Skip to main content

Why we actually need an opposition party in Delaware ...

Let me count the ways:

The Democrats have given us:

1.  A Secretary of Education with only minimal actual public education experience along with an bald-faced allegiance to a corporate reform agenda so confusing that he can't even keep his stories straight when talking to the chief school officers in a public meeting.

2.  An Attorney General who announces for re-election but won't come clean about his semi-public health issues.

3.  A State Treasurer who they are so upset with that they plan to primary themselves next time around.

4.  A State Insurance Commissioner who is so blatantly incompetent and/or corrupt that the Democratic Party already primaried her and lost last time around.

5.  A Lieutenant Governor who is a really good guy but who has abruptly disappeared over the last year when any serious issues come up so he won't be forced to be associated with them and can run (believe it or not) as some sort of "outsider."

6.  A Governor who has (a) wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in chasing fly-by-night "investments" in jobs; (b) allowed his various departments (DNREC and DPH to cite two examples) to operate via "secret" Attorney General opinions; (c) convened what even his pet AG had to admit was an illegal charter school task force; (d) changed the rules without authority to authorize a new hospital in Middletown despite, you know, the law; (e) could give away tens of millions of dollars in corporate welfare and millions to save casinos but couldn't figure out how to give raises to State employees (including those on Food Stamps) or to fully fund education; and (f) spend tens of millions more in creating a totally useless (from any real law enforcement perspective) "homeland security" office whose primary function seems to be collecting information on people who don't break the law and buying power boats for the State Police while people keep getting murdered in Wilmington like it was the VH1 bizarro world edition of "Survivor."

The Republicans have given us:

Nothing.

(Which may mean, objectively speaking, that they should be winning, but their nothing is so vacuous that it looks even worse than what the Democrats have actually done.)

So we really could use an opposition party because the Democrats are not cleaning up their own act.  In fact, if anything, they are getting worse, and the Republicans just want to be sure that Transsexuals can't use what they consider the "wrong" public restroom.

But it's not going to be the IPOD (see below), and both the Greens and the Libertarians have been structurally marginalized in some of the few acts that the GOPers and Dems agree on (no fusion tickets, etc.).

So basically what this means is ... we're screwed.

And, oh yes, DSEA gave millions in campaign contributions over the past 6-8 years for nothing.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Amen, to all of this.
delacrat said…
True, but... depressing.
Anonymous said…
So I guess it is up to the Democratic Party to primary itself?

Would help if the Republicans split into a conservative (ipod) and more moderate (Greenville) parties and would contend across the open ballot, instead of inside closed party ranks.

Then the Republican masquerading as Democrats, Markell, Carper, Carney, and Crowd could hold the middle, and the Progressives could challenge from the left.

The political landscape would become stable, and parties would have less influence on government. In otherwords like a game of RISK, allegiances would have to be forged to get something done... If one attempted to filibuster, the other two could gang up against you, so moving forward becomes how a party survives, instead of drawing a line and saying "no".

Basically Greenville and Sussex County need to be two seperate parties. Then everyone is happy.
Bob Wilson said…
Big government is taking over health care at our expense. We (Markell) took blackmail money from the Feds to sell our imput into our kids education. Markell and our legislators continue to raise our taxes so he and Alan Levin can decide which companies to give it too; without great success. Big government doesn't work. Ask yourself....What does the government do well? More ideas and better ideas are needed. Getting away from the two Party system is the start.
delacrat said…
Bob Wilson,

It's only "Big government", if you don't like the particular thing it's doing.

tom said…
Then it is big government by definition--No one is going to like every thing the Government is doing. Even delacrat, one of Government's most fanatical cheerleaders, said "True, but... depressing." above in a context that can be interpreted as expressing disapproval for some of the particular things the State is doing. Therefore delacrat thinks (at least in this context) that it's "Big government".

May I suggest a few less emotional and more measurable metrics:

At what point point does the ratio of the State's annual spending to the State's GDP constitute "Big government"?

At what point does the ratio of State employees to Delaware's total workforce constitute "Big government"?

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?