I’m all for IRV

I would love to see IRV here. There was an attempt at a ballot measure last year but it didn’t get enough sigs. I would like to vote for Jill Stein come Nov, but if polling is real tight i might cast my bid for Deval to avoid putting the Thuglican into office.

:(

This is the quandary Nader voters faced in 2000, but Nader assured them he would not campaign where it would make a difference. Of course, that changed, most remarkably in Florida. That’s the example we have to keep in mind in casting a vote. If a small percentage of Florida voters, enough to change the final results with the help of the Supremes, hadn’t chosen Nader, we might have avoided the catastrophe of the following eight years.

I like Jill Stein, her message is more in tune with my ideals, but I’ll likely vote for Deval to keep Baker away from that office.
Baker is an ex CEO of a large health insurance provider. My friends and I who are self employed just paid huge increases in our health insurance premiums. I can only imagine what we’d be paying with a governor who is sympathetic to the insurance industry.

I think the progressive movement should be making a big push for runoff voting to be implemented at the state and local level. I would even say it should be close to top priority.

And hey, Patrick’s uncle played saxophone for Sun Ra. That’s a good enough reason to vote for anybody.

Regarding Stein, this is not a Nader situation. Let’s remember that the Mass legislature is perpetually Democratic. There’s only so much damage a Republican governor can do (unlike the President, who has the biggest military in the world at his discretion). The more votes Jill Stein gets and the more pressure she puts on Patrick, the more likely the Dems will eventually support IRV or any kind of runoff system.

Patrick and the Dem legislature have cut public services in a big way during the recession. The only tax hike we got was a regressive sales tax increase. At the same time, fees are going way up in the higher ed system (I used to organize students for a group there, a lot of the kids and their parents are hurting). My wife used to work for a mental health care organization largely funded by the state in Fall River, and they’ve axed the program for indigent patients to see a doctor at the state mental health clinic in town and get prescriptions for their meds. To some extent it’s understandable because states do have to balance their budgets, and the Mass constitution bars an income tax that’s anything more than a flat rate. And the federal government has been woefully unsupportive. But come on, is the only difference between Dems and Repubs in Mass whether we get a regressive sales tax increase with slightly less cuts or no increase and even more cuts?

Several of you mentioned premium increases in Masscare and the connector. Have the Mass Dems proposed any fix for Romneycare? Public option, more aggressive negotiations with insurance comps? Jill Stein’s the only candidate that has proposed doing something to get us to truly universal care at lower cost. She’s also the only candidate to support marijuana legalization and getting serious about clean energy.

On Nov. 2 I’m going to wish I still lived in Mass so I could vote for a principled candidate for statewide office. A candidate that cares about working people around the state, not just monied interests in Boston. And if you want IRV, how the hell are you going to convince the ruling Dems that it’s in their interest other than presenting a threat from the left?

Loscocco is a pretty funny name.

If a small percentage of Florida voters, enough to change the final results with the help of the Supremes, hadn’t chosen Nader, we might have avoided the catastrophe of the following eight years.

Yeah, and if a frog had wings….

I hope you’re not implying it was the fault of Nader voters, because that bullshit meme is old. Really old. And really bullshit.

“If we want more viable choices than just the two major parties in our elections;”

1) Remove the undue influence of money. It corrupts the entire process.

2) Funny, Charlie Baker a past CEO of a tax exempt health insurance corporation which now gets your money pigeoned to healh insurance corporation from the customer, citizen, taxpayer, under fear of tax penalty, is running for Govenor? What “BULLSHIT!” Talk about a revolving door policy where a corporation, like a slaveowner, ownes you! “Corporate Sodomy 101?”

It’s really true, unfortunately — which is one reason why Laura Bush loves Nader. But there were a lot of things that affected the Florida vote, namely the illegal vote suppression done against thousands of voters.

Not just the voter purge but also the actual road blocks erected in Black neighborhoods so they couldn’t get to the polls.

There was definitely no improvement here in Massachusetts when Deval Patrick took over after years of Republican Governors. Patrick and Baker both represent casinos. If one of them wins, it might as well be the other.

If Jill Stein wins, however, there will be a major change: A strong push for Marijuana legalization, as Stein and two-tirds of the state favot it; She will withdraw the Massachusetts National Guard from Afghanistan and Iraq, helping to end those wars; She will push for environmental integrity – none of the other candidates push for any kind of integrity.

If we vote for the lesser evil, we will get something evil.

If by “it’s really true” you’re claiming that it really “was the fault of Nader voters”, then OFG is 100% correct: that’s really old, and it’s real bullshit (and I say that as someone who voted for Gore in 2000, though admittedly without great enthusiasm: he ran a piss-poor campaign, and I preferred Bradley in the primaries).

Gore by his ineptitude arguably helped give us Bush. The Supreme Court by its egregious hypocrisy certainly gave us Bush. Bush voters with their actual votes helped give us Bush. But Nader voters simply voted for what they wanted – as well they should have – and many of them probably still don’t regret it (having correctly understood far earlier than most of us just how bankrupt and similar the two major parties had become and thus not caring all that much whether Bush or Gore won).

It’s hardly clear that getting Bush was the worst that could have happened. Bush demonstrated just how easily the American public could be manipulated. The Democrats learned so well from that that they’ve become equally blatant in their depredations. Had Gore been elected, the same forces would have been at play guiding his administration, but in so much kinder, gentler, less obvious fashions that the complete corruption of BOTH major parties might well have remained invisible to all save a few for much longer, making it all the more impossible to do anything about.

That’s, in fact, about the only reason I can find to be happy about the election of Obama and strong Democratic majorities two years ago: it’s become far harder to continue to ignore just how much a lost cause the national Democratic party is, and how vital it is to weaken it sufficiently to take it over or leave a political vacuum that something better can grow to fill.

But there are still an awful lot of people who prefer to trust their (often manipulated) gut reactions rather than actual analysis. In fact, many seem irredeemably wedded to that approach – it’s how the colloquial term ‘knee-jerk’ originated, as best I can determine.