The Mojave Cross and the prospect of Proportional Representation

Well here we are and still no sign of an agreement in British politics and I bet people are loving it – maybe not David Cameron who must be getting very impatient as I'm sure he can't wait to be Prime Minister; he has that kind of look and body language but Tory Boy Clegg must be loving his moment in the sun.

It's the same over here when one congressman holds the most important vote and you can see them loving their moment.

I see the phrase 'Tory Boy' for Mister Clegg is nothing new as they were calling him that in 2007 but he is the same as the congressman who is the deciding vote; someone of insignificance suddenly being thrust into the limelight.

To draw very broad strokes about British politics there are people who know nothing about politics at all, as there are in every country, who vote, if they vote, for the status quo; in other words Conservative and when they come to America they vote Republican; they say it's the party of big business and big business must know what its talking about; some immigrants will also vote for the status quo because they think that it's the right thing to do.

The Labour Party is traditionally the party of the working classes or the working class movement and sponsored by the trades unions and, there again, some people will vote for Labour just because they are working class.

And then you have the Liberals.

I have honestly thought that the people who voted Liberal, except for the wooly hat eccentrics, are the people who can't bring themselves to vote for either of the two main parties.

I know of people who have gone from Labour to Liberal and from Conservative to Liberal because they just can't go all the way; they are called the Liberal Democtrats now, of course, but I still don't know what they stand for.

I hear, at 10.43am Pacific time as I write this on Tuesday May 11th that Tory Boy Clegg is back talking to the Tories – living up to his name.

Of course there are people who know and follow politics who vote for the two main parties because they believe in them and the policies of their party.

The newspapers in Britain are very partisan and influence the population and they are mainly Conservative.

There was an advertising copy writer who assessed the British Press as follows:

The Times is read by the people who run the country
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country
The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country
The Independent is read by people who don't know who runs the country but are sure they're doing it wrong
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country.
The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run
The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think it is their country.

There was an extra one was put in, I think by Jonathan Lynn in Yes Prime Minister which is that the Sun's readers don't care who runs the country providing she has big tits.

That's a broad caricature of British Politics and the newspapers which is not without a grain of truth.

The phrase I never heard in British Politics was 'the separation of church and state' which we hear over here all the time.

In Britain religion is taught in schools by law – at least it was when I lived there – and here it is against the law to teach it and yet the majority of the people in the USA are religious and the majority of the people in Britain are not; what does that tell you?

I am not religious at all – I am heathen and an agnostic at best. As an Irish Catholic religion was rammed down my throat as a child; I couldn't go to a Catholic school where we lived in Birmingham (UK) so my brother and I had to go to the convent on Saturday mornings for our religious education; by the time I grew up I had had enough of it and I started thinking for myself.

I think that's the case with the majority in Britain and it's the opposite here; maybe more than 85% of the population here attend church on a regular basis and in Britain, where religious education is a must, maybe 85% of the population don't go at all.

In the 1930s a cross was erected in the Mojave Desert to commemorate the dead of the first world war. The Mojave Desert is between here, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas and I've driven through it a few times. I don't think I have ever seen the cross though.

The land where the cross stands is government owned and there was a movement to get the cross taken down as the cross violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment; I believe someone wanted to put a Buddhist shrine erected near it.

It was decided to transfer the land to private ownership to satisfy the law.

The case went to the Supreme Court, recently, and in a 5-4 decision the court sent the case back to the district court, saying the lower court used the wrong legal standard in deciding to invalidate a transfer of the land on which the cross sits to private ownership.

As I have mentioned I am not religious but what harm is it doing? Are they (the protesters and a certain Frank Buono who brought the case in the first place) so anal that they can't just let it go?

This is cut and pasted from something I found on the Internet today:
MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Calif. — Authorities say a 7-foot-tall cross in the Mojave Desert that sparked a U.S. Supreme Court dispute has been stolen.
The National Park Service says someone cut the bolts holding down the metal-pipe cross and made off with it late Sunday or early Monday.
Veterans groups say they're outraged at what they consider the desecration of a symbol that was erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to honor World War I dead.
The cross was challenged by critics who say a religious symbol shouldn't be allowed on public land but the U.S. Supreme Court last month refused to order it removed.

This has nothing to do with Nick (Tory Boy) Clegg who has stated he doesn't believe in God (he wouldn't get voted in here) and who, at 11.19 Pacific Time, has lived up to his name and backed the Tories as Brown has just quit as Prime Minister and at 7.19 pm BST from The Guardian will advise the Queen to invite the leader of the opposition (Cameron) to become Prime Minister – he wished the new PM well.

So it looks like a Proportional Representation referendum.

I wish Gordon Brown well.

The Health Care Debate.

I was going to write about the frustration of the health care debate but what's the point? The USA will never reform health care to any decent satisfaction; the public option is a thing of the past and the latest proposal of extending Medicare to younger people is also going the way of all flesh; younger people by the way would have been 55 and up.

Joe Lieberman, who is an independent senator from Connecticut, a state which has a lot of the health insurance companies, has decided he isn't going to support it; this is after he said in recorded interviews a few weeks ago that he would.

The public option would be support from the government for people who couldn't afford health insurance; the Republicans and the blue dog democrats didn't like this as they said it would affect the insurance companies and their profits – this would be news to anybody from Britain where people in their droves buy health insurance from private companies like BUPA either individually or through the companies they work for.

I mean you don't think The Queen and the Royal Family, the Lords and Ladies Dancing, the ladies in waiting, the Princes and Princesses and that crowd actually use 'the health' do you?

They wouldn't be seen dead in a public hospital (got to be a joke there) and prefer to go to the private sector where the Emirs, Sultans and Sheiks of the world go and pay many thousands of pounds per day for their treatment; in fact probably thousands per hour.

So I don't think – and what do I know? - that the public option would have affected the insurance companies one little bit; I mean the post office, which is the cheapest way of getting mail delivered, doesn't stop people using FED-EX and the other private mail companies does it?

So let's go back to Lieberman; he was the man who stood for Vice President of the USA on Al Gore's ticket in the year 2000; to all intents and purposes he could or should have served a term as the Veep and didn't but now he finds himself with the power to make or break the democrats health care bill – so how did that happen?

At the last election he lost the Democratic nomination in his state and stood as an independent against the person who they replaced him with and because of his name value he won; he said he would support the democrats in the senate giving them the sixty senators they needed for a super majority.

A super majority means that the Republicans wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stymie any of the Democratic sponsored bills.

I seem to remember George W. Bush using phrases like 'it should be an up or down vote' on the things he wanted passed; an up or down vote means bills could pass on a simple majority without the filibuster; Leiberman's vote is needed in this case as the senate needs a two thirds majority to get the bill through and the two thirds majority stops the Republians using the filibuster; a bit like the penalty clock in basketball.

A filibuster, by the way, is when a senator gets up and speaks for hours to prevent the vote being taken – a bit like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' - well I never particularly liked Jimmy Stewart, Disney and all that crap and I don't particularly like Joseph Lieberman.

But what do I know?