paterson should have picked hinchey

i know i haven’t posted anything in awhile, but i just wanted to say that rep. maurice hinchey (d-ny) is much better qualified to be a senator than rep. kirsten gillibrand. usually people like me who blog stuff like to recommend things in advance, but i was operating under the assumption that governor david paterson would pick caroline kennedy or attorney general andrew cuomo, not rep. kirsten gillibrand. let me explain why picking her is so dumb and why maurice hinchey would have been a much better choice:

1) maurice hinchey is one of the most liberal/progressive congresspeople there is, rivaling people like dennis kucinich for the title of most liberal. as a strong liberal/progressive who believes that my state is also strongly liberal/progressive (yes, even the formerly conservative upstate is turning from red to blue), i think he would be perfect. he has many years of experience and is not some inexperienced newcomer like kirsten gillibrand. kirsten gillibrand, on the other hand, is a blue dog centrist democrat who is strongly allied with the national rifle association. so basically, maurice hinchey has the best political views of any congresspeople from new york, he is quite experienced, and he does not have any hint of scandal like charles rangel does.

2) maurice hinchey used to have a swing district and faced very tough elections against republicans, but got redistricted after the 2000 census into a heavily liberal district that includes some of the most liberal parts of upstate new york, like ithaca, and excludes the more conservative areas nearby. if he were nominated to a higher office, his seat would be sure to stay in democratic hands. kirsten gillibrand is currently a congresswoman from a republican district, where it is very hard for a democrat like her to get elected. if she were to stay in congress, her seat could stay in democratic hands, but if she becomes senator, her seat is all but sure to fall back into republican control. by nominating her to the senate, governor paterson is giving the republicans a free house seat that is currently democratic. that is not a good idea.

anyway, i am just comparing the 2 congresspeople from new york, and ignoring our state attorney general andrew cuomo and the daughter of former president john f. kennedy, caroline kennedy. caroline kennedy seems to be pretty liberal/progressive, but she has no experience and for most of her life has been avoiding the public spotlight. apparently governor paterson was going to choose caroline kennedy but she changed her mind for personal reasons, according to some reports. according to other reports, caroline kennedy heard that she was not going to get the job and then publicly announced that she was withdrawing from consideration for the job so as not to be humiliated even further. as for andrew cuomo, i think he is well qualified, and like caroline kennedy he comes from a well-connected political dynasty that can raise lots of money, but the drawback is that he is currently filling the vital role of state attorney general, continuing the good work that eliot spitzer once did as attorney general, before eliot spitzer rose to the level of governor and got a silly notion to go screw some prostitutes for fun. eliot spitzer actually did a very good job as attorney general for years, prior to becoming governor and becoming involved in scandals and having to resign. and governor david paterson is a bit of an enigma when it comes to his political philosophy, because he used to be known as a liberal democrat, but ever since he became governor he has been rather centrist in many issues, especially regarding taxes and government spending, where our governor is downright conservative. our governor does blog on the daily kos, but i am quite certain that this is more of an effort on his part to reach out to liberal/progressive activists than an indication that he actually agrees with liberal/progressive activists on much of anything. he mainly just wants our help re-electing him in 2010. my favorite politician in new york state would have to be rep. maurice hinchey, and my second favorite is binghamton mayor matt ryan. they are both on the correct side on the issues i care about.

anyway, barack obama is president now. i have kind of known that he would be president for quite some time, even before the election in november happened. back in 2007, i thought that whoever the democrats nominated for president would easily beat any of the republican losers who wanted the job, but i was pretty sure hillary clinton would be the democratic nominee and end up as president in a huge landslide. i was not a supporter of hers in the primaries; i supported dennis kucinich throughout 2007, but decided to back barack obama instead after seeing his impressive victory in iowa as well as dennis kucinich getting hardly any votes at all in iowa. i wanted someone more liberal/progressive than hillary clinton who would be able to defeat her in the democratic primaries, since i was sure that whoever the democrats picked would easily win in november 2008. for a while last year, john mccain was actually ahead in the polls, most notably after he picked sarah palin and before sarah palin’s public image went kaput at the same time wall street went bankrupt. once sarah palin became a national laughingstock and john mccain suspended his campaign to go fix the economy in washington, it finally became clear to me that, yes, barack obama really would win this thing. and as for the primaries with hillary clinton, i knew he would beat her back in february or march, once he won a whole bunch of primaries and caucuses in a row and got a big lead in pledged delegates. so anyway, i have kind of seen this obama thing coming for almost a year. two years ago when he first announced his candidacy, i thought barack obama was a joke though, and did not take his candidacy seriously at all. i wondered what the deal was with this guy who seemed more like a celebrity than a politician, and whether he seriously wanted to be president or if it was just something all his adoring fans begged him to do. i have always been a cynic, not the type of person to believe in other people or put my faith or trust in anyone or anything, and i was quite skeptical of him, but by the middle of 2007, i was taking barack obama a lot more seriously, since he seemed to agree with me on a lot more issues than hillary clinton, and he was #2 in the national polls for democratic presidential candidates. i wanted anyone but hillary clinton, since she gave george w. bush a blank check with regard to the patriot act, the war in iraq, and many other things that she and many fellow democrats caved in on, when they should have known better. barack obama was more of a blank slate, and i figured it is better to have a democrat i do not know about than a democrat i already know is too conservative. and in the primaries and caucuses of 2008, barack obama proved that he was more of a liberal/progressive and hillary clinton was more moderate/centrist/conservative. that is why i supported him, for ideological reasons. so i was quite glad to see him finally sworn in as president, although chief justice roberts totally screwed up the oath of office for both of them, so they had to redo the oath of office later in front of reporters. it is great that george w. bush is finally gone, once and for all, and our constitution has term limits in place that say that he can never ever be president again. our country is finally safe from further damage being inflicted by dumbya! barack obama, however, has been saying and doing things that simultaneously make me feel good and make me apprehensive. some of the things he has done, people he has appointed, things he has said, are things i wholeheartedly approve of and think are awesome, such as nominating hilda solis to be labor secretary. other things are a bit, shall i say, troublesome. tax cuts for the rich, having a treasury secretary that is a loyal follower of his predecessor henry paulson and a fan of bailouts for big banks, keeping bob gates as secretary of defense, having rick warren give the prayer at the inauguration, refusing to prosecute former bush administration officials for their crimes, not supporting single-payer health care, etc. i never really expected barack obama to be a liberal/progressive entirely, but just that he would be somewhat closer to my views than someone like hillary clinton, and i suppose he at least has passed that test with flying colors. recently, barack obama has reached out a lot to conservatives and republicans, both politicians and media pundits. i do not know exactly why he is doing this, but he says he wants us all to be united and he thinks they might have some good ideas that he could use. this is part of the overall pattern with barack obama: he is not an ideological person at all, but a pragmatist who does whatever he thinks works best, regardless of the ideology of who came up with the idea. i think that this is both a good thing and a bad thing: good because it may help him be more successful and accomplish more as president, but bad because it means he might not take this country as far in the right direction as someone who stayed ideologically pure as a liberal/progressive. i really think the media has overemphasized him as a personality and pseudo-celebrity, and they have especially overemphasized his race and focused too much on his family members. i think that his race and his family members are not what americans should be focused on right now; he does have a very nice family and it is very nice that he is the first black president, but maybe we should focus on solving the problems facing our country and dealing with the various issues, rather than having gossip about michelle obama’s fashion choices or repeating thousands of times how barack obama is the first black president on the news channels every day. yes he has cute daughters, but maybe we should let them have their privacy and have at least somewhat normal childhoods. the point is, we need to be focused on the problems that affect us as a nation and come up with ways to solve them, and not be sidetracked with gossip and silliness. i have no doubt one of the next few presidents will be female, and while that will be just as noteworthy as our first black president, i hope people do not make too big of a deal out of it, since being president is a very important and serious job and media coverage of presidents should focus on what they actually do that affects us, not whether they are personable people that the average joe would like to have a beer with. it is because of media silliness that george w. bush managed to serve 2 full terms as president, instead of having al gore or john kerry have an outright win in either of their elections against him. the media turned both al gore and john kerry into laughingstocks and both of them were mercilessly made fun of all the time, and vicious untrue rumors were spread about both of them and believed to be true by a large percentage of americans. the media totally screwed up in 2002 and 2003 when dick cheney misled many people into supporting a war against iraq, fooling most of the media and most of congress as well as george w. bush (who is fooled very easily). the media does not do their job properly most of the time, instead acting quite silly and foolish. and yes, i include all major media outlets in this critique. they should go back to reporting just the facts and doing lots of serious investigative journalism to uncover things that are kept secret by the powers that be. leave the gossip to tabloids, websites, and celebrity gossip shows.

but back to my original point: rep. maurice hinchey is awesome, and should have been picked to be senator. rep. kirsten gillibrand will be much more centrist as a senator, and her house seat will fall into republican hands the next time there is an election there. sure, she will be able to get re-elected as senator, but i am sure almost any democratic politician would be able to get re-elected in a state like new york. it’s easy! the republicans barely put up a fight at all, and they have hardly any supporters left in this state. new york is almost as liberal as massachusetts. i mean, just look at the republicans who until recently controlled the state senate: the republicans in the new york state senate are actually more liberal than governor paterson on a number of issues, and they were endorsed by lots of liberal organizations in the 2008 elections, including many labor unions. the republicans lost control of the state senate anyway, because the republican brand name has been so badly tarnished in new york state. in most states, the republican politicians in our state senate would be considered liberals and would have to be part of the democratic party since the republican party in a typical state would want its politicians to be conservatives, not liberals. new york state is an exception because it is so liberal, people in both parties are liberals. there are still some parts of upstate that are conservative, but the binghamton area is definitely becoming more and more liberal, and i think the same thing is going on in other upstate cities. the mayor of binghamton and county executive are both liberal democrats, and the 2 congressmen for our county, rep. maurice hinchey and rep. michael arcuri, are both democrats, rep. hinchey being one of the most liberal democrats in all of congress. our state senator tom libous might be a republican, but he is about as liberal as a republican can be without switching parties. our county has urban and rural areas, and the democrats are strongest in the urban areas, while the republicans are quite strong in the sparsely populated rural areas. the suburbs are the areas that can go either way in an election. anyway, maurice hinchey is one of the best people in congress, matt ryan is the best mayor binghamton has ever had, and barack obama might possibly turn out to be our best president ever, if we are lucky. as for the republicans, the race for rnc chairman is all about race, according to politico.com. they have to get past the public impression that they are a bunch of racists, especially now that we have a black president, and this is quite a difficult problem for them because they are so tone-deaf on issues of race and many of them think that being part of all-white country clubs or distributing songs called “barack the magic negro” is perfectly normal behavior for someone wanting to lead the republican party at a time when we have a very popular black president who is a democrat. republicans are so used to having spokespeople in the media like rush limbaugh, ann coulter, bill o’reilly, michael savage, etc., who hate political correctness and love being offensive. it is hard for them to reign in that beast of offensiveness, since so many republican shills have a constant uncontrollable urge to go around trying to offend people on purpose all the time. then republican politicians or political operatives who get their news from fox news or right-wing talk radio end up saying offensive things without intending to, because they are under the influence of fox news and talk radio. this ends up landing them in hot water, something they richly deserve, because they are the ones who cultivated all of these shills in the media who say offensive things all the time to get higher ratings and make more money. colin powell spoke out against rush limbaugh last year, but then again, he did that after endorsing barack obama, so colin powell can hardly be considered representative of what a typical republican thinks. now if any republicans in congress denounced fox news and talk radio, that would be much more interesting, but i doubt any of them has the gonads to do it. i have seen plenty of democrats denounce msnbc, like the people in the hillary clinton campaign last year, so obviously democrats have a lot more gonads than sissy republican losers. republicans are sissies because they are always afraid of criticizing whoever their current Dear Leader is, so all throughout the era of george w. bush they all had to avoid ever saying anything negative about him. democrats are not like that at all: we attack each other just as viciously as we attack republicans, on a regular basis. when bill clinton had both houses of congress controlled by democrats for his first 2 years in office, he did not get along with them at all, and there was a lot of public criticism back and forth between the democratic president and the democratic congress, helping lead to republican victories in 1994. republicans like to march in lock-step behind their leader and never criticize anything their leader does, instead heaping all their criticism on liberals, even at times when liberals have been out of power for many years and all the country’s problems are the fault of conservative republicans, like in 2006. and what happened in 2006, at a time when conservative republicans controlled all 3 branches of the federal government with an iron fist? they lost badly, and the democrats took over both houses of congress, and 2 years later, democrats made even more gains in both houses of congress and won the presidency too. that is what republicans get for following their leader george w. bush like lemmings after he jumps off a metaphorical cliff. and in the 2008 election, the bush name was tarnished, so everyone running for president as a republican was going around singing the praises of ronald reagan and claiming that they were just like reagan. the hero-worship of ronald reagan is quite bizarre, since they seem to think ronald reagan is equally as awesome as their other hero, jesus christ, or maybe ronald reagan is even more awesome than jesus christ. but republicans have a visceral hatred of hollywood actors who publicly speak about their political views, even though one such hollywood actor who became involved in politics was ronald reagan. their hypocrisy is just immeasurable. i remember a few years ago they claimed that anyone who publicly said anything bad about george w. bush was a traitor to america and a communist/terrorist sympathizer. at least that is what republicans who post stuff on the internet said online. so it is rather ironic that now us liberal democrats are accused of having a cult of personality around barack obama and thinking him to be the messiah. it is one of the most ridiculous things to be accused of, since we criticize obama’s decisions on a regular basis, and a large percentage of us (including me) don’t believe such a thing as a messiah can possibly exist, since it is just mythology. the hero-worship crap is mostly the creation of the news media, which goes around encouraging that type of silliness all the time, typical behavior for the idiotic news media we have in this country. i am sure there are some people, probably numbering in tens or hundreds of thousands, who really do think barack obama is so fricken awesome that he will magically solve everyone’s problems and turn the entire world into a happy, peaceful, prosperous utopia. but who cares about them? let them live in the safety of their own delusions and pull the wool over their own eyes. as for me, i don’t practice what i preach because i’m not the kind of person i’m preaching to. i have to go now, because there is this thing called “sleep” that i have not done yet tonight, and i have, umm, very very few hours left to even attempt to do any sleep, and in all likelihood, i will get little-to-no sleep unless i miss an appointment with my psychologist today. but missing an appointment would be a big mistake, because i suffer from c.b.i.d., the most common psychological disorder in the world. c.b.i.d. is short for completely batshit insane disorder, and everyone on the entire planet suffers from this form of mental illness. the only cure is... well i had better not mention the cure, because it is worse than the disease. anyway, i hope we all get better from this illness, and praise “bob”! whoops... i guess my case is worse than i thought, if i believe in “bob”... i will need to have trepanation to open my third nostril so i can become an OverMan, but the only place where this controversial surgery is done is hidden deep within the jungles of malaysia in a place called dobbstown, which is sort of like a cross between xanadu, atlantis, and jonestown. it is not on any maps, because its location is kept secret from the cartographers, and i have never been there. on second thought, i would rather not go there. it is a silly place.