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The Montgomery County Democratic Party Endorses Primary Candidates

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Mike Bock

The Montgomery County Democratic Party this evening, at its Central Committee Meeting, in separate unanimous actions agreed to endorse all of the primary candidates recommended by its Selection Committee. It was reported that at the Selection Committee Endorsement Meeting there were 47 members who voted on the endorsements.

The Central Committee was acting on recommendations from the Executive Committee. The issue of the timing of endorsements had been discussed at the last Executive and the last Central Committee meeting in October and a motion to delay endorsement had been defeated at that meeting. This issue of delaying endorsements was raised again at this evening’s Executive Committee and, again, by a large margin the Executive Committee defeated a motion to delay. The deadline for candidates to file is January 4.

The MCDP voted to endorse the following candidates as Democratic candidates for the following offices: 36th Ohio House District, Chuck Norton; 37th OHD no endorsement; 38th OHD, Susan Lemish; 39th OHD, Clayton Luckie; 40th OHD, Roland Windburn; 6th Ohio Senate District, John Doll. In addition, the party endorsed John Froelich for judge (I didn’t catch the court). The MCDP made no endorsement for anyone to fill the Office of Coroner.

Most interestingly, the Selection Committee made no endorsement for either the 3rd U.S. House District or the 8th U.S. House District — the two House of Representative Districts in Montgomery County. At the Central Committee Meeting, MCDP chairperson, Mark Owens, indicated that Jane Mitakides had recently expressed an interest in becoming the Democratic Party’s candidate for the 3rd U.S. House District. He invited Ms Mitakides to the platform and she spoke, I thought, convincingly and well. But the Central Committee, by vote, determined to keep the primary candidate selection process open and chose not to endorse anyone for the 3rd U.S. House District — until after the January 4th deadline to file.

After the October meeting, I made this post: The Mission of the Democratic Party Should Be to Empower Democracy to Work
Earlier in October, I made this post: “The Big Questions Facing Our Democracy Are Too Important To Allow Political Parties to Decide”

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The National Review Endorses Mitt Romney For President

Posted on December 12, 2007 by Mike Bock

The National Review, saying their “guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate,” has endorsed Mitt Romney to be the Republican candidate for president.

Excerpts from the article:

Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.
John McCain is not as conservative as Romney. He sponsored and still champions a campaign-finance law that impinged on fundamental rights of political speech; he voted against the Bush tax cuts; he supported this year’s amnesty bill, although he now says he understands the need to control the border before doing anything else.
Fred Thompson is as conservative as Romney, and has distinguished himself with serious proposals on Social Security, immigration, and defense. But Thompson has never run any large enterprise — and he has not run his campaign well, either.
Romney is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished former businessman and governor. At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too often the Bush administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven executive skill. He has demonstrated it in everything he has done in his professional life, and his tightly organized, disciplined campaign is no exception. He himself has shown impressive focus and energy.
Like any Republican, he would have an uphill climb next fall. But he would be able to offer a persuasive outsider’s critique of Washington. His conservative accomplishments as governor showed that he can work with, and resist, a Demo°©crat°©ic legislature. He knows that not every feature of the health-care plan he enacted in Massachusetts should be replicated nationally, but he can also speak with more authority than any of the other Republican candidates about this pressing issue. He would also have credibility on the economy, given his success as a businessman and a manager of the Olympics.
Some conservatives question his sincerity. It is true that he has reversed some of his positions. But we should be careful not to overstate how much he has changed. In 1994, when he tried to unseat Ted Kennedy, he ran against higher taxes and government-run health care, and for school choice, a balanced budget amendment, welfare reform, and “tougher measures to stop illegal immigration.” He was no Rockefeller Republican even then.
We believe that Romney is a natural ally of social conservatives. He speaks often about the toll of fatherlessness in this country. He may not have thought deeply about the political dimensions of social issues until, as governor, he was confronted with the cutting edge of social liberalism. No other Republican governor had to deal with both human cloning and court-imposed same-sex marriage. He was on the right side of both issues, and those battles seem to have made him see the stakes of a broad range of public-policy issues more clearly. He will work to put abortion on a path to extinction. Whatever the process by which he got to where he is on marriage, judges, and life, we’re glad he is now on our side — and we trust him to stay there.
He still has some convincing to do with other conservatives. Romney has been plagued by the sense that his is a passionless, paint-by-the-numbers conservatism. If he is to win the nomination, he will have to show more of the kind of emotion and resolve he demonstrated in his College Station “Faith in America” speech.
More than the other primary candidates, Romney has President Bush’s virtues and avoids his flaws. His moral positions, and his instincts on taxes and foreign policy, are the same. But he is less inclined to federal activism, less tolerant of overspending, better able to defend conservative positions in debate, and more likely to demand performance from his subordinates. A winning combination, by our lights. In this most fluid and unpredictable Republican field, we vote for Mitt Romney.

From The National Review Online, “Romney for President,” written by the editors of The National Review

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Our Growing Huge Debt Means Politicians Must Find A Way To Discuss Raising Taxes

Posted on December 11, 2007 by Mike Bock

Interesting article in Sunday’s NY Times says that because of huge debts caused by the anti-tax movement, the U.S. is sliding into a second class status in the world economy. According to its author, economist Robert Frank, “Our political system must find a way to talk about taxes.”

Excerpts from the article:

Our national debt has increased by more than $3 trillion since 2002. Once the world’s largest creditor nation, we are now its largest debtor. We are currently borrowing more than $800 billion a year from the Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans and others — loans that will have to be repaid in full with interest. These imbalances have sent the dollar plummeting.
The situation is set to become worse. On the current trajectory, the national debt will rise an additional $5 trillion over the next decade. The retirement of baby boomers will require additional revenue to cover growing deficits in the Social Security and Medicare programs.
In short, realistic proposals for solving our budget problems must include higher revenue. But unless political leaders can develop strategies for dealing with the powerful anti-tax rhetoric that has sunk similar proposals in the past, the impasse will continue. Various strategies like a debt consolidation loan and others, to settle debts must be engaged to put a cork on the overarching national debt. Get advice from iva on how to write them off.
One strategy would be to inform voters that the “it’s your money” argument is incoherent. Taken to its logical conclusion, it implies that it is illegitimate for the government to collect taxes. But if that were true, there could be no government and no army, in which case, the United States would have long ago been conquered by another country. Then we’d be paying compulsory taxes to that country’s government. In the real world, governments not only maintain armies, they also provide a variety of public goods and services that would be impractical for private citizens to provide for themselves. Every government, including our own, has always levied taxes of some sort to pay for these goods and services.
It’s strongly in our interest to talk about what services the government should provide and how to raise the revenue to pay for them. Politicians need to explain this clearly to their constituents. The argument is simple and would fit easily into a 30-second campaign spot.
Anti-tax crusaders sometimes brand proposals to make the tax structure more progressive as class warfare based on envy. This tactic has also been rhetorically effective, but, like the “it’s your money” slogan, it stifles an important conversation to everyone’s detriment.
Progressive taxation is not about envy. Top earners have captured the big share of all income and wealth gains during the last three decades. They’re where the money is. If we’re to pay for public services they and others want, they must carry a disproportionate share of the tax burden.
FORTUNATELY, there is clear evidence that reframing the discussion often has a big impact on the way voters think about tax policy. In the spring of 2005, for example, I asked the Survey Research Institute at Cornell University to conduct two telephone surveys to investigate public attitudes about the Bush administration’s proposal to eliminate the estate tax. In the first survey, respondents were simply asked whether they favored the proposal. Almost 75 percent said they did. In the second, respondents were first told that lost revenue from eliminating the estate tax would necessitate some combination of raising other taxes, borrowing more money from abroad and further cutbacks in government services. This time, almost 80 percent of respondents favored keeping the estate tax.
Given the effectiveness of anti-tax rhetoric, presidential candidates are understandably reluctant to tell voters what must be done to put the fiscal house in order. But voters are smarter than many cynics think, and they may be especially receptive to fresh points of view at this stage in the political cycle. The anti-tax rhetoric of recent decades is at the root of many of our current problems. Candidates with the courage to confront it head on may not only contribute to our economic recovery, but may also win additional votes.