12 thoughts on “Get More Smarter on Friday (May 8)”

1. I so love seeing our 2 senators work together in Bipartisan Bliss. Bennet's leadership and political savvy (as well as his ability to shrewdly divine which policy is best for his humble constituents) are impossible to ignore. He'll surely be rewarded for working so closely with Gardner to serve the people of Colorado.

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2. I wish there was some way to punish Gessler for all his crap

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   1. Worst Secretary of State ever?  I don't know, Vicki Buckley, God rest her soul, was very bad from an administrative point of view.  Yes, Gessler was overtly political, but from a pure getting business done point of view, she was much worse.

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      1. Vicky Buckley was incompetent, but she wasn't corrupt. There was a lot to clean-up after she was gone, but the money was all there.

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         1. I vote that not putting the medical marijuana initiative on the ballot in 1998 qualifies Buckley as corrupt.

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            1. No, it was incompetence and sloppiness, literally. After Buckley died, Donetta Davidson was appointed and went through Vicky's desk. Wedged between two draws in the desk were some of the petitions for the MMJ initiative from 1998 which was when Buckley said there weren't enough signatures. (The additional signatures were on the sheets lost in her messy desk.) That's not corrupt; she didn't derive any personal benefit from it. It was just incompetence.

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               1. They found a total of 66 petitions (source: Rocky Mountain News, 9/22/99) "wedged between two draws in the desk"? The part about the petitions wedged into a spot not easily accessible isn't something that I've seen cited before.

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3. Josh Hosler will be a less embarrassing rep for HD15., if he gets the Republican nomination. 

   Should Dems boo or cheer?

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4. The U.K. is really more a indication of how things could be worse in the United States.  Their system certainly is simpler.  There are no primary elections – party officials choose their candidates – and there is only one national election held whenever the party in power decides to hold one but not less than once every five years.  The candidate in each district with the most votes wins.  The party or coalition of parties with the most seats in the House of Commons chooses a Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister then rules the country like a dictator until the next election, which can be triggered prematurely by a majority of representatives in the House of Commons, including some people from his original coalition, holding a vote of "no confidence" that triggers a new election.  The Court's generally speaking can't overturn parliament passed laws either.

   It gets somewhat more complicated.  Parliament elected from the entire U.K. passes both national laws and the equivalent of state laws for England and Wales.  Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own equivalent to state government, elected locally.

   Scotland recently held a vote on independence.  About 45% of the population voted to leave the U.K., so it didn't, but those same people mostly voted for the Scottish Nationalist Party whose main goal in parliament is to get as much local control for Scotland as possible and to get as much national spending in Scotland in possible.  The opposition was divided, so the SNP (which had just 6 seats before) won 56 of 59 seats, with the conservatives, labour and the liberal party each getting one seat.

   All eighteen seats from Northern Ireland were from parties only interested in Northern Ireland – most favoring remaining in the U.K., but four from Sinn Fein who want independence from the U.K.

   There is also a party in Wales that wants independence or much greater autonomy that won 3 out of 40 seats in Wales (Plaid Cymaru).

   The rest of the seats in England and Wales went to the Conservative Party and Labour Party (roughly our Republican and Democratic Party), except that 7 seats went to the Liberal Party (it also got one seat from Scotland in the Ornkey Islands) (a loss of 49 seats from the last election when there had been three viable nationwide in scope parties), 1 seat went to the Green Party in a very left leaning district (despite the fact that the Green Party got about 4% of the national vote spread fairly evenly across the country), and 1 seat went to the UK Independence Party (compare to the Tea Party faction in the U.S. or neo-Nazi parties in Europe) despite the fact that it got about 13% of the overall vote, and more than 14% of the vote in England and Wales.  The UKIP like the Green Party is underrepresented because its members are spread evenly in England and Wales – its only seat was won by someone who used to be a Conservative Party MP and defected to the UKIP, given him some incumbency credibility.

   The main effect of having so many nationalist parties mostly interested in helping people from their region leave the country, is that any of the parties that want to run the country in its current form need an overwhelming lead over the other parties to get the majority needed to appoint a Prime Minister, as the conservatives did in this election.  But, they have only a 5 seat margin of error (i.e. six defecting MPs in the conservative party could force a new election), despite the fact that the runner up labour party has only 232 seats to their 331 seats.

   If the Conservatives and Labour had each won roughly equal numbers of seats, say 282 and 281, for example (when 326 seats is a majority) it could have forced a crisis.  Both the Conservatives and Labour had sworn not to form coalitions with the Scottish National Party.  But, a Conservative and Labour "grand coalition" which would be like the Democrats and Republicans agreeing to a joint Presidential candidate, would be unthinkable as well.  Yet, all of the parties other than these three combined have only 31 seats, not enough to form a majority (and realistically, no coalition could have both the Unionists and Sinn Fein parties from Northern Ireland, or the UKIP and the Green Party, so the maximum coalition would really be smaller).  Probably no more than 26 of the remaining 31 seats could have been joined to any one coalition, so if neither the Conservatives nor Labor had gotten more than 299 seats, there would have been a crisis, something that could have happened if 16 seats closely matched between Conservatives and Labor had gone the other way. The polls had predicted that this was what was going to happen, but the Conservative Party surged in the end and the crisis was averted.

   This would have probably led to the party with the most seats naming a Prime Minister and forming a weak "minority government" that could collapse into new elections any time the Scottish National Party or the other major party wanted to demand them.  It could have also led to a unilateral declaration of independence by Scotland.

   While living on the brink of constitutional crisis is nothing to emulate, voter turnout was great, and the system is very simple.

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5. Bipartisanship in Trade – Obama and Bennet and most R's in DC want to speed up this process:

   President Obama will take his campaign for a free trade deal to the headquarters of Nike Friday, where he's extracted a pledge from the world's largest athletic shoe company that it will hire 10,000 workers in the United States over the next decade if a Pacific trade agreement passes Congress.

   But Obama's appearance at a company known for importing shoes from contract factories in the Pacific Rim is also drawing protests from unions and other liberal groups who oppose the trade deal.

   In Beaverton, Ore., Obama will argue that free trade will create American jobs by reducing barriers to selling American goods overseas. Nike says reducing tariffs would allow it to invest in manufacturing in the United States, allowing it to export more shoes, get them to domestic customers faster, and even customize more shoes for its customers.

   At first, Nike seemed like an unlikely venue for a speech touting the virtues of free trade. It has 26,000 employees in the United States, but 330,000 in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 56 cents an hour.

   Nike was one of the first, and one of the most notorious, American corporations to outsource its labor to Asian sweatshops. 

   But of Nike's slightly more than 1 million factory contract workers, more than nine out of 10 are in Asia, with the largest number in low-wage Vietnam.

   "It is a perverse place to try to go and sell a trade agreement that the American public thinks would make it easier to offshore our jobs and push down our wages," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

   Makes me kinda glad I haven't bought a Nike product in many years…. 

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   1. Just [don't] do it!!

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6. FYI – the Speaker of the House wasn't commenting about the demise of SB 1; she was commenting about the demise of the bill that would have change the hospital provider fee from TABOR revenue to TABOR exempt. That was HB 1389.

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