partisanship

For some reason, I was a moderate Democrat when I lived amongst and worked for liberal Democrats in Massachusetts. I was also fairly moderate when worked for the DLC, although I strongly disagreed with their advocacy for the Iraq war. But living in Utah again has made me much more partisan, although I was pretty partisan from birth.

I think it is because the Republicans in power in this state--with a few exceptions--are really radically reactionary. All of the Congressional Republicans from Utah carry water for the radical presidency of Bush-Cheney, who has claimed an unprecidented [and unconstitutional] amount of executive privilege and power. Some--like Rep. Bishop and Sens. Hatch and Bennett--have placed this duty above those of their constituents. I dislike bootlickers of all stripes, and Clinton appologists are just as annoying to me [and dishonest] as folks like Hatch and Rep. Patrick McHenry.

For its part, the state legislature seeks to outdo their congressional counterparts in unconstitutionality, partisanship, and ideology over constituents. To me, Sen. Buttars takes the cake. Despite his greatest desires, he probably has homosexual constituents. Yet his whole legislative agenda is to do everything possible to make life worse for them from the moment they come out. Well that's not fair, the rest of his agenda is based on legislating his other religious views, such as the world was literally created in 6 days by God.

If there were more Senators like Scott McCoy, who worked hard to do what was right for their constituents, sought to save taxpayers money by arguing against unconstitutional bills, etc. I wouldn't care about their particular beliefs much.

I have many conservative friends and I respect conservatives at all levels of government who try to do the right thing. But when conservatives use underhanded tactics and dishonest arguments to pass bad laws, I react to condemn their party who fails to condemn them.

I am for solutions to big problems and don't really have a set agenda on how to get there. For example, if someone can convince me that Vouchers really do work, I would love to see it. But so far, for every study that says they are good, there are more studies that say the opposite. And the whole church-state thing makes me uneasy, despite what SCOTUS said. I want to reduce the number of abortions, lower health care costs, raise the standard of living world wide, level the playing field, keep America safe, end/reduce wars, stop global warming, etc. If a free-market or social-conservative approach to any of these problems is shown to work empirically better than social-democratic approach, I will support it. However, all I have seen thus far is that abstinence-only doesn't work, forcing marriage doesn't work, privatizing health care doesn't work, voluntary business compliance doesn't work, discrimination lives on without legislation/litigation, preemptive voluntary wars are disastrous, etc.

But as the masthead says: "truth over balance, progress over ideology."