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Why We Lost

I am soooo out of touch with the majority in my state. I voted against the chickens and for the homo’s. Now chickens have more rights than homosexuals.

In all seriousness, the passage of Prop 8 can be laid directly at the feet of Obama. He sent a very mixed signal to his flock. He said he does not approve of gay marriage, and then went into verbal deliberations on why he didn’t think that amending the constitution via proposition was the correct way to go about defending marriage.

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.”

He did not make a firm stand against prop 8, and when masses hear him say he’s “not in favor of gay marriage”, every thing else after that is gobldy-gook. It’s like talking to your dog – “Spot, Bad Dog, blah, blah, blah…

Booooo!!!!!

Prop 8 won. The tryanny of the majority has prevailed. I’m still a second class citizen. Los Angeles, you really let me down!

Now the countdown to the inevitable legal challenges has begun. I’m keeping an eye out for a post by Dale Carpenter over at Volokh, as he is bound to explore the legal options or process to challenge the proposition.

And congratulations to Barrack Obama. No, I didn’t vote for him (my candidate, Paris Hilton, only got one vote), but I give him the respect I would if he was my candidate of choice. Now, could you please start to reduce the $23 trillion dollars in national debt? Thanks

The Rubber Meets The Road. Part 2

I’m not going to be able to stay up and see if Prop 8 wins or loses. Right now, with 24% of the precincts counted, it is close, at 53% for banning gay marriage, and 47% opposed to the ban. At first glance, that looks pretty bad. But here is the thing you have to remember. In California, the smaller, less populated counties, which consists of a majority of conservative leaning voters, are the first to get counted.

This is a map from 2004. The red areas voted dominantly for Bush, the Blue, for Kerry. There is a lot more surface area that is conservative. But here is the sticky wicket. The blue areas, though it takes up much less space, those voters are very, very liberal, i.e. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and are the urban meccas of the state. Note that Kerry won with a ten percent margin. That gives you some idea of the dominance of the blue areas in state elections.

The blue areas, as a rule, take longer to get into the final tally. Because they are so much more densely populated, it takes a lot more time to count the votes in those counties. It matters. When Bill Simon was running for Governor in 2002, we went to bed with him in the lead by seven’ish points against the later-to-be-recalled Grey Davis. We woke up to find he had lost by 47 to 42 percent. That is the difference the blue areas make. Plus, in this election cycle, some of those red areas have been leaning blue. So though the measure is behind right now, we will see what the morning brings.

In the mean time, this is how the Religious Right sees the outcome of this vote:.

“If we lose California, if they defeat the marriage amendment, I’m afraid that the culture war is over and Christians have lost,” said Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. “California is a big dam, holding back the flood — and if you take down the dam in California, it’s going to flood 49 other states.”

Before the night is over, there will be a deluge of “No” votes from SacroFranAngeles. Here’s hoping for a flood of Biblical proportions.

Remembering The Past… Bloggy Style. When Political Partys Collapse.

Many years ago, in a different time and on a different blog, I wrote a post or two about the impending doom of the Democratic Party. It was 2004, and the Dems were tripping over themselves to try to be both anti-war, and pro military at the same time. It’s possible to do, but it ain’t easy. They had a Presidential candidate in John Kerry who was about as charismatic as a dead bug, and, in case you didn’t know, he was in Vietnam… Uhm scratch that. I was looking through my archives, for the post I was referring to, and as it turns out, I wasn’t even blogging when Kerry was running for President. I didn’t start until January 2005. But If I would have been blogging then, I would have been gleefully anticipating the collapse of the Democratic party. They had picked yet another lame candidate for the Presidency. They were doing their bet to ensure defeat in Iraq, which, especially the latter, caused rgeat strife within the party. It looked as if the ghosts of Vietnam (which Kerry served in BTW) were coming back to tear the party in two.

Now here we are on election day 2008, and the Dems are poised to gain even more of a majority in the House, take over and maybe even get a veto proof majority in the Senate, and to top things off, get the biggest prize of them all, the Presidency.  And it is the Republican party that appears to be in tatters. Am I gleeful? Not really. Though I am a registered libertarian, I identify more with conservatives more than liberals.

The reason why I am not gleeful is that the Republican party is shedding the Reagan inspired concept of “the Big Tent”. The Rush Republicans have declared that the moderates and RINO’s leave the party – they want it to shape in their own image. Fine. When the night is over, and Obama has won by a landslide, we’ll see how well you do without us in the next elections.