www.JoeCobb.com

First, see my message [click here: message below] celebrating the Montana and Missouri Libertarian successes taking voters away from Conrad Burns and Jim Talent. Notice that I say, “taking VOTERS away,” not the more common term - taking votes away. Those were not Burn’s or Talent’s votes; they were individual voters who chose Jones and Gilmour instead of them. I assume it was due to the message Jones and Gilmour were telling people in Montana and Missouri.

But look at this question, from the perspective of Power Politics. Dogmatic Social Conservatives (DSC) have lost the 2006 elections BIG TIME! They have had a good run with Bush and the Republicans for the past 12 years, but it’s all over now. They have shot their wad, and missed.

The Republican Party will become the minority in the House of Representatives.

In the Senate, it will continue to have strong control, because under Senate Rules there must be 60 votes to move anything. Bush won’t have to veto very much, since the Pelosi Democrats won’t really be able to do more than to bluster and pass dead letters about health care, minimum wages, and global warming.

Impotence in the House of Representatives is strongly to be desired. But it will be exciting.

Sadly, the tax cuts of 2001-03 are surely not permanent. As Bruce Bartlet has shown from official data, “Who Pays the Income Tax?”, the rich are already paying almost all the taxes. This burden will only go up in 2009-10 if the Democrats in the House do nothing. What do you expect?

But, cheer three times, the excreable Dogmatic Social Conservatives are in a corner; they should stay there. The income tax cuts are going to move to center stage, particularly as the economic growth we have enjoyed since 2001 begins to slow down in 2007-08. The Democratic Congress will have to accept the accusations that their pro-tax, pro-environmentalist, pro-union policies are responsible for slowing the economy.

John McCain is sitting very high right now because the Republicans, hungry for power and wanting to keep the presidency in 2009, will look more favorably on “moderate” McCain. The DSC will also know their most serious philosophical enemies are in the Democratic Party - but they can’t dominate the Republican Party without destroying its effectiveness. So, the social issues are checkmated.

As of 9:11am EST November 8, 2006, with 99% of the precincts reporting (according to CNN and MSNBC).

Party, Candidate, Voter Percentage (nbr. votes)

Election results, Montana U.S. Senate:

Republican Conrad Burns 48% (193,180)
Democrat Jon Tester 49% (194,916)
Libertarian Stan Jones 3% (10,166)

Election results, Missouri U.S. Senate:

Republican Jim Talent 47.4% (1,001,238)
Democrat Claire McCaskill 49.5% (1,047,049)
Libertarian Frank Gilmour 2.2% (47,504)

Congratulations to Frank Gilmour and Stan Jones! Libertarian candidates are doing what we do best: we force a rotation in office among the arrogant and powerful; retire them; kick them out. Without the participation of Stan Jones in Montana, it is possible Conrad Burns might have obtained 1,737 of the votes from voters favoring lower taxes, property rights, and a smaller government with fewer police powers. In Missouri, Talent needed 45,812 more votes, which went to Frank Gilmour instead. Maybe.

by Edward L. Hudgins

Political success depends on promoting the right ideas at the right time in the right environment. Sometimes, the right ideas are ahead of their time. But true leaders will articulate them even in the face of ridicule or short-term political failure, for if they remain silent, those ideas will never take root in the cultural soil and be ready to spring forth when the climate is right.

For the modern political right, it always begins with Barry Goldwater.

His 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, served as the manifesto that propelled Goldwater to the 1964 Republican nomination for president. Yes, he lost that election, big time. But his ideas gave rise to the activists and think tanks that paved the way for his successor, Ronald Reagan.

Goldwater wrote that “the first thing…[a conservative] has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul.â€? Secondly, “the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free…if he is enslaved politically; conversely, man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the state.â€? And finally, “man’s development, in both its material and spiritual aspects, is not something that can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his individual good and for the good of society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.â€?

These ideas found their way straight into the 1964 Republican Party platform:

1. Every person has the right to govern himself, to fix his own goals, and to make his own way with a minimum of governmental interference.

2. It is for government to foster and maintain an environment of freedom encouraging every individual to develop to the fullest his God-given powers of mind, heart and body; and, beyond this, government should undertake only needful things, rightly of public concern, which the citizen cannot himself accomplish. …

3. Within our Republic the Federal Government should act only in areas where it has Constitutional authority to act, and then only in respect to proven needs where individuals and local or state governments will not or cannot adequately perform.

Despite philosophical imprecision and some implicit contradictions (which were to have dire long-term consequences for his brand of conservatism), Goldwater presented not just a concrete guide for public policy, but a different political vision of a good society. At its center: the individual.

To Goldwater Republicans, individual liberty was the end of political society, and the core purpose of government was to protect the freedom of the individual. This was in keeping with the philosophy of America’s Founders. The Declaration of Independence speaks of individuals, not of collectives or communities, “endowed with certain unalienable rights.�

Goldwater was both behind the times and ahead of them. Most Americans living during that period would no doubt give a nod to those general sentiments. But during the 1960s and early ’70s, many also believed that problems in society—poverty, crime, racism—were caused by alleged free market failures. If governments could just intervene here and there, they could correct those problems and still leave us relatively free and prosperous.

The Johnson-Nixon era of “big government� programs, however, proved to be a practical disaster: they slowed the economy, tied up businesses in regulatory red tape, over-taxed the middle class, and created social problems even worse than those they sought to cure. The time was right for new ideas.

(Ed Hudgins is Executive Director of the Atlas Society / Objectivist Center. This has been quoted from his “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party,” New Individualist, Vol.9, Nbr. 9-10 [Fall 2006].)

See also Ed Hudgins’ commentary on the election, “Report from the Front: Republican Election Fiasco.” Emailed to his distribution list Nov.8,2006.

by Steve Chapman

It used to be thought that women had no business voting, but when women got the vote, men didn’t suddenly decide their once-exclusive prerogative was worthless. Blacks were once barred from owning property. When the laws changed, whites didn’t suddenly give up buying in favor of renting.

Admitting an excluded group to an institution doesn’t necessarily weaken the institution. When the subject is matrimony, however, self-styled defenders of marriage say that if it isn’t restricted, it will promptly wither and die. They think allowing gays to wed would soon cause heterosexuals to abandon marriage, start propagating offspring out of wedlock and slide into degeneracy.

American treatment of homosexuality has come a long way. Though many people view it as a sin, it’s no longer a crime. Gays and lesbians can live their lives openly now.

Changes such as these were unimaginable 50 years ago, but they haven’t led to a collapse of the social order. Yet we are told that allowing homosexuals to join in legally sanctioned unions will reduce Western civilization to a smoking ruin.

That’s one of the chief rationales for efforts to block same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, eight states are offering ballot initiatives against it, and most if not all are expected to pass.

Supporters of these bans warn that redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would damage it beyond repair. Maggie Gallagher, head of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, writes that gay marriage would grossly shortchange the needs of children “in order to further adult interests in sexual freedom.”

Now, it will come as a shock to heterosexual couples that marriage can further sexual freedom, but never mind that. As it happens, sodomy laws have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Gays are already at liberty to have commitment-free trysts with members of Congress, evangelical pastors and anyone else they choose. Unfettered sex is already abundantly available to gays who want it.

What same-sex marriage offers, by contrast, is a safe harbor for those who prefer responsible monogamy to free love. It’s not a rejection of the values of traditional marriage — it’s an affirmation.

Gallagher and others say conventional marriage serves to reconcile “the erotic, social, sexual and financial needs of men and women with the needs of their partner and their children.” Funny — that’s
also what gay marriage does. It provides a durable framework in which two people can commit themselves to an exclusive sexual relationship while assuring a stable environment for their children.

Gallagher insists that youngsters are better off in a home with both a mother and a father, but thanks in part to liberal divorce laws — which conservatives are not mobilizing to repeal — many
children already are deprived of the model family.

Some kids already are being brought up by same-sex partners. Conservatives think children of straight couples are better off if their parents are married. So how can children of gay couples be better off if their parents are not?

The argument that gay marriage will increase family instability by pushing heterosexuals away from marriage is ingenious but unfounded. In this realm, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, a page of history is worth a volume of logic. Some European countries have allowed gays to enter into registered partnerships (which closely resemble marriage) for years, and the results are reassuring.

M.V. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, looked at the data
from Scandinavia and the Netherlands and found, “Divorce rates have not risen since the passage
of partnership laws, and marriage rates have remained stable or actually increased.” It’s true that out-of-wedlock births have increased, but they were increasing long before this change, and, Badgett reports, they increased just as fast in the countries that don’t sanction same-sex unions.

William Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale document the same patterns in their new book, “Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse?” And they note that “children in Denmark and Sweden [and the Netherlands] are much more likely to be raised by their parents than American children.” If banning gay marriage is supposed to help American kids, it isn’t working.

There are lots of things that could be done in this country to encourage marriage, prevent divorce and improve the well-being of children. Keeping same-sex couples from the altar is not one of them.

[Chicago Tribune, November 5, 2006]

The Immoral Majority

By John Tierney

As usual, Republicans are hoping that righteous voters will come through for them on Election Day. But this year looks like the revenge of the sinners.

The sinners aren’t easy to count, since they don’t spend a lot of time doing grass-roots politicking. There is no Washington lobby for the Coalition of the Damned. They don’t like to confess their urges to pollsters. But there are enough of them, particularly in places where Republicans are struggling, to cast doubt on the party’s long-standing strategy.

Why did Republicans assume there was a Moral Majority? Where in the Bible does it say that the virtuous outnumber the wicked? When you define wickedness the way Republicans do, the numbers are daunting.

One of the G.O.P. Congress’s few achievements this year was a law to crack down on Internet gambling, an industry that counted eight million American customers last year — about four times the membership of the Christian Coalition. The new law hasn’t stopped the online gamblers from betting, but it will give them second thoughts about voting Republican.

The Republican war on marijuana — the chief priority of the current drug czar — isn’t playing any better in the heartland. More than 40 percent of people over the age of 12 have tried marijuana, and more than three-quarters of Americans support legalizing it for medical purposes. The White House and the Justice Department have had little luck in their attempts to stop states from legalizing medical marijuana, but they have succeeded in alienating voters.

These federal intrusions are especially scorned by independent voters in the Western states where Republicans have been losing ground, like Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and Montana. Western Democrats have been siphoning off libertarian voters by moderating their liberal views on issues like gun control, but Republicans have been driving libertarians away with their wars on vice and their jeremiads against gay marriage (and their attempt to regulate that from Washington, too).

Libertarian voters tend to get ignored by political strategists because they’re not easy to categorize or organize. They don’t congregate in churches or union halls; they don’t unite to push political agendas. Many don’t even call themselves libertarians, although they qualify because of their social liberalism and economic conservatism: they want the government out of their bedrooms as well as their wallets.

They distrust moral busybodies of both parties, and they may well be the most important bloc of swing voters this election, as David Boaz and David Kirby conclude in a new study for the Cato Institute. Analyzing a variety of voter surveys, they estimate that libertarians make up about 15 percent of voters — a bloc roughly comparable in size to liberals and to conservative Christians, and far bigger than blocs like NASCAR dads or soccer moms.

They’re especially prevalent in the West, where half a dozen states have legalized medical marijuana. When Californians approved one of the first medical marijuana laws, in 1996, drug warriors were so convinced it would lead to a catastrophic spike in illegal use by teenagers that they sponsored a study to document the damage. But there was no catastrophe: after the law, marijuana use by teenagers actually declined in California.

In the decade since, as the Marijuana Policy Project documented in a recent study, popular support for legalized medical marijuana has increased in California and in virtually every other state with a similar law. Last year it was favored by 78 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll.

Yet these realities still haven’t registered with Republicans in Washington. This year the White House drug czar, John Walters, and his minions have been out campaigning in Nevada, Colorado and South Dakota, which have marijuana initiatives on the ballot. The drug warriors are still sounding the discredited alarms about youths turning into potheads. Their fervor’s not surprising — they may even believe their own hype.

What’s surprising is the political stupidity of the meddling. Westerners, no matter what they think of marijuana, don’t appreciate sermons from federal officials on how to vote. In 2002, when the White House campaigned against another marijuana ballot initiative in Nevada, the state’s attorney general said it was “disturbing� to see the federal interference in a state election.

This year, with Republicans in so much trouble in the West, the missionaries from Washington aren’t doing them any favors. They need every sinner’s vote they can get.

John Tierney is a nationally syndicated columnist.
[New York Times, October 31, 2006]

Rushing Off a Cliff

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant� in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.