Musings of a Patriot

Tag: civic participation

  • Contributing to the fediverse

    This is both new and old for me. I wrote consistently on political policy topics for over 10 years but then life happened and I tapered off nearly 10 years ago. I was writing before social media was a thing – back when decentralized personal publishing was the norm rather than everybody using one or…

  • Endorsing Laura Belnap

    School board races tend to fly under the radar and rarely do I see one candidate shine compared to their opponent but this is one of those times.

  • Funding Education

    When your car stops running the solution isn’t always to put gas in the gas tank. Likewise, funding our schools isn’t as straightforward as simply figuring out who should foot the bill.

  • Thoughts on Caucus System Reform

    Curt Bentley has an excellent post in which he discusses the issue of reforming the caucus system. I really appreciate the methodical approach he has taken to examine the issue. I completely agree with each of his guiding principles and while I suspect I am more comfortable with the caucus system in its current form…

  • Strengthening Our Caucus System

    Instead of sidestepping our caucus system we should strengthen it by keeping what it is good at (leveling the playing field for candidates) and improving where it is weak (disenfranchising less popular political positions). We can do that by changing the way delegates are chosen.

  • Addressing Abysmal Voter Turnout

    Would non-partisan runoffs be a possible solution to address our declining levels of voter participation in Utah?

  • Please Don’t Vote

    Voting is no panacea. If we don’t do the work that needs to be the foundation of voting it can do more harm than good.

  • Happy Fireworks Day

    photo credit: Camera Slayer Regardless of how much some people may talk about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States during their celebrations on the fourth day of July each year, and despite reports suggesting that participation in such celebrations makes children more likely to identify politically as Republicans, it seems…

  • Failure of the American Voter

    I’ve been thinking about the massive disconnect between the abysmal ratings that Congress enjoys (8% approval I recently read) and the virtual invincibility of Congressional incumbents (incumbents consistently win 90% of the elections where they seek reelection). I realized that the apparent disconnect was not as stark as it first appeared (11 out of 12…

  • Multi-Dimensional Political Perspectives

    photo credit: mkandlez Jane Hamsher wrote about the 11 Dimensional Chess approach to health care legislation that the Obama administration tried. That sent me back to some earlier thoughts I had shared about how we visualize the political spectrum. The simplest way to view things is one dimensional. Like the opening image here it breaks…