(no subject)

[ilanarama]

Politics report: getting whoa scary acrimonious on the local level. What do you do when two people you know socially run against each other in a primary?

Movie report: the Durango Independent Film Festival is so far a lot of fun. This afternoon I hope to sit in the theatre from 3 until 8 and watch my little eyeballs out.

Psotcrad report: tofty has beautiful small precision handwriting.

Remodeling report: I unpacked three boxes of books to put them on our new!!! bookshelves!!! today. The Ekornes chairs we ordered are supposed to come in on Wednesday.

Running report: eight miles yesterday, the longest I've run since I started getting knee problems in November. Felt pretty good.

Snow report: still none at all.

Comments

[mehitabelmmoss.livejournal.com]

Tough question, that. If I felt strongly about the issues or the quality of the candidate I guess I'd hep but not diss your other aquaintance. After the primary you can work hard for whoever won. If they are equal in your eyes I guess you could be supportive to both but not take sides.
I have a problem in that our congressman is running for the Senate. MAny great local politicians are running for his seat and I can't decide who to support. I do need to get more details on issues and what they want to do in Congress but I would support many of them. In our area, it is pretty strongly democratic. Pretty much the primary is the election.

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the politics thing is complicated. I like one more than the other, on a personal level, but on the other hand I think the other is more likely to win the general election. (We have the opposite situation that you do: there are more Republicans than Democrats, and about the same number of unaffiliated voters as Dems, so centrist candidates are more likely to win because they need to draw support from everyone.)

And then there is the primary where I don't care for either of the Dem candidates, and I kind of like the Republican who's unopposed in her party, so. Politics out here in purple-state-country is always interesting!

[guntar.livejournal.com]

It sounds interesting! We never get such interesting electoral problems here, except in municipal elections.

I suppose that, in the US, each candidate has more freedom than they do here in Canada; here, almost everything is done along party lines, and there are only a few times in recent history where people have broken ranks with their party (an MP in my party, the NDP, broke ranks with it in order to vote against the gay marriage bill); more common is for people to cross the floor, and join the other party, or become an independent; this happens from time-to-time. But, in Canada, most people vote for the party, and not the individual members, unless the member is very prominent.

[guntar.livejournal.com]

That was a poorly-constructed sentence. My bad.

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

I think that's the case in general in the US, but perhaps not as strongly. The real problem (or maybe opportunity) here is that as the Republican party nationwide has been taken over by the right-wing religious nuts, many western-states Republicans (who are generally more libertarian in their outlooks) are unhappy with the party, particularly over civil liberties and rights issues. Our current state representative for this area is such a man - and the Democrats haven't run anyone against him in years because we like him, even though sometimes we disagree with him. But the state Republican party has recently had a huge blowup over his "siding with the enemy" on an issue (pitting big business against environmentalists) - the party leadership has been slagging him off publically.

He's term-limited, as it happens, and in the Republican primary there are two candidates - one a woman who casts herself as his ideological successor (and she's the one I might vote for in the general election, if she wins the primary), the other a stereotypical churchy anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-big-business businessman. We'll see what happens in the primary.

(In our Dem primary we have a relatively young sleazeball lawyer, who I really dislike, against a former professor and city councilman who is a nice guy but about 90 years old, totally uncharming, and as it turns out personally uncomfortable with gay rights and abortion issues even though his campaign managers are a couple of lesbians - we had a laugh over that. If he wins the primary (likely) and goes up against the republican woman, I'm not really sure who I'd vote for.)