Martin O’Malley For President? What Do You Know About Him?

April 29th, 2013 | Posted by jclifford in Buttons | Democrats | Election 2016 | Politics | Shirts - (5 Comments)

Hillary Clinton aside, the big talk for the 2016 presidential election is centered around Martin O’Malley, the Democratic governor of Maryland. What do Democratic voters know about him, though?

O’Malley gave a speech at last years Democratic national convention, praising Barack Obama. It was an acceptable speech, but not particularly great in any way. It didn’t surprise anybody with new insights, or facts, or ways of communicating ideas. Still, O’Malley seemed nice enough.

omalley president 2016“Swiss bank accounts never built an American bridge. Swiss bank accounts don’t put cops on the beat or teachers in our classrooms. Swiss bank accounts never created American jobs. We are Americans. We must act like Americans. We must move forward, not back,” O’Malley said. “There is a powerful truth at the heart of the American dream: The stronger we make our country, the more she gives back to us, to our children and grandchildren.”

Okay enough with the platitudes. Let’s get to the specifics. What has Martin O’Malley actually stood for?

Martin O’Malley began his political career as an aide to Senator Barbara Mikulski, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who is neither very liberal nor very conservative on the whole. O’Malley then moved on to the Baltimore City Council before being elected mayor of the city. He was first elected Governor in 2006, and again in 2010.

Governor O’Malley has not responded to Project Vote Smart requests for his positions on key political issues. However, O’Malley’s position on gun issues is made fairly clear by his grade from the National Rifle Association: An F.

As Governor, O’Malley has refused to include Maryland in the federal health care reform exchange program, setting up a health-care exchange system that is unique to Maryland itself.

o'malley 2016 campaign pinEnvironmental groups have expressed concerns that the Shale Advisory Commission set up by O’Malley is biased in favor of companies intent on beginning fracking for natural gas in Maryland. “Despite citizen concerns and warnings from independent scientists and public health officials about the negative impacts of fracking, our state government seems intent on finding rationales for issuing permits,” says local environmental group Patuxent Riverkeeper. “The Governor’s own task force echoes those same concerns, yet inexplicably presumes that fracking should happen in Maryland.” On the other hand, O’Malley has supported an increase in gasoline taxes. On climate change, O’Malley opposes regulations, and favors a scheme for businesses to trade government permissions to continue polluting the air.

On social issues, O’Malley supports funding for abortions, supports equal marriage rights regardless of sexual orientation, and opposes efforts to drain public school budgets to provide government money to private schools.

Most recently, O’Malley has signed legislation approving the expansion of gambling in Maryland, another bill expanding wind farms.

This is just a preliminary sketch of Martin O’Malley’s political identity, of course. What else do you know about Martin O’Malley? What have you concluded about his worth as a potential candidate for President of the United States? Why do you think some Democrats are eager for O’Malley to run for President in 2016?

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Coastline of United States Sharply Altered in Post-Election Cataclysm

November 7th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Politics | Religion | Sex and Gender | State and Local - (2 Comments)

The morning after the 2012 elections saw a starkly changed American landscape, changed in a very literal sense as large sections of the North American landmass collapsed into the ocean.

As the dawn rose over the United States of America, it quickly became apparent that the entire states of Maine (where voters approved same-sex marriage by a margin of 53%-47%), Maryland (where voters approved same-sex marriage by 52%-48% margin) and Washington State (where voters approved same-sex marriage by a 52%-48% margin) had disappeared under the waves. NSAT-5 and NSAT-7 satellite imagery quickly pieced together by the Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration of Very, Very Straight but Clergy revealed a new composite image of the American coastline:

Coastline of the United States Dramatically Altered in Cataclysm After Votes on Same-Sex Marriage in Maryland, Maine and Washington State

Reaction was swift from conservative quarters. “By their actions, the voters of three states invited God’s judgment on our nation,” opined theogeologist and chicken-frying magnate Dan Cathy. Fellow theogeologist Rabbi Yehuda Levin agreed with Cathy’s assessment:

The way this works is very simple: God warns us. God warns in the Bible as early as Noah that this kind of misbehavior can lead to floods. It can lead to disasters. It can lead to buildings falling and earthquakes.

So that is our tradition. It is written in our Talmud, two thousand years ago, that because of the sin of homosexuality and the, organized homosexuality, societal homosexuality is, cause, brings about earthquakes.

Innocent people then get destroyed with the guilty people, just like when a bus driver drives a bus and goes over a ravine, innocent people are killed. We don’t hold this against God. These are the regulations.

“Yes, millions of people are dead, but some ladies were planning to kiss one another. God had no choice,” added Rabbi Levin’s longtime personal assistant and groomsman, who refused to be named for this article. “God’s justice demands that we sort out our genitals hygenically.”

Update, 7:50 AM EST: Officials at the Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration of Very, Very Straight Clergy have released a statement clarifying that the states of Maine, Maryland and Washington have actually not collapsed into the ocean after all. “One of our technicians misinterpreted the image on our lab computers. The map is just our screen saver,” explained the Very, Very Straight Reverend Frederick Updike. “We regret the error.” “Check back in tomorrow, though,” added VVSR Updike’s longtime personal groomsman.

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Watching Equality of Marriage Rights In The 2012 Election

October 15th, 2012 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Election 2012 | Liberal Links | Liberty | Sex and Gender - (5 Comments)

Thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union for assembling a list of the states where there are ballot initiatives on the issue of marriage equality for heterosexuals and homosexuals.

On Election Day in Maryland, Maine, and the state of Washington, voters will have the chance to recognize the right of all people to equal protection under the law, regardless of sexual orientation. In Minnesota, home to kooky Republicans like Michele Bachmann, right wing groups have pushed forward an initiative to prohibit marriage equality.

It would be nice if the initiative in Minnesota were voted down, and the other initiatives were approved, but such a result would not be ideal. The legal rights of American citizens shouldn’t be approved or discarded by voters. They’re constitutionally established, not a matter for popular referenda.

It’s long past time for the Supreme Court to hear a case on the right of same-sex couples to get married, and to rule in favor of ending the discrimination in many states simply because a shrinking cultural group of bigots wants to interfere in the private lives of Americans they don’t even know.

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Poverty Higher In States That Ban Atheists From Public Office

May 30th, 2012 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Liberty | Religion | State and Local - (4 Comments)

There are seven states in the USA with constitutions that prohibit atheists from holding public office: Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

There are two testable justifications for these discriminatory provisions:

1. Atheists should be banned from public office because atheists cannot be effective leaders and will lead to problems for the states in which they hold public office
2. A divine being controls the universe, and that divine being gets angry when atheists hold public office, so that divine being punishes states where atheists are allowed to hold public office

A specific test that should confirm or refute these justifications is an examination of the poverty rate in the states where atheists are allowed to hold public office, and compare that to the poverty rate in the states where atheists are banned from holding public office. If either or both of the above justifications are valid, then the poverty rate in states that ban atheists from holding public office should be lower.

I looked at the data from the Census Bureau. Specifically, I used the bureau’s average of the last three years of data, which is calculated in order establish a more steady sense of relative poverty in each state, compensating for swings in the data from year to year. I averaged the poverty rates in the two sets of states, and here’s what I found:

discrimination against atheists increases poverty

These results show that there is indeed a relationship between constitutional provisions that ban atheists from public office and the poverty rate, but it’s exactly the opposite relationship that the justifications for the discrimination would predict. States that prohibit atheists from holding public office have a higher average rate of poverty (15.4%) than states that allow atheists to hold public office (13.1%).

There are three reasonable explanations for this pattern that I can think of (Supernatural explanations aren’t reasonable, so I’m not going to speculate that there is a divine being who hates discrimination against atheists and metes out punishment accordingly):

1. Allowing atheists into public office encourages people of greater ability to run for office, thus increasing the effectiveness of government in a state
2. Allowing atheists into public office is part of a state culture of open-mindedness that tends to attract people of greater ability, who are able to keep themselves out of poverty
3. States that have high rates of poverty tend to make poor decisions, because their most talented residents tend to leave in desperation, and prohibitions on atheists in public office are just one symptom of a more general statewide ineptitude

Whichever explanation is true, or even if there’s some other dynamic at play, this much is clear: Banning atheists from holding public office doesn’t make the residents of a state, and it just might hurt them.

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Marriage Equality Squished In New Jersey, Advanced In Maryland

February 19th, 2012 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Legislation | Liberty | Sex and Gender - (5 Comments)

Not long at all after Washington legalized same-sex marriage, the state House of Representatives in Maryland has passed legislation to grant marriage equality as well. The Maryland Senate expected to follow suit before long, and the Governor of Maryland has expressed willingness to sign the bill into law.

Just to the north, both houses of the New Jersey legislature passed a similar law. New Jersey was about to move forward into the proud club of states that support equality under the law regardless of sexual orientation. Governor Chris Christie wouldn’t have it, though. He vetoed the legislation, saying that the state legislature shouldn’t act to protect the constitutional rights of the people of New Jersey.

i apologize if my legal rights are getting in the way of your bigotryIn a perfect world, state legislatures shouldn’t have to pass laws recognizing that citizens have the right to equal protection under the law. Ideally, the matter should be decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. However, the Supreme Court has been cowardly on the matter, too afraid to confront the clear trend that, although right wing Republicans want to keep American couples unequal, most Americans recognize that it doesn’t do them any harm to allow other people to get married.

So, good for Washington! Good for Maryland! Shame on Chris Christie. Gays and lesbians don’t have to get married if they don’t want to, and regressive grumps don’t have to like it if they don’t want to, but the choice to get married ought to be up to the people who are getting married. One person’s bigotry is not a valid reason to interfere with another person’s wedded bliss.

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Campaigned For Bike Trails, Killed On Her Bike

September 22nd, 2010 | Posted by The Green Man in Alternative Parties | Election 2010 | Environment | Greens - (0 Comments)

“During my free time I enjoy swimming, biking, and running,” wrote U.S. Senate candidate Natasha Pettigrew. As part of her campaign, she spoke out against “a lack of bike paths”, and she used her bicycle to get around instead of driving a car almost every day. That’s where the irony comes in: Pettigrew was killed when an SUV ran over her and her bicycle. She was riding on a road in a place where there was no bike trail.

Natasha Pettigrew had the courage to put her life on the line to help move her vision of a better world closer to reality. In a country where roads are often not safe for bicycles, she took to a bicycle anyway, instead of surrendering her ideals and hopping into a motorized vehicle like most other people. She knew that automobiles, in addition to killing bicyclists, are dangerous to the planet as a whole, emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Pettigrew campaigned for a platform of environmentalism that went far beyond transportation, ranging from the cleaning of Chesapeake Bay to the development of wind farms in Maryland. She wrote, “We only have one planet. It is a beautiful and strong planet. We must do what is necessary to protect for our own use and enjoyment.”

Although Natasha Pettigrew was killed this week, the voters of Maryland can do justice to her cause by giving serious consideration to the Green Party candidate that will be chosen to replace her on the ballot next week.

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Green Party Senate Candidacy Literally Killed Off By an SUV. What Can You Do?

September 21st, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Alternative Parties | Election 2010 | Environment | Greens | Politics | State and Local - (4 Comments)

This should be talked about more than it will be.

Maryland Green Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Natasha Pettigrew was killed today. She wasn’t walking her talk: she was riding it, riding her bicycle as a means of transportation. She was hit and killed by a massive sport utility vehicle driven by someone who says she wasn’t paying enough attention to the road to tell whether she’d hit a dog, a deer, or a person, and so kept on driving for four miles.

The Cadillac Escalade costs as much as a house does in some parts of the country, as much as 415 brand-new bicycles. It has an infinitely higher gas mileage. Cadillac says its SUV has “power and presence” and is “untouchable” on the road. Sadly, Cadillac was right.

Natasha Pettigrew wrote:

We only have one planet. It is a beautiful and strong planet… we should strive to leave Earth in a better state than when we inherited it. Our goal should be the continued existence of humans, flora, and fauna… here, on our Beautiful Blue Planet.

Natasha Pettigrew can’t carry on any longer in the struggle for a cleaner environment and a lower-impact way of life. Ask yourself what you can do today. Ask yourself what you can do tomorrow.

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Maryland Primary Results 2010

September 14th, 2010 | Posted by jclifford in Election 2010 | Politics | State and Local - (4 Comments)

Maryland‘s most powerful seat on Capitol Hill is being broadly contested today, as eleven Republicans, eight Democrats, and one Green Party candidate are seeking to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Barbara Mikulski.

Of the many Democrats challenging Mikulski, Christopher Garner and Sanquetta Taylor were the most organized. Garner is a right wing Democrat who cites the Heritage Foundation in asserting that the United States is in decline because it has become too “Leftist”. Taylor has expressed no detailed policy positions. Despite Garner and Taylor’s efforts, Mikulski has won her bid to be the Democrats’ Senate nominee again in a mega-landslide, despite a recent history of questionable votes for the dirty three of surveillance bills: the Protect America Act, the FISA Amendments Act, and the Patriot Act.

Of the GOP contenders, Senate candidate Neil Cohen describes himself as a “moderate Republican”, pro-choice and seeking to improve government rather than broadly cutting it down. Stephens Dempsey is running for the GOP nomination on a libertarian platform. Daniel McAndrew proposes opposition to all legislation attempting to deal with the issue of climate change, and supports expansion of offshore drilling, despite the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster this year. Eric Wargotz advocates against fair criminal trials for people suspected of particularly despised criminal acts. Meanwhile Jim Rutledge lists dozens of “freedoms” he stands for, but the freedoms in the Bill of Rights don’t make it up there. Instead Rutledge insists on the “freedom” from having his kids being taught about evolution in public schools and the “freedom” of teachers in public schools to turn their classrooms into proselytization chambers. Character actors on the GOP stage, Wargotz and Rutledge have been playing it up for votes and were in a pitched battle for a primary win on election day — a battle that Wargotz eked out by gaining a plurality but not a majority of votes.

Natasha Pettigrew is the sole Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland this year. She proposes an expansion of wind farms within Maryland state lines, writing that “If we invest in wind, we can provide not only for ourselves, but sell the excess to generate revenue.”

1st district liberals have little choice for representation in the U.S. House. Democratic incumbent Frank Kratovil is a right-leaning Blue Dog, and has no challenger from within his own party this year. Republicans Rob Fisher and Andy Harris competed for the right to challenge Kratovil in the general election. Harris, whipping up stories of a border crisis that just doesn’t exist, will be Kratovil’s opponent in November.

Dutch Ruppersberger, the Democratic incumbent for the 2nd congressional district, has fended off the campaign of Jeff Morris, who claims to be the candidate of reason in spite of a rather loose grasp on the logic of climate issues. Two other Democrats also failed in their challenge. Five Republicans are competing for their party’s nomination to the seat: Marcelo Cardarelli, Josh Dowlut, Jimmy Mathis, Troy Stouffer and Francis Treadwell. Cardarelli, who wants to solve America’s economic problems by lowering taxes on the ultra-rich, has coasted to a GOP primary victory.

In the 3rd district, incumbent John Sarbanes has three Democratic challengers in today’s primary: John Kibler, Michael Miller and John Rea. None of these challengers have strong campaign resources, however. Four candidates are competing for the GOP nomination in this district. Of those four, twp have substantial organization: Greg Bartosz, who joins other congressional candidates from Maryland in making gross misrepresentations of the body of research into climate change, and Jim Wilhelm, who perpetuates this year’s dominant political folktale, the myth of a border crisis. Wilhelm has held off Bartosz to win the 3rd District GOP nomination.

There will be no Republican primary in the 4th district. Robert Broadus is the only GOP candidate. However, there are three candidates taking on incumbent Donna Edwards in today’s Democratic primary: Kwame Gyamfi, George McDermott and Herman Taylor. Donna Edwards, popular in her liberal district for her strong liberal stands on Capitol Hill, has easily won re-election.

In the 5th district Andrew Gall is mounting an idealistic, liberal challenge to senior Democratic incumbent Steny Hoyer. Sylvanus Bent is also challenging Hoyer. With next to no money and driven almost solely by the power of his indignation at Steny Hoyer’s entrenched insiderism, Andrew Gall has managed to convince 1 in 10 Democratic voters to vote with him and for a change. That’s an impressive result given the power of the corporate-funded Hoyer campaign juggernaut, but it’s not enough to keep him in the race. Steny Hoyer will be the Democratic nominee.

Collins Bailey, Chris Chaffee, Charles Lollar and Chris Robins competed for the Republican nomination. Lollar, who has given public speeches promising not to tell any one how much he opposes reproductive rights, has handily won the GOP nomination and will face Hoyer in the November election.

Roscoe Bartlett is the incumbent in the 6th congressional district, and is being challenged, mainly on account of his old age, by four other Republicans: Joe Krysztoforski, Steve Taylor, Dennis Janda and Seth Edward Wilson. Republican voters haven’t held Bartlett’s age against him, and he will be the GOP nominee again. On the Democratic side, journalist Casey Clark competed against Andrew Duck. Duck, a military consultant for defense contractor Northrup Grumman, has won the Democratic nomination.

7th district incumbent Elijah Cummings faced one rival from within the Democratic Party this year, community activist Charles Smith, who Cummings roundly defeated tonight. Frank Mirabile, Mike Vallerie and Ray Bly are running for the Republican nomination, and although the race is still too close to call at the time of this writing, it looks as though Mirabile will come out on top. Like Marcelo Cardarelli in Maryland’s 2nd district, Frank Mirabile favors of tackling the economic crisis facing American families by cutting the taxes of America’s most comfortably wealthy citizens.

Incumbent Chris Van Hollen is running unopposed for the Democratic Party nomination in the 8th district. Four Republicans are campaigning for the right to face Van Hollen in the general election this autumn. Mike Philips likens his campaign to a small earthquake recently felt in Maryland, writing, “let the rumble we felt this morning be a metaphor to every incumbent, career politician.” Bruce Stern has positioned himself as “pragmatic” and “viable”. Bill Thomas promises to “mean trouble for liberals in Congress” Christine Thron campaigns on a platform of supporting the expansion of offshore drilling and opposing legislation to deal with climate change. The contest for votes between Philips and Stern is still too close to call.

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