TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS: The National Dialogue

OPEN PRIMARIES

• WA STATE: Kastama: Good reason to oppose bill featured in ad Sen. Kastama: The root of all evil (JIM KASTAMA; STATE SENATOR 25TH LEGISLATIVE DISTRICT PUYALLUP, The News Tribune)
  
• Dr. Joe Harrop: Under the big top or just a side show? (Red Bluff Daily News CA) That is one reason some of those six heretical GOP profligates have proposed an open primary. That possible blessing is that a new party may arise, a party of open-minded individuals who are willing to work together to improve government and society without being slaves to ideology.
  

NEW YORK POLITICS/INDEPENDENCE PARTY

• New York City Republican Party More Likely to Let Mayor Bloomberg Run in its Primary (Ballot Access News) His strong showing in Brooklyn makes it likely that he will also receive permission from at least two other borough committees.
  
• 'Irish For Mike' (NY Daily News/Daily Politics) Lucadamo also spotted signs sponsored by the Rockaway Republicans that read: “Our candidates: Michael Bloomberg, Eric Ulrich (the councilman-elect who won the seat previously held by Democrat Joe Addabbo) and Jerry Sullivan (an Assembly candidate).”
  
• New York Libertarian Expects to Qualify in Special US House Election (Ballot Access News) The Independence Party and the Working Families Party both cross-endorsed the Democratic nominee, and the Conservative Party cross-endorsed the Republican nominee.
  

LAST WORD

GALLAGHER: Not your mama's liberals (Maggie Gallagher, Washtingon Times) Republicans say: The stimulus package/new budget expansion is "pork"; it contains something called "earmarks," they tell the American people. It is "wasteful" government spending that drives up an abstraction called the "deficit." Barack Obama, we fear, is engaged in "class warfare," which is fundamentally "unfair" given that, as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg blurted out, 1 percent of the taxpayers pay 50 percent or more of the taxes.

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

Coalition of Dems and independent voters supporting Obama's stimulus plan

More on California's open primary bill -- good for people, bad for parties

California had open primaries for 50 years before the parties sued to close them

Partisan gov races among increasingly independent voter constituencies

Is the dialogue about economic stimulus developing?

As an independent voter, what do you think about the economic stimulus plan and partisan politics?? Here's what Gallup said independents said:

Independent voters favor the progressive priorities set forth by Obama: 50 percent independents favor "increased government funding of projects" in the recovery package, compared to only 36 percent who favor "tax cuts for individuals/businesses" promulgated by conservatives. Congressional Republicans, who see political gain from their "party of no" status, have a "staggeringly high" disapproval of 58 percent. Their approval rating is at 44 percent compared to 60 percent for Democrats.

From The Establishment Vs. The Public on Huffington Post...

Newman and Salit had this to say on today's Talk Talk The Rules of the Game:

 

Salit: In attempting to give what you might call a more strategic framing to the shaping of the stimulus package, Mark Shields says that one of the things that's operative, at a meta-level if you will, is that it's the end of the conservative era. The conservative era is over. Deregulation, tax cuts, all of that has been wholly discredited by the facts on the ground, by the onset of the economic crisis. So, says Shields, the conservative era is over, but we don't know where to go. We're in "uncharted territory," his term. I guess what he's saying is that things haven't "swung back to" traditional liberalism, but conservatism is over. So the question is where are we? Where are we going?

Newman: All that might be true. I don't know. It sounds somewhat metaphorical to me. But the process has remained exactly the same.

Salit: The process for hammering out what Congress does, yes.

Newman: It's like people who come in to reform education and one side has a liberal view and the other side has a conservative view. But, when you get to the schools, the chairs are screwed into the floor in exactly the same way, no matter what....

Talk Talk: The Rules of the Game

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Below are excerpts from this week's Talk Talk, The Rules of the Game. Every Sunday CUIP's president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogue on Sunday, February 8, 2009 after watching "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer", "Hard with Chris Matthews" and "This Week with George Stephanopoulos".   Salit: Let's put to rest the idea that coming up with an economic stimulus package is going to somehow be less partisan or more elevated or whatever.   Newman: It's just another appropriations bill. That's what it is.   Salit: Exactly. And that's what Congress does. That's what it's empowered and required to do by the Constitution.   Newman: And it has a certain way of doing that. And it has been done in that way for a very long time.   Read Talk Talk in its entirety here.

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

Independents don't like Rush...

Stimulus: Should the government just do "nothing"?

Stimulus: Bankers' morality -- capital's wandering eyes....

Business as Usual or Capitalist Greed?

Any blog that quotes John Steinbeck, Karl Marx and B.C. Forbes can't be all bad, right? Especially when the post is on Wednesday... Check out Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post!