Politics

I was curious who the new Senate Minority Leader will be, and it looks like the Dems have tapped Harry Reid from Nevada. On the face of it, things look promising. He’s a Mormon who is pro-life. This may rankle some folks out there, but the fact that he’s a Mormon and pro-life carries weight with me. I have a high opinion of Mormons, mainly because I’ve worked with quite a few during my career. For me, Mormons tend to be hardworking, religious people who are very very friendly. And based on what I’ve read, Reid looks like a reasonable man. Here are a few articles I read to get up to speed:

EDITORIAL: Sen. Harry Reid, minority leader

Nevada senator in line to assume minority-leader job

Las Vegas SUN: Reid confident in his bid for minority leader

Reid, Durbin May Be Democratic Leaders in Senate, Carper Says

Senate Dems look for new leader

Hopefully he’s not a dual identity Senator like Daschle: country boy at home, ultra leftist in D.C. But with Nevada being a Red State, that should at a minimum keep him in check. But there’s hope. Perhaps the Dem’s will get the message, and make this a part of the their push toward the center.

Maybe the Dems haven’t learned anything, and the ultra left is still driving the party. What would be funny, and the ideal situation for Republicans in 2006, is if the Dems decide that Reid is too soft spoken, and elect a more vocal heir to Daschle. What would be even more funny is if Kerry gets tapped to be the new Minority Leader. He is still a Senator after all.

As a side note, being that Kerry is still a Senator with responsiblity to the American people, shouldn’t he present all the secret plans he had while campaigning? If he did in fact have plans to get us out of Iraq and create 10 million jobs, shouldn’t he present and champion them now as a duty to the American people since he is still a Senator?

Ultimately, the Senate Minority Leader position is what Reid makes of it. The battle next year will be in approving judges, hopefully Reid will be more amenable.

I may be alone in this but I’d like to see the Democratic party stop pretending to be something it isn’t and just be honest about what it IS: the party of Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader. The proud party of Big Government that believes it can make your life better by taking money from rich people.

I think our political process suffers from having one side of the debate absent. I don’t want this just because I think it would lead to huge electoral victories for Republicans, I want it because the Democrats’ feigned move to the center has forced Republicans to do things that nobody who calls themself a Conservative should ever consider: Huge tax-payer funded give-aways to farmers and senior citizens, the doubling of budgets for previously endangered departments (under the “Contract with America”)like Education, Energy, Commerce, and even the friggin’ NEA, generally spending money like drunken sailors in order to buy votes to stay in office and maintain their committee chairmanships, loving Washington and wanting to stay there as long as possible and running up a huge deficit.

-Reader DS, commenting on this post.

UPDATE: William Niskanen published a paper around 1995 that was titled something like, “Why Our Two-Party Political System Doesn’t Work.” IIRC, Niskanen argued that the left-leaning cartelized outcome that DS laments is the logical result of our having only two major political parties. Unfortunately I was not able to find the paper online. Does anyone know where to find it?

Since I live in the San Francisco area, there was a radio show on the channel following football by a gay host named Karel. I left it on to hear what he said. His answer to the Democrats’ dilema?

1. Examine and talk about the personal grief George W’s victory is causing among Liberals.

2. Get back to the Democrats’ roots. This is no time to compromise with the Red states. Democrats should emphasize even more that religion has absolutely no place in American politics.

Wow, move even more to the left. That’s going to work out well… The Dem’s have no clue. I hope he stays on the air and his message gets across.

Update: As a sidenote, a belated quote of the day from Ann Coulter : “Whatever happened to all those gays who wanted to join the military? We haven’t heard a peep out of them lately.”

As evidenced by Karel, radical gays have a visceral hatred of Bush. But don’t they realize if the Islamo-fascists take over they would be among the first ones executed as degenerates?

So I’ve left the bowels of Big 4 accounting and moved over to the corporate/in-house finance side of things. With my new job, the budgets for our lobbying and corporate giving activities fall under my area of responsibility. One of our goals is to sell software to NATO and NATO expansion countries. Speaking with our guy in charge of lobbying, it seems the European way has evolved into quid pro quo for giving: if you are an American company wanting to bid for European government contracts, you better have a long and distinguished list of European charities to which you have donated substantial sums of money. Monterey Bay Aquarium won’t quite cut it.

Governments have every right to promote what’s good for their countries. This would be similar to the U.S. government wanting to buy from U.S. companies. But I think when the U.S. government awards contracts, in terms of what’s good for the U.S., we tend to care more about how many jobs it creates. We tend to want to steer money towards domestic expansion, or at least expansion of the tax base. This European quid pro quo isn’t quite extortion in giving a bribe to a magistrate to ease the way. But for some reason it just has a dirty feel about it. For me, nonprofits, government, and academia run in the same circle. You have the same mindset and people who work there, ensconced comfortably in a bureaucracy of inefficiency. Can’t work? Go teach. Can’t teach? Go govern. Can’t govern? Go ask for money. It’s one big mass of socialist utopia where there is little accountability and a lack of quantifiable measures of success. When you throw Eurocrats into the mix, I can see where plenty can go wrong. To me, European charities tend to mean U.N. related work, which translates to corruption and waste.

As is everywhere, political pork is about buying political capital. The American constituent tends to care about jobs. So it makes sense to appeal to what we want. Europe being predominantly liberal, it makes sense to appeal to what the liberal voter base wants. Steering money towards the unproductive part of the economy just seems a dumb way to go about things.

I’m no expert on European nonprofits, so categorize this under Friday night random beer talk.

As a side note our company also gives much more to the Republican side of the fence, which is nice to see.

Thanks to Tim Blair, we now know that the good people running the Netscape CNN site have a remarkably expressive file naming system.

As a commentator on Blair’s site says, “winners can laugh … losers are losers”.

(Just in case they fix the file in question, here’s a screenshot)

UPDATE:

As I’m sure everyone’s already seen on Instapundit, CNN and Netscape have announced that the offending filename was created by a junior Netscape (not CNN) employee responsible for posting files (which is what I figured). This person has apparently been fired.