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Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 28, 2009 02:52 PM
from the crossing-the-aisle dept.
from the crossing-the-aisle dept.
Akido37 was one of many readers letting us know that US Sen. Arlen Specter has changed parties to become a Democrat. This gives the Democrats 59 seats in the Senate, and 60 if and when Al Franken gets seated from Minnesota. However, Specter said in his announcement that he will not be an automatic 60th vote for breaking Republican filibusters. While the senator's move seems to have surprised many Republicans, it is understandable to moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who said, "You haven't certainly heard warm encouraging words of how they [Republicans] view moderates. Either you are with us or against us." Specter noted that in his home state of Pennsylvania, 200,000 formerly Republican voters switched party allegiance last year.
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Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
They are SO upset that they lost the election and they're going ape shit. Instead of trying to push their message with resonable thought, they force it on you with words of communism and "fascism."
The more they do it though, the less people they will inevitably get to vote for them. You might get some simple people to believe the nonsense but not a thinking person.
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Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty much it. The Republicans have been reduced to the anti-Democrat party. As long as Obama remains reasonable and intelligent, the Republicans are left with crazy and stupid.
I'd like them to take a little time, and find the party that used to be smart and conservative rather than the party that panders to the bottom half of the electorate.
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Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
So 100 days of Republican bitching has more of an effect than 8 years of relentless Bush Bashing?
In retrospect, the left clearly did not bash Bush enough. Two failed wars, deregulation of banks that have destroyed the economy, deregulation of industry which has lead to increased polution, removal of personal civil rights, the loss of our standing in the world... This vs. Obama's slight change in the tax structure to let the super-wealthy bear a little bit more of the burden, and the attempt to provide federal assistance through the depression.
The noisy ones on the extreme right wing of the Republican party should be ashamed of themselves, including but not limited to the folks on Fox who have clearly sold their souls.
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Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Interesting)
This will be interesting though! Just for yucks, I went over to fox news to see what they had to say about it, and their first headline read "Specter abandons millions of GOP voters to join the democratic party." I think that's pretty funny since Specter himself says the GOP voters are abandoning the GOP. That is, he says 200k registered republicans switched parties in the last election in pennsylvania. (They've got something else up now about him being a party pooper.)
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No sir (Score:5, Insightful)
"Eh. Specter is an old school reagan-ish republican."
There is nothing even remotely "Reagan-ish" about Arlen Specter. The only principle Specter has ever had are the ones that keep Arlen Specter in power. Though it puts the GOP in a painful disadvantage in the Senate, I am well and truly glad to see him gone. Besides the shiny new (D) beside his name, the only difference in Specter is that now he'll have to stab the Republicans in the front.
And Democrats, while you're happy about your new supposedly filibuster proof majority, consider this; if history is any indication, sooner or later you'll need Specter's vote on something. And he'll screw you guys too. When a whore leaves her husband for another man, does she ever really stop being a whore?
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Re:Shift in dynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
The leading competitor in the republican primary against him was Pat Toomney- an ultra right wing nutjob. He was going to take the primary due to the number of Pennsylvanians who reregistered as D to vote in the presidential primary, but he had no chance against any D in the general. Specter polls very well with both democrats and independents. If he wins the democratic primary (likely), he's an automatic win for the democrats against any republican likely to run. The only person who could possibly win the seat from him is governor Rendell (D), who won't be running.
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Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
...Specter was a Republican to begin with?
Can't win as a Republican... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can't win as a Republican... (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote a smart man, "Gee - big surprise."
The GOP has shrunk a great deal in the last 4 years. Moderates and Independents left the party. Millions of them.
The result is a GOP that is far more conservative than it was as recently as the 2004 election.
BushCo drove so many sane people out of the GOP that the only people left are of the dyed-in-the-wool variety.
Such a party is not going to nominate a moderate. Specter knew that. Everybody knew that.
The people of PA have re-elected Specter many times. By switching parties he's preventing a small group of very conservative voters from restricting the people of PA from electing somebody they've supported over and over in the past.
This would all be moot if PA, like most states, had open primaries where registered dems and indies could vote in the GOP primary if they chose to do so.
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Pennsylvania Politics (As Usual?) (Score:5, Interesting)
For those that are not aware:
Re:Maybe i'm just cynical... (Score:5, Informative)
Specter left the Democratic Party in '81 because he lacked seniority for cool appointments. The Republicans were (and have been) desperate enough for a Pennsylvania senate seat that he could write his own checks in the GOP. Now, he's looking at being part of a permanent minority, and the majority party is probably going to give him nicer committee chairs than he could get with the GOP.
It's not a principled stand; it's politics.
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Re:Maybe i'm just cynical... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, to be fair, he has always described himself as a moderate republican; elected in the 80's when the 'Big Tent' philosophy was strong in the Republican party. If 200,000 people left the Republican party for the Democratic party, you can bet that it was the moderates that were leaving, shifting the party farther to the right and making it impossible for him to win the primary as a self described moderate.
If he is more likely to win the primary in the democratic party than the republican party, he is almost by definition a democrat. If he isn't a democrat, he will lose badly in his first primary and everything will be exactly as it would be if he had stayed as a republican.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Republicrat or Democan, the only difference is where their pocket change comes from (and it doesn't come from We, the people).
Sure, sure, they each use different issues to trap you into voting against the other guy (who really votes *FOR* anyone these days?). But each side knows they need the other and that no matter who has the majority the "big" issues can't ever be completely done away with (what would they run on then?).
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Insightful)
YEAH! Like universal health care, and an end to the 35% of health care expenditure that goes to parasite insurance companies! WOOT!
(Just for reference, the US is the only western country to tie health care to one's employer. It is a strange combination, that has many perverse effects such as separating the consumer from the one paying the health care bills, and turning the bill-payers into care-denial organizations. The macro effect is that we spend more of our GDP on health care than any other country in the world, yet our population dies sooner (about 3 years' shorter life span).)
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Informative)
You feel sick, you go to a doctor without worrying about "prior condition" exclusions resulting in termination of insurance or non-coverage. You get hurt, you go to a hospital, without worrying about your care being delayed while they shunt you over to someplace else because you don't have the right kind of (or maybe any) insurance, or discovering that your insurance has gotchas such as only paying for 2nd+days in hospital (all the expensive stuff happens on the first day).
Not happy with the universal health insurance? You can still go to a private practitioner and pay for it yourself. But, because you are negotiating up front, the costs are much lower than the US, and come without some kind of arcane billing system designed to confuse the end user. And the care providers don't want an insane billing system and are much more likely to give you a rollup all-in-one bill amount before you start.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Interesting)
To say this system works better is ridiculous.
Unless you measure health outcomes, rather than user experience. I agree the user experience sucks, and while private care is not entirely unavailable here it is generally only available to the ultra-rich and politically well-connected.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
Critics of the Canadian system don't actually care about health care outcomes, which is why they always focus on the lousy user experience. The curious question is: if they don't care about health care outcomes, why are they bothering to get all worked up about the system in the first place? They could avoid all the inconveniences of our system and get EXACTLY THE SAME CARE as an uninsured person in the United States without ever leaving home.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Informative)
To further clarify, this is true even controlling for the fact that there are groups that tend to have worse health outcomes in the US and which are less numerous in Canada. So even comparing between just middle-class white people in Canada and the US, you get significant differences in those metrics.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Informative)
I have lived for several years in both the US and in Candada, and my experience has been that Canada's health care system does work better than the US one. There are problems with it, but in general I found that both the quality of care and the administrative details that I had to deal with were both significantly better in Canada than in the US. Your milage may vary.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Informative)
The Daily Mail is not a balanced source for debating health care in NHS (I'm not American, but I think citing Fox News for gun control laws would be similar?).
In any case, in the third sentence, "this demonstrates how much dental care has deteriorated under Labour". They're criticising the way the current government is running the NHS, not universal health care.
"He pointed the finger at the general difficulty in finding a Health Service dentist since the Government introduced a 'botched' contract in April 2006." -- again, blaming the government.
"The crisis in NHS dentistry is one of this Government's most shameful legacies"
In the second article "A spokesman for NHS East Riding of Yorkshire said Mr Boynton's case gave an 'inaccurate scare-mongering picture of dental service provision in East Yorkshire based solely on the claims of one man'", which sums up the Daily Mail nicely.
Note that at no point in either article does the newspaper suggest switching to a private system. They want the government (well, the next government) to fix the current system, but none of the main parties in the UK want to end universal health care.
Try searching for David Cameron (leader of the Conservative party, the major right-wing one) and his experience with the NHS wrt his terminally ill son.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The correct term is universal health bureaucracy, there is no care involved.
Says the guy who obviously hasn't yet had to face a serious health problem without coverage or with inadequate health insurance. I know, you shouldn't be made to suffer just because of the poor choices made by others to have genetic disorders, evil employers or the lack of foresight to grow older.
If you think having government administered health coverage vs. private coverage will result in more bureaucracy, then you just haven't had to deal with your health insurance provider yet.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Funny)
The correct term is universal health bureaucracy, there is no care involved.
Yeah, why would anyone want Universal Health Bureaucracy when our current system of Private Health Bureaucracy works so well
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately for you, the facts are plain. Americans pay the most for our health care, per capita. Four times as much as any other country. And we have one of the worst health care outcomes, as measured by average life expectancy, child mortality rate, and so forth. Our outcomes are worse than some third world countries. So, for four times the cost of the next most expensive health care system, we get a third world health care system. You can speculate all you want, but your speculations are proven worthless by the real world.
Right now, you have private insurance companies, dedicated to nothing more than profiting off of your suffering, deciding whether you get care. Do you honestly think that is better?
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with you in principle, I think your numbers might be a bit off. The ones I find indicate the U.S. is paying between 20% and 50% more than the next highest country (per capita). U.S. citizens pay about twice as much for health care as the average of all the other industrialized countries. However, it places second to last in terms of effectiveness among the industrialized nations, only beating New Zealand. World-wide the U.S. ranks 37th world-wide according to the WHO, and the only North American or European country it seems to beat in terms of health care results is Mexico.
So yeah, the U.S. system is a raw deal for U.S. citizens.
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Re:And.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, if my health insurance provider screws me over, I can sue them. You can't sue the government.
Why not? British people occasionally sue the NHS (National Health Service). It doesn't make them very popular -- they're taking public money if they win -- but there's nothing to stop them suing, and sometimes they win.
Amtrack, Postal Service, Social Security... Nope, they all suck.
Because your right-wing governments don't fund them properly.
I don't want my health care decisions handed over to the same group of losers that are wasting my retirement funds.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was the insurance companies and the banks that wasted all the money, and it's the insurance company that's deciding your health care.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
>90% of Americans think that way. It's funny to sit on the outside and see Democrats fear monger about the Patriot act being a horrible piece of legislation that the Republicans put into place, then instead of repealing it when they took power the Democrats use it to put Conservative Idealists on a list of possible terrorists.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Informative)
The right-wing extremism report was initiated by George W. Bush's White House, as a counterpoint to the left-wing extremism report issued earlier this year. The right-wing extremism report further did not identify conservatives as extremists; it identified two major groups within right-wing extremists, those being hate extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and single-issue extremist groups like abortion-clinic bombers. Agreeing with any of the issues does not mean that they called you an extremist, only that extremists have been known to share that issue.
Some squirrels are male and some squirrels are female. You are in all likelihood either male or female. This does not, however, mean that you are necessarily a squirrel. It's the same argument, except with 'squirrel' in place of 'extremist,' 'male' in place of 'hate groups,' and 'female' in place of 'single-issue groups.'
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes they can. Private industry can collude with others to prevent you getting a job. They can buy all the land around yours and refuse you access. They can pollute your land and kill you, then if you've got anyone left alive to sue them, they can beat them with hundreds of lawyers.
In fact, it is the government that can't take your money, your freedom or your life without good reason. Private industry feels no compunction against doing so.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Nobody on 'my side' has ever wanted America to lose a war. Try again. Here's a hint: you may want to stop looking at politics as something with 'sides' and realize we are all in this together.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
okay, if we're going to play the "your side" game, you have to look at the other side as well.
The side you refer to 'thinking the Founding Fathers' were on to something also believes in the erosion of civil liberties, consolidation of executive power, silencing those who dissent, torture, revoking habeous corpus, forced religion, racial profiling and exclusion, warmongering, etc...
Read some of President Washington's work and tell me how ANYTHING from the last 8 years even remotely comes close to the Framer's vision!?!?
Face it, both sides are out of touch with the Founding Fathers. Both "sides" are corrupted abominations that offer little in the way of serious social stability with in the original frame work of our Constitution.
The Democrats have long understood and I think important elements of the Conservative movement (not the Republicans as of yet) now realize that we are fast approaching a 'there can be only one' point in history, where one side must finally confront and defeat the other.
Mean while I think the general population of the US is finally coming to the inevitable "there can not be only two" point in history.
There are way more issues than there are sides. Some of those issues the Democrats are more liberal, some of them Republicans are more liberal, hell some of them the Libertarians are more liberal on. Stop thinking of politics as a black and white game, all that type of thinking is doing is shrinking and isolating the once proud Republican movement. Learn to deal with nuance. Work to reform the party based on intellectual debate rather than 5 second sound bites of FUD and maybe we can see a healthy return of the Republican party.
-Rick
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nit pick (Score:5, Funny)
Unitary Executive, not Unitarian! If Bush were a Unitarian executive, he would be far more open minded ^_^.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
New Orleans is squarely in Democrat hands, the Republicans haven't had anything to do with it. The fact that you don't know that just goes to show how good the media is at covering for them.
Really, though, I think jmorris was talking about CONSERVATIVES, which Republicans ain't. Which is why they lost so big in the last election cycle, their own "right wing" base won't support them.
Actually, Conservatives believe in not giving any charities government funding, regardless of belief.
As far as Scientific Funding.... Who was the first US President to dedicate Federal funds to embryonic stem cell research?
Actually that sounds pretty awesome. :)
Can you give an actual example of a Conservative Republican who wants that? I don't think so. Hell, I'd be surprised if you came up with an example of a Conservative Republican, period.
Ahh there's that tolerance everyone on the left said was missing during the Bush years. I feel so accepted for my differing viewpoints. Really.
Here's a news flash: At this rate, things are going to come to a head, one way or another. And only one side of this argument owns guns.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not in so many words, no. Many Democrats have, however, called for us to pull out of Iraq under conditions that are equivalent (in my, and many other people's opinion) to admitting that we've lost.
How is coming to the realization that we lost the same thing as wanting to lose? Did Japan's surrender that ended WWII before his entire country was destroyed mean that Emperor Hirohito wanted to lose? Did the fact that that James Madison signed a peace treaty with the British that under conditions that are equivalent to admitting that we've lost [wikipedia.org] mean that he wanted America to lose the War of 1812?
I wish as much as the most hardcore right winger that we were accepted with open arms in Iraq and that Iraqi citizens were willing to work with us to rebuild their country, but that isn't what happened. No one wanted to (or wants to today, for that matter) lose the war. What the Democrats wanted to do was stop sending our boys off to die overseas just to prove that invading Iraq was a good idea in the first place.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a libertarian, I don't really have a dog in this fight, I think that most politicians are crooks. But do you have any idea how irrational & childish you sound?
There is a huge difference between wanting your country out of a war & wanting your country to *lose* a war.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are hundreds of regimes around the world doing worse. Some of them we even put in power. We do nothing there, why is Iraq different? THAT is the question. Why are we meddling there, and not in any place with real problems, like Somalia?
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are hundreds of regimes around the world doing worse. Some of them we even put in power.
You'd think we would have learned by now not to keep putting new regimes in power, just to have them become our Mortal Enemies (TM) 10 years later.
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Re:Hahaha, good one. (Score:5, Insightful)
"socialism" doesn't mean what the bulk of americans (ie "you") think it means. Most of Europe, Canada and South America are "socialist". We say "socialism" and you hear "communist dictatorship" which is something completely, completely different.
Sort of like how "liberal" is slanderous to you guys... so weird.
Stop thinking in black & white, flush the cold-war era propaganda from your mind, and you'll find there are some excellent lessons to be learned from a system not driven wholy by greed.
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Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Funny)
I find the principle of political parties disgusting and cowardly.
If you vote for the party, you deserve to get raped by your representative.
He was elected as Arlen Specter, and he's the same Arlen Specter he was last week. If you voted for him solely because of the R next to his name, you don't deserve a vote at all.
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Re:Purpose of partisan politics (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why we have the party system, so we have an extra layer of protection
Nonsense. The party system we have was not designed. There is nothing in the constitution about political parties, and in fact George Washington argued strongly against political parties in his farewell address. Our party system evolved for one reason and one reason only, because it is easier to get elected if you're in a party than not.
We don't place unlimited trust in the guy, we only vote for him as long as he maintains integrity to the party under which he ran
Political parties don't fix this issue, they just shift it. Instead of placing trust in the guy you vote for, you place trust in the party you vote for. I don't see how one is better than the other. Well, I do, considering that a person can have a conscience and a political party cannot, I'd rather trust the person. (Of course, since it's politics, I don't really trust anyone.)
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Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Party lines are more harmful than they are helpful. Also, he doesn't ONLY represent republican voters in the state, he represents ALL the voters in the state. So your notion that switching midterm is disgusting is just plain stupid, and hows your zealotry along party lines.
Personally, I'm inclinded to go with the founders, who believed parties were a bad idea. I think our history shows that to be true, and I'm in favor of doing away with political parties all together. Explain your ideas, don't just say "I'm a republican!" (or democrat).
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Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Neo-Conservatives (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a bit too simplistic to call all the people responsible for the Republicans' fiasco neo-cons.
The Republicans looked very powerful around the time of GW Bush's first election, but what they had is something we old time Democrats knew a lot about: a big tent coalition. We had the cultural elite and labor, and Reagan figured out that that was a fracture line he could split Democratic support along.
The difference is that the Republican coalition had even less coherence than the Democrats, and underwent spontaneous implosion as they tried to put together an agenda that pleased everyone in the tent: Westerners of a libertarian bent, the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party, the evangelicals, the flat out racists. That's why they could never control spending, they were too busy keeping everybody in the tent happy. They fooled themselves into thinking they were cleverly doing this temporarily so they could "starve the beast" until such a time the system began to fall apart. That was stupid. You can't starve the beast. If you try, then when things start to fall apart it just reaches out and eats you alive.
Still, if you want to find a scapegoat, look the the Southern social conservatives. It was their backing of the messianic mission of the neo-cons that allowed them to hijack foreign policy.
Nixon invited the old enemies of the Republicans economic elites into th party, the old Dixiecrats. They became powerful, like the far out religious parties in Israel, because they were the key to power. They're the ones that run the Republican party; not the people who elected Eisenhower. It's too bad, because the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party weren't such a bad bunch, if you kept an eye on them. The country needs people like that, even if you didn't want them to have unchallenged control over policy.
But those old time Republicans don't have any place to go now. The Republican party has been redefined out from under them. It's now the party of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and racism, all things that were anathema to those old time conservatives.
Maybe it's time for a Grand New Party.
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Re:Awesome. (Score:5, Interesting)
I want the Democrats to have to own what happens the next few years. After all the years of hearing them harp on Bush deficits I want them to have undeniable majority so they are undeniably responsible for the economy busting budgets they are signing off on.
Lord preserve us from such conservative wishing.
There was a time when conservatives saw this country as something more than a wall for spraying political graffiti onto, or fuel for their rally's bonfire They used to care for traditions, principles, and institutions.
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the quote in context (Score:5, Interesting)
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