 87 where people are standing there telling me that the cost for an oil tax will be felt at the pump, when it quite literally in the law says that the companies cannot pass the cost onto the consumer. I mean, don't people read the fine print on their political commercials?! If I see a commercial, that is actually paid for by Chevron going against an oil company tax, you'd think that I'd realize hey maybe its just the oil companies trying to save their own ass. arrgh.... anyhow. I shouldn't be mad, it is what it is. That's just big business and politics. Lame.

I would really like to see a third political party emerge in the United States. I know Nader screwed things up for the Dems a few years ago, but one of the ideas of the Green party that year was to just to get enough votes to become a "national party". And that plan had merit. If we could really break out of this two party mold I think everyone would be better off. Unfortunately 2008 does not look like the year for that. Ah well... I can still dream.

It'll definitely be interesting to see how Bush deals with this turn of events.

update - Looks like Montana went Democrat, just Virginia to decide. That shouldn't take too long, right?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Re: Virgina - one month. Otherwise good luck on the political landscape taking on a third party. What you need is 'proportional representation' WIKI. Then you could get a Green Party in there. The other thing you might look at is gutting the electoral system. Just some friendly advice from a GermanoCanadian.