…and so should you.  Here’s why:

Let’s briefly review the established record of the Clintons:

-pro gun control

-pro choice

-family and medical leave

-AmeriCorps

-increased minimum wage

-liberal or moderate judges on the Supreme Court

-“balancing” the budget (I know they used part of the Social Security surplus to do that, but you can blame President Johnson for the unified federal budget theory)

-a fairer and more progressive tax structure (increases on the rich and decreases for everyone else)

-no endless, completely unnecessary wars

I could go on and on…you all remember the 1990s right?  I know we can never really “go back” to another time (and I don’t want to), but come on…it’s wasn’t that bad at all back then.

Continued pleading below the fold…

I know the Clintons aren’t perfect…either personally or politically…I didn’t like what they did to Welfare along with the GOP, and I was disappointed that they botched health care reform.  I think that there’s a real chance now that we can make some significant progress on health care at the national level though.  The Clintons don’t govern as liberal as I’d like them to be (or I think even as they’d like to be given the political realities of this nation), but they have a proven track record of real, positive, progressive change for the better I think.  Who better to clean up the huge mess that another Bush has made than a Clinton?   🙂

What we want, I think, is change from Bush…not change just for the sake of change.  I don’t buy at all that Clinton is “Bush-lite”.  Why would many on the Right-wing be so up in arms at the threat of her being President if they thought she was just like them?  I like Edwards (and even voted for him after my boy Dean dropped out in 2004), but he brought nothing to the table to get anything done IMO.  He couldn’t have even won a second term in the Senate in NC if he wanted to, he botched grilling Cheney in 2004 like the dog that he was and still is, and he didn’t have the cred to carry any southern states.

The Clintons have a proven track record of being able to win in crucial states like NH, NV, AR, NM, and TN & maybe even OH, WV, and KY.  Keeping the GOP on the defensive across a wide portion of the country will be a key to winning this fall I think.  I’m sure that a lot has already been said for and against Obama here, so I’ll try not to go on and on about that now.  I’m just afraid that a lot of the support that Obama has gotten so far from states like SC, GA, AK, MN, CO, MO, KS, AL, ID, ND, UT, LA, NB, VA, and WI will dry up once the threat of a Hillary Presidency goes away.  Some of the above states are solidly Republican states that I doubt will stray away from McCain so easily.  I do acknowledge that Obama has his newness, youth, and appeal to independent voters (which will cut into McCain’s strength) in his favor though.  I’m still not sure whether this country as a whole has gotten over its prejudices against blacks more than against women (or vise-versa).  

I have no problem being a good Democrat and voting for their nominee in November, but let’s not repeat 2004 again…ugh…  Iowa picked the two candidates in that race that were exactly wrong to go up against Bush and Cheney in 2004.  Iowa doesn’t have a very good record of picking candidates that can win in the general election either (besides incumbents).  

I know that Bill Clinton also gave us NAFTA and DOMA, two really bad pieces of legislation IMO.  DOMA was the GOP though…Clinton just signed it because he basically had to.  The GOP would have raked him over the coals even more if he didn’t…”What…you don’t want to ‘defend’ marriage?!”  I don’t mind NAFTA that much (I’m a liberal free/fair trader actually), but there need to be better protections for unions and the environment in future trade deals.

There was a right-wing backlash against the Clintons in 1994 after they raised taxes to help balance the budget and after they overreached on health care.  Things are different now…we’ve tried “supply-side” economics twice now (under a Democratic and GOP Congress) in the last 30 years, and it’s failed every time.

So, I’m for Hillary Clinton in 2008.  It’s waaaay past time that we elected a woman to be President.  Look at the messes that all those white guys have gotten us into so far.   🙂

Remember to vote, no matter who you want to vote for, this year!

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…when I was 12 years-old.  It was 1984, and I was in civics class.  Do they even have those kind of classes anymore?  Our teacher actually worked part-time as a nighttime deli meat slicer at a local supermarket to make ends meet.  He really didn’t do that great a job teaching, since he was kind of lazy and didn’t really care too much.  I once got into a fight with another kid in class after the teacher had left early to go to lunch…before the lunch bell even rang.  

Anways, our teacher had photocopied the actual general election ballot for our city and handed out a bunch of copies to us all.  They had old-time voting machines in my city back then with those levers that you actually had to pull to vote for a candidate.  There was one master lever at the top that you could pull to vote a straight party ticket as well.  

This one kid across from me (I forget his name but he was some tall, blonde kid whose mom was a Democratic school committee member) just checked off the box to vote a straight Democratic ticket.  He was all proud of himself, and he decided to show us all how quick he was done voting.  I remember thinking (and maybe even saying to him) that was a strange way to vote.  Now, I almost never vote for Republicans, but anyways…

So, we all voted in a mock election, and our teacher totaled the votes.  I think Reagan won the class, and he ended up winning almost every state in the country too in the real election that year.

That night, my Mom, Dad, and I went out to Woolworth’s (a small department store chain) to do some shopping.  We were having a typical “what did you do at school today?” conversation, and I told them about the mock election that we had.  My parents asked me who I had voted for.  So I started telling them, “Well, I voted for Reagan and…”

Both my parents wheeled around in the parking lot as we were heading towards the store, “You did what?!?!”

“I voted for Reagan…all the kids did.”, which was true, and, since I didn’t know any better at the time, so did I.

“Get back to the car and stay there!”, my Dad yelled at me.  So I had to stay in the car for the entire time that they were in the store that night.

They both couldn’t believe that I had voted for Reagan.  They were both big Democrats at the time, and neither could stand Reagan.  Now my Dad talks about how great he was, but that’s just cuz he went off the deep end in 1988.  My Mom always says, “They fooled me once, but never again.”  She voted for Nixon (as I think a lot of young kids did back then cuz he was in favor of having 18-20 year-olds vote I guess), and she always regretted it.  

Now, imagine if everyone’s parents had disciplined their kids for voting for Reagan…   🙂

In this edition, we’ll focus on ignorance, partisanship, gimmicks, and energy policy from “the Tiger”…oh my!  Buckle it up and come on down below the fold.

Mr. Jon “Hyperbole” Harrison is at it again in a slightly humorous post about breaking VT up:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

Mr. Harrison has been in VT for a whole 4 years now, so he’s an “expert” on the subject.  The idea that Killington wants to join up with NH is about a productive idea, I think, as Brattleboro wanting to arrest Cheney and Bush…neither is even going to happen.  Have fun trying to get a NH plow to come over and do the roads during a snowstorm there Killington.  I’ve always said that if Killington gets to join NH, then I want my city to join AK…I want an Alaska Permanent Fund (read that as oil) Dividend check damnit!   The post goes on to sing the praises of NH’s (property) tax structure and economy:

The New Hampshire law is perhaps even more convoluted and regressive than our own, hard as that may be to believe. Still, New Hampshire has no state income tax or sales tax. And its economy, at least in comparison to Vermont’s, is relatively modern and prosperous.

When I used to live in NH, my boss and one of my friends at work had houses of similar sizes in adjoining towns.  The property taxes that my boss paid on her house were around double what my friend paid…mostly because my boss lived in a town with a high school and my friend lived in a town that just sent their kids to another town for high school.  Sounds “fair” to me.  I personally don’t think that VT’s fiscal future lies with nickel and diming its citizens with fees, having toll roads that will never go away, having a state liquor store on the highway, soaking the tourism and business community with taxes, etc., etc. like NH does.

The post goes on to opine about how to break up VT:

Portions of the Northeast Kingdom might want to join New Hampshire, but most of it would probably prefer to become a part of Canada. Ethnic ties already exist, and the Canadian social model would no doubt appeal to many in the Kingdom.

Ah, those wacky Canadian-style socialists in the Northeast Kingdom…they’re all over the place…in Mr. Hyperbole’s mind no doubt.  BTW, it’s Chittenden Mr. Harrison…read a map sometime.  Then he goes on to reminisce about how great things were when he lived in MA:

On the other hand, electricity, food and gasoline are cheaper in Mass. And taxes are lower, with more return for your tax dollar than Vermonters get.

Right, gas is cheaper in MA, except for every single time that I’ve been there in the last decade or so.  Sheesh…

Here’s another take on the recent McCain fundraising trip to VT from “the Tiger”:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where they compare Leahy-sponsored federal funds that have:

helped clean up Lake Champlain, provide affordable housing and expand Vermont National Guard facilities

to a

bridge-to-nowhere.

And then there’s this post:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where “the Tiger” conveniently forgets that the “steroids in baseball” issue was originally investigated under a GOP Congress I believe.

Things certainly are strictly non-partisan over there at “the Tiger”.

Here’s some more anti-union and anti-teacher blather from “the Tiger”:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

Stronger unions bad…employers good.  “Better pay for teachers in such schools, in order to attract the teaching talent these students need” bad…less money for schools good.

“The Tiger” routinely advocates for gimmicks in order to try and solve real problems, like here:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where the solution to rising education costs is…more voting, and when that’s not enough…more voting on top of that.  Here’s to that bastion of liberalism, the city of Rutland, where apparently the residents don’t vote on the school budget!  I wish that “conservatives” that advocate more voting as a solution to education spending were honest about what they were stumping for.  They want arbitrary caps on education spending, but they know that this idea wouldn’t be as popular as the issue of “more voting”…so they stump for that instead.  I also wish that if a school budget was voted down in a municipality that the schools actually shut down.  No budget, no school…just like no contract, no school.  The fact is that school districts keep right on spending money whenever a budget is voted down now.  I just wonder how that dynamic would change if the shoe was on the other foot.  We need real solutions to education spending problems in this state, not more gimmicks.

Finally, we come to the (insane) energy policies that “the Tiger” routinely advocates…little to no alternative energy sources or conservation and just more of the same sources of energy that are costing us so dearly, in more ways than one.  We’ll start with this post:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where “the Tiger” describes nuclear energy as “all-natural” after all.  They also completely miss the point about the common argument against nuclear energy…pretty much all nuclear power plants in this country are permanent nuclear waste dumps.  It doesn’t matter if the radioactivity at these sites “migrates”.  None of the nuclear waste that’s been generated so far in the USA will ever be going to that failed waste dump site in NV, and every year that a nuclear plant stays online simply means more nuclear waste that will need to be stored…forever.  I actually love the idea of getting our energy from natural nuclear energy sources…like the Sun.  And I love this quote from Mr. Hyperbole in this post:

What really surprises me about this post is Paul’s – er, I mean Mr. Guy’s – failure to comment on it. I peg him as a fanatical anti-nuclear activist. Rumor has it that he’s retired to an ‘entertainment farm’ in the north of the state. There also seems to be a rumor circulating that he was killed in a freak motorcycle accident in upstate New York this past weekend. Nothing in the local papers, though.

My name isn’t Paul, I haven’t gone away, and I don’t drive a motorcycle…keep hope alive though.   🙂

“The Tiger” has also recently come out in favor of woefully inefficient incandescent bulbs:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

I don’t know about the guys over at “the Tiger”, but I’ve been able to cut my electricity bill/usage a fair amount by using CFLs.  I like my bulbs to generate more light then heat…call me crazy though.

“The Tiger” further disses the idea of alternative energy and conservation efforts in VT in these two recent posts:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

And they are likely to realize that Vermont will be better off if it focuses on generating energy rather than conserving it, which is an exercise in diminishing returns.  Alternative energy initiatives are plainly needed and inevitable.  But there are two questions we’d like answered:

a) just how large will those ‘state subsidies’ be?

&

b) where will we go for ‘base load’ power to cover us when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing?

renewables are intermittent.  Not only is Vermont sunshine-disadvantged, but the sun tends not to shine at night.  As for wind, well, wind power is almost never available when it is most needed, on the coldest and hottest days.

This would be a great time to remind people of how the city of Burlington was able to cut it’s energy usage by roughly 10% a while back through conservation efforts.  Someone should have told Dick Cheney that when he was going around the country at the beginning of the Bush Regime trying to sell the same idea that “the Tiger” keeps trying to sell, that energy conservation doesn’t work.  It also would be great time to re-tell a story that I’ve told on other websites before.  One of my former co-workers built a house for himself and his wife up along the Canadian border where he maximized the use of insulation and where he also used the power of the Sun and the wind to generate electricity.  He did this over a decade ago and was able to stay completely disconnected from the electrical grid.  There is no reason why this kind of technology can’t be used more widely today and why the govt. shouldn’t try to encourage its use.  Our sources of coal, natural gas, and oil are finite, period.  It’s way, way past time to wake up to this IMO.

P.S. – I promise to post about some issues with this election cycle soon JD.

Tony the Tiger?  No silly, Vermont Tiger!  For the last several weeks, I’ve been having a lot of fun sparing with the boys over at VT Tiger.  Too much fun I guess, since they appear to have unofficially banned me from commenting on their site anymore for some reason.  I’ve been amazed, in general, at how thinly-skinned most of them are over there at “the Tiger” (as they refer to it).

I’m still waiting for multiple comments that I’ve left on their site to appear in the following threads:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

Yea, that’s eight different posts, and I’m not holding my breath.

Mostly what I’ve had some fun with over there at “the Tiger” was watching them defend the indefensible by trying to go on and on about how “non-partisan” they are over there:

See:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

Mr. Art Woolf is a personal favorite of mine over at “the Tiger”.  I like his folksy style, and he seems to be the smartest of the routine bloggers over there.  He was at least smart enough not to wander into the minefield that I tried to plant in his way above when I expressed my glee at seeing that he was implying (what we both know wasn’t really true) that he was a supporter of the Clintons and the DLC in the 1990s.  

Another fine example of the type of “non-partisanship” (that’s been discussed here before I think) that “the Tiger” loves to engage in can be found here:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where they say

the Democratic Party — and the environmental movement in general — have been taken over by more radical activists who seem to be inspired by the anti-technology Luddite movement of the early 19th century.

 

What a lot of people fail to understand about the environmental movement is that it’s really not about saving the planet.  The planet will be just fine.  It’s we that need saving…as we are slowly making our planet unlivable…for us.  I also don’t know of that many people that think that our planet is still governed by the Malthusian Cycle in a post-Industrial Revolution world.  A frequent Tiger commenter also laid another turd when he responded to this post by saying

the Constitution only guarantees the right to the ‘pursuit’ of happiness. It does not guarantee actual happiness.

Ummmm, I think he might have been confusing the Declaration of Independence with the U.S. Constitution.  One is the document that formed our government, and the other one didn’t.  

The comparisons that they sometimes draw over there at “the Tiger” are also quite humorous.  I loved when they tried to link obesity & energy efficiency together in this post:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

and then they conveniently left out the part where the real reason that “fat people” might be cheaper to treat in the long run is that they tend to DIE sooner than other people…nice.

Or here:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where they compare immigrant English lessons to health care reform.  I wonder if they actually feel that the public has no interest at all in having all incoming immigrants learn English?

Wild hyperbole is another theme that frequently comes up over at “the Tiger”, like here:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where the political situation in VT is compared to fighting the Nazis in WWII.  Then, of course, they try and remember how “great” things were after Ronald Reagan saved us all.  I wonder though how we would be if we continued the move towards alternative energy sources that Jimmy Carter tried to start when he was in office.  Reagan even went so far as to take down the solar panels that the Carter administration had placed on or near the White House.  IMO, Mr. Jon Harrison has earned the nickname “Mr. Hyperbole” by many of his comments on “the Tiger”.  He’s one of the few routine posters over there that I have any respect for though.

In this post about health care policy:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

“the Tiger” asks,

Would it not be possible to design a system where the employees got the money and then went out and shopped for their own insurance?

To which I say, how about if we had a system where the employees got the money that their employers were spending on their health care coverage, then they only had to pay a fraction of that money to the govt. to pay for a single-payer health care system?  Sounds cheaper to me.

This Tiger post was actually inspired by a comment that I had made in an earlier post:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to respond to this post on “the Tiger”.  I merely wanted to say that I do think it’s disturbing to boil down the entire VT Supreme Court system to “a few activist lawyers and judges”…see:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

Let’s hope that “Mr. Hyperbole” doesn’t ever end up in front of the VT Supreme Court, since he’ll likely find it a lot less forgiving and liberal…especially if he calls them a bunch of activist judges.  He also misstates the reason why the Brigham decision was made in the first place I think.  The Legislature had failed to act to make VT’s educational system fair.  I also don’t believe the court ever mandated a specific way to raise taxes for VT’s education system, which makes the “taxes imposed by the judiciary — taxation without representation” comment ridiculous IMO.  I also don’t think that the Legislature has failed to re-appoint any of the VT Supreme Court judges recently.  Perhaps “Mr. Hyperbole” would like to see judges directly elected by the people in VT?  

The other funny thing about “the Tiger” is that they apparently restrict comments that actually AGREE with the postings that they put on their website. For instance, in response to this post:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

I tried to say that I completely agreed with ending govt. milk price supports, but also that speaking out against them in VT would be like speaking out against ethanol subsidies in Iowa I bet.  I also completely agreed with the statement:

Housing for the young families that Vermont desperately needs can be built on the land that goes out of production.

So much for bi-partisanship…

In this post on “the Tiger”:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

I tried to post to agree with quite a lot of what was stated there in a rather ham-handed way.  I would have loved to have pointed out that the direct radiation from the Sun (mostly visible light) is a shorter wavelength than the longer wavelength of radiation that comes off of a body that’s been heated.  So, plant greenhouses can be designed to have glass panels that only allow the shorter, incoming radiation from the Sun to penetrate and that trap the longer, outgoing radiation from the stuff that’s been heated inside the greenhouse.  The Environment Greenhouse Effect is the reason that our planet doesn’t heat up to some ridiculously high temperature during the day and then cool down to some ridiculously low temperature at night.  In other words, we have an atmosphere that allows most of the incoming radiation from the Sun during the day to heat the ground (which, in turn heats the air above the ground) and then doesn’t allow all of the outgoing radiation from the Earth’s system to escape into space at night.  It is also true that the air above the Earth’s surface is mostly heated from below by convection and, to a much lesser extent, by radiation from the ground, while very little of the atmosphere is heated by direct conduction with the ground’s surface.  Sure, the fact that a greenhouse is completely enclosed allows for the heated air to remain in place longer than if there were holes in the greenhouse’s walls.  I also think that Mr. Wizard would have been proud of Mr. Decker’s little experiment, but I’m not sure what the real meaning behind this post on VT Tiger was.  He goes on to ask,

Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as expected by its atmosphere?

Yes, since it is a portion of the global heat budget of our planet.  I like talking about basic meteorology and physics too.   🙂

Mr. Decker gets more to point with his next post here:

http://www.vermonttiger.com/co…

where he tries to poke fun at the “consensus” over global warming.  I’m not a fan at all of global warming, but the Russian claim that’s mentioned here was already debunked, I think, over on Charity’s website…see:

http://shesright.org/2008/02/0…

The other desperate Canadian plea for research money is just that…an attempt to scare people with supposedly “new” information that needs to be studied more.  It’s a shame that both sides of the global warming issue feel the need to scare people in order to gain money for their side.  I’m a big believer that the first thing that goes right out the window when an issue of science becomes politicized is the truth, unfortunately.  The 11-year Sun cycle has been well-know for many decades now BTW.  

So, the point of this too-long post is to try and encourage some of you to venture on over to our friends on the Right (you know…the VT chapter of “the free market will solve all our problems and the GOP has most of the best ideas” crowd) and voice your opinions.  Don’t tell them that I sent you though!  

I’m a firm believer that when two opposing sides engage in a vigorous and emotional debate on issues that BOTH sides come out the other side stronger.  It’s a shame that the guys over at “the Tiger” apparently don’t believe in that.

P.S. – This is my first, real, public blog posting…so please excuse any obvious posting errors on my part.